The Washington Post National Weekly - Oct. 8, 2015

Worst Week Gov. Terry McAuliffe 3

Nation The next big LGBT fight 9

Music Honoring the roots of blues 16

5 Myths About bacon 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2015

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

Searching for greatness Trump’s supporters are united in their belief the U.S. has lost its mojo and that the GOP candidate is the best bet for getting it back. PAGE 12

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Foothills Magazine presents its 4th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine! Photos will be judged in two categories – human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at ncwfoothills.com/photocontest Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2016

North Central Washington’s lifestyle magazine foothills.wenatcheeworld.com

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Gov. Terry McAuliffe

by Chris Cillizza

A

ll Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) needed was one. If just one measly state Senate seat flipped from Republican to Democratic control in Tuesday’s election, McAuliffe would have a badly needed foothold in the state legislature.

He didn’t get it; Republicans held every seat they controlled going into Election Day. For McAuliffe, the defeat was particularly bitter. He had done two dozen events for Democratic candidates in the final four days before the general election and cast taking control of the state Senate — which stood at 21 Republicans and 19 Democrats going into the Nov. 3 vote — as critical to his governing hopes over his next (and final) two years in office.

With the state House firmly in Republican control, McAuliffe saw a Democratic takeover of the Senate as perhaps his only chance to craft any sort of legacy — a la the budget deal then­Gov. Mark Warner (D) cut in 2004.

“It makes a lot of difference,” McAuliffe told a local TV station in the run­up to the vote. “If I have one chamber that will work with me, then it puts a lot of pressure on the other chamber if one chamber passes safe gun restrictions, investments in K through 12, investments in pre­K.” It was not to be. McAuliffe is now left to labor under a state legislature entirely controlled by the opposition party even as he battles the lame­duck status that the

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NIKKI FOX/ASSOCIATED PRESS

commonwealth’s ridiculous and outdated one­term limit on governors confers on him.

Terry McAuliffe, for watching your legacy get lost by just a single Senate seat, you had the Worst Week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 4

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY EDUCATION BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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ON THE COVER Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks before the Greater Charleston Business Alliance on Sept. 23 in North Charleston, S.C. Photograph by CHARLES OMMANNEY, The Washington Post

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Bush began, then left, charter school R OBERT S AMUELS Miami BY

S

ix weeks before he was set to open Florida’s first charter school, Jeb Bush had yet to recruit a principal. Then he met Katrina Wilson-Davis, a 32year-old social studies teacher with no management experience but a positive spirit that gave him hope.

“We need someone who carries a knife in her teeth and can swing through the vines,” Wilson-Davis recalls Bush telling her on that summer day in 1996.

Recovering from an egobruising election loss, Bush was looking for chances to soften his image as a callous Republican who proclaimed he would do “probably nothing” as governor to help African Americans. As a private citizen likely to run for governor again in 1998, Bush created the Liberty City Charter School as a way to educate black children from Miami’s poorest neighborhoods. The school would give him a way to mend ties with the black community while testing a controversial, conservative education theory that was drawing the ire of teachers unions.

“My friends told me I was being used,” Wilson-Davis remembered.

She figured it was worth a try. “I said: ‘So? Everyone’s being used.’ ” As he runs for president nearly two decades later, Bush points to his time working on the school as evidence of his early commitment to a reform agenda. He has said the experience “still shapes the way I see the deep-seated challenges facing urban communities today.” He points to the school’s opening as “one of the happiest, proudest moments of my life.”

But for Wilson-Davis and others who walked the halls of Liberty City, that happy moment has been obscured by the complicated years that have followed.

Over time, Bush’s tightknit relationship with the school and his handpicked principal fizzled. After he won election as Florida governor, in part by touting the school, Bush stepped down from the board — a move his aides say avoided any perceptions of favoritism. He was unable to help the

JOE BURBANK/ORLANDO SENTINEL

He touted initiative in black community but couldn’t keep it going school overcome steep debt or help it resolve a dispute with the building’s landlord. By 2008, the year after Bush left office, local officials voted to close the school.

As Bush campaigns in Florida today to revive his struggling presidential campaign, many in this beleaguered community wrestle with his legacy in their lives. There are feelings of adoration and feelings of abandonment.

Many here wonder: Why couldn’t a man so well connected and powerful help raise money or strike a

deal with a local landlord? How could he step away from a cause that was so dear to him?

A project that intended to close the chasm between Bush and the black community ended up broadening the distance between them.

Bush’s presidential campaign — in which he has promised to broaden the Republican Party’s appeal to minorities while, on one occasion, appearing to suggest that Democrats win black votes by offering “free stuff” — serves as a reminder of the two sides of the

Jeb Bush hugs Liberty City Charter School third-grader David Tice in 1998.

Bush created the school in one of Miami’s poorest neighborhoods in 1996 and resigned from its board by 2000. The school suffered financial setbacks and was closed in 2008.

man they knew.

“It’s like I’m reliving the sadness all over again,” Wilson-Davis said.

She exhaled.

“Everyone wants me to bash Jeb,” she added. “I can’t just bash Jeb. He did so much for me. He introduced me to so many good people, white people, who cared about our community.”

Bush, in a recent interview, said he could not have saved the school.

He had helped negotiate with the landlord early on, but he said little could be done about the landlord’s

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POLITICS desire to kick the school out.

“The problem is that they didn’t own the school. They tried to own the school,” Bush said. “But you can’t operate a school if you don’t have the real estate.”

The idea for a charter school in Liberty City stemmed from a new kinship between Bush and T. Willard Fair, a local black activist.

In Fair, head of the Urban League of Greater Miami, Bush found his first full ally within Miami’s black community. Fair had been swayed by the “probably nothing” remark because he long believed black people needed to rely more on themselves, not the government, for their uplift. It took only 90 minutes for them to agree to start the charter school, which would be privately run but publicly funded.

Bush attempted to get another prominent local black activist to serve as principal, school board member Frederica S. Wilson. She rebuffed his efforts but recommended Wilson-Davis, who always dreamed of being a principal.

“I knew I could educate those children,” Wilson-Davis said. “I know these children. I was one of them.”

In an hour, they agreed to work together.

Bush knew he was asking Wilson-Davis to take on a difficult task that would put her at the center of an intense political debate over the future of public schools.

But he had confidence in her.

“She had a heart for these kids,” he said.

Their meeting spawned a fruitful partnership.

The young, black schoolteacher — granddaughter of sharecroppers and daughter of a cafeteria worker and a truck driver — gained a mentor and powerful friend who introduced her to the upper echelon of American politics and wealth. The privileged white politician got a charismatic leader for his school who taught him to use bits of slang like “off the chain.” He also got a useful anecdote for his next campaign, and he doubled his share of the black vote.

Soon, Wilson-Davis was going to fancy parties with the son of a president. Hillary Rodham Clinton, first lady at the time, invited her to the White House for a forum on education. “You’re now swimming with big fish,” Wilson-Davis recalled someone telling her at a

RYAN STONE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Wilson-Davis estimates at least 85 percent of her students graduated from high school and 40 percent went on to college. fundraiser for the school, after which she wondered, “What have I gotten into?”

Bush, too, was acclimating to a different kind of pond. On Saturdays, he drove from tony Coral Gables to a neighborhood of scraggy lots, barbed-wire fences and malls scarred by riots from nearly two decades before.

At first, Fair recalled, Bush looked uncomfortable when he met young mothers in subsidized housing who were interested in his school.

“It was an extraordinary experience,” Bush said.

Sixty students enrolled in the school when it opened in August 1996.

When Bush would visit, he would pat students on the head and call them by name. They would try to scare him with pictures of alligators they drew, and he dressed up as Santa Claus at Christmastime. His mother, Barbara Bush, came to read “Goodnight Moon.”

TV cameras and reporters captured Bush’s big experiment. Educators and donors wanted tours.

The school was mocked by the

teachers unions when it performed poorly on tests, praised in the papers when it performed well. The attention helped the school with its fundraising, even as Wilson-Davis tired of being a tour guide.

She was more focused on intensive reading and math instruction and weekly positive-reinforcement assemblies. When she heard students arguing about whether zebras were donkeys with painted stripes, she arranged a trip to the zoo. Many children were being raised by their grandparents, so Wilson-Davis started a quilting night to connect the community.

“Don’t let me call your mama,” became one of Wilson-Davis’s best-known threats to the students. About a dozen former students contacted by The Washington Post recalled how she offered Jolly Rancher candies when students visited her office and kept a small mattress there in case anyone needed a nap.

“It was really this custom education that was developed for the kids at the school that made us able to succeed,” said Maurice Jackson, now 22.

Katrina Wilson-Davis was the principal of Liberty City Charter School, which was co-founded by Jeb Bush. Talking about the difficulties the school experienced before it closed saddens her, but she says, “Everyone wants me to bash Jeb. I can’t just bash Jeb. He did so much for me.”

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Jackson, who interned this summer at the White House, said his views on school turned around after Wilson-Davis placed him in more-advanced classes.

Bush was in the background as much as the foreground. He was a strict taskmaster who could not stomach seeing so much as a wad of paper on the ground. “ ’Trina,” he would say to Wilson-Davis, she recalled, “poor doesn’t mean dirty.”

The school received the same per-pupil funding as traditional schools, but additional expenses such as rent meant that teachers at first were paid less. Bush’s fundraising prowess helped, but he warned that it would not last forever.

“He’s a fiscally frugal guy, so the goal was you have to learn how to operate with what the state gives you each year,” Wilson-Davis recalled.

As he walked through the school hall on the day after his successful 1998 election, the cheerleading squad yelled: “Give me a B! Give me a U! Give me an S! Give me an H!” “I used to love seeing him, and he was there so much,’’ said Michelle Turner, now 25, who was captured by news photographers hugging Bush on that day in 1998.

But then, Turner and others recall, something changed.

“In later years, I don’t remember him being there at all,” Turner said.

Bush had left the board by 2000, two years after being elected governor, but Wilson-Davis continued to reach out to him, often using e-mail. He would respond with brief words of encouragement.

“I hope that you will find time to come by the school and see the children,” Wilson-Davis wrote in July 2001. “i will try to make it,” Bush responded. There was no indication whether he paid a visit.

In January 2002, Wilson-Davis bragged to him that the school was operating entirely from its state allotment after “many years of prudent and fiscal conservatism.”

By 2006, though, trouble was mounting. The school incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. The growing importance of high-stakes standardized tests, pushed by Bush, led to the school spending more on new textbooks. continues on next page

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from previous page

And a devastating hurricane season in 2005 left the school with a leaky roof that, she said, the landlord was slow to fix.

“You know that I don’t run to you for everything because I know that you have a whole state and the country to contend with,” WilsonDavis wrote to Bush on Oct. 13, 2006. “I am in a position where I need some intervention and direction from YOU!” Bush wrote back, telling Wilson-Davis that “I will work on both issues.” He told her that as a public school, “you should receive the same benefits . . . that all public schools receive.”

Bush attempted to connect her with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to e-mails that have been released publicly. But Wilson-Davis said she worried the process was moving too slowly. Fearing for her students’ safety, she used the school’s money to fix the roof.

The landlord, Patrick Beauregard, sued. The repairs violated the lease, and he wanted the school out. Beauregard did not respond to several phone calls from The Post.

Wilson-Davis reached out to Bush. She recalled Bush telling her that his hands were tied. The $500,000 debt was too much for him to recoup. The legal fees continued to mount, and debt grew to $1 million. Parents held walks and protests to generate attention, but their efforts were futile. They wondered what happened to their powerful founder.

After Bush left office in 2007, he made a lucrative reentry into the private sector. Asked at the time about the school’s difficulties, Bush told the Miami Herald, “I am not aware what this is about.”

In 2008, the county school board shut the school down. Wilson-Davis was so distraught, she said, that she could not bring herself to find work for two years.

As she discusses her experience with the school, Wilson-Davis likes to focus on the successes. She estimated at least 85 percent of her students graduated from high school and 40 percent went on to college.

“I don’t think [Bush] was a racist or tried to pimp out these children; that wasn’t his heart,” Wilson-Davis said. “But I think it’s a fair question for a community to want to hold him accountable.” n

First lady urges men to foster global gender equity N ICK A NDERSON Doha, Qatar BY

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irst lady Michelle Obama urged the world to open more opportunities for girls in education and women in the workforce in a speech Wednesday that drew on her experience with gender bias growing up in Chicago.

“Back when I was a girl, even though I was bright and curious, and I had plenty of opinions of my own, people were often more interested in hearing what my brother had to say,” Obama told about 2,000 people from more than 120 countries gathered for an education conference in Qatar, among the Persian Gulf nations that host branches of U.S. and other Western universities.

“I was even told that I would never be admitted to a prestigious university, so I shouldn’t even bother to apply,” added Obama, who graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

In Qatar, she made an impassioned plea for men to stand up for gender equity in education, a message that could be at odds with views on the roles of men and women held in some parts of the Arab world and beyond.

“Today, to all of the men here, I want to be very clear. We need you,” Obama said, drawing slight laughter and significant applause in the cavernous auditorium of the Qatar National Convention Center. “As fathers, as husbands and simply as human beings, this is your struggle, too.”

Obama arrived Monday in Doha to begin a week-long Mideast visit.

Obama’s speech drew attention to a White House initiative called Let Girls Learn. It also cast a spotlight on an annual conference sponsored by the Qatar Foundation, an organization connected to the country’s ruling family. The foundation is chaired

by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, second wife of the former ruler

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

First lady Michelle Obama visits students from the Doha British School and the Doha Modern Indian School on Wednesday during the World Innovation Summit for Education in Qatar.

Sheik Hamad Bin Khalifa alThani and mother of his successor, Emir Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani.

The conference is known as the World Innovation Summit for Education, or WISE. It has drawn educators, education officials, analysts and activists to Doha every year since 2009 in an effort to spur thinking about how to improve education and bridge gaps in opportunity around the world.

Among the goals of WISE is to draw attention to urgent problems, such as: 1 in 5 workers will lack basic education by 2030 if trends hold; conflicts in the Middle East are depriving more than 13 million children of an education; and young people in North America and Western Europe are 12 times as likely as those in sub-Saharan Africa to have a chance at higher education.

Equally important is the search for solutions, organizers emphasized.

To that end, the conference honored Afghan educator Sakena Yacoobi, 65, winner of the WISE Prize for 2015. Founder of the Afghan Institute for Learning, She has sought for many years through the nonprofit organization to provide teacher training

to Afghan women and take other steps to support education and health services in a nation wracked by myriad troubles.

During the Taliban’s repressive rule, according to a biography provided by the conference, Yacoobi started 80 “underground” learning centers to help girls continue to receive education.

“It’s a great honor to be recognized,” Yacoobi said in an interview. She said it was “fantastic” to showcase efforts to empower women and girls.

“My goal is there would not be one single child uneducated in Afghanistan, especially girls,” she said. “We have a long ways to go.

Education is in my heart, in my blood. Especially regarding Afghanistan, the world should know how important education is to Afghan society.”

Delegates to the conference embraced Obama’s message.

“I’m in total agreement with her about education rights for children,” said Walaa Abdel Khalek, an expert on the Spanish language who was visiting from Cairo University in Egypt. “I really liked her story about growing up and how her family helped her a lot. When the first lady of the United States says it, it matters.” n

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Rubio rises — and becomes a target

BY J ENNA J OHNSON AND S EAN S ULLIVAN

New York

D

onald Trump and Ben Carson are still dominating the polls, but many in the crowded Republican presidential race are now launching attacks on the candidate who seems poised to be their next major threat: Marco Rubio.

The freshman senator from Florida has seen small but steady gains in the polls, attention from major donors and a growing collection of endorsements, especially after a well-received performance in the recent GOP debate.

That has quickly made him a prime target for criticism from his rivals, especially Trump and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

During a news conference Tuesday in Manhattan, Trump called Rubio “overrated,” accused him of being “a disaster with his credit cards” and attacked him as “very weak” on immigration. At the same time, Bush — whose campaign has disparagingly labeled Rubio as a “GOP Obama” — doubled down on criticizing Rubio for missing more than a third of his Senate votes this year.

“People that are serving need to show up and work,” Bush said on CNN. “Period. Over and out.”

For months, Rubio has avoided direct confrontations with his rivals. His top aides have long worried about peaking too early, preferring to crest just before the first nominating contest on Feb. 1 in Iowa. The latest attacks bring a new level of attention and scrutiny to the 44-year-old senator’s belowthe-radar campaign that could throw off his timeline.

“Well, you can only hide the bacon for so long,” said David Carney, a top strategist for past GOP presidential candidates who is neutral in this race. “They are fully exposed at this point. This is the gantlet that a serious campaign has to be prepared to run.”

Carney predicted the next hundred days will be “brutal” for Rubio. “If he withstands it, he will be a stronger candidate,” he said.

Two other GOP presidential

NATI HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Trump, Bush and other GOP candidates attack his financial troubles, missed votes in Senate candidates, Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), have also targeted Rubio in recent days — Cruz on trade and Paul on Senate votes. “If you’re going to accept pay, you ought to show up for work,” Paul told CNN. The remarks signal that the Senate attendance criticism, in particular, may not be going away, even after Rubio successfully parried Bush on the issue at the debate in Colorado. Trump said Tuesday that Bush’s attack during the event was “poorly delivered, but the facts are on Bush’s side.”

Rubio has said he has missed Senate votes both because he is running for president and because he is “frustrated” by congressional gridlock. He has also noted that many prior presidential candidates, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), also missed a lot of Senate work while campaigning.

Rubio campaign spokesman Alex Conant declined to respond to this past week’s criticism.

“As Marco said at the debate last week, he’s not running to attack any of the other candidates,” Conant said Tuesday. “He’s running for president because he believes he best understands the challenges facing America in the 21st century. We feel very good about our campaign’s momentum, but obviously we have a lot of work to do and a long way to go.”

In the days since Colorado, Bush has continued to chip away at Rubio, though not as directly.

During a speech in Tampa on Monday aimed at resetting his struggling campaign, Bush did not use the senator’s name but compared Rubio’s short Senate experience to that of President Obama.

“The challenges we face as a nation are too great to roll the dice on another presidential experiment,” Bush said.

And then there are Rubio’s personal finances, which have dogged him since he ran for the Senate in

Sen. Marco Rubio (RFla.), shown in Des Moines on Oct. 31, is coming off a strong debate performance and getting more attention from donors and voters.

2010. During that campaign, questions emerged about his personal use of a credit card issued to him by the Republican Party of Florida when he served in the state House.

He reimbursed the state party for flights he said were mistakenly billed to the party and paid for personal expenses that he had charged to the card.

Rubio reported in financial disclosures this year that he had cashed in retirement savings worth nearly $70,000 — a move commonly seen as a sign of financial distress. At the time, Rubio was paid $174,000 as a senator and also collected more than $50,000 from book royalties, a university teaching position and a rental property.

Although those amounts put his family among the top echelons of American earners, Rubio is one of the least wealthy members of the Senate. He has defended his financial history, saying that he is not from a rich family, had to take out loans to pay for his college education and now struggles to pay for his children to go to a private Christian school. He also said the retirement cash-out was due in part to having to spend $3,000 after his refrigerator broke.

“All you have to do is look at his credit card — I mean, he’s a disaster with his credit cards,” Trump said during the news conference Tuesday morning at Trump Tower to launch his new book, “Crippled America.”

“For years I’ve been hearing that his credit cards are a disaster,” Trump continued. “. . . He certainly lives above his means, there’s no question about that.”

Rubio has slowly risen in early-voting state polls in recent weeks, although he is still far behind Trump and Carson, neither of whom have ever held elected office. Still, Rubio is beating Bush, who is now mired in single digits in most surveys.

“I think so far all of the attacks have been very weak and ineffective. I’m not terribly worried at the moment,” said Eric Anton, a New York investment broker who is raising money for Rubio. “Let’s put it this way: Nothing new has come up.” n

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A parable of contemporary schooling E MMA B ROWN Wilkinsburg, Pa. BY

T

he high school in this tiny, impoverished Pittsburgh suburb has long been among the worst in Pennsylvania. Now the school board has decided to close it, along with the town’s only middle school.

Board members say that giving up on the schools is the best thing they can do to give their students a shot at a better education and a better life. But two neighboring school districts declined to take the students before a third, Pittsburgh Public Schools, found room at one of the city’s lowest-performing high schools, located in one of its poorest neighborhoods.

So in a deal approved late last month, Wilkinsburg students are headed for a school that is similar to the one they are leaving behind.

Both have a history of chaotic classrooms and academic failure.

Students at both schools are overwhelmingly African American, and many suffer from the twin traumas of living in poverty and in violent neighborhoods.

Some see Wilkinsburg’s plight as evidence of a broken school funding system that shortchanges children from poor families, while others see it as an argument for investing in charter schools instead of trying to turn around dysfunctional school systems.

But there is widespread agreement on one thing: The story unfolding here shows the distance that remains between the ideal of public education as a great equalizer and the reality that many children are still consigned to schools that limit their futures.

“It’s a real parable of contemporary American schooling,” said Linda Darling-Hammond , professor emeritus at Stanford University and founder of a national education policy think tank, the Learning Policy Institute.

Urban school reformers have triedtouse schoolclosures asa tool.

But during the past decade, as cities such as Chicago and Washington have closed dozens of schools, students have often been shuffled from one struggling school to an-

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

In this disadvantaged district, merging two campuses by shuttering one is seen as a solution other — and there is no evidence that has done them any good.

Pittsburgh officials say they are offering Wilkinsburg’s students a school that is on the upswing, helmed by a dynamic new principal who has a track record of improving urban schools. The school system is committed to providing a wealth of resources to support students and improve instruction.

“We think we can build something special for kids,” Pittsburgh Superintendent Linda Lane said.

Like many parents, Benetta Blackwell is of two minds. She wants the new option to be a better place for her girls, but she worries that it won’t be.

Students from the two schools have long feuded, she said, and she worries about an eruption of violence when they’re all under one roof. She worries that despite recent improvements at the Pittsburgh school, it isn’t ready for the kids from Wilkinsburg, where she said fights are common and

where, just weeks ago, a female student made headlines for throwing gasoline on a security guard she said had mistreated her.

Wilkinsburg voters elected four new members to the school board in 2013, soon after the financially strapped district had to borrow $3 million just to make payroll.

The new board has won praise for replacing the superintendent, firing pricey consultants and bringing renewed focus to academics.

The board decided to invest in the district’s two elementary schools, which were making progress. But the middle and high schools were so underenrolled and dysfunctional that fixing them seemed impossible.

“Our high school was miserably failing the needs of students. It was just so wrong, what was happening there,” said Ed Donovan, the school board president.

In January, board members began exploring the possibility of paying a nearby district to educate

Principal Steve Puskar examines drawings by sophomore Kevin Blackwell at Wilkinsburg High.

After the closure, Blackwell said he hopes to attend a school where he can excel as a musician.

secondary students. By summer, they had struck a tentative agreement with Pittsburgh: Wilkinsburg would pay $8,000 per student next year, and $9,600 the following year, to send its kids to Westinghouse, three miles away.

Westinghouse Principal LouAnn Zwieryznski, is in her second year of working to turn the school around, with a $1.3 million federal school improvement grant that will be used in part to ensure students have mental, emotional and community-services support.

Westinghouse students say Zwieryznski already has succeeded in sparking a culture change among students and in filling classrooms with permanent teachers instead of substitutes.

Test scores are still far below average, but they rose substantially in 2015, Zwieryznski’s first year.

Some Wilkinsburg families wonder why their kids are being assigned to Westinghouse.

Not much further away, in an affluent Pittsburgh neighborhood, is a high-performing school where nearly half of the students are white. Pittsburgh officials said it doesn’t have space for more students, but many Wilkinsburg parents say race and class play a role.

“I guess they probably look at it like Wilkinsburg is poverty-stricken. They don’t want those issues coming to their school,” said Shari Williams, the mother of a Wilkinsburg freshman, who wants her son to attend a Pittsburgh magnet school for the arts. Under the agreement, he and other students will have to attend Westinghouse next year before they have equal opportunity to apply to magnets for the 2017-2018 school year.

Wilkinsburg students said they know lots of people see them as bad. But in one interview after another, they said they are desperate to learn. “Everyone’s trying to judge us,” one sophomore said.

“You’re on the outside looking in.”

Some said they will miss their school. But many are optimistic that Westinghouse will offer something more.

“I’m hoping for this to be a little bit better,” said Delmar White, a freshman. “A better education.” n

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A Texas-size setback for LGBT cause BY

S ANDHYA S OMASHEKHAR

T

he defeat of an equal-rights ordinance in Houston this past week was a setback for the gay rights movement, which had a banner year with the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage.

But as Tuesday’s vote showed, the movement is still finding its footing on its next big priority: ending discrimination against gay and transgender people.

Voters in Houston, a Democratic-leaning city, decisively rejected the nondiscrimination ordinance, with 61 percent of voters against it and 39 percent in favor. Supporters cited a number of factors for the loss, but voters appeared to be heavily swayed by opponents’ argument that the measure would allow men, particularly sexual predators, to enter women’s restrooms.

That argument is not new. This year, eight states considered bills that would have made it a crime for someone to enter restrooms that do not match their biological sex. While none of them passed, transgender rights groups expect more such bills to be introduced next year.

Across the country, school districts have struggled to balance the needs of transgender students’ use of the appropriate bathroom and locker room with social mores and parental fears. On Monday, federal education authorities found that an Illinois school district violated sex-discrimination laws by barring a transgender student from the girls’ locker room and girls’ sports teams.

The issue has stymied efforts to gain what gay rights groups consider to be comprehensive antidiscrimination protections for gay and transgender people: laws that bar unequal treatment in employment, housing, and public accommodations such as shops and restaurants. In Massachusetts, a typically liberal state that was the first to legalize same-sex marriage, efforts to include gender identity as a protected class in public accommodations have failed.

Activists say they expect opponents to rachet up the rhetoric on

BRETT COOMER/HOUSTON CHRONICLE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Focus on transgender people’s use of bathrooms sets stage for similar battles over other measures bathrooms, emboldened by the Houston vote.

“We know there’s more work to do,” said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, who said she thinks the bathroom issue will dominate the organization’s work for the next few years. The focus during that time, she said, will be “educating the American public that we are good, decent people who are being attacked by — I don’t know how else to say it — lying extremists.”

Opponents of anti-discrimination measures say that the bathroom issue is real and that such measures put women at risk. In a startling TV ad aired during the Houston campaign, a young girl wearing knee socks and a backpack is stalked in a public restroom by an older man as a voice warns that “any man at any time could enter a women’s bathroom by claiming to be a woman that day.”

“From a purely common-sense perspective, it’s a big problem when you open restrooms, locker

rooms, shower facilities where people are in various states of undress to people of the opposite sex,” said Christiana Holcomb, legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization that has advocated against the Houston ordinance and other efforts to expand gay and transgender rights. “It looks like an open invitation for people to use these laws for nefarious purposes.”

Gay and transgender rights activists call these warnings fearmongering and stereotyping, and compare them to past efforts to portray gay and lesbian adults as “recruiters” for the “gay agenda.”

In 2008, opponents of same-sex marriage in California aired a TV ad in which a pigtailed girl bounds home to proudly tell her mother what she learned in school: “I learned how a prince married a prince and I can marry a princess!”

The ad famously and successfully played on parents’ worst fears about same-sex marriage, said Matt McTighe, executive di-

Rita Palomarez, left, and Linda Rodriguez pray during an election watch party attended by opponents of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance.

Opponents appeared to sway voters by saying the ordinance would allow men to enter women’s restrooms.

rector of Freedom for All Americans, a gay rights group focused on passing anti-discrimination measures across the country. It took years of public outreach to overcome such fears, he said.

Now, the movement must take a similar approach with transgender people, he said, introducing them to average Americans as their neighbors, co-workers and friends. To that end, Freedom for All Americans has launched a campaign called the Transgender Freedom Project, which will identify and educate transgender people in small towns and big cities who can speak to the media, stand on rally stages and make their case personally to lawmakers.

“It’s the personal stories that won us the freedom to marry,” he said. “It’s going to be those personal stories that, again, win the day.”

McTighe credits a host of factors for the defeat of the Houston ordinance, which failed despite the endorsements of the White House, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, businesses such as Apple and celebrities including actress Sally Field.

It was added to the ballot in late July, leaving activists just two months to cobble together a campaign, he said. And despite its Democratic bent, Houston is still located in one of the most conservative states in the country.

Much of the state’s that the Republican establishment lined up against the measure, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, as well as some African American Democrats. The reason the measure failed, they said, was simple: People are not comfortable allowing men in women’s bathrooms.

“The win here was huge in the eyes of the country,” said Jared Woodfill, co-chairman of the Campaign for Houston, one of the main groups opposing the ordinance.

He predicted that the bathroom issue would be taken up in other communities that oppose antidiscrimination ordinances.

“I think clearly it is a spark that is going to start a revolution,” he said. n

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Cuba’s island of broken dreams N ICK M IROFF Isla De La Juventud, Cuba BY

S

ome places are blessed by geography, with a deep harbor, mighty river or abundant natural resources.

Then there are places where geography is more of a curse. In the absence of any distinctive feature or economic purpose, they appear like a blank slate, inviting grandiose schemes and outsize ambitions. Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud, the “Isle of Youth,” is one of those places.

In other forlorn corners of Cuba, newly warming relations between Washington and Havana have kindled hopes for more tourists and investment. Here, the one place that came closer than any other except Guantanamo Bay to actually being part of the United States, Cubans have learned to temper their expectations.

Their island is a boneyard of big ideas. Over the years, it has been a pirate hideout, a Spanish penal colony, an American enclave, a Cuban penal colony and the setting for one of Fidel Castro’s most ambitious attempts at communist internationalism.

All failed. An island Castro renamed in 1978 to honor young people is now struggling to keep them there.

“If the Americans want to come back, great, but I doubt it’ll happen anytime soon,” said Carlos Enríquez, the proprietor of an outdoor nightclub built out of the ruins of 19th-century mineral baths, showing off the gurgling pools where Cuban partiers now swill beer and wriggle to reggaeton on weekends.

U.S. visitors once came for the cure-all properties of the springs.

“They called it Shangri-La,” Enríquez said.

The island was then known as Isla de Pinos (Isle of Pines), named for the native conifers that once covered its rolling plains and swamps. Hurricanes have blasted through every few years, enforcing a sense of impermanence.

The comma-shaped island is the seventh-largest landmass in the Caribbean but has only about

SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Improved relations with the U.S. offer little hope to remaining residents of the ‘Isle of Youth’ 80,000 residents. Persuading them to remain is an ongoing challenge for the Cuban government.

“There are boats leaving from here every night,” said Jean Pablo Concepción, a 28-year-old soccer coach. He was browsing the Internet in the main plaza of the capital, Nueva Gerona, where authorities have recently installed public WiFi. “In my neighborhood, it seems like there are hardly any young people left.”

His friend Alberto Deceaux, 19, said he plans to leave for the Cayman Islands as soon as he finishes his military service. He had seen the pictures of shiny banks and vacationing celebrities. “Tiger Woods goes there,” he said. “It’s paradise compared to this.”

Christopher Columbus called the island “La Evangelista” (“The Evangelist”) in 1494. But a generation later it appeared in Spanish records as the Isle of Pines.

Mineral baths brought the first American tourists in the 1860s.

But it was the 1898 SpanishAmerican War that turned it into a U.S. satellite. Washington had its sights on a possible canal project through the Isthmus of Panama and was eager to establish bases in the Caribbean. Soon, U.S. government maps were depicting the island as an American possession.

When the United States granted Cuba quasi-independence in 1902, the status of the Isle of Pines remained in limbo. The ratification of the Hay-Quesada Treaty in 1925 fully relinquished the American claim to the island. Most of the settlers left, cursing what they saw as a betrayal by Washington.

A ruined American cemetery is one of the few traces of their presence. Many of the headstones have toppled over, and the old citrus groves around it are smothered under 15-foot-tall thickets of marabú, the thorny African bush consuming the island’s abandoned farms.

When Cuba took full possession

María Álvarez, 45, left, arrived at School 15 on Isla de la Juventud as a teacher 25 years ago. She now lives in the shuttered facility with her family.

of the island, President Gerardo Machado ordered the construction of a vast prison complex, Presidio Modelo.

The prison’s most famous inmate arrived in 1953: 27-year-old Fidel Castro. He and his younger brother Raúl, then 22, were sent there with 30 comrades who had attempted to overthrow the government in a bloody attack on a military garrison. After 19 months, they were pardoned and set free and less than four years later Castro took power and revoked the island’s status as a free port, wiping out a second wave of 1950s U.S. investment. After the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, he militarized the island, seeing it as vulnerable to attack. He shut down Presidio Modelo in 1966.

In the early 1970s, Castro launched a bold plan to fill the island with rural boarding schools where Cuban students would labor in the fields and take classes in Spanish, math and Marxism.

Thousands of students arrived from poor nations to study free of charge. The government built 61 boarding schools, each with a capacity for 500 pupils.

You can drive around today and see their hollowed-out shells.

The schools were referred to by their numbers: The Sudanese kids were in 47. No. 4 was the Ethiopians. Fifteen was the school for Namibians. María Álvarez arrived there as a teacher 25 years ago.

When the international schools shut for good in 1994, at the worst moment of Cuba’s post-Soviet economic collapse, Álvarez chose to stay at the shuttered School 15. She lives with her family in what used to be administration offices.

“This was one of Fidel’s favorite schools,” Álvarez said. “He used to visit a lot and bring guests here.”

The Namibian kids were wonderful: polite, affectionate, well behaved, she said.

“Every once in a while, one of them comes back to show their own children where they went to school,” Álvarez said. She met several Namibian officials this way.

“They are very important people now,” she said. “They come here and see this, and they cry.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Where tech giants go for guidance America’s business titans explore spirituality at Indian ashram

A NNIE G OWEN Bhowali Range, India

resisted.

“Every time I would try and meditate he would distract me and frequently it was by throwing fruit,” Brilliant recalled. “He hit me with flying apples a couple of times in my testicles.”

Brilliant eventually talked himself into a job at the World Health Organization and worked for the groundbreaking smallpox eradication effort.

Zuckerberg came to Kainchi in 2008, a time when his company had hit a “tough patch,” he said recently at a live Facebook event with India’s prime minister. He went to see Jobs to ask his advice.

“He told me that in order to reconnect with what I believed as the mission of the company, I should visit this temple that he had gone to in India, early on in his evolution of thinking about what he wanted Apple and his vision of the future to be,” Zuckerberg said.

His month-long trip “reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing.

BY

T

he young American arrived at Kainchi Dham ashram in the hills of northern India wearing a T-shirt and a pair of ripped jeans, carrying little. Nobody at the spiritual retreat knew who he was.

Only recently did Mark Zuckerberg reveal that he had traveled to the ashram during the early days of Facebook at the suggestion of one ofhismentors,ApplefounderSteve Jobs. Zuckerberg said that Jobs had come here as a college student in the 1970s and thought it would be a good place for him to mull over the future of his company.

Over the years, the riverside retreat in the state of Uttarakhand has quietly attracted other tech titans from Google, Apple and eBay. Now, thanks to Zuckerberg, who was in India again in late October, it is having its moment in the spotlight.

Indian media descended in droves. Attendance tripled. Trains and busloads of curiosity seekers from other parts of India began arriving, hoping to get a look at what is now being called the “Zuckerberg temple.”

As with hundreds of other ashrams and spiritual centers in India, Western backpackers and tourists have come to Kainchi for decades.

But the mystery is why this modest ashram would attract such a steady stream of American tech visionaries. Along with Jobs and Zuckerberg, Google’s Larry Page and Jeffrey Skoll, co-founder of eBay, have made the pilgrimage.

“Everybody in the world wants to go and see this place,” said Larry Brilliant, a doctor who once lived at the ashram and later became head of Google’s philanthropy division. “It’s a combination of ‘Eat Pray Love,’ ‘Know Thyself’ and ‘Change the World.’ ” ‘It was like seeing the sun’ Devotees say much of Kainchi’s appeal is connected to its spiritual founder, Neem Karoli Baba. The sadhu, or holy man, came to the hills from a nearby state and lived

PHOTOS BY ANNIE GOWEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

The Kainchi Dham ashram in northern India has attracted technology giants such as Steve Jobs of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. At left, the ashram’s late guru, Neem Karoli Baba.

in a cave for a time — a spot preserved at the ashram and lighted by candles — before the first temple was built in 1964.

A small person wrapped in a large plaid shawl, Neem Karoli Baba normally sat on an elevated cot as followers meditated around him, offering a few kind words, a laugh and occasionally throwing fruit. His philosophy was simple — “all one.”

He exuded goodness, according to devotee Craig Mather, 64, a business analyst from Wales.

When he first saw the holy man in 1973, he said, “It was like seeing the sun — dressed in a blanket.”

Jobs arrived in 1974 on a trip around India. He had a growing interest in Eastern spirituality and a classmate had met the guru and urged Jobs to meet him, Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson.

But when he arrived, suffering

from dysentery, Jobs was disappointed to learn that the guru had died the previous September. He spent most of his time walking around nearby villages and reading an English version of “Autobiography of a Yogi,” the story of another famed sage, according to Isaacson.

“He was searching for the same thing all of us search for, what we’re still searching for, the meaning of life, why we live, how we can do anything good in our lifetimes,” said Brilliant, who became a lifelong friend of Jobs. He was also searching for raw food, as Brilliant puts it — “Where the hell am I going to get a good salad?”

Brilliant, who is now senior adviser to Skoll Global Threats Fund, lived at the ashram for three years before Neem Karoli Baba pushed him to leave and take on the smallpox epidemic. At first, Brilliant

Peace and meditation At morning prayers one recent day, several worshipers arrived who said they’d come to see the place they’d heard so much about.

One was Sheelendra Pratap Singh, 28, a New Delhi resident who said he made the trip because of Zuckerberg’s journey. Singh was searching for inspiration, too.

Business at his civil construction firm is down 50 percent.

“I thought if I came here, Kainchi Dham would bless me, and business will improve,” As he spoke, the morning worship ritual had reached a crescendo. Priest and followers paused in front of a small temple dedicated to Neem Karoli Baba, chanting, beating cymbals, singing and raising their hands in the air in praise.

Inside the small marble structure sits a lifelike statue of the holy man, wrapped in a purple blanket, lighted with candles and incense.

The idol has a wry, twinkly expression his followers say was similar to the guru’s in life.

That’s funny, he seems to be saying, you thinking you can control everything. n

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

Why his appeal is so huugge!

BY MARC FISHER

t

he way Joe McCoy sees it, the last time America was great was when Ronald Reagan was president, when people played by the rules. No, it was in the ’70s, Holly Martin says, when you could depend on Americans to work hard. No, to find true American greatness, Steve Trivett contends, you need to go back to before the Vietnam War, “when you could still own a home and have a good job even if you didn’t have a college education.” ¶ Even if they don’t have “Make America Great Again” campaign caps, Donald Trump’s supporters easily recite the signature slogan of the real estate developer’s insurgent presidential bid. And even if they don’t agree on exactly why the country lost its way, they do accept — give or take a few degrees of hyperbole — Trump’s contention that the United States has become, as he has put it, “an economic wasteland” that is “committing cultural suicide.” ¶ The premise behind “Make America Great Again” is that the country is no longer great. It can be great again, and the campaign has a certain can­do billionaire in mind as the guy to make that happen, but at the moment, the leading contender for the nomination of the party that regularly touts the notion of American exceptionalism is arguing that the country ain’t what it used to be. ¶ Interviews with Trump supporters across the country find a profusion of perspectives on how and when America lost its mojo; what bonds them is a sense of frustration so abiding that they’re willing to take a chance on a man they readily admit is anything but presiden­ tial, at least the way the term has historically been defined. continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

“The way he talks is just silly sometimes — he sounds like a fourth-grader,” said Holly Martin, a freelance technology writer who recently moved, in search of a lower cost of living, from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to the exurban town of Winchester, Va. But Martin, 59, attended a training session for Trump campaign volunteers recently because “he talks like a regular guy, and he actually loves this country.

He’s not afraid to say that we’ve lost our good character.”

Many Trump supporters interpret their candidate’s rough rhetoric not as anger, but as determination. Without ever having seen Trump’s reality TV show, “The Apprentice,” Martin has come to think that he has a rare ability to get things done. She was a Republican all her life — until her party regained the majority in Congress in 2014 and proceeded, she said, “to do nothing. They did nothing on Obamacare, nothing on cutting spending, nothing on restoring honesty. They hate us, so now I’m done with Republicans. Trump is not one of them. He doesn’t hate us. He really believes we can make America great again, and I’m not an optimistic person, but I think he can, because he’s got a built-in ability to use the media, just like Obama.”

For some supporters, especially those in the second half of life, Trump’s slogan is a tribute to a simpler time. “He could have said, ‘Make America what it was before’ and I would have voted for him,” said Jane Cimbal, 69, who lives in Winchester and signed up to collect signatures to get Trump on the Virginia ballot. “The last time we had good jobs and respect for the military and law enforcement was, oh, probably during Eisenhower.”

Cimbal doesn’t view Trump as an optimist of the Reagan stripe, but she’s okay with voting for a harsh critic. “He speaks his mind,” she said.

“So many of the others are wishy-washy. Mr. Trump isn’t a provocateur to annoy people but to get them thinking.”

Cimbal, a loyal Republican, wants people to think about how to curb illegal immigration and protect Second Amendment gun ownership rights, but she’s mainly drawn to Trump because she thinks his plain talk can get things done. Her goal is to restore a time “when there wasn’t as much animosity toward each other, when everything wasn’t about race and people just got along.”

The crowds at Trump events tend to be older and whiter than the national population, but so is the party whose nomination he seeks, and so are frequent voters generally. If younger supporters don’t have firsthand experience of the Eisenhower, Kennedy or Reagan years, they nonetheless share the older generation’s sense of loss.

Joe McCoy, who is 31, says he started out this campaign season “laughing at this Trump guy like everyone else.”

Still, the more he heard Trump, the more the greatness slogan resonated. “He boasts a lot, he’s got trophy wives, he’s not exactly Mr. Clean, so I was skeptical,” said McCoy, who lives in

DONALD TRUMP AT OCT. 29 RALLY IN SPARKS, NEV.; LANCE IVERSEN/ASSOCIATED PRES

DICK STROBEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Although Donald Trump has said that he came up with his slogan “Make America Great Again,” both John F. Kennedy, top, and Ronald Reagan, above, used versions of the sentiment in their campaigns. But those men couched their laments for America’s perceived loss of prowess amid a larger promise of change.

Norwich, Conn., where he does tech support from home for a multinational company.

“Mitt Romney was more my kind of guy: practical, a nice guy. But you know, people don’t like a nice guy. They like this guy because he’s right about us losing our country. I really don’t think we should be letting kids go into whichever bathroom they want to in school. The Democrats are really reaching too far on the social issues. And there’s no retirement anymore, no pensions.”

McCoy laments the pervasive sense that it no longer pays to play by the rules. That’s where immigration enters the equation: “When my wife came here from the Philippines, she had to go through a health assessment, background checks and interviews to become a citizen.

Now, these people come in from Mexico and Central America through some mule, just whoever comes.”

“I’m not a rigid tea partyer,” he continued.

“I’m in favor of government paying for roads and the fire department. Social Security is a great thing. But I don’t think Trump is really much of a conservative; he’s definitely more moderate than the others.”

McCoy recognizes that his sense of lost greatness is probably different from that of others who are drawn to Trump, but he says that’s all right. When Trump talks about losing the country, “it’s about whatever you want it to be,” McCoy said. “He lets you fill in the blanks.”

That free-floating sense of decline expresses itself in many different ways among Trump

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2015

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COVER STORY

TRUMP PROMOTES HIS BOOK NOV. 3 IN MANHATTAN; BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS

supporters. Some speak of a fading sense of mobility, a loss of the expectation that each generation will surpass its parents’ standard of living. Others focus on the loss of blue-collar jobs and a sense that only those with computer backgrounds can take advantage of the new digital economy.

Although Trump has said in campaign speeches that he came up with his slogan himself, Ronald Reagan put “Let’s Make America Great Again” on buttons and posters in his 1980 campaign, and John Kennedy used “We Can Do Better” and “Get This Country Moving Again” as slogans in 1960.

But Reagan and Kennedy were widely perceived as happy warriors with a shining vision of what the country could be. Reagan and Kennedy couched their laments for America’s perceived loss of prowess amid a larger promise of change — ideological in Reagan’s case and generational in Kennedy’s.

Other successful candidates carefully grounded their critiques of the country’s state in optimistic packaging.

“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America,” Bill Clinton said in his first inaugural address in 1993.

“A lot of the difference is tonal,” said David Greenberg, a historian of the presidency at Rutgers University. “Kennedy had great confidence and self-possession, and although Reagan’s optimism has been overstated, he got the balance right between that shining personality

ASSOCIATED PRESS

ED REINKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some of Trump’s supporters say the last time America was great was during the Eisenhower administration, middle. “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America,” Bill Clinton, above, said in his inaugural address in 1993.

KLMNO WEEKLY

and his tough, no-compromise willingness to stand up to the Iranians, the Soviet Union or the liberals. There wasn’t just the tone of anger and resentment, the shouting people down, that you see with Trump.”

In the recent GOP debate, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) pointedly presented a more optimistic perspective, rejecting the developer’s blunt, blustery barbs about the nation’s decline. “Our greatest days lie ahead,” Rubio said.

Undaunted, Trump began his closing statement with one of his trademark lines: “Our country doesn’t win anymore.” It’s a theme he has developed in several of his books, including a new 2016 campaign edition of “Time to Get Tough!,” where he writes: “The country I love is a total economic disaster right now. We have become a laughingstock, the world’s whipping boy, blamed for everything, credited for nothing, given no respect. You see and feel it all around you, and so do I.” That dark view of the nation would seem to violate the political science adage that Americans favor optimistic candidates, but Trump’s dire summation of the state of the nation is far from unique in the annals of presidential campaigns.

“In the ’30s in the Depression, many people felt the American way of life was finished,” said Robert Lieber, a government professor at Georgetown University who wrote a book arguing against the notion that the country is in decline. “In 1957, after Sputnik, there was a strong belief that the Soviets were much more disciplined than us. Since the ’70s, it’s been the Russians who were eating our lunch and then the Japanese and then the Chinese. Each time, we underestimated America’s material strengths.”

Lieber sees Trump’s slogan as a symbol of his ability to slice through standard political rhetoric: “His discourse is deliberately provocative, but he’s refreshing to a lot of people because he talks about reality with the bark off, and people are sick to death of the language of political correctness.”

Steve Trivett, sports editor of a newspaper in central Florida, worries about his six grandchildren’s futures “in an anything-goes society where there are no ramifications for any action.

People here are concerned about why nothing gets done. We’re not angry, we’re frustrated.

And then Donald Trump comes along and says, ‘I am going to make America great again’ and we all go, ‘Hallelujah!’ ” Trivett, who turns 70 this month, is still working because he says he “blew my 401(k) sending two kids to college, and I don’t regret it, but where’s the security? When America was great, our economy was strong. Our economy’s been shipped off to other countries. Can Donald Trump solve that? Hell, I don’t know.

Somebody not as flamboyant or egomaniacal might be more effective, but I’m not sure anybody can bring us back. At least Trump gets things done. The last Democrat I voted for was Jimmy Carter. He was a good, honest man, and the system ate him up. So maybe we need a guy like Trump.” n

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MUSIC

No longer ignoring blues heritage Planned museums in Chicago and St. Louis will pay longoverdue tribute to musical genre

M ARK G UARINO Chicago BY

B

uddy Guy, the legendary Chicago guitarist, sums up the need for a national blues museum with something that his mother once told him.

“She said, ‘Son, if you got flowers, give them to me now so I can smell them. I’m not going to smell them when I’m gone,’ ” Guy told The Washington Post.

Two such museums are breaking ground, starting next year.

First up is the National Blues Museum in St. Louis, a 23,000square-foot facility of mostly exhibition space that will open in early 2016. In late 2017, the Chicago Blues Experience (CBE), a multiuse facility encompassing nearly 56,000 square feet, will introduce visitors to how the blues developed from the Great Migration of African Americans from the deep South to Chicago. It will be housed downtown at Navy Pier.

Both facilities are long overdue, says Guy, 79, adding that it is shameful that his city has done little to promote its most famous cultural import. “I started this fight almost 40 years ago when Muddy [Waters] died,” he says. “I said to the mayor and other elected officials, ‘We need something in Chicago because Chicago is losing everything, and don’t tell me it’s too late.’ ” It’s a tricky proposition for any city to claim ownership of the blues, as the music’s development was largely migratory. So far, St. Louis is ahead of Chicago, as it has already instituted a walk of fame.

Visitors routinely flock to an eightfoot-tall bronze statue of rockand-roll icon Chuck Berry, the city’s most famous son. Even its NHL team, the St. Louis Blues, is named in a nod to its musical past.

Jim O’Neal, the co-founder of Living Blues magazine, who also is the research director for the Mississippi Blues Trail, a series of historical site markers, says that even though its position on the Mississippi River initially meant that St. Louis was a popular destination for early bluesmen, it was

NELS AKERLUND FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Buddy Guy at Legends, which has served as Chicago’s only real blues museum. Guitars and photos of influential performers line its walls.

eclipsed after World War II, once Chicago dominated the industrialized North’s job opportunities.

Soon after, during the 1950s and 1960s, Chicago became the recording center for the blues.

O’Neal finds news of both museums remarkable because “the blues is always on the bottom of the entertainment industry rung.

Everybody acknowledges it, but it doesn’t always get the financial support.”

“There’s a place for it, especially if they’re trying to appeal to the average population, not necessarily the hard-core blues enthusiasts, because there aren’t that many of us left,” he says with a laugh.

In Chicago, there is little evidence of blues culture in the city: No statutes are dedicated to such pioneering musicians as Waters, Willie Dixon or Howlin’ Wolf, or to the original Maxwell Street market, one of the original incubators for electric blues. And because Chicago has not created a blues trail of its own, visitors are on their own if they want to visit landmark buildings or neighborhoods

where blues musicians developed their craft, not to mention where the music is performed today.

The CBE aims to reverse the trend somewhat. It is the product of a team of private equity investors who plan to raise $45 million by the end of the year to break ground early next year on the museum. It has raised $37 million so far. The organization’s vision is to keep the museum a for-profit enterprise in order to make it more sustainable.

In St. Louis, the nonprofit National Blues Museum will anchor the historic Laurel Building, which has been undergoing a $150 million redevelopment in the Mercantile Exchange district.

Developer Steve Metherd hired Dion Brown, executive director of the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, Miss., to move north and make things operational at the $15 million facility.

“This location makes perfect sense because there are so many variations of the blues. Blues traveled to Memphis, to Chicago, to St.

Louis and to Detroit before branching out. We get to capture all that,” Brown says.

Although the history they intend to tell predates the digital age, both museums will rely largely on interactive storytelling rather than curated artifacts. Brown says his museum will include items from Berry, Pinetop Perkins, Ella Fitzgerald and David “Honeyboy” Edwards, among others that he is purchasing from estates and collecting via donations. Thanks to a “six-figure” contribution from rocker Jack White, the museum’s “Mix It Up” program will allow users to compose their own songs via four kiosks. In other designated areas, they will be able to record and view oral histories.

The CBE will feature fewer artifacts in favor of an immersive experience intended to drop visitors into different time periods and locations where the blues developed, including Maxwell Street and South Side clubs.

“We want to re-create that sound and feeling of being there,” says Christian Lachel, the creative director of BRC Imagination Arts, a Burbank, Calif.-based company that the CBE has commissioned to build out the space.

Contemporary blues musicians often lament that canonizing the music results in the public perception that it’s a dead art form. Two performance spaces aim to correct that — a 600-person capacity club in Chicago and a 150-person capacity room in St. Louis — aimed to keep the blues alive, whether through informal jam sessions or nightly performances.

Guy says that 80 percent of the people who show up at Legends, his club in Chicago’s South Loop, are foreign tourists. For years, Legends has served as Chicago’s only real blues museum, with guitars and photographs of the music’s most influential performers lining its walls.

The greatest exhibit is Guy himself, who is often found seated at his club’s bar, where he poses for photographs.

“When I go in there at night,” he says, “sometimes I have to take 100 pictures.” n

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EDUCATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

What’s a STEM degree worth?

Science, technology, engineering and math majors have the greatest earning potential, while education and counseling have the smallest, according to an annual survey by Payscale.com, a Seattle-based developer of salary-tracking software.

Early career* Before you give up on that humanities major . . .

English literature majors have the potential to earn more by mid-career than cell and molecular biology majors: $75,300 vs. $74,800.

l

l American studies majors have the potential to earn more than logistics and supply-chain management or computer programming majors: $78,300 vs. $77,900 and $77,100, respectively. l Philosophy majors have the potential to earn more than biotechnology majors: $85,000 vs. $84,000. n

$150,000

$100,000

$50,000

Mid-career* College majors with the largest earning potential 1. Petroleum engineering 2. Nuclear engineering 3. Actuarial mathematics 4. Chemical engineering 5. Electronics and communications engineering 6. Computer science and engineering 7. Electrical and computer engineering 7. Systems engineering 9. Aeronautical engineering 10. Computer engineering 10. Mining engineering College majors with the smallest earning potential 309. Special education 310. Biblical studies 311. Social work 312. Elementary education 313. Youth ministry 314. Human services 315. Early childhood and elementary education 316. Counseling 317. Child and family studies 317. Child development 319. Early childhood education

*EARLY CAREER MEANS FULL TIME WITH AT LEAST 5 YEARS’ EXPERIENCE; MID-CAREER MEANS FULL TIME WITH AT LEAST 10 YEARS’ EXPERIENCE. THE SAMPLE CONSIDERED FOR THE 2015-2016 COLLEGE SALARY REPORT WAS 1.4 MILLION COLLEGE GRADUATES, INCLUDING THOSE WHO WENT ON TO EARN AN ASSOCIATE’S, MASTER’S, MBA, PH.D AND JD. ONLY GRADUATES WHO ARE EMPLOYED FULL TIME, NOT ON ACTIVE MILITARY DUTY AND PAID WITH EITHER AN HOURLY WAGE OR AN ANNUAL SALARY ARE INCLUDED. SELF-EMPLOYED, PROJECT-BASED AND CONTRACT EMPLOYEES ARE NOT INCLUDED. SALARY FIGURES COMBINE BASE ANNUAL SALARY OR HOURLY WAGE, BONUSES, PROFIT SHARING, TIPS, COMMISSIONS, OVERTIME AND OTHER FORMS OF CASH EARNINGS, AS APPLICABLE. SALARY DOES NOT INCLUDE EQUITY (STOCK) COMPENSATION, NOR DOES IT INCLUDE CASH VALUE OF RETIREMENT BENEFITS, OR VALUE OF OTHER NON-CASH BENEFITS SUCH AS HEALTH CARE.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2015

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BOOKS

A fatal day changed Israel for worse F ICTION

O KILLING A KING The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel

By Dan Ephron Norton. 290 pp. $27.95

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REVIEWED BY

M ATTI F RIEDMAN

ne Saturday night in late 1995, I was with a few other 18-year-olds at a kibbutz in northern Israel, watching a Hebrew B-movie on TV. Words began scrolling urgently at the bottom of the screen, a news flash: The prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had been shot at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Soon the movie winked off, newscasters took over, and we learned that Rabin was dead. Israelis are used to instability and sudden tragedy, but nothing like this had ever happened, and the country was plunged into grief and discord. I remember being crushed in a crowd of tens of thousands filing past Rabin’s coffin in Jerusalem a day or two later, the crowd so big I never actually saw the coffin.

Hanging over it all was a sense that something significant had changed for the worse — a sense that lingers 20 years later.

That moment, on Nov. 4, 1995, is the subject of Dan Ephron’s “Killing a King.” Ephron, a veteran journalist who was at the rally that night, spent years reporting in Israel and has a firm grasp of the country’s complexities. For this book, he had the cooperation of Rabin’s family and that of the assassin, Yigal Amir. The result is a narrative that is carefully reported, clearly presented, concise and gripping.

Ephron follows Rabin and Amir over two turbulent years as fate draws them closer to their fatal collision. Rabin, a hero of Israel’s founding generation and the leader of the pragmatic left, is intent on achieving a peace deal that disentangles Israel from millions of Palestinians under military occupation since the 1967 war (which Rabin led as chief of staff). Amir, an undistinguished law student moving on the fringes of the Israeli right, sees Rabin’s plan as an existential danger to Israel and a crime against God. He likes the idea of being an actor in great events and an agent of divine disfavor, and he thinks Jews should be as ready to

HAVAKUK LEVISON/REUTERS

Israelis gather in 1997 on the second anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

die for their beliefs as the Palestinian suicide bombers blowing themselves up with terrifying frequency on Israeli streets in those days. He decides to kill the prime minister, an act he realizes will almost certainly cost him his own life.

In recounting the buildup to the killing, Ephron reminds us of the giddiness of the early years of the peace process, when it seemed a better future might actually be in store for the Middle East. It is jarring to read this amid the maelstrom of 2015; the region is unrecognizable in these pages, its problems almost quaint. The signing ceremony on the White House lawn in 1993, Ephron writes, saw Rabin and Yasser Arafat meet for the first time, and “the sheer enormity of the moment, the unscripted interactions, the nervous asides, all generated currents of

electricity.” When the two shook hands, the crowd gasped, then cheered.

If much seemed possible at the time, what seemed impossible to many Israelis was a political murder. Those Israelis included the prime minister. Debates in Israel had always been vehement but conformed to certain familial rules — the country was small and fragile, everyone knew each other, and people drew back before they went too far. Amir, an amateur, goes unnoticed by intelligence agents tracking Jewish extremists, easily surprises Rabin’s small security detail, and not only shoots the prime minister at point-blank range but lives to gloat. Ephron’s account of how all this happened is dramatic and painful.

“Killing a King” doesn’t delve too deeply into the ways the mur-

der is still felt in Israeli society, and Ephron avoids speculation — wisely, I think — about what might have been had Rabin lived.

But that news flash I remember as an 18-year-old was a crucial moment, one when Israelis were forced to look not outward at our enemies but inward at ourselves.

What we saw was ugly and frightening, and it still matters very much.

The assassination has been nearly submerged by the torrent of events, which makes this book timely and useful — a reminder that what happened on a Tel Aviv sidewalk 20 years ago is as important to understanding Israel as any of its wars, though the death toll that night was just one. n Friedman is a journalist in Jerusalem and the author of “The Aleppo Codex.”

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2015

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Harry Bosch goes to the dark side

The birth of the Federal Reserve

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

A

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REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

ny Michael Connelly fan could have predicted that the situation that kickstarts “The Crossing” — the latest Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch novel — isn’t going to end well.

I’m not talking about armed robberies, home invasions, rogue cops or shootouts with stone-cold killers, all of which provide some tense moments here. No, I’m talking about the toughest jam Bosch has ever faced: retirement.

At the conclusion of his last outing, “The Burning Room,” Bosch got himself suspended from the Los Angeles Police Department on a trumped-up complaint. Instead of fighting his suspension, which would have entailed months of paperwork during which time he would have had to live without his salary, Bosch capitulated so that he would be able to pay for his daughter’s college expenses.

In retirement, Bosch has been restoring an old Harley, a hobby that keeps him occupied for maybe 10 minutes a day. As another character remarks, “Retired and relentless are two things that don’t mesh together very well.”

Bosch may be out to pasture as far as the Los Angeles Police Department is concerned, but Connelly is still very much in his prime as a suspense writer. “The Crossing” is a pensive thriller that’s ingeniously constructed and ambitious in scope. Indeed, it’s even something of a twofer: The hero of another Connelly series, Mickey Haller (a.k.a. “The Lincoln Lawyer”), hires Bosch at the outset to work as a private investigator.

Haller, who’s also Bosch’s halfbrother, is a criminal defense attorney. He wants Bosch to find evidence to clear his client of the murder of a woman named Lexi Parks — the wife of a sheriff’s deputy — found bludgeoned to death in her bed. That’ll be difficult given that DNA evidence at the scene points to Haller’s client.

Even more difficult to overturn are Bosch’s own qualms about the job.

Here’s his initial response to

Haller’s offer: “I work a case for you — not just you, any defense lawyer — and it’ll undo everything I did with the badge. . . . It’s crossing to the dark side.”

But, cross Bosch does. He’s motivated a bit by money, a bit by boredom and, in the best hardboiled tradition, a lot by a desire to get at the truth of the crime.

Bosch’s investigations take him all over his beloved L.A. and beyond, from swank watering holes to hot sheet motel rooms. All the while, Bosch himself is being tracked by killers and dogged by obscenity-laced phone calls from irate former Los Angeles police colleagues who’ve learned of his defection to the enemy country of criminal defense.

As always with a Bosch novel, the delight is in these “inside police” details. When Bosch begins reading the police file or so-called “murder book” on the Parks case, he studies it as closely as a rabbi studies the Talmud: “He knew every trick there was when it came to planting obfuscation and misdirection in a murder book. . . . It had been his routine practice back in the day to redact words in reports . . . to intermittently remove the toner cartridge from the squad room photocopier so that pages and pages of the documents he was turning over were printed so lightly they were impossible or at least headacheinducing to read.”

Now, Bosch finds himself perched, uneasily, on the other side of the investigation, searching the files for police errors or cover-ups that might not be evident to an investigator without all his years of on-the-job experience.

What Bosch does discover in “The Crossing” is a vile conspiracy and a new vocation as an independent investigator that should keep him busy — and Connelly fans happy — for years to come. n Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.

I THE CROSSING

By Michael Connelly Little, Brown. 388 pp. $28

AMERICA’S BANK The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

By Roger Lowenstein Penguin Press. 355 pp. $29.95

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REVIEWED BY

D ANIEL G ROSS

n recent years, as it has stepped in to deal with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve has become remarkably politicized. That’s not altogether surprising. Almost exactly a century ago, America’s central bank emerged from the muck of the nation’s immature, crash-anddepression-prone financial system. As Roger Lowenstein tells it in “America’s Bank,” an illuminating history of the Fed’s unlikely origin story, the central bank represented an ambitious — and not entirely successful — effort to resolve several long-standing tensions at the heart of the American experiment in self-government: East Coast vs. the interior, urban sensibilities vs. rural ones, mercantile vs. agrarian interests, Wall Street vs. Main Street. It is still working out the kinks.

Lowenstein, a financial journalist and author of books on the financial crisis and Warren Buffett, has a great facility for constructing highly readable narratives about complex financial topics. In his telling, America’s central bank came about through political and intellectual horse-trading among a German Jewish immigrant banker, a patrician Republican from New England and a states-rights Democrat from rural Virginia.

In 1914, the United States stood alone among industrialized nations in eschewing a central bank.

Andrew Jackson had famously allowed the charter of the Second Bank of the United States to expire in the 1830s. With only loose regulation, the financial system was decentralized and rudderless. Banks issued their own notes. When conditions turned sour, banks, which were required to hold large reserves, called in loans and withdrew credit — at the same time.

And so the industrializing United States “suffered a continual spate of financial panics, bank runs, money shortages and, indeed, fullblown depressions.”

The effort to reconcile a func-

tioning European tradition with the dysfunctional U.S. system started with Paul Warburg. The scion of a German banking family with the “soul of a poet,” Warburg arrived in the United States in 1902 to join the bank run by his in-laws and was “shocked by the primitiveness of American finance.” In January 1907, Warburg wrote a New York Times opinion piece titled “Defects and Needs of Our Banking System,” in which he argued for a central bank. Nine months later, the market illustrated his point perfectly during the Panic of 1907.

After much horse-trading between legislators, a plan was created and President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law on Dec. 23, 1913.

Lowenstein notes, correctly, that the establishment of the Federal Reserve was “less an ending than a truce.” Battles over banking regulation, the gold standard and the appropriate way to conduct monetary policy continued to rage. (They still do!) The lines of authority over who would run the Fed were not resolved for many years. (They still aren’t!) The Fed’s mission constantly shifted.

Few would have predicted the success the Federal Reserve has had in ironing out business cycles.

But few would have foreseen its stunning failures. Warburg died in 1932, three years after the stock market crash and a banking crisis far worse than the Panic of 1907 that the Fed had failed to avert.

You can blame the architecture.

But the Federal Reserve has been beset from its outset by the biases, failings and quirks of the people who run it. As Lowenstein notes, “The Federal Reserve Act did not guarantee sound monetary policy any more than the establishment of Congress could guarantee good laws.” n Gross’s most recent book is “Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline and the Rise of a New Economy.”

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Where is America’s cyberdefense plan?

TED KOPPEL hosted the ABC news program “Nightline” from 1980 to 2005 and is the author of the new book, “Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath.”

To begin, a conclusion: The Internet, whatever its many virtues, is also a weapon of mass destruction.

We have been distracted from focusing on that potential by a succession of high­profile cyberattacks, including China vacuuming up more than 22 million federal employee records, North Korea’s humiliating shot across the bow of Sony Pictures Entertainment and a barrage of cyberlarceny directed at U.S. banks and businesses, much of which has originated in Russia and Ukraine. Each of these targets was protected by firewalls and other defenses. But the Internet is inherently vulnerable. It was never intended to keep intruders out. It was designed to facilitate the unimpeded exchange of information, giving attackers a built-in advantage over defenders.

If that constitutes an ongoing threat to commerce (and it does), it also represents a potentially catastrophic threat to our national security — and not just in the area of intelligence-gathering. The United States’ physical infrastructure is vulnerable. Our electric power grids, in particular, are highly susceptible to cyberattacks, the consequences of which would be both devastating and long-lasting.

Deregulation of the electric power industry has resulted in a network of more than 3,000 companies, some of which are well protected, many of which are not, but all of which are interconnected. Hacking into the most vulnerable could lead to a domino-like penetration of even the most secure companies. The automated programs (known as supervisory control and data acquisition systems) that control the supply and demand of electricity nationwide are, for the most part, standardized and therefore highly accessible.

Multiple sources in the intelligence community and the military tell me that Russia and China have already embedded

cyber-capabilities within our electrical systems that would enable them to take down all or large parts of a grid. Iran’s capabilities are believed to be close behind. North Korea is working toward such a goal.

George Cotter, a former chief scientist at the National Security Agency, told me that he fears groups such as the Islamic State may soon be able to hire capable experts and assemble the necessary equipment, which is available on the open market.

Why hasn’t anyone in authority warned us? Well, they have — repeatedly. In October 2012, thenDefense Secretary Leon Panetta told an audience of security executives that “a destructive cyber-terrorist attack could virtually paralyze the nation.”

Panetta warned that it could “shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.” Warning specifically of cyberattacks, President Obama said in his 2013 State of the Union address that “our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid.”

The impact of such an attack would be dire. In 2010, a bipartisan group, including two former secretaries of defense, two former directors of central intelligence and two former

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national security advisers, sent a confidential letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce warning that the electric grid “is extremely vulnerable to disruption by a cyber or other attack.” The letter went on to say that “timely reconstruction of the grid following a carefully targeted attack . . . would be impossible” and could “result in widespread outages for at least months to two years or more, depending on the nature of the attack.”

Serious warnings of an attack resulting in “widespread outages for at least months to two years or more” would, you might think, have galvanized the attention of policymakers. Yet the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, continue to bundle cyberattack into a generalized, one-size-fits-all threat response package covering floods, hurricanes, blizzards and earthquakes — disasters of shorter duration and affecting more localized areas than, say, the entire Eastern Seaboard, which is part of only one grid’s coverage area. An attack on the grid would have a particularly devastating impact in our cities, quickly exhausting emergency supplies and overwhelming evacuation plans.

When I asked former secretary of homeland security Janet Napolitano what the chances are that an aggressor could knock out one of our power grids with a cyberattack, she replied, “Very high — 80 percent, 90 percent.”

Yet she acknowledged that there

is no specific plan to respond to a disaster of that magnitude. Jeh Johnson, the current homeland security secretary, was unable or unwilling to provide even the outline of a plan to deal with the aftermath of such an attack.

When asked if he was aware that such a plan even exists and why it wouldn’t make sense to share it with the public, Johnson kept returning to the importance of having a battery-powered radio.

The military would be expected to provide support and security in the event of longer-lasting disasters. Nothing has been done, however, to prepare the greater public. FEMA’s recommendations entail having a two- to three-day supply of food and water, prescribed medicines, an unspecified amount of cash, flashlights, extra batteries and — as Johnson stressed — a portable radio. Beyond that there is the prudent recommendation that families agree on a predetermined emergency meeting place and the phone number of an out-of-state friend or relative as a common point of contact.

It is difficult to imagine what counsel Homeland Security will broadcast after the fact that it is unable to share now.

The Internet is a potential weapon of mass destruction, accessible to many of this country’s enemies. It is surely time that the vulnerability of our power grids to cyberattacks and the absence of a national plan to deal with the consequences become a part of our national conversation. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Time for dose of religious realism MICHAEL GERSON is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Post.

“Today,” said Ted Cruz when the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision came down, “is some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history.” Which is quite a claim, as that history includes the Battle of Antietam. Some evangelical leaders pronounced it “the downfall of America” (Tony Perkins) and a “nose dive off of the moral diving board into the cesspool of humanity” (Franklin Graham) — a mental image I wish I could unthink.

Suffice it to say that conservative Christians have been lately pondering their relationship to American culture. And not just those who are hysterical for a living. When the court rejected traditional sexual ethics as a permissible basis for laws defining marriage, many conservative believers felt a cultural milestone had been reached.

It had once been plausible — though not necessarily accurate — for conservative Christians to regard themselves as part of a “moral majority” in which traditional Judeo-Christian views were broadly shared. That is no longer minimally credible on issues of the family and sexual ethics. And the change in selfperception among some believers has been jarring.

In an essay in Christianity Today, “The Power of Our Weakness,” my co-author, Peter

Wehner, and I explore this altered landscape. The manner in which conservative Christians navigate their journey away from outdated notions of a “Christian America” will have much to say about the quality of our public life in the actual America.

The cultural, legal and theological arguments of the essay might be summarized as: Snap out of it. There is, as legal scholar John Inazu told us, “an insecurity caused by a rapidly lost social position,” leading some to a “growing bitterness and despair.”

But this reaction is not particularly constructive or religiously serious.

There are valid concerns about what the Supreme Court ruling portends for institutions — particularly Catholic and evangelical institutions that serve the poor and educate the young — that touch upon the public order

but do not share its values.

Religious liberty means little if it does not extend to institutions as well as individuals.

But this set of legal challenges does not translate into social apocalypse. By many (though not nearly all) indicators, American culture is getting better. Divorce rates and abortion rates have declined in recent decades. Rates of violent crime and homicide are down dramatically from historical highs. Many religious conservatives mistake alarming legal trends for across-the-board cultural decay.

This new circumstance does, however, require a dose of realism. While we do not assume that every religious conservative holds to the traditional view of marriage, most (by the polling) do. But reversing the Supreme Court decision on marriage — which is rooted in long-term cultural changes that emerged in the context of heterosexual relationships — is not a realistic political goal. This means that religious conservatives must learn to operate in a same-sex marriage world.

At a practical level, traditionally minded people will need to take up social projects alongside people who support gay marriage (a group, by the way, that includes more than 40

percent of white evangelical millennials). In some cases, they will need to work cooperatively alongside people in gay marriages. This is not moral compromise; it is the normal practice of democracy. Beyond issues of sexuality, there is a broad agenda for which the building of coalitions is essential: the global fight against HIV/AIDS and sexual trafficking, the reform of foster care and the criminal justice system, the building of safe, healthy, child-friendly communities.

Pulling back from the practical, religious conservatives will need to recover some perspective. For most of the past 2,000 years, Christians have lived in societies that did not reflect their sexual ethics. And sexual ethics is not the sum total of Christian ethics, which, at its best, affirms the priority of the person and the defense of human rights, wellbeing and dignity.

For religious conservatives, this might even be an opportunity to recall the true nature of power.

Periods of vulnerability and political weakness have often been times of expanding Christian influence.

Politics, in its own way, is important. But there is a type of influence not counted in votes, which no court can overturn. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY DANZIGER

Australia’s lesson on immigration FRED HIATT is the editorial page editor of The Post. He writes editorials for the newspaper and a biweekly column that appears on Mondays. He also contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

sydney — Why is there no mop-haired demagogue here denouncing immigrants as rapists?

After all, if America’s excuse is anxiety caused by a flood of incoming foreigners, Australia should be twice as anxious. In the United States, 14 percent of the population was born elsewhere, near the record of 15 percent reached a century ago. In Australia, more than one-quarter of the population is foreign-born, and some 46 percent have at least one foreign-born parent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Yet both main parties, the center-right Liberals and leftleaning Labor, are committed to continued immigration.

Politicians who seek to whip up or exploit anti-immigrant prejudice are relegated to the fringe. Is there some secret sauce whose recipe the United States could copy?

First, a few caveats. One week Down Under does not qualify me as a full-fledged Australianist, but it is long enough to learn that this nation of 23 million people is not a race-blind paradise.

Waves of immigration have each aroused anxiety among some Australians that the newcomers would never fit in: Greeks and Italians in the 1950s; Vietnamese in the 1970s; Chinese, Indians and Middle Easterners today. People fret over crime and worry that newcomers segregate themselves in suburban enclaves.

Everyone swears fealty to the national ideal of “multiculturalism,” but beneath the surface there is profound disagreement over how much assimilation is desirable.

Meanwhile the captains of industry and government remain mostly Anglo (and male). And the country as a whole remains overwhelmingly white.

Still, given that White Australia was official policy until the early 1970s, acceptance of a world in which Chinese and Indians are the fastest-growing groups of immigrants would strike anyone escaping from the GOP primary debates as remarkable.

Paul Kelly, a leading historian and political analyst with the newspaper the Australian, explained that the nation as a whole realized after World War II that it had to “bulk up” its

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY ROGERS FOR THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

population if it was to defend itself. Seven million people in a nation the size of the continental United States wasn’t enough — and when it became clear, with time, that Great Britain couldn’t furnish enough immigrants, “the White Australia policy buckled, surrendered and was abolished.”

“It was a deliberate, bipartisan decision,” Kelly told me.

A second critical factor has been Australia’s ability to decide who gets in. “The island culture is fundamental,” Kelly said.

Australia has consistently been a leader, in per capita terms, in accepting refugees from conflict zones. But in 2001, when people from Afghanistan and elsewhere started turning up as boat people, it challenged Australia’s sense of control and became “a very traumatic issue,” Kelly said.

A conservative prime minister decreed that no boat people would be admitted and was excoriated by human rights advocates. A Labor prime minister in 2007 reversed that call, but when leniency seemed to encourage more and more arrivals — some 30,000 over several years — the nation returned to a no-entry policy.

Tom Switzer, a conservative commentator and research associate at the United States Studies Centre at the University of

Sydney (which was also my host the other week), argues that the tougher policy was not only more humane — because so many migrants were drowning during the years of laxer control — but also essential to preserving public support for legal migration.

“Strict controls help dampen down xenophobia, and ensure that decent treatment is given to those seeking the nation’s hospitality,” Switzer wrote recently in the Spectator.

The same logic has helped shape U.S. immigration policy under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both of whom have emphasized border security, deportation and other enforcement measures in part to lay the political groundwork for humane immigration reform. The policy has been successful in tamping down illegal immigration, and maybe also in shaping public opinion; polls show a majority of Americans, and even of Republicans, favor a path to legalization for the 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

Sadly, though, the enforcement success has yet to produce any Australian-style bipartisanship on this issue out of Republican Congress members or presidential candidates. If there’s a recipe for that, no one here has shared it with me. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Bacon BY

M ARK E SSIG

When the World Health Organization recently linked consumption of pro­ cessed meats to cancer, most of the ar­ ticles bearing the bad news were illus­ trated with images of bacon — the meat product that Americans, appar­ ently, hold most dear. Threat of pre­ mature death might put us off hot dogs or ham. But bacon? You can pry it from our cold, greasy fingers. The adoration, however, is often plagued by misinformation. Here are five myths about this newly maligned na­ tional culinary icon.

1

Bacon is delicious.

Well, it is now. The twin pairing of salt and smoke, fat and meat cannot be equaled. But those who’ll tell you that it’s “impossible to have terrible bacon” are just as wrong as those who claim there is no such thing as bad sex or bad pizza.

Historically speaking, there has been far more bad bacon than good bacon. That’s because bacon, though now a cult food, once served as a survival ration.

Until the 1950s, we ate more pork than beef, and most of it was cured at home and stored under questionable conditions. In other words, it probably wasn’t delicious in the least. When Frederick Law Olmsted, then a journalist, journeyed through the South in the 1850s, he griped that “the bane of my life” was a steady diet of “corn-bread and bacon.”

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2

Bacon is belly meat.

Bacon is “cured meat from the sides and belly of a pig” — at least that’s Google’s definition. But Canadians make bacon from pork loin, a lean, cylindrical muscle; a slice is round and nearly fat-free. English bacon is the loin with an extra

wedge of meat and fat attached; a slice is shaped a bit like a comet with a tail. Only in the United States does bacon refer exclusively to pork belly.

But before the Civil War, bacon, in this country, referred not to a part of the pig but to a curing technique. Any meat that had been dry-cured with salt and smoke — rather than soaked in brine — was called bacon.

By the 1870s, Chicago’s meatprocessing plants were butchering more than 1 million hogs a year. And at some point along the way, the term “bacon” became synonymous with belly meat. Sometimes the packers drycured this bacon in the traditional way, but the process took more than a month. By the 1910s, they had turned to wet curing because it could be accomplished in days, resulting in an inferior product but a quicker return on investment.

The industry wiped away the established definitions of bacon — first as loin or back meat, then as dry-cured meat — and gave us the wet-cured belly we know as bacon today.

3

Bacon has always been what’s for breakfast.

Frequently, marketing icon Edward Bernays gets credit for convincing consumers that “bacon and eggs was the true allAmerican breakfast,” as NPR put it, on behalf of the Beech-Nut meatpacking company — though that claim, too, is at least partly a result of marketing.

Credit, as Roger Horowitz notes in “Putting Meat on the American Table,” certainly goes

to developments during the years after World War II, when pork packers automated production lines so that bellies were compressed to uniform thickness, needle-injected with brine, machine-sliced, shuffled into a shingle-like display and packed in clear plastic that let customers admire the streaks of lean and fat. Vacuum-sealing and new materials such as PVC, developed later, gave sliced bacon the shelf life needed to create tempting displays in supermarket cases.

By the 1960s, 60 percent of American families bought bacon.

Aided by a strong industry marketing push, bacon shed its reputation as a country staple and was reborn nationwide as a breakfast side enjoyed by all social strata.

4

Uncured bacon is nitratefree.

Since the Middle Ages, bacon has been cured with nitrates. This was originally accomplished using salt and smoke, but saltpeter, a.k.a. potassium nitrate, was eventually introduced. When they come into contact with bacteria, nitrates break down into nitrites and add a distinctive flavor and a pinkish hue, a far more appetizing color than the dull gray that cured meat would otherwise be. Most important, they kill the pathogens that cause botulism.

But consuming nitrates, the Mayo Clinic tells us, “could increase your heart disease risk.” No one wants that, and for years it’s been one reason we’ve been warned off of cured meats. As a workaround,

some brands offer “uncured” “nitrate-free” or “nitrite-free” bacon.

Except those products typically contain celery powder — which, of course, sounds harmless. But like a number of vegetables, celery contains naturally occurring nitrates, and here they serve the same purpose as the synthetic stuff, meaning uncured or nitrate-free bacon can actually have as many nitrates and nitrites as the standard kind.

5

Eating bacon is as risky as smoking.

Nitrites, whether synthesized or derived from celery, are indeed cause for concern. In the body, they can transform into what are known as N-nitroso compounds, which have been linked to bowel cancer.

That’s why the World Health Organization added cured meats to its list of carcinogens.

But when the Guardian reports this news with the headline “Processed meats pose same cancer risk as smoking and asbestos, reports say,” it’s hogwash.

The WHO placed smoking, asbestos and processed meats in the same category because all have solid links to cancer. But that doesn’t mean they have the same level of risk. As Wired explained, “Smoking increases your relative risk of lung cancer by 2,500 percent; eating two slices of bacon a day increases your relative risk for colorectal cancer by 18 percent.”

Essig is the author of “Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig.”

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24

Thank you for your service.

The Wenatchee World is seeking stories and photos of area veterans for our online Veterans Guide this November. We’ll compile your stories and photos on our website, and feature selected stories and photographs in print in The Wenatchee World.

There’s no cost, we want to include as many stories of veterans, living and deceased, to serve as a permanent repository of these stories of service from local veterans and their families.

To submit your stories, or those of a family member who served, go to our website at wenatcheeworld.com/veterans/submit/ and complete the online form.

wenatcheeworld.com