The Washington Post National Weekly - Nov. 15, 2015

Worst Week Gov. John Kasich 3

Politics High stakes in Kentucky 4

Music Cashing in on Kurt Cobain 17

5 Myths Baby boomers 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2015

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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.

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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Gov. John Kasich

by Chris Cillizza

J

ohn Kasich came into the fourth Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee with a very clear mission: Don’t get left behind.

The Ohio governor’s strategy to do that?

Interrupt. A lot.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I would like to make a comment,” he added. “Can we comment on that?” he asked. “Look, I hate to crash the party,” he said.

It got so bad that at one point, Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo had to shush Kasich. “We have more questions for you, Governor Kasich, coming up,” she said. “We have more questions for you, Governor Kasich.” In short, please be quiet.

Kasich’s butting­in did ensure that he talked the second most of the eight candidates on stage. But, even that wasn’t a good thing for him.

He got into an extended back and forth with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas on whether Wall Street banks should be allowed to fail. Backed into a corner by Cruz for his refusal to say where he stood on the issue, Kasich responded: “I would figure out how to separate those people who can afford it versus those people, or the hard­ working folks who put those money in those institutions.”

At that point, he was interrupted by spontaneous booing from the crowd — to which he responded: “Let me — no, no. Let me say another thing. Here’s what I

KLMNO WEEKLY

DARREN HAUCK/REUTERS

mean by that. Here’s what I mean by that.”

Um, okay. The reviews for Kasich were scathingly, and unsurprisingly, bad. “My New Hampshire focus group is offended by Kasich’s interruptions,” said GOP pollster Frank Luntz. “Really offended.”

John Kasich, for trying to stand out but coming off as just plain standoffish, 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. 5

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER A sample from Stickmen Brewing’s 16-tap brew pub in Lake Oswego, Ore. Next year, the 80-employee operation is on track to produce 1,000 barrels of beer, largely India Pale Ale; this year should be the first it clears a profit.

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POLITICS

Without help, ‘I could probably die’ A MY G OLDSTEIN Pikeville, Ky BY

A

mid the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, a small clinic that is part of the Big Sandy Health Care network furnishes daily proof of this state’s full embrace of the Affordable Care Act. It was here that Mindy Fleming handed a wad of tissues to Tiffany Coleman when she arrived, sleepless and frantic, with no health insurance and a daughter suffering a 103-degree fever and mysterious pain. “It will be all right,” Fleming assured her, and it was.

An hour later, Coleman had a WellCare card that paid for hospital tests, which found that 4-yearold Alexsis had an unusual bladder problem.

Such one-by-one life changes are the ground-level stakes ushered in by the election this month of businessman Matt Bevin as Kentucky’s next governor. The second Republican elected to the office in 48 years, he wrapped his campaign around a pledge to dismantle Kynect, the state’s response to the federal health-care law. If he follows through, the Bluegrass State would go from being perhaps the nation’s premier ACA success story to the first to undo the law’s results, razing a state insurance exchange and reversing its considerable expansion of Medicaid.

During his first news conference since his unexpected victory, Bevin named abolishing Kynect as a top priority, again contending that the state can’t afford it. He said change would come in “a thoughtful way” and made it clear that he intends for people on Medicaid to pay more for their care — but left other details of his intentions blurry.

Still, the broad contours of his condemnation of the ACA are creating a quandary here in remote Pike County, where 55 percent of voters supported Bevin even though the county benefits greatly from the health-care changes he plans to rescind.

Dennis Blackburn has this splintered self-interest. The 56-

PHOTOS BY JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

Some grow anxious over the fate of Ky.’s health insurance expansion year-old mechanic hasn’t worked in 18 months, since he lost his job at a tire company that supplies a diminishing number of local coal mines. “The old guy had to go home,” Blackburn says of his layoff.

He has a hereditary liver disorder, numbness in his hands and legs, back pain from folding his 6-foot-1-inch frame into 29-inch mine shafts as a young man, plus an abnormal heart rhythm — the likely vestige of having been struck by lightning 15 years ago in his tin-roofed farmhouse.

Blackburn was making small payments on an MRI he’d gotten at Pikeville Medical Center, the only hospital in a 150-mile radius,

when he heard about Big Sandy’s Shelby Valley Clinic. There he met Fleming, who helped him sign up for one of the managed-care Medicaid plans available in Kentucky.

On Election Day, Blackburn voted for Bevin because he is tired of career politicians and thought a businessman would be more apt to create the jobs that Pike County so needs. Yet when it comes to the state’s expansion of health insurance, “it doesn’t look to me as if he understands,” Blackburn said.

“Without this little bit of help these people are giving me, I could probably die. . . . It’s not right to not understand something but want to stamp it out.”

Dennis Blackburn, 56, of South Williamson, Ky., relies heavily on insurance he receives through the state’s expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. He voted for Matt Bevin for governor.

Largest drop in uninsured Kentucky is the only state in the South that wholeheartedly placed in motion all the ideas for spreading access to health care envisioned by the ACA’s authors.

During the fall of 2013, when the federal HealthCare.gov enrollment system began as a software mess, Kynect was orderly, signing up people for private health plans and Medicaid.

When 2014 arrived, President Obama invited Gov. Steve Beshear (D) to sit in the first lady’s box for the State of the Union address and lauded him as “a man possessed when it comes to covering his commonwealth’s families.”

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POLITICS Days festival, at churches and food banks, at the county seat’s two small colleges and at drug treatment centers.

Many enrollees are now sending referrals to her, people such as Coleman.

Coleman works a couple of days a month as a secretary for Appalachian Title Research off Main Street in Pikeville. She was a media specialist in a nearby school district until budget cuts ended her job and she decided to stay home with her toddler. Not long after, her husband, Jeremy, switched to a truck-driving job with Coca-Cola that paid $17 an hour and offered health insurance.

His new insurance card had arrived in the mail just before Alexsis got sick. But when Coleman took her to Pikeville Medical Center, she was astounded to learn that the coverage had not begun.

Even now, Kentucky rules allow her to keep WellCare, a Medicaid managed-care plan, as a backup. Coleman is near the end of a high-risk pregnancy that requires her to get frequent shots.

WellCare picks up all but a few dollars of the $200 monthly copay that her husband’s work insurance requires for the shots.

And WellCare helps cover the cost of a pediatric urologist at a Lexington hospital whom Alexsis sees every three months.

Visits to the doctor cost $3, medicine $1 per prescription — amounts that Coleman can manage even if she can’t always pay the electric bill on time.

PHOTOS BY JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

By the end of that year, census figures show, no other state had as large a one-year decrease in uninsured residents. In a state of 4.4 million people, 500,000 gained coverage because of Kynect — 4 in 5 through Medicaid.

The effects were particularly dramatic in this Appalachian county, where many coal jobs have vanished and the poverty rate is 23 percent. From 2013 to 2014, the proportion of residents lacking health coverage plummeted by half

Top, a worker at a McCoy Elkhorn Coal mine in Pike County.

Above, Gary Ryan, 64, with doctor Fadi Al Akhrass at the Pikeville Medical Center. If Kentucky starts charging Medicaid patients more, “it would probably be a lifethreatening thing,” Ryan said.

— from 13 percent to 6.6 percent.

The main driver of that achievement: the whopping 7,500 people who joined Medicaid as the state widened eligibility under the health-care law.

Fleming has single-handedly enrolled more than 1,000 individuals and families. As a “Kynector” — one of the foot soldiers trained to help people sign up for ACA insurance — she has stood with fliers in front of the local WalMart and at Pikeville’s Hillbilly

Waiting for change On Route 23 in Pike County, a billboard for Kynect touts “Happy teeth. Healthy bodies.” If Bevin carries out his intentions, the billboard will be gone. So will Fleming and the other Kynectors.

Beshear, the outgoing governor, created Kynect and broadened Medicaid by executive order.

A new governor, however, cannot undo the moves on his own.

Under federal rules, a state must give a year’s notice before closing a state-run ACA insurance marketplace and switching to the federal one, something no state has attempted. And despite early vows to abolish the Medicaid expansion, Bevin has sounded more nuanced lately. His transition spokeswoman said that the expansion would remain intact while he drafts a plan for a differ-

KLMNO WEEKLY

ent Medicaid permutation and tries to win federal approval.

Big questions loom. Bevin has said repeatedly that Kentucky cannot afford the current expansion, which includes people with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line. He has not said whether he will try to lower the income threshold — something federal rules may not allow — or keep the income ceiling but require people to pay more for care.

Even the latter “would be a mess,” said Ancil Lewis, chief executive of Big Sandy Health Care, a nonprofit that traces its origins to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Before Kynect, 30 percent of Big Sandy’s patients had no help paying their bills.

Now, it’s half that many. As Medic-

“It’s not right to not understand something but want to stamp it out.”

Dennis Blackburn

aid has taken up the slack, about $2 million more has flowed into the clinics, allowing Big Sandy to hire more nurses, buy new computers and plan to replace an aging clinic.

If Kentucky charges Medicaid patients a lot more, “it would certainly be a barrier for them seeking care,” Lewis said.

“It would probably be a lifethreatening thing,” said Gary Ryan, 64, who was at Pikeville Medical Center two days after he voted for Bevin’s Democratic opponent. Ryan worked in the mines when he was young, but decentpaying work became so scarce that he took a job in Danville, Va., 270 miles to the east, and spent 13 years as a Nestlé Toll House cookie mixer. He moved back in 2013 to be with his sick wife and because he’d heard that good health insurance was available.

He sat on an exam table as a doctor, Fadi Al Akhrass, told him he was scheduling a liver biopsy because Ryan still had an active hepatitis C infection. They’d then talk about what treatment he should get.

“It’s a plan,” Ryan said. Medicaid will pay. n

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POLITICS

Waiting for their last shot at relief BY

P AMELA C ONSTABLE

M

iguel Claros has done everything in his power — praying, protesting, fasting — to help salvage President Obama’s stalled proposals to shield illegal immigrants like himself and his longtime partner from deportation.

With Monday night’s appeals court ruling against Obama’s plan, the chances of obtaining that relief just got a lot slimmer.

“I don’t want my children to fear I will be taken from them one day, and I don’t want millions of other decent people to continue suffering such humiliation,” said Claros, a 51-year-old garage mechanic from Bolivia who lives in Maryland with his partner and their two U.S.-born sons. “I am filled with sadness and rage.”

The 2-to-1 ruling from a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans upheld a Texas court’s injunction against Obama’s executive actions, which the president proposed a year ago as a way to provide deportation relief to up to 5 million undocumented immigrants.

Claros was among a group of activists who fasted for nine days last month outside the federal courthouse in New Orleans to demand a ruling on the case.

The administration announced Tuesday that it would appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. But time is running out for further legal action that could revive the president’s programs while he is still in office.

The high court would have to consider the case and rule in Obama’s favor by next summer, when its current term ends, in order for the program to start up before a new president is sworn in.

By summer, however, the 2016 presidential campaign will be in full gear, with illegal immigration a toxic issue and two leading Republican candidates vowing to end any possibility of deportation relief.

Advocates for undocumented immigrants said Tuesday that they were holding out hope for a miracle — a favorable Supreme

ALLISON SHELLEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The Supreme Court could overturn a key immigration hurdle, but time is running out Court ruling that would come soon enough for at least a portion of eligible immigrants to apply for a reprieve.

Some groups said they have encouraged potential applicants to gather all their paperwork and be prepared to act in case such a ruling comes.

“It took the appeals court way too long to rule, but at least now there is an opportunity to get a petition to the Supreme Court. We will strongly urge and expect the White House to move as fast as it can,” said Kica Matos, a New Yorkbased spokesperson for the Fair Immigration Reform Movement.

“Do we think we would have enough time to process all 5 million applicants? Probably not,” Matos said. “But definitely for a significant number to apply.”

The two programs proposed by Obama would allow two groups of illegal immigrants — several million who are parents of U.S.-born children, and up to 1 million oth-

ers who arrived here as youths — to apply for deportation relief for up to three years.

Officials at CASA of Maryland and Virginia, the largest service agency for illegal immigrants in the greater Washington region, said they were relieved that the appeals court ruling had not been further delayed after months of inaction.

They said they were geared up to help applicants through the process if the Supreme Court hears the case and upholds Obama’s proposals.

“This still bodes well for us. We fully expected a negative ruling, but we are motivated by the fact that it came out now,” said George Escobar, director of legal services at CASA. “If we get a positive Supreme Court ruling by summer, that would still put us on schedule to have six to eight months for implementation” during Obama’s term.

“Regardless of what happens in

Mechanic Miguel Claros kisses the hand of his son Michael, 6, who was feeling under the weather, in the family's apartment.

Miguel and his partner are both undocumented immigrants from Bolivia who face deportation. Their two children are U.S. citizens.

a new administration, even in the worst-case scenario, we will still have the capacity to help a large portion of those eligible,” Escobar said.

Obama’s “deferred action” proposals, which he announced just over a year ago, have been in limbo for months, ever since a lawsuit by conservative state governors won an injunction against the programs in a Texas court.

The proposals are an attempt by the president to use executive powers to provide deportation relief for up to 5 million undocumented immigrants, after failing to win enough legislative support for broad immigration reform that would offer a path to legalization for most of the 11 million people in this country illegally.

After the White House announced the plan, U.S. officials and immigrant assistance groups around the country began preparing to implement the programs, only to see them abruptly suspended once the legal challenge was filed.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of undocumented families, mostly from Mexico and Central America, have been waiting and wondering whether they will have a chance to gain legal relief.

Among them are Jose Rosales, 48, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in New York City for two decades and raised five children there.

“We worked, we paid taxes, we raised our kids, but we never got our papers,” said Rosales, who said he had entered the U.S. at age 14 and earned money as a dishwasher, a cook, a grass cutter and a cemetery groundskeeper. Along the way, he also joined an immigrant rights group and became a regular protester at rallies.

“So many people like me are frustrated,” Rosales said, speaking in Spanish. “We listen to these politicians, the things they say about us. They don’t realize how much it hurts. Mr. Obama’s announcement was a great joy and relief to us, but then everything was blocked. Now we have to defend our rights.” n

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POLITICS: COMMENTARY

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE TAKE

GOP pack feels no need to thin D AN B ALZ Milwaukee BY

M

ore than 10 months of campaign activity have left the Republican Party in a quandary. The contest for the GOP’s presidential nomination has no obvious front-runner.

This has been a confusing race almost from the beginning and it seems only to grow more muddled. That was apparent again on Tuesday night in the fourth debate among the candidates. No one was treated as though he or she was the person to beat. The night belonged to many, and therefore to no one in particular.

The polls show a somewhat stratified field.

Businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson still stand above the others. Each, however, has limitations and questions that must be dealt with. Behind them are Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.). Both continue to impress with their debate performances, but neither has been through the fires that are surely to come.

After that, it’s anybody’s guess which of the other candidates is truly viable, but some could be. Even after months on the campaign trail, the winnowing has been minimal. More rather than fewer candidates still harbor dreams of accepting the nomination next summer in Cleveland. That means the incentives argue in favor of staying in to see how things shake out, rather than quitting in the face of tepid poll numbers or weak fundraising.

Whatever the surveys show, they don’t fully measure the dynamics of the race or the conversation among primary and caucus voters and among party insiders and strategists.

Rather than a contest with a front-runner and others seeking to become the alternative, the race remains a series of smaller battles, with jockeying to emerge in one lane or another, in one early state or another.

The summer months were a time of scrambled expectations as both Trump and then Carson rose in the polls. Trump maneuvered his way up the ladder with strong rhetoric about immigration and serial insults that unsettled his rivals. Carson caught everyone by surprise, including perhaps himself. If there is an organic candidacy, fueled by social media and word of mouth, it could be his.

The rise of Trump and Carson coincided with the diminishment of the biggest name in the field. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush strutted as a fundraising behemoth through the spring and early summer, salting away more than $100 million in a super PAC. But as a candidate, he faltered. He could not generate sparks among Republicans, many of whom are wary about handing their nomination once

again to someone named Bush.

Two weeks ago, his standing had sunk so low that his advisers were asked whether he might soon quit the race. Today, revived by his performance in Tuesday’s debate, those questions have faded to the background. That’s a small consolation for a candidate who was expected to be the most formidable in the field, but it is something to cling to.

Bush is now reduced to pinning his hopes on his ability to connect with the often-fickle voters of New Hampshire, who saved his father’s candidacy in 1988 and savaged that of his brother in 2000.

tween Rubio and Cruz — and it’s apparent that their advisers are preparing for a coming collision. They are gifted politicians in distinctly different ways, both capable of making their points with flair and emotion on the debate stage. But wider popular support has escaped them, although there is plenty of time.

Further back are New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. They are also on a collision course, two alpha personalities whose hopes are kept alive by their conviction that those above them are no more capable than they are of leading the party.

Christie lost his place on the main debate

JEFFREY PHELPS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

From left, GOP presidential candidates John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina and Rand Paul take the stage before Tuesday’s debate.

The other contenders aren’t quite sure what to do about Trump and Carson. As the outsiders in a year of voter anger and frustration with Washington, their campaign messages write themselves. Each has loyal followers, but how many and for how long?

Carson’s intelligence and mellow personality continue to attract support, but his policy prescriptions will draw more questions. Will the details matter to unhappy conservatives looking for something that breaks the mold?

Trump now speaks of himself as a politician.

He will never fully throttle his instincts to put down rivals, but he seems more subdued.

His opponents continue to recalibrate their sense of his candidacy — from dismissing his potential to fearing his attacks. His hard-line immigration policy — to deport 11 million who are in the United States without documentation — draws rebukes from the likes of Bush.

Much depends on the trajectory of Trump and Carson. If the campaign turns to policy, each will be challenged. But if this year is about other things, then the other candidates will have to decide when to engage them.

Many Republicans see a contest looming be-

stage because of flagging national poll numbers but used his slight to dominate the undercard debate Tuesday. His message was reduced to the claim that he is the best the party can offer to take on Hillary Rodham Clinton. He draws good reviews for his town hall meetings in the Granite State, where his bluntness is appreciated. But he needs to convert that into broader and more solid support.

Kasich came to Milwaukee with a strategy of interruption, inserting himself over the objection of the moderators. It was a strong dose of Kasich and drew mixed-to-negative reviews.

But it could be the only way he knows.

Republicans have celebrated the breadth and depth of their field of candidates. At some point, they will have to pick the person to lead them. For now, the choices remain numerous, although hardly similar in what the candidates offer. The campaign has moved beyond the period of introduction. The next phase will bring more heated engagement and with it, perhaps, greater clarity. To date, the campaign has produced anything but. n Dan Balz is chief correspondent at The Post.

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NATION

They’re used to wildfires, but not this S ARAH K APLAN Winthrop, Wash.

BY

T

he three crosses are made of tree branches and twine, planted in a charred gully by the side of the road. One is topped by a helmet and a loop of fire hose. A piece of paper is lodged under a rock beside another, though the message is long gone, washed away by rain that came too late.

At this spot, an engine carrying four Forest Service firefighters toppled off the narrow, twisting road as it escaped the “hell storm” of the Twisp River Fire, one of nine wildfires that raced this summer through Okanogan County, on the arid eastern slopes of the North Cascades.

Three men were killed instantly by the smoke and heat: Richard Wheeler, 31, a veteran firefighter who grew up in Michigan; Andrew Zajac, 26, a newlywed from Illinois; and Tom Zbyszewski, the local kid with the goofy grin.

Everyone here knew Zbyszewski. He was 20 years old.

A combination of climate change and bad luck this summer created one of the worst wildfire seasons Okanogan County has seen. All across the West, fires broke records. In Okanogan’s Methow Valley, they broke hearts.

But two months later, faced with huge losses and little sign of letup, residents aren’t fleeing their scorched valley. Instead, they’re digging in, getting ready for when the next fires come.

The small towns strung along the Methow River are no strangers to wildfires. The shrubstrewn hills and densely forested canyons are fire-prone and the people who live here know to expect smoke in the summer. The bronze firefighter memorial in a local park has 17 names on it going back to the 1920s.

But in the past two years, the two largest wildfires in state history have torn through the county. More than 500 homes have been destroyed. Towns were evacuated. People went weeks without electricity and running

ZOANN MURPHY/THE WASHINGTON POST

In Washington state’s Methow Valley, two straight devastating summers test a community’s resolve water. And then there were three more names for the memorial — the highest possible price to pay for living in the line of fire.

Wildfires here used to consume maybe a few thousand acres and then burn out, said Susan Prichard, an ecologist for the University of Washington.

But climate change and years of misguided forest management that suppressed smaller, healthy fires have “made a less resilient landscape,” she said.

Now, one lightning strike can torch tens of thousands of acres.

Even a spark from a worn-out truck wheel can start a blaze.

The new reality is evident everywhere. Carcasses of burnt homes linger among stands of blackened trees. The economy is fueled by thousands of firefighters who flock to the Methow each summer.

In the poorer southern section of the valley, towns have been all

but obliterated, and there’s not nearly enough money to rebuild.

Neighbors whisper about whether it’s worth it to stay.

J.D. Daniels has lived in this area for more than six decades.

“Fire is fire,” he said. “It happens every year here. It just doesn’t happen to you every year.”

Now everything Daniels owns sits on the crowded porch of his sister’s house. His cabin, his tools and eight cats all burned up in a blaze. None of it was insured.

Still, as soon as the bridge to his house is repaired, Daniels plans to rebuild.

Nearly everyone who has been affected by the fires says something along those lines.

Tom Zbyszewski’s parents live in a single-level house just outside Twisp. Jennifer and Richard Zbyszewski are both veteran firefighters and longtime Forest Service employees, and they usu-

The Black Canyon Fire, one of many fires this past summer in Washington state’s Methow Valley, burned 6,761 acres and left large swaths of forest charred.

ally didn’t worry about Tom when he was out on the line. But Jennifer felt nervous when she heard over the radio that Tom’s crew was being sent up Twisp River Road to defend some houses in the path of the fire.

When the news came that there had been “entrapments” — the terrifying term for when firefighters are stuck inside a blaze — she called her husband. Hours passed and more phone calls came, each worse than the last.

Then the worst one.

“I just was, I’ve never been like, I’ve never felt like that in my life,” said Richard, who goes by Ski. Nearly a third of the Methow’s residents came to the memorial.

The Zbyszewskis think about leaving sometimes, but not because of the fire.

“Any place you can go, you can find reasons” to leave, he said.

“But it’s like going on after Tommy’s death: You gotta do what you gotta do. It’s home.”

Over the past two years, fires have burned so fast, hot and violent that even the soil dies.

The land probably won’t ever recover, said Meg Trebon, an assistant fire management officer for the Forest Service.

“When a fire happens like this, you see the landscape stripped bare, you see the bones of it,” Trebon said.

Trebon’s job is to develop the forest’s resilience so it burns in a healthier way.

The work is expensive and often unpopular. But successive summers of out-of control fires might be the price of going without.

Fires will still happen, and homes will still burn. In all likelihood, firefighters will still die.

But life in the Methow is worth defending, said Mike Liu, the local district ranger for the Forest Service.

“We live on hallowed ground,” Liu told his staff two months ago, right after their three colleagues died at that scorched spot up Twisp River Road. “This valley, this forest, these streams have been bought with the sacrifices of firefighters.” n

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Safeguarding speech, battling bigotry

BY N ICK A NDERSON AND S USAN S VRLUGA

C

ollege campuses have plunged into an intense debate that pits freespeech advocates against those who want to rein in insults, slurs and other offensive expressions.

Student uprisings at Yale University, the University of Missouri and elsewhere show a passionate desire to confront racism and bigotry in all its forms, from the disgustingly overt — a fecal swastika smeared on a bathroom wall in Columbia, Mo. — to the subtle or even unintentional offenses known as “microaggressions.”

But the drive to combat hurtful and hateful speech is colliding in some places with principles that educators have long held dear: freedom of speech and academic expression. Universities are struggling to strike a balance as they seek to foster a climate that is at once tolerant of racial and cultural differences but also unafraid of a robust clash of viewpoints.

“Every college president faces a challenge in creating a welcoming and productive environment but at the same time encouraging the free exchange of ideas,” said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education. “A lot of ideas can be very unwelcoming. How you handle those is something that a lot of people worry about.”

On Tuesday evening, Yale officials addressed the debate headon. They told the university community that they embrace the school’s diversity and want to ensure that all groups are treated with respect. But they also emphasized the centrality of speech on the Ivy League campus.

“We also affirm Yale’s bedrock principle of the freedom to speak and be heard, without fear of intimidation, threats, or harm, and we renew our commitment to this freedom not as a special exception for unpopular or controversial ideas but for them especially,” Yale President Peter Salovey wrote in a joint statement with a dean.

Many academics are heartened

MICHAEL B. THOMAS/GETTY IMAGES

In recent uprisings, colleges seek to protect free speech while curbing voices of hate that students from minority groups feel emboldened to speak out forcefully against indignities they have suffered quietly for generations. The abrupt resignation Monday of the University of Missouri system’s president — amid pressure from civil rights protests over his response to troubling racial incidents at the school — showed the surging power of these student voices.

Derald Wing Sue, a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, said events in Missouri showed the results of students’ pent-up frustration at having to routinely endure insulting expressions of bias. “It is cumulative,” Sue said. “Years of being discriminated against, being fatigued and tired of having to take it.” A racial epithet or a swastika, in that environment, he said, can be “the match, the spark that creates the explosion.”

Others fear that colleges are jeopardizing freedom of expression, including the freedom to

make verbal mistakes, a core academic value. Robert Shibley, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said he worries about a rising tendency toward censorship on campus. Shibley cited the rapid expulsion of two University of Oklahoma students in March after they participated in a fraternity’s racist chant, captured on a video that went viral online.

“Anytime someone is punished for pure expression, that is an attack on the principles of free speech,” Shibley said. “It’s not the government’s job to pick what speech is good and what speech is bad. We’ve always said the remedy for bad speech is more speech.”

Schools nationwide, public and private, have grappled recently with controversies about speech and expression. Some critics wonder whether colleges have become too politically correct, obsessed with preventing “microaggressions” and promoting “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” — a

Members of the University of Missouri football team return to practice in Columbia.

Their threat to boycott games helped pressure the system president to resign.

view expressed in a recent article in the Atlantic headlined “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign last year rescinded a job offer to a professor, Steven Salaita, after critics took offense at the tone of comments he made about Israel on Twitter. The American Association of University Professors later censured the school for breaching principles of academic freedom.

Williams College in Massachusetts was roiled last month after a student club, called Uncomfortable Learning, invited author Suzanne Venker to speak. Many students objected, citing what they saw as Venker’s rejection of feminism. Reaction was so intense that students canceled the event, concerned for her safety. A student then reinvited her, but she declined.

At Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the student newspaper, the Wesleyan Argus, faced a sharp backlash in September after publishing an opinion piece critical of the tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement. The student government later took steps toward cutting the newspaper’s budget for next year.

Rebecca Brill, the twice-weekly paper’s co-editor-in-chief, said she drew two lessons from the episode: that student journalists must listen closely to their community if their work causes an uproar and that free speech is essential to the dialogue.

“This is clearly a nuanced issue,” Brill said. “I would never want to be totally blind to the hurt that the op-ed caused some students.” But the senior added that the piece spawned “interesting and productive” conversations on campus.

“It is a dangerous precedent to try to silence a voice you don’t agree with,” Brill said. “We need to be able to say what we think about issues we’ve given thought to.”

Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan’s president, declared support for free speech after the episode.

“The institution has to protect people against attack that causes harm,” Roth said. “But it should never protect people against ideas that are difficult to digest.” n

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WORLD

Living in fear in Islamic State prison Iraqi prisoners detail life behind bars and their risky rescue

L OVEDAY M ORRIS Irbil, Iraq BY

B

efore Kurdish and U.S. commandos arrived at his cell door last month, Hassan Abu Ahmed had not seen daylight for five months.

Held in an Islamic State prison near the Iraqi town of Hawijah, the 46-year-old was accused of being a spy and was regularly tortured.

Sometimes a plastic bag was placed over his face until he nearly suffocated. He was electrocuted, beaten with plastic pipes and whipped with electric cables.

There were mock executions.

“They’d put a gun to your head and [say], ‘We are going to kill you now,’ and then shoot next to you,” Abu Ahmed said. “We always feared execution.”

Two prisoners held in the facility described life in an Islamic State prison and the mission that set them free. The operation, which a Kurdish commando also detailed, freed 69 detainees and was the first confirmed time that U.S. troops had directly accompanied Iraqi forces on the battlefield in the fight against the Islamic State.

But the raid also claimed the life of a U.S. soldier. The raid in Hawijah was supposed to be led by Kurdish forces, but U.S. troops were called in when they were pinned down.

Kurdish authorities had received intelligence that captured Kurdish soldiers, known as peshmerga, were being held at the prison. A mass grave measuring about 20 yards long had been dug on the grounds, and it was feared the detainees would soon be killed.

The operation was planned over five days, said a Kurdish commando who requested anonymity, citing security protocol. The United States was asked to play a “logistics and support” role.

On Oct. 21, the day before the raid, Abu Ahmed said he heard drones buzzing overhead from the cell he shared with dozens of other prisoners. Abu Ahmed was accused of supplying information to Kurdish authorities, something he admits he had done.

“I was giving information to

PHOTOS BY AYMAN OGHANNA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

“They’d put a gun to your head and [say], ‘We are going to kill you now,’ and then shoot next to you,” says Hassan Abu Ahmed, top. Qassim Awad said he was tortured during the weeks he was being held.

people here because we wanted our areas to be liberated,” he said.

Abu Ahmed’s frequent trips to the nearby city of Kirkuk, outside the Islamic State’s territory, had raised suspicions. When the militants seized control of Hawijah, about 150 miles north of Baghdad, in June 2014, he had resisted pressure to join them.

“They knew me personally very well, my family, my tribe,” he said.

“They were looking for influential people to join.”

Life in the town went from “white to black” when the militants took over, he said.

In May, five armed Islamic State members appeared at his house to arrest him. After he was blindfolded and driven to prison that day, he

did not see daylight for another five months.

He said he prayed for rescue but had little hope it would come.

But at 2 a.m. on Oct. 22, Kurdish special forces launched their mission — accompanied by about 30 U.S. troops. U.S. Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters also took part.

Abu Ahmed heard the helicopters draw closer. When the guards started shouting, he realized that a rescue attempt was underway.

“Paratroopers, paratroopers!” the guards yelled in the confusion, he said. U.S. and Kurdish officials say no paratroopers were involved, with helicopters landing about 30 yards from the prison.

In another cell, Qassim Awad, 36, was jolted awake by the shout-

ing guards.

“We heard the helicopters,” he said. “We were all scared and went to the bathroom and hid.”

Awad said he was in prison for attempting to escape Hawijah with his two wives and 10 children. He had been in prison for about two weeks before the rescue attempt.

The prisoners’ accounts of why they were held could not be independently verified. A Kurdish security officer was present during their interviews, which took place in a security building in Irbil.

Awad said the prison’s main interrogator, a militant from neighboring Diyala province, was called “Abu Hajjar.” Awad, a truck driver who had served in the Iraqi military, said he lost some of his hearing after being beaten on the head with a plastic pipe.

“I confessed,” he said. “I couldn’t handle the torture. Other prisoners told me about the electric shocks, and I couldn’t handle it. I decided death was the best way out, but then they came.”

When the U.S. forces and Kurdish forces reached Awad’s cell, he said, one prisoner who spoke some English cried out, “Please help us!

Please help us!” The prisoners were searched and handcuffed before waiting to be airlifted out.

Kurdish forces searched for their peshmerga colleagues, but none were found.

Six Islamic State militants were arrested, according to Kurdish authorities, and 20 were killed. In a video released in the aftermath, the Islamic State said just six militants had held off the attack, which it described as a “failed operation.” Twenty-five prisoners were killed, it claimed. The video showed four peshmerga being executed on the bombed remains of the compound in retaliation for the raid.

“Obama, you have learned a new lesson,” a masked Islamic State militant said in the video.

“You did not gain anything. You returned to your bases, and with losses and humiliation.”

The American killed was Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler, who had served 14 tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was 39. n

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WORLD

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‘All we want to know is the truth’ S IMON D ENYER Shanghai BY

I

n the office of the Shanghai Tourism Board, the officials look grim, bored, contemptuous. They face an angry group of people who lost relatives in China’s worst peacetime maritime disaster, but, with folded arms, they sit back in their chairs appearing as though they couldn’t care less.

For the two dozen people gathered there one recent day, the pain of losing loved ones when an excursion boat sank on the Yangtze River in June has been joined by a deep disillusionment with the government.

Instead of being given information about what happened and who is to blame, they say, they have been placed under surveillance; seeking justice, they have been stonewalled for over four months.

The lack of transparency that pervades China’s one-party state, the sense that there will be no meaningful accountability for what went wrong, and the effective silencing of the voices of the people who lost their relatives have made them feel helpless and increasingly bitter.

“The government just thinks of us as troublemakers now,” said Candy Tang, 35, who lost her 6year-old daughter when the Eastern Star sank.

“All we want to know is the truth, but we have no right to know and no right to speak,” she said.

Over the summer, two disasters shook China and dominated global headlines: 442 lives were lost when the riverboat sank in a storm on the Yangtze, and 173 people died after explosions at a chemicals warehouse in the northern port city of Tianjin in August.

In the days that followed, China’s top leaders promised “transparent” investigations of what went wrong in each case and justice for those who lost loved ones.

In their grief, many relatives of the victims believed those promises, trusting the government in the same way, one man said, that Chinese people trust the oldest brother to make decisions in his family’s best interests.

CHINA DAILY VIA REUTERS

Despite China’s vows of transparency, relatives of victims in two disasters still wait for answers But many now think the promises have been broken.

The government has prevented the media from reporting on the causes of each accident, while the results of its own investigations remain a mystery. Compensation has been offered to victims’ families but on the condition that they give up the right to ask questions.

Even in such high-profile cases, the government, they say, has not shown compassion for its citizens.

It’s not so much oldest brother as it is Big Brother, they say.

After the Eastern Star disaster, President Xi Jinping instructed officials to “empathize with the suffering of family members” and placate them patiently, but he also told them to “maintain social stability.”

In Tianjin, relatives of each of the 104 firefighters who died have received about $360,000 in compensation — but only, some said, after staging a protest outside the district government. The injured

have received nothing.

“Many of my injured colleagues can’t work as firefighters anymore — so how can they afford to live?” asked one firefighter, who said he has nightmares about the blaze.

As he recovered in the hospital, nurses told him not to talk to the media, he said, while police closely tracked visiting relatives to prevent them from doing so.

Wu Guoqiang, a representative of local residents who lost relatives and property in the explosions, said he also came under intense surveillance: “I have been forced to change my phone number several times, and all of them have been tapped.”

Armed police patrolled his apartment compound last month to prevent residents from gathering, Wu added, in a brief, nervous telephone interview.

In central China, after hearing news of the disaster on the Yangtze, many relatives rushed to the

Rescuers watch as the Eastern Star is pulled from the Yangtze River after it capsized in a storm in June, killing 442 people. Two months later, chemical blasts in the city of Tianjin left 173 people dead.

nearest town of Jianli, where they were joined by scores of provincial officials, who latched onto each family, accompanied them everywhere and paid for their food and accommodations.

But the sympathy came at a price.

“They tried to prevent us from going to the rescue site, and they wouldn’t even let us have a meeting of the victims’ families,” said a woman who lost her mother but asked not to be named for fear of inviting trouble from authorities.

“That’s why they sent so many officials — they were just there to watch us,” she said.

Questions surfaced about why the captain of the vessel had not dropped anchor in the face of a violent storm and about whether a refitting of the ship to carry more passengers had undermined its stability.

But those questions were swiftly suppressed — as instructions went out to local media to remove reporters from the scene and to strictly follow the party line.

Family members were offered compensation of about $130,000, without admission of liability, on the condition that beneficiaries agree not to demand any more money.

Many have declined to accept those terms.

“I am not selling my relatives,” said a 60-year-old woman who lost her husband and said her name is Zhou. “I don’t need money, I need the truth.”

In August, relatives said, they staged a peaceful protest in Nanjing to demand that the government reveal what happened: One woman was beaten and detained by police, they said.

Provincial and city governments declined to comment on the two incidents, although official reports on both are promised in the coming months. But for many victims, the damage has been done.

“The accident changed me dramatically,” Tang said. “It changed my worldview and made me feel ashamed to be a Chinese citizen. I have now seen what censorship is, and I have realized I was brainwashed when I was brought up.” n

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN JAY CABUAY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

WHAT OREGON’S MICROBREWS, MARIJUANA CAN TEACH POLICYMAKERS ABOUT SMALL BUSINESS

BY JIM TANKERSLEY in Lake Oswego, Ore.

At first, Jon Turner was just a software guy who really liked to brew beer. He cooked up two batches a week in his kitchen and kept his hard­drinking friends well supplied. He once brewed one pale ale over and over for a year to get it just right. In 2011, at a national conference of home brewers, he fell under the spell of a panel called “Going Pro.” ¶ This is how Turner came to cash out a large chunk of his retirement savings and launch a 16­tap brew pub on the shores of a private lake in a swanky suburb south of Portland. He and his co­owner, Tim Schoenheit, have kept their tech jobs and worked nights, weekends and assorted off hours to bring their 80­employee operation, Stickmen Brewing, to the brink of profitability. ¶ Drive around the Portland area today and you’ll see dozens of stories just like Stickmen’s — small pubs and breweries that have sprung to life in the past half­decade and endured, in spite of fierce competition from rivals large and small. ¶ In the past month, Portland has seen a similar proliferation of start­ups in the cannabis industry, ignited by a new state law that allows legal marijuana sales to the general public. ¶ Microbreweries and pot dispensaries aren’t the major drivers of Portland’s economy, but they loom much larger here than in most U.S. cities. In both those industries, small start­ups are thriving. continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

That’s a sharp contrast to the American economy at large. Don’t let Silicon Valley fool you: The nation has long had a start-up problem. The rate at which new businesses are formed has fallen steadily since 1984, a trend that accelerated during and after the Great Recession, according to research by University of Maryland economist John Haltiwanger and several co-authors. Since the recession ended, more businesses have failed every year than have sprung to life.

Breweries and dispensaries offer lessons for how policymakers might nurture a smallbusiness comeback in America. But they offer very different lessons, one focused on government intervention, the other on reducing hurdles for entrepreneurs to enter a market — and their ultimate lesson could prove to be: The big guys tend to win in the end.

In Oregon’s sin industries, “We’ve had a renaissance of start-ups, which is almost the exact opposite of what we’ve seen almost everywhere else in the economy,” said Joshua Lehner, a state economist in Oregon. “It’s going to be challenging to maintain this.”

America’s start-up slowdown began in the 1980s and ’90s, when much of the drop-off was concentrated in the retail trade and service sectors. A lot of new mom-and-pop groceries and bookstores were pushed out of business or were kept from starting up in the first place by the emergence of Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and other large chain retailers. In the 2000s, the trend spread to other industries, most notably high tech, which has seen its start-up rate decline over the past 15 years.

Economists can’t say for sure what’s driving that trend, but one theory has to do with market power. As big companies get bigger — in retail or tech or anything else — they find ways to shield themselves from competition, often by lobbying the government.

Here’s an Oregon example: Google and Facebook have each received tens of millions of dollars in property tax reductions from cities on the state’s rural eastern side, where those companies have built huge warehouses filled with servers to store user data. It’s unlikely that a small-time social-media rival could win the same deal, which means that a small company would face higher costs than Facebook does to store its data — a powerful advantage for the large incumbent.

The beer industry is more dominated by big players than almost any other in the United States. Its four largest companies account for nearly 90 percent of all sales. That’s a function of a wave of brewery consolidation in recent years, culminating in an announcement last month that the world’s two largest beer companies, SAB Miller and Anheuser-Busch InBev, plan to merge.

And yet, for all that market power, the beer giants are acting scared of their smallest competitors — perhaps because there are more of them every day, especially in Oregon.

The number of breweries and brew pubs in Oregon has roughly quadrupled since 2001, to

PHOTOS BY NIKI WALKER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

more than 200 today. Since the end of the recession, the state’s total beer production for consumption by Oregonians has grown from about 30,000 barrels a year to nearly 50,000. All but a few drops of that increase has come from start-up brewers, according to state statistics.

There are simple reasons why brewing is so friendly to start-ups, all of them on display at the Stickmen facility in Lake Oswego. It doesn’t cost much to learn to brew — just $100 or so for a starter kit and a handbook, more for hops and grains when you begin to experiment, as Turner did when he returned to his native Oregon in the late 1990s after a stint in the Navy. It also doesn’t cost much to start a

Shane McKee, 46, co-founder and owner of Shango Premium Cannabis in Portland, top, displays some of his wares, above.

Shango runs four growing operations and three dispensaries in the state.

brewery, relatively speaking.

Turner practiced his art on the side from his software job until he was hosting annual beer bashes with 30 varieties on tap. When he decided to go pro, he tried to get a government small-business loan. When it fell through, he and Schoenheit borrowed close to $200,000 from a company called Brewery Finance, which paid for steel tanks and other brewing supplies they needed.

The other reason it’s easier to start a brewery in Oregon is that Oregonians really love beer, and they’re willing to pay a premium for new and interesting varieties or for better beer closer to home. Stickmen chose Lake

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COVER STORY

Oswego because there weren’t many brew pubs in town. He also had a stock answer for the people who asked whether he was worried the area was being saturated by beer start-ups.

“Does anybody ever ask,” Turner said, “if there’s too many muffler shops in Portland?”

Stickmen struggled through its first winter, when foot traffic slowed and the restaurant, which did up to $15,000 a day in business during the summer, was lucky to bring in $600 some days. Some weeks Turner had to ask employees to wait to cash their paychecks.

But the beer was good enough to get noticed around town, and it eventually won its way into some of the city’s hottest spots for beer

Alex Schoenheit, 23, top, an assistant brewer, cleans machinery at Stickmen Brewing Co. in Lake Oswego, Ore. Next year, the 80-employee operation is on track to produce 1,000 barrels of beer, largely India Pale Ale.

nerds. Stickmen hired a distributor and a full-time brewer. Next year it’s on track to produce 1,000 barrels of beer, largely IPA; this year should be the first it clears a profit.

Turner says government regulations of his brewery are minimal and that other small producers help out one another — all advantages in a start-up culture. “It’s not like we’re competing with each other,” he said, “as much as we’re competing with the big guys.”

Some beer bloggers, though, have begun to worry that lax government oversight could endanger start-up brewers, whom the large players are targeting on multiple fronts. AB InBev has bought a string of craft brewers

KLMNO WEEKLY

around the country, including one called 10 Barrel in Oregon.

It’s also buying beer distributors, a move that could eventually choke off smaller brewers’ ability to grow by shipping to cities just beginning to warm to microbrews. So far, according to published reports, only California officials are investigating potential anticompetitive implications of those purchases.

In the early days of Oregon’s legal marijuana industry, state officials are already taking steps to keep any big guys out of the game.

They have proposed limits on the size of growing operations, along with mandating that they be majority-owned by Oregon residents — a move widely expected to limit outside investment in the industry. They’ve also approved annual licensing fees, from $4,000 to $6,000, for growers and retail vendors.

Many of the rules won’t be final until next year, but the uncertainty hasn’t stopped hundreds of cannabis entrepreneurs from setting up storefronts around the state. Portland-area billboards are plastered with ads for dispensaries whose names run heavily toward puns. (A few of the pun-ier ones in the area: La Cannaisseur, Yer Best Bud and The New Amsterdam.)

Some of the industry’s more established players — veterans of the state’s smaller medical-marijuana trade, which has been legal for nearly two decades — warn that the mom-and-pop newcomers will struggle to survive once the market matures, and they say state regulators will inevitably loosen size and ownership restrictions.

“You’re going to see some consolidation, and you’re going to see the small players either get out of the market or learn to operate at a higher level,” said Shane McKee, the co-founder of Shango, which runs four commercial growing operations and three dispensaries in the state.

Shango employs 47 people in Oregon, McKee said. Seven of them work on licensing and compliance: “The barriers are pretty high to do it right. You start looking at regulations, you look at legal fees, you look at licensing — they’re pretty intense.”

In that way, the pot industry’s approach to start-up cultivation is the opposite of the beer industry — higher barriers to entry, coupled with strict regulations. And yet, some cannabis entrepreneurs think they can copy a (quintessentially Portland) secret of microbrewers’ success: artisanal differentiation.

In Oregon, “people didn’t understand there could be so many varieties of beer, cannabis or wine,” said William Simpson, the president and founder of Chalice Farms, which operates four dispensaries that are decked out like pinot noir tasting rooms.

“There is a market for your large corporate product as well,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s going to be that big in the Northwest.”

In other words, consumers don’t want a Miller High Life of marijuana. They want the equivalent of a fresh-hop IPA. n

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BUSINESS

Machines are coming for your money Financial advice without the human touch (or high fees)

BY

T ODD C . F RANKEL

ISTOCKPHOTO

P

lease don’t call them roboadvisers.

“That’s obviously a derogatory term,” says Adam Nash, president of Wealthfront.

He prefers the term automated investment services. So does Betterment and SigFig, two other leading wealth management firms that use algorithms instead of humans to manage billions of dollars in individual portfolios.

With software running the show, the tech start-ups can charge clients drastically lower fees.

This sounds like a mortal threat to the nation’s 300,000 human financial advisers, an occupation that ranks high on “best jobs” lists for its good pay and work-life balance. And many analysts agree the sector is ripe for disruption, the same kind now shaking up the nation’s taxi fleets.

“There’s an opportunity to do an Uber of another industry,” says Uday Singh, partner at management consulting firm A.T. Kearney.

The tension of robot vs. humans is expected to play out in an increasing number of jobs in the coming years as computers get faster, the algorithms smarter. For financial advisers, the battle is already underway — just as waves of baby boomers are hitting retirement and members of the even larger millennial generation reach the point in their careers when they are thinking about setting aside funds.

Billions of dollars in fees are up for grabs. The robo hype might be real. Or maybe advice dispensed by humans will triumph. But neither side is waiting around to see how it shakes out, illustrating how the future of many industries will feature a continuing evolution, with each side trying to maximize its particular advantage.

Singh believes algorithm-driven investments will be mainstream in just a few years. He co-authored a 2015 study that found consumers have rapidly turned to robo-advisers after just a couple years on the scene, with these companies projected to be managing nearly 6 percent of all

U.S. investments, about $2 trillion worth, by 2020.

But mention Singh’s study to someone like Frank Moore, chief investment officer at Vintage Financial Services in Ann Arbor, Mich., and he chuckles dismissively. Replace him?

“There is so much you can’t do through a computer screen,” Moore says, pointing to the counseling he did of clients during the stock market’s dark days in 2008 and 2009.

“There’s no way the robo-adviser product platform is going to take away the human interaction that comes with working with a financial adviser,” Geoffrey Brown, head of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisers, said in agreement.

Some dismiss robo-advisers as just target-date funds with slicker marketing — meaning that firms such as Vanguard, which offers similar services, would have the most to lose. But that hasn’t limited the impact of robo-advisers.

“They are revolutionizing everything,” says Randy Kurtz, president of financial advisory firm BetaFrontier in Chicago.

Kurtz said the days of advisers just picking investments and mailing quarterly statements is over. Now, advisers need to spend time with clients, discussing goals and crafting strategies.

The human adviser needs to be even more human.

The rise of these automated services already has driven smaller portfolio-management firms to

Rise of the robo-advisers?

More people may soon use firms that use algorithms instead of humans to manage investment portfolios, according to estimates.

10%

6

5.6%

2

0.5% 0

’15

Source: A.T. Kearney

’20 THE WASHINGTON POST

merge with firms that offer a wider range of wealth management services, says Louis Diamond, vice president at Diamond Consultants in Morristown, N.J., a search and consulting firm for financial advisers.

Those skills are beyond computers, for now. That’s why Alex Benke, director of advice products at Betterment, thinks financial advisers will continue to have jobs. But those jobs are changing.

“I think what is being disrupted is the selling of a portfolio and not doing anything else,” Benke said.

Betterment, based in New York, manages $3 billion for 118,000 customers. There’s no minimum balance — another development

that has spread to traditional financial advisers who are hoping to capture investors earlier. At Betterment, fees range from 0.15 percent to 0.35 percent of assets.

That’s significantly less than the typical adviser fee, which hovers around 1 percent.

Betterment plans to start offering 401(k) services to companies in 2016.

Robo-advisers ask customers their age, income and questions gauging risk tolerance before selecting a series of exchange-traded funds. Many of the companies also offer tax-loss harvesting and automatic rebalancing. All decisions are made by algorithms.

It’s the continuation of a longrunning trend toward technological innovation and lower fees in financial services, says Nash, Wealthfront president. In 1975, Charles Schwab opened its doors as the nation’s first discount brokerage. Then Vanguard introduced index funds. More recently, exchange-traded funds became popular.

Now, it’s algorithm-driven investments.

Some of the larger firms have decided to imitate the newcomers. Both Schwab and Vanguard launched robo-adviser services earlier this year. And smaller advisers talk about the potential for continued downward pressure on their own fees from these new low-cost rivals.

That’s not the only problem facing the industry. The profession is graying – the average adviser is 51, with fewer than 5 percent younger than 30, according to Cerulli Associates.

But with a third of advisers heading to retirement in the next decade, there’s a huge opportunity — for someone, whether it’s humans or computers.

Nash says Wealthfront is “optimized for millennials” — 60 percent of clients are younger than 35.

Betterment noted that while millennials make up the bulk of its customers, 30 percent of business comes from clients older than 50.

The question is who will capture the next wave of investors. n

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17

MUSIC CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

ALL APOLOGIES, KURT BY

C HRIS R ICHARDS

I

t’s an unexpected feeling when a Beatles song ties a knot in your stomach, but listen to Kurt Cobain covering “And I Love Her” and you’ll start to feel one coming on.

The rendition in question appears on “Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings,” a new album of Cobain’s very rough demos being released last week alongside the DVD version of “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” a bleak documentary from writer-director Brett Morgen about the rise and fall of the Nirvana frontman that premiered on HBO in May. With the Cobain estate’s blessing, Morgen culled and curated the music on this quasi-soundtrack. It’s mostly the sound of a young punk rocker loosening his brain and his fingers, mewling along with his guitar until he produces the spore of a Nirvana song (or doesn’t).

The rest of the track list is spackled with weird monologues and play-acted scenes performed in funny voices, sometimes punctuated with belches and onomatopoeic flatulence. In other words, private goofballing that Cobain would never have wanted to see the light of day.

Which means that digging into these recordings — 31 tracks on the album’s deluxe edition — feels as intrusive as it does unfulfilling.

Cobain’s demos of “Been a Son” and “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” might help to confirm that Nirvana’s greatest songs were born out of a confluence of playfulness and rage, but that isn’t enough to justify our voyeurism. To listen is to feel gross. There’s simply no way that Cobain would want the world to be poking around in this stuff.

Morgen doesn’t see it that way.

“It’s a tribute to Kurt that his admirers and fans would feel protective of him,” Morgen recently told the New York Times. But, he said, “if you came across a sketch of ‘Guernica’ by Picasso, is there anyone saying we shouldn’t see it?”

Seeing it — or hearing it — is one thing. Selling it is another. And

Let’s stop dishonoring musicians with shabby posthumous releases

FRANK MICELOTTA ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

KLMNO WEEKLY

who gets to answer that question?

A dead artist? A profiteering executor? A ravenous public?

Maybe it’s time for us to establish a code of ethics for how to deal with the unfinished music of dead pop stars. And maybe it could be really simple.

For musicians, the deal is selfevident. You are mortal, and therefore you’re responsible for the recordings you leave behind when you exit this physical plane. Be proactive. Destroy, delete, burn or bury any recorded music you don’t want the public to hear. If that isn’t an option, instruct the executors designated to negotiate your earthly affairs to handle the necessary erasure. Don’t slack on this.

Failure to act means that you’re cool with leaving your unfinished work for all of humanity to muck around in.

But should your demos still manage to survive you, that shouldn’t mean the custodians of your art have carte blanche to rush them off to retail shelves in time for the holidays. (And make no mistake: “Montage of Heck” is being spewed as a stocking stuffer, not a “Guernica” sketch.)

Unless a late artist’s beneficiaries are in financial need, charging money for uncompleted musical work that was never intended for release is unconscionable. If there’s still a burning feeling that the world needs to hear this music, or that it could help enhance the public’s scholarly understanding of the artist, that’s fine. There are plenty of ways to make sure the public can access the recordings — for instance, through the Library of Congress or through digital media centers.

And what about the abhorrent business of finishing a dead musician’s unfinished work? We were asked to think about this a year and a half ago when record executive L.A. Reid recruited Timbaland and a few others to complete a handful of unfinished Michael Jackson recordings. The songs themselves turned out fine, but they shouldn’t have been packaged and sold as a Michael Jackson album. Michael Jackson didn’t make this album — L.A. Reid did.

By that measure, “Montage of Heck” shouldn’t be sold as a Kurt Cobain album, either. It shouldn’t be sold, period. As fans, we should feel discomfited listening to it, and as human beings, we should feel shame paying money for it. n

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BOOKS

Witty, combative megalomaniac N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

J EROME C HARYN

‘E EMPIRE OF SELF A Life of Gore Vidal

By Jay Parini Doubleday.

464 pp. $35

mpire of Self” is a loving portrait of a very difficult man. Jay Parini — himself a gifted novelist, poet and biographer — has gone very deep into the “black energy” of Gore Vidal’s relentless narcissism and megalomania. Parini envisions an epic battle between Vidal’s angelic and demonic sides, yet there’s very little of the angel in Vidal.

Parini sustained a 30-year friendship with him, though it often seemed to take place in a minefield.

“I allowed him to speak rudely to me,” Parini admits. One couldn’t argue with Gore Vidal. It was either agree with him or leave, and Parini chose to stay. Still, there were many rewards. We have a sense of Vidal — a glimpse into his psyche — that no other biographer could have seen.

The book is almost novelistic in its sculpting of detail and its presentation of Vidal as a creature out of some modern bestiary.

“Never lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television,” Vidal once said, and he never did. He was the most public of public personas, imposing his will upon the nation as a novelist, playwright and pundit. His feuds with Norman Mailer and Truman Capote assumed mythic proportions. And his televised debates with William Buckley during the Democratic and Republican national conventions of 1968 still have some kind of iconic appeal. Vidal seemed to override literary culture. He refused an invitation to join the National Institute of Arts and Letters, declaring, “I already belong to the Diners Club.”

Parini also dapples the narrative with a series of vignettes between chapters that often provide a very amusing and corrosive mirror that reveals Vidal at his best — a man with a wondrous wit.

When Parini asks Vidal if it’s possible for two characters in a work of fiction to talk about the theology of Kierkegaard for 30 pages, Vidal answers: Of course. “Even 40 pages. But only if your characters are sitting in a railway car, and the reader knows

CHARLEY GALLAY/GETTY IMAGES

Author Gore Vidal, pictured in 2007, “sucked all the air out of any room he entered,” the poet James Merrill recalled.

there’s a bomb under the seat.”

Once, when Parini enters Vidal’s study at his villa in Ravello, on the coast of southern Italy, he discovers 20 framed magazine covers with Vidal’s face on every one.

“When I come into this room in the morning to work,” Vidal says, “I like to be reminded who I am.”

Vidal spent his life constructing “a huge empire of self,” with colonies in as many countries and languages as possible. Without a note of self-mockery, he brags that in Brazilian prisons, he was “the most popular American writer after Zane Grey.” Vidal required a colossal hall of mirrors “for adequate reflection,” and there were never enough mirrors to satisfy his endless appetite.

Appetite was everything to Vidal — he gorged himself in every way he could. For a while he went cruising for anonymous sex every day. And suddenly Parini’s moralizing intrudes upon the narrative.

“Unlike most others on this planet, Gore failed to connect sex and love. This was certainly a personality deformation, amplifying the usual loneliness that is part of

being human.” I suspect that at least half the planet suffers from the same “affliction,” and many of our dream lives are littered with anonymous sex. But Parini rarely moralizes again. And the portrait we have of Vidal is quite poignant, even with all his monstrosities.

He was born on Oct. 3, 1925, and was christened Eugene Luther Gore Vidal. His father, a graduate of West Point, had been a professional football player. His mother was the beautiful and sexy daughter of Thomas Pryor Gore, a blind senator from Oklahoma. The most vivid memory of Vidal’s entire life was sitting with his grandfather in the Senate chambers. “I served as his pair of eyes.” He would reinvent himself in his teens, collapse his name into Gore Vidal and publish his first novel by the time he was 20. He began writing scripts during the golden age of live television drama in the 1950s, working for Studio One and Playhouse 90.

One of his teleplays, about Billy the Kid, became the basis for Arthur Penn’s first film, “The Left Handed Gun” (1958). Vidal was able to buy his first mansion,

Edgewater, near Rhinebeck, N.Y., before he was 25.

He enjoyed cruising for sex at Manhattan’s Everard Baths where he met Howard Auster (later Austen), who became his partner and companion for 53 years.

It was often impossible to be around Vidal. As the poet James Merrill recalls, Vidal “sucked all the air out of any room he entered. You couldn’t breathe in his presence.”

But despite the insufferable vanity, he could also be acute about the limits of his art: “The obvious danger for the writer is the matter of time. ‘A talent is formed in stillness,’ wrote Goethe, ‘a character in the stream of the world.’ Goethe, as usual, managed to achieve both.

But it is not easy, and many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.”

Vidal had too much of a public persona — too much sound and fury—toacquireandmaintainthat essential stillness. His fiction often descended into diatribe, yet he managed to write one exquisite novel, “Burr” (1973). I suspect he identified with Aaron Burr’s outlaw self. Burr was a bad boy, another Billy the Kid, even as an old man.

Yet Vidal loved to write about books — “book reviews became his very own Harvard,” according to Parini. He introduced the experimental Italian novelist Italo Calvino to American readers, and he wrote with a certain splendor about Vladimir Nabokov, Ford Madox Ford, Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima, Eleanor Roosevelt and Orson Welles.

Vidal fell apart after Howard died in 2003. Living in the Hollywood Hills, he became incontinent and suffered from hallucinations.

And all we are left with is the cantankerous ghost of Gore Vidal. n Jerome Charyn’s most recent book is “Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories.” His next one, “A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century” will be published in 2016.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2015

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Familiar character in a unique setting

Barrymore, upbeat but uninterested

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

J

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

ohn Irving’s new novel, “Avenue of Mysteries,” is about a famous novelist who published a best-selling novel about abortion and developed a reputation for crazy sex scenes, but you can stop your amateur psychoanalyzing right there, thank you very much. Yes, this protagonist also attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but his name is Juan, not John, and he’s from Mexico, which is thousands of miles from New Hampshire.

Now 73, Irving is clearly in a retrospective, if not autobiographical, mood. Like “Last Night in Twisted River” (2009) and “In One Person” (2012), his new novel — his 14th — is fascinated with the portrait of the artist as a young man: How does a child progress along the avenue of mysteries that leads to becoming an adult storyteller?

The complex response evolves from two distinct but mingled story lines. In the present tense, we follow the beloved teacher and novelist Juan Diego Guerrero as he travels from Iowa to the Philippines to fulfill a promise made years ago to a young draft-dodger.

Although Juan Diego is 54, he’s so addled by the requirements of his flights and his medications that he seems decades older, an impression emphasized by his poor health and the fact that “he’d outlived everyone he’d loved.”

That sounds gloomy, but early on his journey, Juan Diego is ambushed by two aggressive fans: a motherandherdaughterwhoinsist on taking control of his itinerary andhispills.Althoughthere’ssomethingvaguelythreateningaboutthe women, Juan Diego has to admit that they’re terrifically competent tour guides — and he enjoys sleeping with them (one at a time).

But Juan Diego’s heart and the heart of this novel lie far in the past. Prone to frequent spells of dreaming, “his mind was often elsewhere,” Irving writes. “His thoughts, his memories — what he imagined, what he dreamed — were all jumbled up.” For us,

though, these reveries don’t read like dreams so much as superbly crafted short stories about “his childhood, and the people he’d encountered there — the ones who’d changed his life, or who’d been witnesses to what had happened to him at that crucial time.”

Indeed, Juan Diego’s memories of adolescence around 1970 in Oaxaca compose some of the most charming scenes that Irving has ever written. He’s still an unparalleled choreographer of outrageous calamities that exist somewhere between coincidence and fate. (It would hardly feel like an Irving novel if a shower stall didn’t collapse on somebody, startling a nearby elephant into dragging around a dead horse.) The episodic structure of “Avenue” would lend itself to spectacular excerpts, which is the kindest way I can suggest that the parts of this novel are better than its ambling whole.

Juan Diego and his little sister, the hilariously tough-minded Lupe, are “dump kids,” scavengers who sort through vast waste for glass, aluminum and copper. The man who is probably their father works at the dump, too, while their mother works the streets. By teaching himself to read castoff books in Spanish and English, Juan Diego attracts the admiration and care of several kind Jesuits, including an American priestin-training, whose sexual turbulence drives some of the story’s most surprising sections.

Although it’s a dangerous world, Irving casts the dump community in the semi-comical glow of Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.” There’s no effort to romanticize such poverty, but Juan Diego and Lupe enjoy a series of adventures in this deeply religious place.

Eventually, the novelist’s reflections on his life attain a sweet profundity that should win over anyone who follows to the end.

Juan Diego may not figure out how he became the writer he is, but he develops a deeper appreciation for the people who got him here. n

T AVENUE OF MYSTERIES

By John Irving Simon & Schuster.

460 pp. $28

WILDFLOWER

By Drew Barrymore Dutton. 276 pp. $28

l

REVIEWED BY

L IBBY C OPELAND

he problem with Drew Barrymore’s new book of autobiographical essays isn’t that she’s had a boring life.

She started working in infancy, heir to an acting dynasty and daughter of a troubled father and a manager mother. Her rapid fame, her reckless escapades as a young adult and her multiple engagements and marriages formed the stuff of tabloid legend. She climbed her way back to a career as an actor and producer from the precipice of former-child-stardom.

No, the problem here isn’t a dearth of good material but the author’s lack of interest in exploring it. “Wildflower” is relentlessly and blandly upbeat.

The stark, astonishing facts of Barrymore’s childhood — smoking and drinking, rehab, legally emancipated by the time she was a young teenager — are cursorily mentioned, if at all. She gives the barest background to explain why she had to get her own apartment and teach herself how to do laundry, because the story she really wants to tell is about how conquering her fears at the laundromat “taught me how to tackle everything moving forward.” Barrymore’s first, brief marriage, at the age of 19, to a much-older bar owner, is mentioned in passing (“I had just married a guy I was dating”) as part of a chapter about a terrible boat trip in the 1990s.

The tone throughout is doggedly inspirational.

“I love flowers. I protect flowers,” Barrymore writes, explaining why the childhood loss of a bougainvillea bush lead her to distrust ads for weed-killers and, indeed, the whole notion of pruning. (The symbolism of the lost bougainvillea bush — sudden fame, lost childhood — lies taut and largely unexplored.) “Let us all be wildflowers!”

Her father, who struggled with drugs and alcohol and whom Barrymore herself once called “abusive,” is rendered here with a lighter touch, as an eccentric who couldn’t stick around for her child-

hood because he “couldn’t be pinned down.”

“My mother and father were both incapable of being parents, and I don’t fault them for it. ” “Wildflower” is not exactly a memoir, but a series of life stories told out of order, and this disordered chronology and missing context give the reader a sense of backing into the story. It’s possible Barrymore figured that readers already knew the details of her life from profiles and from an autobiography she published as a teenager in 1990. But only super-fans are likely to be able to fill in the gaps without turning to Wikipedia.

Still, there are stories that will delight fans and casual observers.

The actress recounts several longago incidents when, following some urgent and primal instinct, she committed acts of pure youngadult recklessness: jumping over the side of a boat and swimming to a rock. Bashing her Bronco through the locked gate of a closed parking lot on New Year’s Eve. Doing an impromptu strip on David Letterman’s desk and flashing the host on TV. All of them are framed as turning moments when the girl who had been raising herself for years was shocked into growing up. But they are also unscripted and unvarnished and somehow free, standing in stark contrast to the picture of herself that Barrymore paints now: a careful mother who dedicates herself to packing lunches with “bento-box-style precision” and is determined to find the silver lining in every situation.

“At 19 I had ruined the sacred nature of marriage. I had killed my career by 12,” she writes. If Barrymore is even half as relentlessly optimistic in real life as in her book, that seems a triumph given the long odds that once faced her.

But alas, it doesn’t make for the best reading. n Libby Copeland is a journalist in New York and a former Washington Post reporter.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

The most powerful people on campus: Black athletes SHAUN R. HARPER is a University of Pennsylvania professor and executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education.

A research team from the center I direct is spending three days this week assessing the campus climate at a predominantly white university in the Midwest, not far from the University of Missouri. Based on our findings and experiences elsewhere, I am certain they have heard students, faculty and staff of color tell horrifying stories of encounters with racism. By now, one of our researchers has probably heard a black student describe the pain she experienced when someone called her the N­word on campus. Others have probably reflected on how they felt when racial epithets were spraypainted on their dorm-room doors or the numerous times their white peers and professors presumed they were admitted only because of affirmative action. Depending on what the fraternity scene is like at this university, some students of color may recap the insults they felt when photos emerged from a recent party with a blackface theme. When the team gets back, I predict they will say very little that shocks me. I expect to hear that tears were shed, which happens every place we do racialclimate research.

Each year, administrators at several predominantly white colleges and universities hire us to spend a few days on their campuses assessing the racial climate. People of color not only supply numerous examples of racial harm that has been inflicted on them at the institutions we study, but also convey frustration and disappointment with the lack of response from campus administrators. They often tell us that their institutions do not care about people of color, despite the diversity-related values expressed via mission statements, in admissions materials and on Web sites. “The president doesn’t listen to us,” is a common complaint.

Many participants in our studies meet us quite skeptically.

They wonder whether they are, once again, about to waste their time unpacking and reliving painful encounters with racism for the mere sake of institutional window dressing. Most ask us, “Are administrators really going to do something this time?”

Sometimes, administrators do.

But too often, they don’t.

Jonathan Butler, a graduate student at Missouri, and others there were tired of waiting for their campus leaders to do something about the institution’s long-standing racial problems.

I have been engaged in racialclimate research for more than a decade, including an assessment of the University of Missouri at Kansas City eight years ago. I am repeatedly saddened by the powerlessness that people of color often feel on predominantly white campuses. Having spent my career as an administrator and professor at universities where my people are in the numerical minority, I know firsthand the feelings participants of color in my research routinely express. It is a familiar, lived experience of mine. Those feelings correspond with a racially stratified workforce in higher education. At many institutions, blacks and Latinos are overrepresented in food-service, secretarial, custodial and landscaping roles.

Conversely, we are almost always

NICK SCHNELLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Protesters celebrate on Monday following the resignation of Timothy M. Wolfe, the University of Missouri’s system president.

terribly underrepresented among college presidents, vice presidents, deans, tenured professors and trustees — roles at the power epicenter of the institutions. So we often find ourselves at the mercy of our white colleagues to do more to engender among us a sense of belonging, or respond to our reports of encounters with racism and unfair treatment on campus.

Too few of us are powerful enough to make senior administrators take racism seriously and respond in ways that demonstrate authentic commitment to our humanity.

There is one group of blacks on university campuses that has tremendous power, though: student athletes.

In a 2013 report, two researchers and I provide data that show the overrepresentation of black male student athletes relative to their enrollment in the general student body at institutions in six major NCAA Division I athletic conferences.

We found that black men were 2.8 percent of undergraduate students but 57.1 percent of football players and 64.3 percent of men’s basketball players across the 77 major sports programs in our study. Data the NCAA released this month shows that black men constituted 3.3 percent of undergraduates at Missouri, but they were 65.3 percent of the football team

and 72.7 percent of the men’s basketball team there during the 2014-2015 academic school year.

Across institutions in the Southeastern Conference, of which Missouri is a member, nearly 70 percent of football players are black. There were 830 black football players across the 14 SEC campuses last year.

By threatening not to play, black football players at Missouri flexed their collective muscle and exercised their power. Their courageous efforts helped me realize that they and other black male student athletes at institutions similar to theirs are the most powerful people of color on campus. Despite constituting less than 0.2 percent of undergraduates at Mizzou, they were able to get significant attention from the national media more quickly than the original leaders of the protest were. Faced with the prospect of losing $1 million, university officials had no choice but to finally listen.

Football and men’s basketball players are able to get things done that the rest of us cannot because they have unique reputational and economic powers. Their absence on the football field or basketball court puts millions of dollars at stake; no president can afford that. I hope black male student athletes now realize how much power they have to ignite institutional change. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Using olive branches as lifelines JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor of The Post. He is an editorial writer specializing in foreign affairs.

At the heart of President Obama’s foreign policy is a long bet: that American engagement with previously shunned regimes will, over time, lead to their liberalization, without the need for either a messy domestic revolution or a bloody U.S. use of force. By definition, it will be years before we know whether this policy works.

It nevertheless is becoming clear that the regimes on which Obama has lavished attention have greeted his overtures with a counterstrategy. It’s possible, they calculate, to use the economic benefits of better relations to entrench their authoritarian systems for the long term, while screening out any liberalizing influence. Rather than being subverted by U.S. dollars, they would be saved by them.

The dictators’ bet is paying off.

The latest evidence of that came in Burma, when the generals who rule the country staged an election structured to preserve their power. The constitution bans opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming president despite a landslide victory and reserves a quarter of parliamentary seats for the military.

Obama might claim that the lifting of U.S. sanctions and the two trips he made to the country helped prompt this limited democratic opening. The generals see it another way: The restricted system, and the inflow of U.S. and European investment it enables, makes their political supremacy sustainable for the long term. As

proof, they can point to the fact that they rebuffed U.S. appeals for constitutional reforms before the election with no consequence for the new economic relationship.

That Iran’s supreme leader is pursuing a similar course became clear recently as the arrests of two businessmen with U.S. citizenship or residency came to light. Having allowed President Hassan Rouhani to negotiate the nuclear deal with Obama, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard intend to pocket the $100 billion or so in proceeds while preventing what they call the “penetration” of Western influence that Obama hopes for.

Hence the taking of more U.S. hostages. To the imprisonment of The Washington Post’s Jason

Rezaian and two other Iranian Americans, add Nizar Zakka, a U.S.-based Internet specialist, and Siamak Namazi, an Iranian American who has publicly advocated for better relations between the countries. The lack of any U.S. response means that the open season on Americans will continue in Tehran.

Khamenei doesn’t get the prize for the best jujitsu on Obama.

That goes to Raúl Castro, the ruler of Cuba who has managed to transform the resumption of U.S.Cuban relations into an almost entirely one-sided transaction.

Since announcing the end of the 50-year freeze between the countries, Obama has twice loosened restrictions on U.S. travel and investment in Cuba.

Tourism arrivals are up 18 percent this year, and billions in currency is flowing into the regime’s nearly empty treasury.

The White House has dispatched a stream of senior officials to Havana, including Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker.

In response, Castro has done virtually nothing, other than reopen the Cuban Embassy in Washington and allow a cellphone roaming agreement.

His answer to repeated pleadings from U.S. officials for gestures on human rights has been to step up repression of the opposition.

According to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, there were at least 1,093 political detentions in October, the highest number in 16 months.

Castro has shunned offers from U.S. businesses and cut U.S. imports. Pritzker did not sign any deals during her visit. Cuban officials are using the prospect of increased U.S. trade and investment as “chum” to strike bargains with other countries, according to a report by the U.S.Cuba Trade and Economic Council. Imports of U.S. food are down 44 percent, but imports from China are up 76 percent.

The administration appears happy to accept this. The latest high-level envoy, State Department senior adviser David Thorne, told Reuters in Havana last week: “The pace is really going to be set by the Cubans, and we are satisfied with how they want to do this.” What about the lack of progress on human rights? “ . . . let’s find out how we can work together and not always say that human rights are the first things we have to fix before anything else,” he said.

It’s okay to capture U.S. dollars while excluding U.S. business and cracking down on anyone favoring liberalization? No wonder dictators are winning. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

The cruelest show on Earth?

ESTHER J. CEPEDA is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO — Imagine you’re an animal sleeping quietly in your crate and suddenly you feel yourself being carted down a long hallway, loud music growing closer. The next thing you know you’re yanked out, waved around spasmodically in a cacophony of singing and lights for about a minute and a half, then dropped back into your crate and rolled back to the quiet.

This is what happened to one very large snake during a recent Chicago performance of “Circus XTREME” by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. And though snakes hardly elicit most people’s sympathy, they seem a fitting metaphor for the circus’s difficult relationship with the animals it showcases.

I found myself under the big top last weekend on my first circus visit in well over a decade. I wanted to see the last tour of the Ringling circus that will include its iconic elephants.

On that score, I was premature.

Though parent company Feld Entertainment made the startling announcement in March that they would finally end their elephant troop in performances, the pachyderms will work throughout a phase-out that is supposed to be complete by 2018.

Still, I was glad to witness a bona fide end of an era and maybe

gain a small bit of understanding about what will be lost once generations of young children are deprived of seeing these huge animals at the circus.

The problem with the elephants’ starring role in the show is that their living conditions never make an appearance in the ring. For those of us in the audience, it was a delight to see the stoic, ashen animals parade into the spotlight wearing their gorgeous headdresses, giving the impression of joyously holding hands as they link tails to trunks.

The elephants seem so serene that it’s easy to tell yourself that they are enjoying themselves as they lay down, roll over, spin in place, do their headstands, kick giant beach balls into the stands and execute their conga line formations. During the performance I attended, an elephant even sported giant

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

headphones while scratching at an oversized turntable.

Interestingly, “education” was a prominent part of the elephant act, with the trainers explaining in carefully crafted language that the elephant goads — also known as bull hooks, which are used to prod the animals — are employed to “reinforce verbal commands with touch.”

Harmless as that sounds, the horrific conditions in which the elephants and other animals live and travel during their captivity with the circus have been well documented.

Advocates estimate that at least 30 elephants, including four babies, have died since 1992, and there is widespread outrage whenever video footage leaks or news reporting highlights the cruelty. As Feld Entertainment noted in its news release, the circus is responding to “shifting consumer preferences.”

It should also consider retiring other large and exotic animals.

The argument about the cruelty of keeping elephants restrained — in addition to harsh training methods and poor medical care — is that they are wild animals that roam for miles.

The same can be said of the tigers and camels, neither of which did anything particularly stunning during the

performance, aside from sulkily prancing in formation. (The snakes deserve our pity, too.)

The tigers, at least, provided suspense. None of the 15 showcased the day I attended seemed particularly happy to be onstage, and several behaved as though they’d have liked to rip the trainer’s throat open.

Based on my observations, adults’ nostalgia will be the only thing hurt with fewer animals at the circus. As I sat surrounded by babies, toddlers and young children, it was obvious that the animal attention was driven by parents and grandparents yelling in their kids’ ears.

The rest of the circus was wonderful. There were aerialists, dancers, contortionists, jugglers, tightrope walkers and a woman who was shot out of a cannon.

The lighting effects, emotional musical scoring accompanied by a live band and the modern touches of BMX bike stunt riders, acrobats and trampoline artists were far beyond the spectacles I recall from my own childhood.

There’s no need to worry that the circus won’t be as good without the elephants. Ringling puts on something quite worthy of its slogan “The Greatest Show On Earth,” and it will only be better without the shadow of animal cruelty hanging over it. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Baby boomers BY

S ALLY A BRAHMS

There are 75.4 million baby boomers in the United States, people aged 51 to 69 years old. They are the largest generation in our his­ tory, raised during the economic prosperity that followed World War II. The oldest boomer was 18 years old and voting for Lyndon B. Johnson when the youngest was just entering the world. It’s time to debunk some generalizations about the original Me Generation.

1

Boomers are wealthy.

Rather than downsizing, many empty nesters are snapping up second homes or moving into bigger quarters, seeking more prestige and space for friends and relatives to visit.

Stories of big spending have dominated popular perceptions of boomers in their later years.

But many boomers couldn’t be further from living that dream.

While some benefit from multiple income streams, members of this sandwich generation often are saddled simultaneously with their children’s eye-popping college tuition payments and health expenses for their aging parents.

Some have to leave their jobs to be full-time caregivers. A 2013 AARP study found that about 1 in 5 workers between ages 45 and 74 had either taken leave or quit a job to care for an adult family member in the past five years.

On top of that, there’s a mounting number of “gray divorce” couples who, in their 50s and 60s, suddenly have to divide assets they had counted on. Given boomers’ longer life expectancy, that translates into a lot more bills for many more years.

Savings aren’t helping them much. A Wells Fargo study released last month shows that working Americans age 60 or older have median savings of just $50,000, about $250,000 short of their goal. And plans to keep their jobs longer might not work. In the same study, 49 percent of retirees left the workforce earlier than expected, frequently because of health problems or an employer’s decision.

2

Boomers are healthier than their parents.

Baby boomers have the longest life expectancy in history.

The average 65-year-old today can expect to live to 84.3 — nearly three years longer than a 65-yearold in 1980. Yet research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2013 showed that boomers were in worse health than their parents at about the same age.

They had more disabilities and higher rates of chronic diseases.

Just 13 percent of the studied boomers said they were in excellent health, compared with 32 percent from the previous generation. Boomers were more likely to be obese, exercised less, and had higher rates of hypertension and high cholesterol.

3

Boomers are selfish.

Boomers have been far more generous with their money than they’re given credit for, a benevolence that will continue after their deaths. The generation is poised to lead the largest wealth transfer in U.S. history. Researchers at Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy estimated that between 2007 and 2061, heirs will receive $36 trillion from deceased relatives, and $20.6 trillion will be given to charity. A new Merrill Lynch report credits boomers for an upcoming surge in charity: Over the next 20 years, retirees will donate money and time worth $8 trillion.

The generation also has solidified the concept of the “encore career,” with retirees

AARON BLACK/AURORA PHOTOS

parlaying experience and skills into volunteer roles or paid “second act” jobs with social impact.

4

Boomers are technology-challenged.

It stands to reason that people who weren’t exposed to personal computers until adulthood would have a harder time learning digital skills than those who have been using them since childhood. The personal computer didn’t even exist until the oldest boomers were a decade out of high school. The youngest were in their late 20s when the public Internet was born. In 2001, educator Marc Prensky coined “digital immig-rant” for those born before 1980 who can find technology foreign. It’s assumed that older adults are slower to grasp new skills.

But a 2010 Pew Research Center study found that 84 percent of Americans between ages 57 and 65 owned a cellphone, about the average for adults of all ages. They were nearly as likely as Gen Xers to own a desktop computer — 64 percent compared with 69 percent (though Gen Xers were more likely to have a laptop). And among younger boomers, 42 percent owned an iPod or MP3

player and 38 percent owned a game console. They’re also far from social-media shy. Users older than 55 are Facebook’s fastest-growing segment; 7 out of 10 boomers have an account.

5

Boomers don’t have sex.

Even 48 years after the Summer of Love, people in this generation haven’t let their love lives die. In the 2010 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, 38 percent of married men ages 50 to 59 said they had sex “a few times a month to weekly,” and 35.4 percent of 60to 69-year-olds concurred. They didn’t trail too far behind young men in their sexual prime; among those in the 25-to-29 set, 46 percent said they had sex that frequently.

It’s not all good news, though.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sexually transmitted diseases are hitting boomers hard. STD rates doubled among 50- to 90-yearolds between 2000 and 2010.

Specifically, the rate of chlamydia soared about 32 percent, and the incidence of syphilis rose about 52 percent. n Sally Abrahms is a nationally recognized writer on baby boomers and aging.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2015

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BE INFORMED AND INSPIRED CHELAN ◆ AN

D ALL OF NORT

H CENTRAL WA

In the November–December edition of Foothills Magazine, you’ll find that our holiday edition lives up to its name. Enjoy our feature on 12 Days for Christmas—gift items which highlight a memorable day’s experience, from a winter sleigh ride to a night out at the roller derby rink. There’s no shortage of fun and distinctive day trips throughout the North Central Washington region that make for great gift experiences.

SHINGTON

S L L I H T O O

LEAVENWORTH WENATCHEE ◆

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ber 2015 November-Decem

On the home front, we take a look inside a Leavenworth home which overlooks the Wenatchee River, built on a challenging building lot but the results are outstanding.

12 DAYS FOR CHRISTMAS ary Out-of-the-ordin gift ideas

Inside

SaddlegivUe,pneed love ber 2015 HoFrses thatSeptember / Octo 40 oothills

With Thanksgiving just a few weeks away, foodie Marlene Farrell has a tasty recipe for dressing/stuffing—whatever you call it— that includes local apples and pears.

For you active types, you’ll enjoy our piece on Run Wenatchee, and for you more sedentary readers, enjoy the flavors of France while sipping wine at Cairdeas Winery in Lake Chelan.

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