The Washington Post National Weekly - November 20, 2016

Politics Bannon used flattery to get Trump’s ear 4

Nation Anti-vaxxers not welcome 8

Technology Can virtual reality improve empathy? 16

5 Myths Democracy is really pretty complicated 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

Wild.

First-time hunter T.M. Shine had a plan: Bring home the Thanksgiving meal.

It did not go smoothly.

PAGE 12

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

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Foothills Magazine presents its 5th Annual

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

Get all the details at photos.ncwfoothills.com Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2017

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

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THE FIX

Backing Obama and Trump BY

A ARON B LAKE

O

Trump voters who approve of President Obama

ne of the big stories of the 2016 election is that Donald Trump won despite being the most unpopular presidential nominee in modern history.

The polls weren’t wrong about that; he won in spite of it.

He also won despite the outgoing Democratic president being popular — more popular than Ronald Reagan at this point in his presidency, in fact. Popularity, it seems, was not the be-all, end-all. And neither were Obama’s coattails.

The working theory is that people simply wanted change — but many Trump voters seemed pretty happy with the presidential status quo.

17 percent of them, in fact.

According to a new poll from The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, nearly 1 in 5 Trump voters say they approve of Obama’s job performance. That would mean about 8 percent (note: large margin of error) of Americans went to the polls on Election Day liking what Obama was producing as president but deciding to vote for the other party’s unpopular nominee anyway.

And that is why Donald Trump is our president-elect.

The numbers aren’t hugely surprising.

Simply doing the math of a president whose approval rating is in the mid-50s and the other party’s nominee winning the election, there had to be pro-Obama voters who were on Trump’s side. The fact that there are so many people with this kind of dual loyalty, though, is striking — especially since both candidates used Obama’s policies as a touchstone: Hillary Clinton setting herself up as the standard-bearer for those policies and

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A new Washington Post-Schar School poll shows large shares of Trump voters who don’t agree with him on most issues or aren’t “very” optimistic about his policies also approve of Obama. But they still voted for Trump.

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

President Obama and President-elect Donald Trump meet in the Oval Office last week.

Trump the one who would undo them. Even as Obama’s approval rating rose in recent months, Trump said often that Clinton’s election would translate into four more years of Obama.

It was a questionable strategy at the time, given Obama's popularity. But it doesn’t seem

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. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 6

to have hurt Trump’s chances.

It’s also fair to ask just how strongly these voters approved of Obama. Obama’s approval rating dipped into the low-40s in recent years, so it’s possible these Trump voters’ approval of him was rather new and pretty soft.

Maybe they liked Obama well enough now that he’s about to be not-president but don’t love him. In fact, that’s probably very true.

But it’s also true that many people voted for Trump despite not totally buying into his campaign and apparently liking Obama just fine.

The Post-Schar School poll also shows that, among Trump voters who said they shared Trump’s views on only some, hardly any or no issues, 30 percent approved of Obama. And among Trump voters who weren’t “very” optimistic about Trump’s policies — they were only “somewhat” optimistic or were pessimistic — 25 percent approved of Obama.

This suggests a very real and sizable group of voters who didn’t really like Trump that much and liked Obama — but still voted for the GOP nominee.

It didn’t take a ton of them to tip the scales to Trump. But there were enough. n

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Author T.M.Shine recounts his quest to bag a turkey for his family’s Thanksgiving meal.

Photograph by JEFFERY SALTER for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

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POLITICS

How Bannon coaxed Trump alt-right

DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

Radio interviews show how former Breitbart News chief used flattery to gain agreement

BY D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD AND F RANCES S TEAD S ELLERS

S

oon after terrorist attacks killed 130 people in Paris last year, Donald Trump faced sharp criticism for saying the United States had “no choice” but to close down some mosques.

Two days later, Trump called in to a radio show run by a friendly political operative who offered a suggestion.

Was it possible, asked the host, Stephen K. Bannon, that Trump

hadn’t really meant that mosques should be closed?

“Were you actually saying, you need a [New York City police] intelligence unit to get a network of informants?” Bannon asked. He continued: “I guess what I’m saying is, you’re not prepared to allow an enemy within . . . to try to tear down this country?”

Trump — presented with a less controversial but entirely different idea than what he’d actually said — agreed.

“That’s right. That’s not going to happen,” he told Bannon.

Today, Trump is president-elect.

Bannon, the former Breitbart News chief who helped guide Trump’s victorious campaign, is set to be one of the new president’s most influential advisers. The clearest public sense of how the two will work together — and what policies Bannon may try to push — can be gleaned from a series of one-on-one interviews on Bannon’s radio show between November 2015 and June of this year.

In those exchanges, a dynamic emerged, with Bannon often coaxing Trump to agree to his view-

Trump campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon, seen in Trump Tower on Nov. 11, has been named Presidentelect Donald Trump’s pick for chief strategist.

point, whether on climate change, foreign policy or the need to take on Republican leaders in Congress.

At times, Bannon seemed to coach Trump to soften the harder edges of his message, to make it more palatable to a broader audience, while in other cases he pushed Trump to take tougher positions. He flattered Trump, praising his negotiating skills and the size of his campaign crowds.

The conversations marked a coming-together of Trump, who at the time was a pariah among many top Republicans, and the alt-right,

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POLITICS a loosely defined term describing a far-right ideology that includes opposition to immigration and “globalism” and had found a home in the Breitbart News empire. The alt-right movement has also been saturated with white-nationalist rhetoric, prompting criticism of Bannon’s appointment this past week, though Bannon has said the movement is not racist.

A spokeswoman for the Trump transition did not respond to a request for comments on behalf of Bannon and the president-elect.

Bannon’s interviews with Trump were done for Breitbart News Daily, a radio program that airs on SiriusXM satellite radio’s “Patriot” channel, a home for conservative talk. In all, they add up to more than two hours of one-onone conversations.

By the time of that first show, Breitbart had already become a crucial booster of Trump’s presidential campaign.

“Mr. Trump, thank you very much for joining us on the initial Breitbart News Daily Show,” Bannon said on Nov. 2, 2015.

When Trump came on the air, the first thing Bannon wanted to talk about was how well Trump was doing in his campaign — and how Bannon had noticed it before other people did.

“I said, ‘This guy, people are leaning forward in these audiences when he’s talking,’ ” Bannon said, recalling earlier conversations about Trump’s run. “And we were mocked and ridiculed.”

Trump also wanted to talk about how well he was doing.

“We had 20,000 in Dallas. . . .

And 35,000 in Alabama, and 20,000 in Oklahoma,” Trump said, talking about his rallies. “We’ve had a lot of fun talking about very negative subjects. Because everything is negative with the country, Steve. I mean, there’s nothing good happening.”

During their conversations, there were some moments on-air when Trump and Bannon disagreed. Though not many.

Last November, for instance, Trump said he was concerned that foreign students attending Ivy League schools have to return home because of U.S. immigration laws.

“We have to be careful of that, Steve. You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country,” Trump said. He paused. Bannon said, “Um.” “I think you agree with that,”

RADIO EXCHANGE NOV. 19, 2015

Bannon: “Were you actually saying, you need a [New York City police] intelligence unit to get a network of informants? I guess what I’m saying is, you’re not prepared to allow an enemy within . . . to try to tear down this country?”

Trump: “That’s right. That’s not going to happen.”

Trump said. “Do you agree with that?”

Bannon was hesitant.

“When two-thirds or threequarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” Bannon said, not finishing the sentence, which a 2015 study countered. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

Trump said he would build a border wall but still wanted to let highly educated foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges to be able to stay in the country.

“I still want people to come in,” Trump said. “But I want them to go through the process.”

Bannon said: “You got to remember, we’re Breitbart. We’re the know-nothing vulgarians. So we’ve always got to be to the right of you on this.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Trump said.

In most of the interviews, Bannon often called his subject “sir” or “Mr. Trump.” Trump called his interviewer “Steve.”

In his questions, Bannon often began with praise for Trump. Asking about foreign affairs, for instance, Bannon praised Trump’s capacity for dealmaking.

“It’s complicated,” Bannon said.

“That’s your calling card.”

“I love complicated,” Trump responded. “I thrive on complicated.”

The flattery often came before a leading question.

Last December, Bannon told Trump that, “I know you’re a student of military history.” Then, he laid out a case for questioning the U.S. alliance with Turkey, a member of NATO since the 1950s.

Wasn’t it true, Bannon asked, that the situation was a bit like the web of treaties that connected Euro-

pean countries before World War I? “People were locked into these treaties. . . . It led to the beginning of the bloodiest century in mankind’s history,” Bannon said. He said that Turkey had changed since it joined NATO, turning to Islamism under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. What if Turkey was drawn into a broader conflict in Syria, perhaps with Russia?

“This is not something, Steve, that you want to end up in World War III over,” Trump said.

In other cases, Bannon would use his questions to frame policy choices — and then ask Trump if he agreed with the frame and the choice.

In the December interview, Bannon presented the problems of climate change and the Islamic State as a binary option — offering Trump, in effect, the choice of fighting one or the other.

“Do you agree with the pope and President Obama that [climate change] is absolutely a path to global suicide, if specific deals are not cut in Paris, versus focusing on radical Islam?” Bannon asked, referring to the negotiations that eventually led to a global climate agreement in Paris last year.

Trump said that what other people considered to be climate change was probably just weather.

Radical Islam should be the focus.

“We are fools,” Trump said, meaning the Obama administration.

In the wake of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s early May announcement that he was not ready to back Trump, Bannon invited Trump to reflect on whether Ryan (R-Wis.) was showing “a lack of respect — not just for you, but for your policies.”

On issues ranging from trade to slowing Muslim immigration, Bannon said, “What [Ryan] wants

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Sen. Ted Cruz have been the topic of conversations between Donald Trump and Stephen K. Bannon on the Breitbart News Daily satellite radio show.

KLMNO WEEKLY

is for you to drop those policies.

Are you prepared to do that for unity?” When Trump later began to say it would be “better if we do get together,” Bannon interrupted, saying that Ryan’s version of unity would represent “a collapse of what you ran on and a collapse on what [voters] backed you on.”

“Well, you can’t do that,” responded Trump.

Bannon also seemed to recognize when Trump had made a potential gaffe — even when Trump had not — and to try to steer him back to correct it. The first time Bannon asked Trump about U.S. foreign policy toward Turkey, Trump volunteered that he had business interests there.

“I have a little conflict of interest, because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump said.

“It’s called Trump Towers. Two towers, instead of one. Not the usual one, it’s two. And I’ve gotten to know Turkey very well.”

A little later, Bannon circled back, asking Trump to explain why his conflict of interest should not bother voters.

“They say, ‘Hey look, this guy’s got vested business interests all over the world. How do I know he’s going to stand up to Turkey?’ ” Bannon said.

Trump did not directly address the question.

In another conversation, from February, Trump began with an attack on Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), his GOP primary rival, saying, “I’ve never seen any human being lie like he lies.”

Bannon, who had also praised Cruz in the past, interrupted.

“Mr. Trump . . . You’ve been in New York real estate, and global real estate, and the gaming industry, and with politicians. You can’t say, reasonably, that Ted Cruz is the biggest liar you’ve ever seen,” Bannon said.

“He’s the biggest liar,” Trump said. “Okay, let’s get on to another subject. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

A few minutes later, however, Bannon circled back again. “These personal attacks. It’s turning people off,” he said. “On this Ted Cruz situation: You’ve dealt with the toughest hombres in the world. You can’t expect us to believe that Ted Cruz is the biggest liar you’ve ever met. It doesn’t stand to reason.”

Trump moderated. A little bit.

“He’s right up there, let me tell you,” he said. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

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POLITICS

Where Trump was seen as only hope G REGORY S . S CHNEIDER in Lebanon, Va. BY

B

ehind the barber’s chair where Claude Rasnake diagnoses many of the world’s problems, he charted the to-do list of the Trump administration.

Social Security, Medicare, the tax code — maybe Trump and a Republican Congress can finally get them fixed. Dismantle Obamacare and fix roads and bridges, too.

But all that comes later, after the top priority.

“The first thing I’d like him to do is fire that lady that runs the EPA,” Rasnake, 81, said, working the trimmer around a customer’s ear.

The Environmental Protection Agency makes regulations that limit the use of coal, and here that kills jobs.

Rasnake had pondered his vote for months. He didn’t like Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton — didn’t like the insults and the lies. But days before the election he made up his mind, and it came down to this: Clinton had promised to put coal companies out of business, and Trump donned a miner’s helmet and said he would help the dying industry.

“That was the basis of our economy here,” Rasnake said, as his customer began to grunt in agreement. “That’s really hurt.

I’ve lost customers — some have had to move away. The ones that are left have a hard time getting by, month to month.”

Here in Virginia’s far Southwest corner — almost as distant from Washington as Boston — voters went overwhelmingly for Trump.

Clinton did win the state’s 13 electoral votes (thanks in part to Democrats voting in Northern Virginia’s Washington suburbs) but the people of these hard-hit hamlets and towns woke up on Nov. 9 to find that their man had won the presidency.

“I was elated. I was super surprised,” said Roy Bonney, 49, who owns Red Oak Trading Co., a hardware and home improvement store in Coeburn. He had thought Trump shot his mouth off too much to get elected. Many voters

PHOTOS BY JULIA RENDLEMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Rural voters shrugged off his faults and put faith in his promises here said the same, that they were unhappy with the way Trump talked and conducted himself.

Unemployment in these counties runs roughly twice the statewide rate of 4 percent. Most of the job losses are from mining and related industries. Virginia coal production last year dropped 70 percent from its peak, in 1990, and is declining every year.

“We’ve had a lot of factories closing down. Families have lost jobs,” said Linda Smith, 39, who works part time at the Food City grocery store in Lebanon and can’t afford health insurance, even under the Affordable Care Act. In Wise County, Juan Lopez, 42, climbs down off the huge mining truck he has been repairing, hands blackened with grease. He came to the United States in 1991 from Mexico, got married, got his citizenship, had two children. “We go to church,” he said. “We’re trying to do it right.”

Lopez voted for Trump. It was a vote to keep his job. “They say if Trump can do it better [with the coal industry], we might be able to have jobs two or three more years,” he said. “But if not, we might be out by the end of next year.”

Lopez’s employer, Ricky Meade, owns a fleet of trucks for hauling or loading coal — yellow and red Peterbilt and Kenworth rigs with

35-foot trailers, about 70 of them sitting idle behind a chain-link fence bearing Trump/Pence signs.

“We went from running 85 trucks to running eight trucks, over the past three or four years,” said Meade, 47. He grew up here but now lives an hour’s drive away in Bristol, Tenn., so his daughters can have more opportunities. His customer base is down to a single mine. From 105 employees, he now has about 25.

Meade wants to see if Trump will deliver on what he promised. If he lowers restrictions on power plants, then use of steam coal may go up and some miners may go back to work. “I know he can’t wave a magic wand. I know we can’t get back to where we were two or three years ago,” he said. “I hope we can get back at least part of it.”

That alone is a tall order. Coal is simply on the wane worldwide as climate change becomes more of a concern, natural gas remains cheap and alternative forms of energy become more cost-effective. U.S. coal consumption dropped 13 percent last year.

Back at Rasnake’s barber shop, hope is barely hanging on.

“If we’re going to have any jobs here it’s going to have to be the coal companies. This little town is just drying up,” said Kenneth Jessee, 67, who retired from a coal compa-

Claude Rasnake, 81, left, in a Lebanon, Va., barber shop, said he hopes Donald Trump will bring jobs to the area. Ricky Meade, 47, right, owner of Double R Trucking in Wise County, said he voted for Trump. He said he is down to eight trucks from 85 about four years ago. He grew up in the area but now lives an hour’s drive away in Bristol, Tenn., so his daughters can have more opportunities.

ny three years ago to farm.

As Rasnake talked about his decision to vote for Trump, the man getting a haircut finally spoke up at the question of whether Trump can make a difference.

“No, he can’t,” said William Sisk, 78, of Buchanan County. “You won’t see those people working in the coal industry no more. Natural gas is too cheap. Any kind of market for coal anymore is very weak.”

Sisk spent 30 years at Pittston Coal, he said, as Rasnake finished and whipped the cover off him. “I made a good living at it, got a good retirement. But it’s gone,” he said, referring to the industry, but also Pittston, which sold out years ago after a crippling strike.

“It was the life’s blood here,” Rasnake agreed.

“A lot of people talk about [President] Obama’s war on coal,” Sisk said, standing and getting his cap.

“But the coal war was on long before Obama got there. The bottom dropped plumb out when he got in there and he got all the blame for it. But I don’t think it’s ever going to come back.”

As Sisk stepped out into the sunlight, he confessed that he didn’t vote for Trump. “He’s too radical. He promised too much,” he said. “You can promise anything, but you got to deliver.”

Sisk didn’t vote at all. n

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Defusing anger over electoral college BY

D AN Z AK

T

uesday, Nov. 8, was quiet.

Wednesday was quiet, too.

The pitchforks started arriving the next day, about 36 hours after the presidential election was called. They were virtual pitchforks, but still. Email after email. Tweets. Phone calls. Facebook posts. Some profane. Some pleading.

One subject line: “electoral votes are wrong” Another: “Vote in Hillary Clinton Dec. 19” Another: “Letter to America” Another: “HELP” So it goes at the Office of the Federal Register, which administers the electoral college and now finds itself at the center of a populist brouhaha.

The electoral college is not an actual place — no grassy quad, nor group of people sharing a space. It exists for one day every four years and then vanishes, like Brigadoon, until the next presidential election. The closest thing to a physical headquarters is this office, one half of the seventh floor of a neoclassical brick building over an Au Bon Pain, six blocks north of the Capitol. Over the past week or so, the Office of the Federal Register has been inundated by Americans wanting to learn about — or somehow control — the college, which is composed of the 538 party officials who will actually go about the formal business of electing Donald Trump president on Dec. 19, based on the popular votes of each state.

Many people have something to say about that, partly because Hillary Clinton won the most votes nationwide, partly because Donald Trump is Donald Trump.

“It’s just that they keep coming,” says Miriam Vincent, staring at her inbox this past Wednesday morning. “And every time we get close to having a handle on it, we get more. It goes on. And on.”

Her email pings.

“And on.”

Vincent has 558 unread emails, a grande chai in her hand, and a big bottle of Excedrin Migraine on her

EVELYN HOCKSTEIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Federal Register workers seek to educate and calm citizens amid huge influx of calls, emails cluttered desk. She is a staff attorney in the Legal Affairs and Policy Division in the Office of the Federal Register under the National Archives and Records Administration.

What that really means, right now, is that she is dealing with the nation’s collective freakout about the electoral college. Millions of Trump haters who can’t handle Clinton’s loss are signing petitions to persuade electors to vote as the majority of Americans did, which would be completely permissible but also pretty unprecedented. Actual electors are being lobbied and harassed, according to the Idaho Statesman, and this frantic energy has also funneled toward the Office of the Federal Register, whose website is the second Google hit when you search “electoral college.”

Death threats. Promises of civil war. Inappropriate photographs.

Students with homework questions. A daughter of Holocaust survivors who called to sob into the ear of a government bureaucrat. A woman in Florida who wanted Vincent to do something about Russian hacking.

Only four employees work in Vincent’s division. In the past week, each has taken on the role of civics teacher, and the role of therapist.

“You really need a thick skin,” says Amy Bunk, the division director. “People are venting their frustration. This woman, who didn’t understand the system at all, ended up accusing me of interrupting her and thinking she was stupid.”

She sighs. “I spent an hour on the phone with her.”

The normal work in this office is the publishing of the daily Federal Register, which includes government agencies’ notices and proposed rules, plus presidential documents such as speeches and proclamations. It’s America’s paper trail, wide open for anyone to see, textual government transparency in action. They’ve processed over 28,000 documents so far this year.

“And every four years we have this dropped on us,” Vincent says.

It goes back to a 1950 government reorganization that moved administrative responsibility for the electoral college from the State Department to the National Archives. “And we have it because the

Miriam Vincent, staff attorney at the Office of the Federal Register, responds to emails from citizens inquiring — not always politely — about the electoral college. The volume of calls and emails has been up significantly since Donald Trump won.

archivist said, ‘You’re doing it.’

Maybe the [Register] director was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

After a presidential election, on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, the electors gather at their respective state capitals to cast their votes. Who are they? Just regular people, entrenched in party politics, who have been selected by their parties for this very specific task. Among other standing requirements, they cannot have fought for the South in the Civil War. They sign their state’s electoral certificates, which are then sent to Congress and to Vincent’s division.

There are usually a handful of states that screw something up.

Either the governor didn’t sign the certificate, or they didn’t put the state seal on it, or they got the election date wrong — in which case Vincent’s division says “try again.” Then she and her colleagues compare its 51 certificates to the ones received by Congress, to make sure everything checks out.

And then we have a president.

The past three elections were easy for Vincent’s office. This year, though, is unreal.

A tweet from an anonymous 18-year-old: “F--- YOU. Hillary got the most popular votes and then you chose a guy who can’t even do his fake tan right.”

But Vincent and Bunk are not in charge of choosing the president.

Their role is simply to respond to these emails with information, excise offensive posts from the Facebook page, and screenshot the threats to send to the inspector general.

“A lot of people have been asking or advocating or yelling that we need to go back to the popular vote, but there is no ‘back,’” Vincent says. “Because this is how it’s been since 1789.”

For now, then, there are emails to deal with, callers to educate, and a process to follow that helps to formally elect a president. And a couple weeks after the inauguration, Vincent will enjoy her first vacation since August, on the beaches of Miami, far from the paper and the pinging. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

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NATION

Doctors take a hard line on vaccines BY

L ENA H . S UN

P

ediatricians around the country, faced with persistent opposition to childhood vaccinations, are increasingly grappling with the difficult decision of whether to dismiss those families from their practices to protect their other patients.

Doctors say they are more willing to take this last-resort step because the anti-vaccine movement in recent years has contributed to a resurgence of preventable childhood diseases such as measles, mumps and whooping cough. Their practices also have been emboldened by families who say they will choose only physicians who require vaccinations.

But the decision is ethically fraught. Doctors must balance their obligation to care for individual children against the potential harm to other patients. They must respect a parent’s right to make their own decisions. And they need to consider the public health consequences of a refusal to treat, which could result in non-vaccinating families clustered in certain practices, raising the risk of disease outbreaks.

Until recently, the American Academy of Pediatrics considered it unacceptable to refuse families for not vaccinating.

At the large Salem, Ore., pediatric practice where Mark Helm is a partner, clinicians eventually felt that their top priority was to protect their many medically fragile patients, including children with cancer or weak immune systems and infants not yet old enough to be fully vaccinated.

Last year, Childhood Health Associates of Salem became the first practice in Oregon to require all families to vaccinate their children fully.

“Our policy happened because it simply did not seem ‘just’ to permit the kids who could not be vaccinated to face dire risks because another child’s parent ‘disbelieved’ vaccination,” Helm said.

“We did not want anyone to get measles because they passed through our waiting room.”

AUSTIN REGIONAL CLINIC AND LEINDANI CREATIVE

As more clients join anti-inoculation movement, pediatricians are showing these families the door In response, about a dozen families out of several thousand chose to leave the practice. But other doctors’ groups in the community followed Childhood Health’s lead and adopted similar measures. The overwhelming majority of Childhood Health’s families supported the move.

After years of meeting hesitation or reluctance from parents, he said, “it’s just nice to hear parents say that — that they want their children to be vaccinated.”

Some of the heightened appreciation of vaccines grew out of a 2015 measles outbreak that started at Disneyland in California. A single, unvaccinated child with measles led to the infection of 131 people, many of whom also were unvaccinated. One infected adult who visited several hospitals exposed 98 infants, 14 pregnant women and 237 hospital employees, according to the California Department of Public Health.

After the Disneyland outbreak, California passed a law that requires almost all schoolchildren to be fully vaccinated to go to

school, allowing only some medical exemptions. The debate over the bill helped raise awareness of the dangers of measles and other preventable diseases.

For years, the official position of the AAP was not to dismiss vaccine-resistant families. But recently, the AAP recognized what many individual pediatricians have been wrestling with on an ad hoc basis. This summer, it announced for the first time that dismissal is now an acceptable option if doctors have exhausted counseling efforts.

“We found there was a lot of resentment at the AAP for hanging those of us who did choose to dismiss [patients] out on a limb with no institutional support,” said Jesse Hackell, a Rockland, N.Y., pediatrician and an author of the AAP report. “We felt that it was time for the AAP to recognize that there were many members who did choose this route, and that we were good pediatricians and loyal members.”

The AAP found that pediatricians are increasingly likely to

Avis Meeks Day, a pediatrician at the Austin Regional Clinic in Texas, examines a girl. Last year, the clinic announced it would no longer accept new patients who aren’t getting fully vaccinated.

dismiss families who refuse vaccinations. In 2013, nearly 1 in 8 pediatricians reported that they always do so, twice as many as in 2006, according to a study comparing the survey results published this summer in Pediatrics.

Pediatricians say this more systematic and open acceptance of dismissing vaccine refusers is evident in email discussions and conversations at meetings. In addition to the public-health impact, there is also the personal frustration and burnout among providers who have repeated unsuccessful conversations with vaccine refusers, Hackell said.

The modern anti-vaccine movement began in 1998, when a medical journal published a study suggesting a link between vaccines and autism. The study was later revealed to be an elaborate fraud, and scores of studies from around the world since then have shown conclusively that vaccines do not cause autism. Every relevant scientific and medical organization has examined the evidence and concluded that vaccines are safe and effective and that the real danger lies in skipping or delaying them.

Conspiracy theories against vaccines tend to be strongest in politically extreme communities suspicious of modern medicine, such as fundamentalist conservatives or back-to-nature liberals.

Still, the vast majority of parents vaccinate their children fully, leading to a dramatic decline in the rates of severe illness and death from infectious disease.

Heather Felton, part of a Louisville, says doctors are still trying to figure out what their policy should be for vaccine refusers. So far, clinicians have been able to persuade reluctant families.

When parents are unsure or reluctant to get their children vaccinated, Felton says her most powerful argument may come from her status not as a doctor, but as the mother of a 2-year-old and a 6-month-old baby.

“I tell them I have two little girls,” Felton said. “I get them all their shots, and I get all of them on time.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

A water supply about to run dry D ARRYL F EARS Lake Cachuma, Calif.

BY

A

t the marina Monty Keller manages amid sloping mountains here, business is down by half.

For hours every workday, he stares sadly at the reason.

Lake Cachuma, a giant reservoir built to hold Santa Barbara County’s drinking water, has all but vanished in California’s historic drought. It reached an alltime low this summer — 7 percent capacity, which left a thick beige watermark that circles the hills framing the lake like an enormous bathtub ring. “We’re just amazed,” Keller said.

Under a sky that hardly ever delivers rain, the lake will only continue to fall, putting nearly a half-million county residents in an ugly situation. As early as January, the depth is expected to be too low to distribute water.

Barring a winter miracle of massive snows and rains extending into April, weather that has forsaken Southern California for more than five years, there will be “no water available next year from the reservoir,” said Duane Stroup, deputy area manager for the south-central region of the federal Bureau of Reclamation.

The entire Santa Ynez Valley will then face a future without water. The 3,000-acre reservoir supplies half of what the valley needs to recharge an underground aquifer that nearly every household, business and farm uses to pump water.

“I don’t know what will happen if we get the same amount of [precipitation] we got this winter.

The wells will go dry, and they will fail. There are people in agriculture that will be required to fallow crops,” meaning destroy them, said Bruce Wales, general manager of the Santa Ynez River Water Conservation District. He predicts the area could one day resemble the Central Valley to the east. Residents there couldn’t wash or flush after 2,000 wells went dry, and the state has been forced to provide huge tanks and water to hundreds of homes.

DARRYL FEARS/THE WASHINGTON POST

California’s Lake Cachuma in Santa Barbara has all but vanished in the state’s five-year drought The cities of Solvang and Buellton are making plans to tap alternative water sources. The community of Montecito is scrambling to buy whatever the state and private vendors can provide. Santa Barbara is strongly considering a total ban on outdoor water use as it rushes to start operation of a desalination plant that will turn Pacific Ocean saltwater to drinking water at a rate of 3 million gallons per day.

The water woes have curbed the appeal of coastal towns cherished by the rich and famous and eventually will be a drain on the local economy. On Santa Barbara’s hills, movie stars live in houses shaded by colorful citrus trees. In Montecito, where talk show hosts Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres own property, large estates with long driveways

are hidden behind gates. Vacationers flock to the valley to enjoy the landscape and wine.

Southern California has long had an aching thirst. The region is nursed by water funneled through a system of aqueducts and pipes from the Colorado River and reservoirs closer to the northern Sierra Nevada.

That wasn’t enough for growing Santa Barbara County, which sits northwest of Los Angeles.

After a bad drought in the middle of the last century, Lake Cachuma was created in 1953 behind the Bradbury Dam, with an elaborate tunnel and conduit to move water throughout the county.

Because it’s a major drinking water source, swimming was never allowed, but the lake was stocked with trout, coy and other fish for recreational anglers.

Nick Giese goes out to fish on what’s left of the Lake Cachuma reservoir in California. It reached an all-time low this summer — 7 percent capacity.

Fearing the worst, local water suppliers ordered everyone to cut 35 percent of their monthly water use a year ago.

In Santa Barbara’s San Roque neighborhood, where lemon and orange trees abound, some homeowners also call it an injustice.

They say they dutifully cut back, even as lawns went brown, but construction projects that daily use thousands of gallons of water have been allowed to proceed.

Santa Barbara is spending $61 million to bring the desalination plant online, a move expected to provide 30 percent of its water needs. The plant was built 20 years ago during another drought, but when rains returned it was mothballed.

Desalination is a marvel of technology, but some scientists say it’s also an environmental hazard. Pipes that pull in saltwater through tiny holes harm marine animals, and the briny water pumped back into the ocean after purification is pollution. In addition, the massive amounts of electricity a plant requires is both costly and a significant source of carbon emissions.

Along Lake Cachuma, Keller clings to hope for its rebound.

Overall visitation at the Cachuma Lake Recreation Area is down 20 percent. The general store his wife, Beverly, manages is often empty.

A silvery sun hung in a clear blue sky on a recent Monday, but no boats were on the water and there were no sales at the marina.

Finally, a single customer, Nick Giese, arrived. Giese descended the steep stairs to a fishing boat, well past the high-water mark for the lake. “You mean the pond?” he quipped. Rain had better come, “else we’re all in trouble,” he said.

“I might have to think about moving.”

A soft drizzle had fallen twice in the previous week, but the bone-dry ground absorbed it before any reached the reservoir.

“Sad little rains,” said Austin Snider, the marina mechanic, as he kicked dirt that should have been deep underwater. “We’ve had sad little rains for six years.” n

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‘This is it’: Escaping death by ISIS L OVEDAY M ORRIS Safiya, Iraq BY

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lindfolded and bound, his knees pressing into the dirt, Imad resigned himself to what seemed inevitable: He was going to die.

Islamic State gunmen had driven him and about 90 other former Iraqi police and army officers to a remote industrial area on the edge of Hamam al-Alil, 10 miles south of Mosul, after rounding them up from their villages last month.

Iraqi security forces were approaching, and the militants were losing their grip on the area.

Packed into two pickup trucks and a bus, the men were told they were being taken to see their families, but they were instead slated for execution.

Imad’s truck was the first to be unloaded, and he was the first in line. A militant took him by the arm.

He walked about 10 yards.

He was ordered to kneel down.

“I thought, ‘This is it, it’s over,’ ” he said as he recounted his ordeal from his home in the village of Safiya. “We’ve lived under the rule of Islamic State for more than two years, and we know that nobody survives such things.”

The gunmen opened fire.

Imad’s account of what happened that day provides a rare firsthand view of the brutality that has become a notorious hallmark of the Islamic State’s rule.

The militants have steadily lost ground since Iraqi forces began their offensive to recapture Mosul a month ago, breaking into the city from the east and capturing towns and villages to the south.

Increasingly cornered, they have fought to hold their last remaining stronghold in Iraq any way they can. They have held civilians as human shields and dispatched hundreds of car bombs.

Inside the city and other areas on the outskirts under their control, they have also lashed out with mass arrests and summary executions.

Those who served in the police and army have borne the brunt of recent mass killings, whether they

ALICE MARTINS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Militants have executed dozens of former Iraqi security officers as the group loses territory were accused of collaborating with the advancing forces or simply attacked out of vengeance.

The United Nations reported this month that the Islamic State had abducted 295 former members of the Iraqi security forces from areas around Mosul. It also said that 50 former police officers were executed in Hamam al-Alil last month. Imad said nearly double that number were killed at the place he was taken, which is near a cement factory northwest of the town.

Iraqi police forces said Monday that they found a mass grave at that location containing about 100 bodies, corroborating Imad’s account. Police spokesman Ammar al-Jazairi said they are thought to be the bodies of former police officers rounded up after the Mosul operation began.

That followed the discovery of another mass grave at a bombedout agricultural college near the town after it was retaken by security forces this month. Iraqi security officials have estimated that

grave contains around 100 bodies.

In the days after Iraqi security forces began their offensive last month, Islamic State militants rounded up entire villages farther south, forcing families to retreat to Mosul with them. Thousands arrived in Imad’s village of Safiya, on their way north to Hamam al-Alil.

There were rumors that former police and army officers were being targeted for execution. Imad had served on the police force for seven years.

He was at home with his wife and child when the militants announced over loudspeakers attached to vehicles that all men and boys 15 and older should gather at the mosque. “They said anyone who disobeyed would be killed,” said Imad, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be published because his wife and child are still in Islamic State territory.

“The Islamic State was breathing its last breath, so I decided to run,” he said.

Imad, who spent seven years on a police force near Mosul, shows a wound he says is from a bullet fired by Islamic State militants in Iraq who rounded up and shot former police and army officers.

He took off but was caught by the militants about 100 yards from his home and taken to where the men were gathered.

Former police and army officers were separated from the rest, loaded into trucks and cars and driven north to Hamam al-Alil.

Imad was held in a house with more than 200 others from his village and communities around it.

Some were released, but about 90 remained. They were blindfolded and their hands were bound.

They were loaded into trucks and driven for half an hour along a dirt road. It was dark by the time they reached the spot near the cement factory.

“I thought of my wife and son and how I’d never see them again,” he said.

When the gunmen opened fire, he felt a bullet hit his leg.

“I got shot, but I didn’t know how many times,” he said. “I felt things hitting my back.”

He fell forward into the dirt and pretended to be dead. He heard a commotion as someone from one of the other trucks tried to escape.

The gunmen were distracted.

“They were screaming and shouting,” he said. “As soon as I heard that, I saw my chance.”

His hands had been only loosely bound with rope. He pulled them apart, tore off his blindfold and ran. It was only then that he realized he had been only lightly injured, a bullet grazing his leg.

His back had been hit by stones kicked up by the bullets.

A steep bank prevented the militants from chasing him in their vehicles. He walked all night before reaching an area controlled by security forces.

Some 22 former officers from his village died that day.

“As for me, I’ve seen death, and I feel reborn,” he said. He worries about life under Iraqi forces, who he said damaged property in the village as they retook it.

Still, nothing will compare to the brutality of life under the Islamic State, he said: “Those people are monsters, killers. They don’t have any humanity.” n

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Hitler exhibit touches a nerve

BY S TEPHANIE K IRCHNER AND A NTHONY F AIOLA

Berlin

T

he latest attraction in the German capital is an underground chamber about the size of a small living room, a devotional portrait of Frederick the Great hanging on the wall. An oxygen tank sits in one corner, suggesting its occupant’s constant fear of suffocation. On a desk rests a small statue resembling his beloved German shepherd, Blondi.

The new exhibit is a re-creation of the study in Adolf Hitler’s bunker, the space where the 20th century’s most notorious tyrant spent his final days before taking his life with a gunshot to the head. Painstakingly assembled by the curators at the Berlin Story Bunker in an attempt to evoke the horror of the Third Reich for a new generation, the exhibit has fast become a lightning rod for critics who charge the museum with doing something else: humanizing Hitler.

In a nation where portrayals of the Nazis remain the ultimate cultural minefield, the museum’s approach has sparked a backlash from those who fear that depictions of the darkest chapter of this nation’s history are veering into entertainment. The uproar is adding fuel to a broader debate about the commercialization of Hitler and the Nazi era.

Only last month, there was widespread outrage when a giant Hitler face was projected onto the facade of a central Berlin shopping mall as part of an art installation while recorded excerpts from a speech by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, played in the background.

Earlier this year, a collection of Nazi memorabilia, including socks worn by Hitler and a cyanide vial that belonged to Goebbels, were sold at an auction in Munich. Hitler’s former Strength Through Joy resort on the Baltic Sea — never finished in his day — is being transformed into luxury vacation apartments that are selling out fast.

WOLFGANG KUMM/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Some Germans fear that depictions veer into entertainment and humanizing the Nazi leader And now Germans can see the re-creation of the study in Hitler’s bunker.

Levi Salomon, spokesman for the Berlin-based Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism, called the new exhibit a step toward the “normalization of evil.” To show the room, Salomon said, meant presenting the German leader as a bureaucrat and statesman like any other.

At a time when far-right politics are on the rise in Germany and across Europe, critics say there has perhaps never been more potential danger in blunting the horror of the Nazi era.

“People today know that Hitler did many bad things, but they’re not emotionally affected by it. . . .

They don’t tremble when they think of Hitler — my body is always shaking when I hear this name,” Salomon said.

Yet Salomon, like many other critics, has not seen the new exhibit in person. Enno Lenze, one

of its creators, insisted it is vital to view the reproduction of the study in the context offered by the museum, which is housed in a World War II air raid shelter and offers damning historical accounts of the Nazis.

The shelter is situated a few blocks from Hitler’s original Führerbunker (“leader’s bunker”), a series of rooms measuring over 3,000 square feet, which were destroyed years ago and are now covered by a parking lot. Lenze said he was initially worried that the new exhibit might become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. But they have been discouraged, he said, by the museum’s policy of offering only a glimpse of the reproduction of Hitler’s study as part of a 90-minute guided tour.

Yet Lenze concedes that by building the study, the museum is to some extent offering a voyeuristic peek into Hitler’s last days. If that is what it takes to draw in visitors and teach them about the Nazis, then so be it, he says.

A re-creation of Adolf Hitler’s study in Berlin is part of an exhibition documenting the Führerbunker.

“We bait them with a buzzword and squeeze the education in between,” Lenze said.

On a recent tour of the museum, Lenze provided a group of visitors with gruesome details of Nazi crimes and the appalling conditions in most air raid bunkers. In April 1945, up to 14,000 Berliners were crammed into the bunker that holds the exhibit — a space meant for 3,500 — while Nazi bigwigs were throwing champagne parties at the nearby Reich Chancellery in nihilistic anticipation of defeat.

As the tour reached the copy of Hitler’s underground study, visitors took in the mundane room with interest. It was in a room just like this, Lenze told his audience, that Hitler fatally shot himself on April 30, 1945.

To be sure he died, Hitler also swallowed cyanide, which his aides tested beforehand on his German shepherd, Blondi. Hitler reassured himself that his pistol worked by having Blondi’s puppies shot one by one.

The museum intends to keep visits solemn. Lenze, during the tour, suddenly snapped at a Scandinavian tourist who tried to take a photo of the room. “No pictures, I told you!” he exclaimed. The woman explained that she had not understood his warning in German. Lenze replied: “It doesn’t matter, these are our rules.”

Lenze later said: “We don’t want to create the impression that people can just come here for entertainment, quickly check out Hitler and snap a fun picture.”

Six years ago, Berlin’s German Historical Museum found itself in the center of a similar controversy over its special exhibit on Hitler, which critics said focused too much on the man himself, and might leave visitors fascinated with the fascist leader.

“The problem is that there’s a danger of certain items becoming devotional objects,” said Boris Nitzsche, the historical museum’s spokesman. “There’s always the risk when dealing with a person like Hitler that he’s given an aura of mystery and becomes some kind of pop icon.” n

The last turkey One reluctant hunter’s recipe for Thanksgiving: Find a gun, get camouflage, hope for a miracle.

BY T . M . SH IN E “Some men are mere hunters; others are turkey hunters.”

T

— Archibald Rutledge

wo days in and the shotgun swings with my body as I straddle the wooden fence onto private property. “Don’t worry, it’s my uncle’s place,” Shawn says.

“My uncle said he keeps seeing turkeys cutting through to the cornfield across the way.”

This was not the plan, slipping onto private property. We are surrounded by thousands of acres of open land, but the grand wild turkey of south-central Pennsylvania has made itself extremely scarce, which makes perfect sense three weeks before Thanksgiving.

Shawn is of the Dicken clan, born and raised hunting on this mountain, his parents the proprietors of Whispering Hollows Exotic Hunting Preserve. Not wanting the stigma of a gated preserve on my first-timer hunter résumé, I insisted on hunting outside the gates on public land, which Shawn is expert in — when the turkeys do their part.

If Shawn’s uncle actually did see a turkey, he’s the only one within a 30-mile radius that has.

The second my feet drop to the other side of the fence a herd of cattle comes storming out of a small barn inches from the fence . . . and my face. For two days I’ve been tiptoeing around, daintily creeping through the brush so I don’t snap a twig and alert the elusive turkey. Now we’re to assume it’s going to be waiting for us on the other side of this grazing land.

I cling to the fence, watching the dust roll up as the cattle stampede. Why would a turkey hang out in an area where the cattle erupt every 23 minutes like a volcano at a Vegas hotel?

“Don’t worry about them,” Shawn says, marching toward the woods on the horizon.

Thanks for that.

My family back in Florida is counting on me

JEFFERY SALTER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY to bring home Thanksgiving dinner. I thought bagging a turkey in the backwoods of this part of the country would be as common and easy as cutting down your own Christmas tree, even though my family scoffed at the whole idea.

But they’ll see. They’ll see.

The first day in the wilderness, I was simply in awe. Every step through the woods was a scenic treat: deer frolicking on hillsides, eagles fighting overhead, mist floating through clearings, a tree decorated entirely with Skoal snuff cans. Admittedly, Shawn spitting tobacco and tooting on a turkey-mating-call whistle every nine steps was amusing early on, but now we are desperate hunters, dressed in mismatched camouflage, eating the dust of cattle while being outsmarted by what Benjamin Franklin once called a “vain and silly” bird. The hours are slipping away.

Your hunter is here It’s a bit late in the evening as I arrive at Whispering Hollows. Shawn’s parents, Tommy and Debbie Dicken, are sitting at the front of the lodge. The members of the Dicken family have their own homes nearby, but the lodge is the main hangout.

Other than the folks, the place is eerily empty. I drift toward a room in the back and begin unpacking camouflage in the dark.

In the shadows, while emptying my pockets onto a nightstand, I slam my head into the antlers of a deer head hanging right next to the bed. I’m stunned and sitting on the edge of a bed when I hear the dad on his cellphone talking to Shawn, who lives down the road.

“Your hunter is here.”

It takes a second to realize he’s referring to me.

In adulthood I’ve come around to the fact that I’m a bit of a coward to not at least step out of my comfort zone, better known as Costco’s organic meat aisle, and need, at least once, to feel what it is like to take part in the killing of what I so easily devour on my plate day in and day out.

Training interlude All the firearms classes I can find are geared toward shooting the enemy . . . and your neighbors. A lot of tactical instruction, too — often in the dark.

All I want to do is get semi-confident with a shotgun, but I can’t seem to find a simple instructional class that coincides with my philosophical hunting adventure. Respectable, sane people have advised me to “Just go on YouTube. You can learn how to do anything.” I don’t mind learning online how to repair my attic air-conditioning ducts with an expired jar of Vaseline and strips of cut-up greeting cards, or how to make a bicycle out of palm fronds, but I really don’t want to learn the basics to kill on YouTube. But that’s just me.

I finally hit on Shotgun 101 and don’t even read the class description. For all I know, I’m going to be trained by a sniper in the dark.

Two students wander in for the Monday-

KLMNO WEEKLY

A chair? I don’t even like it when guitar players perform sitting down.

After we handle and load the guns several times, Will escorts us to the indoor shooting range, which looks like a racquetball court, only the walls are riddled with bullet holes. He runs targets out to a midpoint, and, of course, the targets are of the human form, the body and head blue. I do hate the Blue Man Group, so I don’t really mind. The other Terry is a little more erratic, giving hope to intruders everywhere. His neighbors may want to lie low, perhaps watch TV in beanbag chairs until after the apocalypse dies down to keep out of the line of fire.

During that first session, the butt of the shotgun jumps up and smacks me in the face. I thought the recoil was supposed to bruise your shoulder, not your right cheek. I think it misaligned my jaw and shifted my teeth a little. It put a strain on my expressions, at least.

To combat the pain, when I eat a sandwich it’s with a smirk on my face.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF T.M. SHINE

night training class. Both of us are named Terry, but that’s where the similarities end.

The other Terry is a field biologist who winces when I mention I might shoot a turkey. He wants to master the shotgun only to pick off wild apocalyptic marauders who may someday come after his stuff.

Will, our firearms instructor, briefly gleans information about each of our plans and then tries to cater to each of our needs simultaneously.

A veteran of the British Army who seems to have an Australian accent, Will begins straddling that line between two shotgun novices with different agendas.

“So if you’re going to be using a loaner,” Will says, “the first thing you want to ask about is the pattern of the gun. Is it a tight pattern?

Does it go left or right? You might have to adjust quickly.”

Will is giving me his full attention, explaining in detail what I might expect during my hunting expedition. He describes how the guide will probably have me set up in what he calls a “blind” and how it will be sort of a stakeout situation. The guide will have me sitting, probably in a chair.

At top: The taxidermy-stuffed lodge at Whispering Hollows Exotic Hunting Preserve in Pennsylvania. Above: The author’s guide, Shawn Dicken, uses a turkey-mating-call whistle during the hunt.

Camo up “Just go to Gander and load up on camo.”

That’s the advice I keep getting from my advisers. Camo head to toe. “And don’t forget the turkeys have extraordinary vision, so you have to cover the whites of your eyes,” Will says.

Camo is something I was actually looking forward to because I enjoy going unnoticed.

Up to this point in life I may have shunned guns and the kill, but I love hiding from people.

Anyway, first impressions are everything, and I didn’t want to show up in camo that might allow me to disappear among tree frogs in a rain forest but make me a laughingstock in Pennsylvania.

At Gander Mountain I stick my arm out like a tollbooth gate at the first employee I see. I explain my situation and ask which camouflage is best for fall and winter hunting in south-central Pennsylvania.

“I don’t know.”

He does point me in the direction of all the different styles, and I am stunned by how far camo has come. The details in the design seem a mix of science, tech and nature, creating the perfect abstract blend of wildlife and the environment: pieces of bark and the tips of bird wings, beaks and branches and slivers of antlers intertwined in hundreds of shades of brown and green. It’s art. The more you get lost in the pattern the more you think you see — not Jesus, but is that Yanni?

I have a natural camo that makes me close to invisible in everyday life, and it may work just as well with wild turkeys as it does when I’m trying to get the bartender’s attention at Mulligan’s Beach House Bar & Grill.

I decide to go home and think this over.

Before leaving, though, I remember I need one more item. Up front, I catch the same employee from earlier and ask where I might find the blinders that cover the whites of your eyes.

“Huh?” continues on next page

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COVER STORY “People don’t understand,” he says. “The preserve is over 500 acres. It may not be any easier in there. They can fly off at any time. We don’t feed them and have them walk up to you.”

I scoff. I’m in my own battle between shame and disappointment, but at this point I’d be willing to load up and go to a petting zoo to get my turkey.

“All right, whenever you’re ready we’ll go to the preserve,” Shawn says. “But I can’t promise any . . .”

“I’m ready.”

Turkeys can fly?

from previous page

One distant turkey As I enter the kitchen, Shawn pulls out a knife and cuts off my camo tags. He makes no sly comments about my wardrobe. He’s mismatched, too. Camo’s cool, but we’d ruin it by discussing it.

Once out the door, we trek through the lengthy pasture adjacent to the lodge and up the hillside.

“You hear that?” Shawn asks.

Every 10 yards, the cold morning air is filled with either the sounds of Shawn sending out a mating call or spitting out a lump of chew. So I’m not sure which he is referring to.

Neither.

“Listen. That’s a big gobbler. Too far, though.”

Last night I got a text from my wife stating: Probably get a 2nd turkey. Just in case.

So nonchalant with the “probably.” Oh, just in case. In case of what? That I fail, that my turkey sucks?

“No, it just might not be enough,” she answered. “If we have extra people.”

The main thing is, it pretty much defeats the whole purpose of this journey if two turkeys have to die for my Thanksgiving dinner.

Ever the optimist, Shawn asks me if I might want to go for bear on my next hunting trip, sway me into big trophy game. “Yeah, who knows?” I say. Not because I’d ever shoot a bear, but because I pretty much just go along with everything until actually pressed. Saying, “Oh, yeah, sounds cool” to bear hunting is no different than smiling and shaking my head up and down when a neighbor says, “Terry, let’s get a few couples together and all go on a cruise together.”

“Psst! Over there,” Shawn says. “Look.”

But I gaze in the opposite direction.

Sweet dreams Shawn is pounding his boots outside the front door of the lodge, contemplating. “I’ve got a plan for today,” he says. “We’re going to get you a turkey no matter what.”

“Yes!” I say, clenching one of my camouflage mittens into a fist.

We climb high up in an all-terrain buggy that’s sort of a monster golf cart. Reaching a peak, Shawn parks the vehicle and begins scouting the area as I nimbly follow. Our usual routine is to be completely quiet (when we’re not accompanied by a stampede), and then he points to a tree I should sit and lean against and chooses another for himself. But I’m not so quick to take Shawn’s commands when picking out seating arrangements. He may be an expert in tracking creatures, but I’ve been finding comfortable places to sit for decades now. I once read the entirety of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” while nestled between three jagged rocks on the coast of Maine.

Shawn points, but I’m still rebelliously looking around, scoping, until I spot the La-Z-Boy of tree trunks. Shawn is situated a tree or two back on the mezzanine. Once settled, I glance over my shoulder and scan the brush. I’m

PHOTOS COURTESY OF T.M. SHINE

getting good at picking up flashes of movement and the subtle differences between a wind-swept branch and wildlife on the move.

Suddenly half a dozen or more deer briskly walk past us, as if on the way to a morning seminar on winter dietary needs. The last one gives us sort of a “Too bad we’re out of season, boys” wink.

The longer I sit the harder it is to keep my focus on the horizon. Anybody sitting idle too long without a smartphone to play with will find their mind taking flight to parts unknown.

Wait 44 minutes for a 10-minute oil change and you might daydream about getting two Jet Skis complete with trailer instead of health insurance, but stare into the brush for four hours and before you know it you’re seriously conjuring up a plan to leave your entire family to start up a craft brewery on the Outer Banks with two 26-year-old bearded guys named Nathaniel.

Standoff in the doorway Back at Whispering Hollows, I’m cashing in the only chip I have left.

“What about the preserve?” I blurt out.

I’m sure I can take down a turkey in a preserve.

At top: The author leaves his turkey’s beard, bristles that extend from its chest, nestled among fallen leaves.

Above: The author after his successful hunt.

A ruffled king Shawn steers the buggy along the edge of a wide path through the preserve. Nothing looks any different from where we’ve been the past few days. We’re running out of road, reaching a balding area of the hilltop. Instantly, we’re all big sky and steep drop-offs. We wander and wander, repeatedly circling the landscape. Out comes the noisemaker. Shawn has it on repeat, and I’m taking giant steps backward, trying to distance myself when I hear something. The sound is in the same genre as Shawn’s tooter but much more determined . . . and active. It’s getting closer.

I’m trying to position myself by sound and take direction from Shawn. I crouch and quickly pop back up to take the safety off. I’m struggling to stabilize a low stance, forcing the human tripod I learned in gun class, but I keep tipping, buckling backward.

And then, oh my God. It’s the towering feathers of a warrior coming up over the horizon. A vision. It’s like seeing a turkey with clothes on, and this one is dressed like a ruffled king.

My heart stops, but time doesn’t. My mind is racing back to every technical tip I’ve absorbed over the past several weeks, but in an instant I’m the shakiest gun in the Northeast, sweating through my thermals. I’m squatting and thrusting back up, then digging my right knee into the dirt.

“At 30 yards, take it,” Shawn had said. I keep stalling. It has to be a clean hit to the neck. The neck or . . .

The gun blasts, and my ears are ringing.

Shawn’s voice cuts through: “You hit ’em, you hit ’em!” But it’s not enough. This was my nightmare. The turkey is not only still moving, but on the move. I slide down the embankment, pumping and quickly firing again and again. “Too high, you’re aiming too high!”

“The pattern, it’s tight,” Shawn shouts, making a fist. Nuts, I forgot about the whole pattern thing.

I pump. The chamber is empty. Shawn has always been at my side, shells ready to load, but now he’s meekly peeking down the embankment.

“I’m out of shells,” Shawn hollers down to me.

Out of shells?

He’s on the radio, racing back to the buggy, telling his pops to meet him at the gate with ammunition. “Don’t lose sight of him,” he

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COVER STORY shouts over his shoulder. Wheels churn and Shawn’s gone.

But I’ve already lost sight of the turkey.

Huge boulders, about a third of the way down, block the view. Then I catch a glimpse of the feathers, slowly but steadily moving out of sight. I don’t want to have to tackle a turkey.

I’m ducking and weaving down each embankment. What have I done?

When Shawn returns, he’s already rolling up to the ridgeline, and he doesn’t even get out of the vehicle. I’m beside him — Your hunter is here — hanging out the side, as we rattle over rocks and roots down the incline. I’m like a crazed “Mad Max” character, holding on to the shotgun and the monster cart’s roof handle. The turkey comes into sight, badly hobbled but gallantly, steadily treading down a dirt path. I fire off another blast, which sends the turkey hurtling down the path to stillness. The second I join the stillness I feel nauseated. Nothing in my life ever felt so wrong. There is nothing clean or precise about my kill, nothing to distinguish it from the slow death of a catfish in a garbage can. But Shawn is already in hunting glory mode over a prize kill, a celebration he’s had with so many novice hunters. I want to recoil but gently go along, like I always do.

He wants a photo. “Hold the feathers up,” he says. And I do. I hold the fanned feathers up to see if I feel any of that pride or accomplishment running through my fingertips. I feel none.

The age and size of a gobbler are judged by an odd tuft of bristles extending from its chest that is referred to as the beard. The beard — the life — is several inches long.

Zombie-like, I ride back down the mountain. Shawn parks near the shed used for cleaning and gutting; it’s mainly an enclosed slab of concrete with a drain in the center, an aboveground dungeon. I am cosmically obligated to take part in the butchering. As I fanned the feathers back on the hill I felt nothing, but as I peel back the skin I feel the warmth of the body. Stretching the feathers across the gobbler’s chest, the heat of its life is as real and immeasurable as anything I’ve ever experienced.

I’ve stopped breathing, but my hands continue to do the work. I have prepared a cooler for the flight home, having checked with airlines on regulations. They’ll permit only a few ounces of dry ice, so I have to fill it in with convenience-store cubes. I methodically pack it, triple-check the seal in case I have to tilt it to fit into the overhead compartment on the plane. I quickly pack my clothes and pay my bill and thank everyone for the hospitality.

On my way out, Pops jumps up. “Hey, where are you going? You almost forgot the beard,” he says, plucking it off the kitchen counter. “People hunt their whole lives for a beard like this.”

“Thanks, thanks,” I say, snatching it out of his hands.

It’s a meandering ride back toward civilization. One eye on the twists of the country road, the other on the sealed turkey. Closing in on the airport, I pull over. People are kayaking on a

KLMNO WEEKLY

been cooked to perfection. I start to laugh, but all I’m getting is serious faces. “Sir, can you explain what this is, please?” One agent has now moved behind me.

What else could it possibly be? I guess it’s that thing where if you’re not looking for it, the brain doesn’t go there. But come on!

“It’s a turkey.”

“A turkey?” the agents say, leaving the question hanging in the air as they tilt their heads, even though absolutely no head tilting is necessary.

The seal is broken, the lid lifts and one of the agents takes out what appears to be sterile tongs and begins poking at it.

“Easy,” I say.

“You hunt this yourself?”

I answer, and the agent looks me up and down.

“I’ll be,” she says.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF T.M. SHINE

stretch of water. I have the wispy beard in my hand and nestle it among a bed of leaves. The meat will be eaten, the tale will be told, but there will be no souvenirs, no trophies. Not for this hunter.

The golden hue When I reach the security checkpoint at Reagan National Airport, I throw my keys, sunglasses and cellphone into the little basket beside my carry-on and take my place on the other side of the conveyor belt. But something is very wrong now, because my turkey, which I put onto the conveyor belt, has disappeared.

Then my newly sensitive peripheral vision zooms in on a lively discussion going on to the far left, lots of shrugging and gathering of more officers. Still, no sign of my cooler. Then . . .

“Who belongs to this?” a stout security agent shouts. Later, I will appreciate that distinction. I do belong to this poultry now, not the other way around.

I raise my hand and am directed around to the other side. There are three officers huddled, and when the tallest of the bunch tilts his broad shoulders I see it. Up on the screen, glowing with a golden hue, as if it’s already

Thanksgiving at the author’s Florida home, where the turkey is wrapped in bacon.

Raise a glass The turkey’s legs are blue.

I was naive to think something I cooked up could ever look as good as it did on an X-ray screen.

There was an initial “Hey, he really did it!” and that-a-boyness to my returning home with a real turkey on ice. But as I’d feared, it immediately started to wane amid talk of how this wiry wild turkey might ruin Thanksgiving. Like Thanksgiving is that great anyway.

“Why are the legs blue?” my daughter says the second I lift the lid off the roaster to display the finished product.

And now my mother-in-law steps in to “save our Thanksgiving.”

While I am busy cleaning leaves out of the gutters, my mother-in-law homes in on a recipe in a blog she’s been following by some guy in Kentucky. She had mentioned that he hangs the turkey up in his barn, and I mumbled “We don’t have a barn” and went on my way.

My turkey is overflowing with stuffing, but the entire bird is wrapped in bacon now. It looks like a novelty act.

Still, it’s center ring, the main event.

Seconds before we sit down to eat, my mother-in-law brings out a baggie, holds it up and says, “Look what I found.” It’s the buckshot.

“How many times did you shoot this poor turkey?” my daughter asks. But I’m cutting that right off: “This succulent turkey, this bacon-wrapped turkey.” I raise a glass.

“If I get a piece of buckshot stuck in my teeth and then smoke a cigarette will my mouth explode?” my daughter asks.

“That’s a stupid question.”

“Do you think wild turkeys have a wishbone?” I ask in order to change the subject.

“That’s a stupid question.”

I take a bite of the turkey to savor this adventurous experiment for myself. As I chew, there’s no way for anyone to tell what I think.

Delicious or god awful? They can’t judge my expression. Not with this stupid, self-inflicted smirk on my face. n

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TECHNOLOGY

VR can be more than fun and games

BY E LIZABETH D WOSKIN, M ICHAEL A LISON C HANDLER AND B RIAN F UNG

T

he fundraiser invitation promised a night of “Cocktails and Virtual Reality.”

More than 40 people crowded into a Washington, D.C., rowhouse, sipping mixed drinks in Mason jars before settling into folding chairs and adjusting the focus on their Oculus Rift goggles.

For eight minutes, they traversed through a squalid camp that sprawled out in every direction. It has become home to about 120,000 Rohingya Muslims in Burma who fled violence from Buddhist mobs four years ago.

Flora Lerenman, an elementary school teacher, said she had read articles about the plight of the Rohingya, but after watching the film she felt much closer to their struggle.

“I was right there,” she said. “We were standing beneath the same sky.”

Over the past two years, technology giants and Hollywood have poured millions of dollars into virtual reality in the hope that the medium will transform gaming and entertainment. But a growing crop of filmmakers, policymakers, researchers, human rights workers and even some law enforcement officials see a broader societal purpose in the emerging medium’s stunning ability to make people feel as if they have experienced an event firsthand.

These advocates cite research that shows virtual reality can push the boundaries of empathy and influence decision-making about issues ranging from policing to the environment. But they’re also facing new questions about the unintended consequences of an early-stage technology that may doing harm to users by putting them in situations that seem all too real.

This summer, a 15-person film crew flew to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek to record the horrors of the Holocaust in virtual reality as part of an effort to preserve the memory of the atrocity for future genera-

BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Virtual reality technology can provide immersive experiences that may help improve empathy tions. They filmed a scene in which viewers who don a VR headset can enter a gas chamber, escorted by a three-dimensional hologram of a living survivor.

“We don’t actually know whether it’s this empathy machine or whether, if you have an immersive experience, you traumatize your users,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California, which is creating the Holocaust simulations in partnership with virtual reality start-ups.

“There’s also a danger that when you have so many extreme experiences, that you become desensitized.”

Using simulations and roleplaying to foster understanding is hardly a new idea. But new research shows that full virtual-reality immersion, in which a person wearing a headset can be transported instantly to a gunfight on a New York street corner, witness the gruesome crossfire of the Syr-

ian civil war, or experience what it’s like to suffer from dementia, places a unique stamp on the brain that is distinct from watching a movie or reading a book.

“We’re showing that parts of the brain that light up [when a person has a real-life experience] also light up when one has the same experience in virtual reality,” said Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “That allows for this process of perspective-taking, which is kind of hard to do for most people.”

Much of this potential is yet to be explored. Producers of virtualreality content are just starting to figure out basic elements of cinematography for the new medium — such as how to shoot a scene from multiple perspectives, how to hold the camera in ways that don’t make people dizzy, or how to build a hologram that is so vivid that observers can see strands of hair.

People at a gathering in Washington, D.C., wear headsets to view a virtual reality film about life in a Burmese refugee camp. One of the filmmakers said the team chose not to show the most dire suffering, given the visceral reaction that virtual reality can provoke.

Nonetheless, the amount of VR content is exploding — and there are increasingly more places to see it.

At the past two Sundance Film Festivals, attendees who put on virtual-reality headsets could sit in a living room while a husband and wife engaged in a bloody domestic quarrel, or walk into the middle of a police-involved shooting — watching the same scene play out from the different perspectives of a local shopkeeper, two police officers, and the young black men they stop for shoplifting.

Separately, the United Nations has produced films about humanitarian crises around the globe, including 360-degree renderings of post-Ebola Liberia, earthquake relief in Nepal and a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan as experienced by a 12-year-old girl who lives there.

College campuses, including the University of Oregon and the University of Illinois, began experimenting this year with putting students into a virtual-reality immersion film in which a young woman gets drunk at a college party and the night ends in what might be described as sexual assault.

Even some police officials are starting to experiment with VR in hopes of training officers to handle stressful encounters without resorting to force.

The Police Foundation, a nonprofit research group staffed by former law enforcement officials, is applying for grants to study the use of virtual reality in police training, said the organization’s president, Jim Bueermann. This year, Bueermann met with senior government officials to describe his vision: to put a VR headset in every police department in the country.

“We want to get middle-aged white guys to trade places with a 20-year-old African American male walking down the street who gets stopped by police for what he perceives to be no reason,” Bueermann said. “I’ve been through enough of this personally to becontinues on next page

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

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WORKPLACE from previous page

lieve that this has huge potential for changing the way we think about the training of police officers, and their evaluation.”

One of the more provocative and controversial virtual-reality efforts involves preserving the memory of the dead. Developers recently began building 3-D models of people’s deceased loved ones to place them in a virtual environment called Project Elysium, named after the fields of the Greek afterlife. Billionaires are beginning to commission holograms of themselves to be shown after they die. Others are racing to capture Holocaust survivors before they die.

The experience of meeting a virtual version of someone who has died can be overwhelming, these developers say. The Project Elysium developers recently put their work on hold after fielding complaints. They want to reconsider how to make something “people will not only love but won’t be offended or terrified by,” one of the developers, Steve Koutsouliotas, said in an email.

The reaction to VR can affect people’s behavior, studies show. In 2013, researchers at Stanford University and the University of Georgia studied the willingness of two groups to help a visually impaired individual after a virtual-reality experience. One group was asked to perform a color-matching exercise in a virtual-reality environment while imagining themselves to be colorblind. The second was asked to do the same exercise, but with a filter that forced them to experience what it was actually like to be colorblind.

The second group spent twice as much time helping colorblind people in the 24 hours after the study, the researchers found. And the effects of virtual reality appeared to be even more pronounced among those who, before the study, had been rated by the researchers as less predisposed to feel empathy for the colorblind.

In a separate study, a Stanford doctoral student in 2011 had a group of test subjects read a description of what happens when a lumberjack cuts down a redwood tree while a separate group was ordered to cut down the tree in a virtual reality. In an exit interview, both groups reported being more aware that their personal actions could have an impact on the envi-

ronment. But the second group used an average of 20 percent fewer paper napkins to mop up a spill of water.

Of course, most Americans don’t have the opportunity to use the technology. The least expensive, fully featured virtual reality headset, Sony’s recently released PlayStation VR, costs $400 and is largely being developed for gaming applications.

That may soon change. Google plans to start selling a $79 headset in the coming months. Smartphone manufacturers are working to incorporate the ability to shoot a virtual reality video into smartphones. Museums such as the Smithsonian and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London have virtual reality exhibitions, and VR movies are fixtures on the film festival circuit.

Sally Smith, executive director of the Nexus Fund, who organized the Cocktails and Virtual Reality fundraiser in Washington, said she decided to produce her own film after watching a five-minute clip of “One Dark Night,” an immersive re-creation by journalist Nonny de la Peña of the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

“It was so moving and so overwhelming,” Smith said. “I realized this helps people emotionally connect in a way that I have never seen before.”

Her organization is focused on the prevention of genocide and mass violence. In recent years, she has focused efforts on supporting the Rohingya, more than 1 million Muslim people who have been stripped of their citizenship and driven from their homes in a protracted conflict with the neighboring Buddhist majority.

Smith hired two filmmakers who were eager to try the new medium, and together they spent two weeks on the ground in Burma, also known as Myanmar, where they were smuggled past checkpoints in and out of a camp every day in a van with darkened windows.

By May the film, “Behind the Fence,” was ready. It offers a glimpse into what could be the future of news, de la Peña said.

“Instead of sitting around with your family to watch the TV news, you’ll go with your family to walk around and through the news,” she said. “We just have to be careful not to go too far.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Sleeping more may really pay off BY

A NA S WANSON

W

e all know sleep matters for job performance. After a week of vacation, you may find your work better than ever. But rack up a week of sleepless night and you may find yourself struggling.

It wouldn’t surprise anyone that sleep affects attention, memory and cognition — important factors in the workplace. But striking new research suggests the effect of additional sleep has a high monetary value. A paper — from Matthew Gibson of Williams College and Jeffrey Shrader of the University of California at San Diego, based on data from Jawbone, the fitness- and sleep-tracker company — says that additional time sleeping can translate into thousands of dollars in wages.

In fact, they calculate that a onehour increase in weekly sleep raises wages by about half as much as an additional year of education.

Now, the story is not so simple.

Don’t think you can start to sleep more and you will instantly make more money. It’s more about the subtle interplay between how people schedule their lives, how much time they have available to sleep and how that affects worker performance and earnings.

ISTOCKPHOTO

To investigate how sleep affects worker wages, the researchers took advantage of a kind of natural experiment — sunset times across U.S. time zones. Past research shows that people naturally end up sleeping longer when the sun sets earlier, for example in the winter, even if the person goes to bed well after dark. When the sun sets an hour later, it reduces nighttime sleep by roughly 20 minutes per week.

Within a single time zone, the time of sunset varies substantially.

For example, the sun sets about an hour and a half earlier in Mars Hill, Maine, than in Ontonagon, Mich., even though both are in the Eastern time zone. Because there shouldn’t be any significant differences in workers on the eastern or western edge of a time zone beyond the amount of time they sleep, researchers use this variation to calculate how much sleep influences wages.

They find that a one-hour increase in average weekly sleep in a location increases wages by 1.3 percent in the short run, which includes changes of less than a year, and 5 percent in the long run. By moving to a location where a sunset is one hour earlier, a worker will make an additional $1,570 a year.

Those differences in wages end up being incorporated into the local economy. The researchers find that higher wages actually translate into higher home values as well. A county that experiences a sunset one hour earlier has on average a 6 percent higher median home value, they say.

Not all of these wage differences are due directly to sleep, the researchers caution. Some could be due to the cumulative influence of other people. If the workers around you are slightly more productive by sleeping better, that could make your work more productive, too.

The findings suggest that sleep is a crucial determinant of productivity and wages, “rivaling ability and human capital in importance,” the researchers write. n

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BOOKS

The genius behind the Union Army N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

G ARY W . G ALLAGHER

M THE QUARTERMASTER Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln’s General, Master Builder of the Union Army

By Robert O’Harrow Jr. Simon & Schuster.

304 pp. $28

ontgomery Cunningham Meigs deserves a prominent place in the Union military pantheon. Without his performance as quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, more celebrated officers, including Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, would have faced far greater obstacles in suppressing the slaveholders’ rebellion. Meigs dealt with a staggering logistical challenge. The Army numbered about 15,000 at the time of Fort Sumter, but over the next four years more than 2.2 million citizen-soldiers fought for the Union. The United States mobilized and distributed the materiel necessary to equip and sustain armies that maneuvered over a vast strategic landscape. Meigs controlled expenditures totaling nearly $1.5 billion (the entire federal budget in 1860, before wartime demands created vast increases, had been less than $65 million) and earned a reputation for unwavering dedication and integrity.

Meigs’s wartime contributions followed years of antebellum engineering service, the most notable part of which shaped the infrastructure and appearance of Washington. After graduating fifth in his class at West Point in 1836, he worked on various projects before being selected in the early 1850s to devise a way to guarantee a reliable supply of clean water for Washington and to oversee expansion of the Capitol. He achieved notable success in both endeavors, though war intruded before the completion of either. He also orchestrated the conversion of the Arlington estate into a national cemetery and, after the war, designed the sprawling federal pension building, now the National Building Museum.

Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow brings an eye for lively detail and an appreciative sympathy for his subject to “The Quartermaster.” O’Harrow’s narrative divides almost evenly be-

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION

Montgomery C. Meigs, pictured in a group of men in front of the Capitol in 1859, oversaw the expansion of the structure before the Civil War.

tween prewar and Civil War events, and the antebellum section focuses on Meig’s work in the national capital.

Jefferson Davis, the secretary of war under Franklin Pierce, proved invaluable to Meigs’s early advancement. He helped secure the engineer’s appointment to manage Washington’s water project and construction at the Capitol. Although just a captain in the spring of 1853, Meigs wielded considerable power and quickly displayed the energy, imagination and combative honesty that became hallmarks of his later career.

The most notable element of the city’s new aqueduct reached fruition after fighting broke out.

Called Union Bridge, it spanned Cabin John Creek and stood, Meigs noted in 1864, as “the greatest masonry arch in the world. . . .

A stone bears the inscription — Union Arch. Chief Engineer Capt.

Montgomery C. Meigs. U.S. Corps of Engineers. Esto Perpetuo.”

Proud that his name always would be associated with the structure, Meigs added, “It is a great monu-

ment.”

However praiseworthy his antebellum activities, Meigs assumed more important duties as war engulfed the nation in 1861.

General in Chief Winfield Scott urged President Abraham Lincoln to name Meigs quartermaster general, lauding the engineer’s “‘high genius’ for science, engineering, and administration.” On June 10, the president instructed the secretary of war to make the appointment. “There might have been no man in the country,” O’Harrow maintains, “better prepared than Meigs to be quartermaster general.”

Just more than half of “The Quartermaster” details Meigs’s role in the Union’s impressive logistical performance. Echoing themes most fully developed by historian Allan Nevins in the 1960s and 1970s, O’Harrow examines, among other things, how Meigs employed technology (machine-made clothing and shoes, for example), created a bidding system for government contracts and pushed subordinates to bring

Union advantages of production and delivery to bear on the war effort. In the summer of 1863, Meigs predicted victory because commanders such as Grant and Sherman provided clear direction to numerically superior Union forces, which also benefited from sound logistics that the rebels could not match. Conceding that Confederates “are a gallant people and will make stern resistance,” he assured Secretary of State William Henry Seward that “it is the exhaustion of men and money that finally terminate all modern wars.”

O’Harrow’s descriptive, somewhat impressionistic text occasionally diminishes clarity. For example, readers might be uncertain about the contours of Meigs’s attitude toward slavery. But there is no doubt about his rock-ribbed unionism and increasing antipathy toward Confederates.

Charged with caring for the Union dead early in the war, he recommended Arlington as a site. “Bitterness about Robert E. Lee’s defection factored into the choice,” O’Harrow notes, and Meigs later insisted that the rebel chieftain and other Confederate leaders should be executed “by the government which they have betrayed [and] attacked.” The loss of his son John, a 22-year-old junior officer killed in the Shenandoah Valley in October 1864, hardened Meigs’s attitude.

A former member of Lincoln’s Cabinet remarked that without Meigs’s superb contributions, “the civil war in the United States could not have been prosecuted . . . with the smallest hope of success.” “The Quartermaster” does much to sustain this judgment, highlighting the centrality of logistics to the Union victory and situating a principal architect of that success near center stage in the compelling national drama. n Gallagher is the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Dancer, star move in counterpoint

For sports losers, a special legacy

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

Z

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

adie Smith’s “Swing Time” is a story at once intimate and global, as much about childhood friendship as international aid, as fascinated by the fate of an unemployed single mother as it is by the omnipotence of a world-class singer.

Smith, who rocked the literary establishment while still in college with a partial manuscript for “White Teeth,” opens her fifth novel to the toe-tapping tunes of Fred Astaire’s 1936 musical comedy “Swing Time.” But a darker bass line thrums beneath that happy melody. In the prologue, the narrator, a young woman recently fired from her job, seeks solace by Googling an old video clip of Astaire performing “Bojangles of Harlem” — and quickly discovers that memory can be just as flexible as the great dancer. “I hardly understood what we were looking at,” she says. There’s Fred Astaire outdancing his shadows just as she remembers from when she first watched the number as a child.

But now she notices with disgust that he’s in blackface: “the rolling eyes, the white gloves, the Bojangles grin.” Astaire’s magical performance suddenly seems stained by racist exaggerations.

That jarring realization serves as the overture for this complicated story that delivers a series of unsettling revelations as it moves along two alternating timelines.

One takes us back to the narrator’s childhood in 1982 when she lived in northwest London, where the author also grew up. She’s the daughter of an unambitious white father and a strident, emotionally unavailable mother from Jamaica who’s determined to get her degree and champion the cause of social justice. The narrator’s best friend is Tracey, a girl she meets at dance class. “Our shade of brown was exactly the same,” she remembers, “as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both. . . .

Tracey and I lined up next to each other, every time, it was almost unconscious, two iron filings

drawn to a magnet.”

Smith records that attraction, which persists for years, with mingled strains of nostalgia, humor and pathos. The grade school scenes are small masterworks of storytelling in which the child’s innocence is delicately threaded with the adult’s irony. While the narrator slogs along through high school and college, Tracey — the talented one, the daring one — clings to her star-struck dream with corrosive determination. She and the narrator drift apart for long periods, but each new sighting rekindles that disorienting sense that no time has passed.

Their old feelings of affection grow knotted up with jealousy and even disdain.

Spliced between these memories appears a more recent story about the narrator’s work as a personal assistant to Aimee, one of those internationally ubiquitous celebrities “uncontained by space and time.” Surrounded by handlers who sweep before her, clearing away every obstacle, Aimee is a kind of child, accustomed to having every desire sated, every action praised, every idea celebrated.

Smith never forces a connection between Aimee’s public glory and Tracey’s private despair; instead, she lets these two women’s stories play out on their own respective stages. But eventually the contrast between the boundless success that Aimee enjoys and the grinding failure that the narrator’s poor friend endures align as almost exact opposites, as different as white and black.

“Swing Time” uses its extraordinary breadth and its syncopated structure to turn the issues of race and class in every direction. After several valiant near-misses over the last year, we finally have a big social novel nimble enough to keep all its diverse parts moving gracefully toward a vision of what really matters in this life when the music stops. n Charles is the editor of Book World.

A

SWING TIME Zadie Smith Penguin Press. 464 pp. $27

LOSING ISN’T EVERYTHING The Untold Stories and Hidden Lessons Behind the Toughest Losses in Sports History

By Curt Menefee with Michael Arkush Dey St. 255 pp. $26.99

l

REVIEWED BY

S TEVEN V . R OBERTS

s the Chicago Cubs celebrated their first World Series win in 108 years, two Cleveland Indians players, Bryan Shaw and Michael Martinez, felt the loss particularly hard. Shaw was the Indians pitcher who gave up two runs in the 10th inning of the deciding game to put the Cubs ahead. Martinez was the right fielder who was nabbed for the Indians’ final out with the tying run on base. Both men, and their teammates, must learn to deal with their defeat.

In his entertaining new book, “Losing Isn’t Everything,” TV sportscaster Curt Menefee pays special attention to the losers in the sports world.

No matter what they accomplish over their careers, some athletes will always be remembered for one bad moment. Sometimes their obituaries will highlight a loss, not a victory.

Take Lou Michaels, a two-time all-American lineman and place kicker at the University of Kentucky. He finished fourth in the Heisman Trophy balloting in 1957, was the fourth pick in the pro draft and played 13 seasons in the NFL. In 1967 and 1968, he helped the Baltimore Colts compile an astounding record of 26-2-2.

But on Jan. 12, 1969, in Super Bowl III, he missed two field goals in the first half, and the New York Jets, behind quarterback Joe Namath, won the game 16-7. When Michaels died in January, the headline in the New York Times read: “Lou Michaels, All-Purpose Player, Dies at 80; Missed Kicks in ’69 Super Bowl.”

The stories behind sports setbacks tease and tantalize: the catch not made, the shot not defended, the race not finished. John Pelphrey was a Kentucky player assigned to guard Duke star Christian Laettner with 2.1 seconds left in the regional finals of the NCAA basketball tournament in 1992.

Kentucky led by one point, but Laettner evaded his defenders, caught a long pass and sank a shot

with 0.3 seconds left — one of the most famous moments in college basketball history.

“I felt like the guy took the ball out of my hands,” Pelphrey later recalled. “I had the sensation of my hands actually touching the leather. It wasn’t until several days later that I realized that I never got close.”

This book is not about just flashes of failure but their lingering impact. It’s an ambitious idea and not always successful. Some players coped well, others did not.

Their accounts can seem repetitive and obvious. Yes, we know, defeat can make you a better person.

But the stories are still compelling. We don’t know what lies ahead for Shaw and Martinez, but Calvin Schiraldi offers a cautionary tale. He was pitching for the Boston Red Sox against the New York Mets in the World Series of 1986. The Sox led 5-3 in the 10th inning of the sixth game and were one out away from winning their first championship since 1918. But Schiraldi gave up three straight hits, and the Mets went on to win the game and then the series. In the seventh game, Schiraldi gave up three more hits and three runs, and the Mets won 8-5.

He never really got over those games, in part because fans wouldn’t let him. “Eighty-six! You suck,” they yelled. “You lost the World Series.” Schiraldi built walls to protect himself from the abuse, and, as Menefee writes, “the problem is he’s still putting walls up, from time to time, and he hasn’t thrown a pitch in twenty-five years.” Those emotional barriers impaired relationships with his wife, his friends, even strangers who know him for just one thing — blowing the series. “I’m just waiting for the end of it,” he tells Menefee. “I want to be like I was before, when I was twenty-two or twentythree.” n Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

This is why I buy alcohol for my underage children KATHLEEN VOLK MILLER is an essayist, a professor and the director of the graduate program in publishing at Drexel University.

My sister was an alcoholic and passed away from complications of the illness last summer. My mother died without that label but with many of the issues. I enjoy having drinks, but I don’t drink every day and I don’t drink to get drunk. No one takes alcohol more seriously than me; that’s why people are surprised about my parenting choices.

Alcohol was always around in the house where I grew up. My parents had the old-school habit of a cocktail before dinner, every day. The family drank the most on special occasions. And with five kids and a large group of close relatives, growing up in Pittsburgh during the Steelers’ reign, there were many excuses to drink.

I want my children to have a healthy relationship with alcohol.

I don’t want them to see booze as bad, or as a way of life. Bottles on our liquor cabinet stay put so long they get dusty, but they’re not hidden.

I recently ran into a neighbor while I was buying a box of inexpensive zinfandel at the local liquor store. When I saw him again a few days later at a friend’s birthday party, I lightheartedly shared that the box of wine was for my daughter Hayley: “I didn’t want you to think it was for me! I am not a fan of zinfandel, especially not from a box.”

Instead of laughing, the people around me fell silent. “If I were you, I wouldn’t tell people I do that,” said a man I’d never met.

But I’m trying to spare my kids the risks and expenses of procuring alcohol illegally. I realize why some people think this tactic is flawed, but raising kids is not a matter of easy choices.

The zinfandel incident happened when Hayley was 20, a junior in college with a 3.5 gradepoint average. It wasn’t the first time I’d bought alcohol for her and it wasn’t the last. My other

daughter Allison, then 22, graduated summa cum laude.

They are both doing well, succeeding in school, jobs and relationships, coping with the usual challenges young women face. I’m proud of my daughters, and I trust them. This is why I let them drink — and I see no reason to hide this.

I knew some of the other adults at that party had college-age kids, and I asked them about their kids’ drinking: Isn’t it inevitable that they will find a way to drink?

Shouldn’t we try to help them do it safely?

One parent said he encourages his daughter to bring her own beer into parties and keep it with her, for her protection. “I’ve told her to refill her own bottle from the keg and hang on to it even when she goes to the bathroom so no one can spike or roofie her,” he said. When other parents admitted that they, too, have encouraged their kids to BYOB to parties, I asked: “Well, where are they getting their booze?” I was fascinated that they all acknowledged college-aged drinking, but thought my actions went a step too far.

My perspective on a “working relationship” with young adults and alcohol may be skewed, as I’ve taught at the college level since I was barely out of college myself. My 18-to-22 year-old students see me as a safe outlet — an adult who can give them perspective, without punishing them.

So I hear about Friday-night blackouts, throwing up on

JANE MINGAY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

subways, waking up in beds they do not know, losing shoes, belts, phones, hoodies, and much more.

I know two boys who were hospitalized with cirrhosis when they were 20. Their tales are terrifying.

My perspective on alcohol is even more skewed by my family’s history. I saw my mother so snockered she could not see me standing in front of her. I saw my sister get arrested, lose jobs, be evicted. My daughters saw their beloved aunt passed out on the couch and were unable to wake her, and watched her, on numerous occasions, stumble and fall down. They remember waiting to eat as their grandma topped off her bottomless beforedinner cocktail for hours.

These memories may be painful for my children, but there can be value in observing what not to do. We have all seen the worst of what alcohol can inflict, but instead of avoiding it out of fear, we try to understand its strength and be stronger.

I’m trying to teach my kids that alcohol is meant to enhance our life experiences, not cloud them.

We live in a small town and there are many parents who turn a blind eye to high school kids drinking on their property. That is where I draw my line. I never want to make another parent’s choice for them by being the house where kids can hang out and drink.

My middle child, Hayley, moved in with three other girls in her sophomore year of college. As

I helped her set up her apartment, her roommate unpacked a margarita pitcher and glasses.

Wine glasses and beer mugs covered the counters. Later, as they were getting ready for their housewarming party, I knew it was time to leave. “Girls. Here’s the deal,” I said, hoping they would see me as an ally and not just dismiss my parental advice: “These really are some of the best days of your life. You want to remember them.”

The subtext: Don’t drink so much you lose your memory. And Hayley tells me she and her roommates have not forgotten those words. Each night before they go out they remind each other: “Let’s remember tonight.”

Allison says she can hear my voice while she’s out, reminding her to sip water between drinks and to watch out for her friends.

The ramifications of alcoholism in my family have benefited me and my kids. Of course they have made mistakes — as have I. But we talk about them. I’d rather know than pretend it’s not happening.

It’s hard to navigate this terrain. Of course I’m still scared that I’ve made bad decisions, that the children won’t be able to fight heredity, that they will lose control. And I wonder — have I enabled them? Have I made alcohol too “okay”?

But right now, they are more than okay. It works for us that I never turn a blind eye to their behaviors — that way, if they need help, I won’t be in the dark. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Conservatives, don’t serve Trump ELIOT A. COHEN is the author of the forthcoming “The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.” He served as counselor of the State Department from 2007 to 2009.

I am a national security Never-Trumper who, after the election, made the case that young conservatives should volunteer to serve in the new administration, warily, their undated letters of resignation ready. That advice, I have concluded, was wrong.

My about-face began with a discreet request to me from a friend in Trumpworld to provide names — unsullied by having signed the two anti-Trump foreign policy letters — of those who might be willing to serve. My friend and I had agreed to disagree awhile back about my taking an anti-Trump stand; now, he wanted assistance and I willingly complied.

After an exchange about a senior figure who would not submit a résumé but would listen if contacted, an email exchange ensued that I found astonishing.

My friend was seething with anger directed at those of us who had opposed Donald Trump — even those who stood ready to help steer good people to an administration that understandably wanted nothing to do with the likes of me, someone who had been out front in opposing Trump since the beginning.

This friend was someone I liked and admired, and still do. It was a momentary eruption of

temper, and we have since patched up our relationship. I surmise that he has been furious for some time, knowing that supporting Trump has been distinctly unpopular in his normal circles. He is in the midst of a transition team that was never well-prepared to begin with and is now torn by acrimony, resignations and palace coups.

And then there are the pent-up resentments against a liberal intellectual and media establishment that scorned his ilk for years.

I sympathize, but the episode has caused me to change my mind about recommending that conservatives serve in the administration, albeit with a firm view in their minds of what would cause them to quit. This was a tipping point. The tenor of the Trump team, from everything I see, read and hear, is such that, for a garden-variety Republican policy specialist, service in the early phase of the administration

would carry a high risk of compromising one’s integrity and reputation.

In a normal transition to a normal administration, there’s always disorder. There are the presidential friends and second cousins, the flacks and the hangers-on who flame out in the first year or two. Things shake out.

This time may be different.

Trump was not a normal candidate, the transition is not a normal transition, and this will probably not be a normal administration. The presidentelect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty. By all accounts, his ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless.

In the best of times, government service carries with it the danger of compromising your principles. Here, though, we may be in for something much worse.

The canary in the coal mine was not merely the selection of Stephen K. Bannon for the job previously filled by John Podesta and Karl Rove, that of counselor to the president and chief strategist. Rather, the warning signs came from the Republican leaders excusing and normalizing this sinister character — and

those who then justified the normalizers.

One bad boss can be endured. A gaggle of them will poison all decision-making. They will turn on each other. No band of brothers this: rather the permanent campaign as waged by triumphalist rabble-rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistakes — because there will be mistakes — will be exceptional.

My bottom line: Conservative political types should not volunteer to serve in this administration, at least for now.

They would probably have to make excuses for things that are inexcusable and defend people who are indefensible. At the very least, they should wait to see who gets the top jobs.

I hope that I am wrong. I hope that the administration will settle down and that I can cheer it when it is right and offer temperate criticisms when it is wrong. But the auspices here are disturbing.

So what should the policy community do for now? Do what you can do in other venues, and remember that this too will pass, and some day a more normal kind of administration will either emerge or replace this one. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

22

OPINIONS

HENRY OLSEN is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and an adjunct professor at Villanova University. His book “Ronald Reagan: New Deal Republican” is scheduled for publication next year.

Donald Trump has won what might be the greatest “change election” in decades. Republicans leaders are only now waking up to the fact that the change Trump’s voters want will end up changing the GOP, too.

Trump’s voters were not voting for less government. Instead, they believe the promise of American life has been taken from them by elites of both parties who neither know nor care what they are doing to their fellow citizens. Trump stepped into this massive credibility gap with the message that he was different. In his talks, tweets and rallies, he identified the problems these people were facing: stagnating wages, shrinking numbers of good jobs, a political and media culture that treated them as though they were aliens in their own country. For years, they had been longing for someone of Trump’s stature to say to them: “I hear you, and I will make things right.”

These voters backed Trump because they want their heritage back. This is not, as has been charged, a racially tinged impulse. Millions of Trump’s supporters voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Rather, it is the heritage that all

Americans are of equal worth, that common values and common activities are worthy of respect and reward and confer dignity. Trump said he would “make America great again,” but he could have run on a different, more intellectual slogan: “Make American citizenship count again.”

This citizenship agenda is less interested in shrinking government than in making it work for average Americans.

Trump’s signature issues — immigration, trade, law and order, fighting terrorism — all involve the federal government doing more and doing it better.

This push for federal action will pose serious challenges to the reigning GOP orthodoxy.

However, if the first 100 days of a Trump presidency involve nothing more than tax cuts, deregulation and other traditional Republican ideas, the voters who wanted something different will wonder whether they were simply marks in a

WEEKLY

BY JONES FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

For Trump voters, no left or right

KLMNO

skillful con.

Many of Trump voters’ priorities can be addressed in ways consistent with Republican inclinations. Immigration can be reduced but not eliminated; trade deals can proceed if they ensure that benefits flow to average Americans. Tax reform, which means raising taxes on millions of honest Americans, can make way for tax cuts, and those cuts can be structured so that large proportional gains go to those making less than the median income.

Other initiatives might require more direct government action.

Stagnating wages are not going away overnight. Why not create a generous wage subsidy in place of a minimum-wage increase? Why not pass a New Homestead Act that gives incentives to Americans in low-growth areas to move to places with greater opportunity? Why not withhold federal criminal-justice funding from police departments with a pattern of civil rights violations, and increase funding for departments that cut crime and eradicate police misbehavior?

This style of governance is not just what Americans want: It also fits with the Reaganite philosophy Republicans purport to admire. In his famous speech endorsing Barry Goldwater,

Reagan told Americans: “There is no such thing as left or right.

There is only up or down.” Trump voters believe this wholeheartedly. They want government to move up and move beyond the sterile ideological battles of left or right.

There’s a reason Trump got the votes of the descendants of the Reagan Democrats: He was communicating the Reagan message that Americans of all stripes deserved a hand up from their government.

Reagan never let ideology get in the way of helping average Americans. Reagan’s two terms are replete with examples of an energetic, active government that was nonetheless limited in its scope and aspirations.

Trump’s victory has given the GOP the opportunity of a generation. It can either hear the demands of whom, echoing Reagan and conservative Australian statesman Sir Robert Menzies, Trump calls “the forgotten people” or not. If it does, it will realign the GOP with its Reaganite heritage and work to affirm what Reagan called “the purpose and worth to each and every life.” If the GOP can change back to what it once was, it can enact the change Trump’s voters want and change America for the better. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Democracy BY

J ASON B RENNAN

Democracy is one of the most cherished features of our nation, but we have many misconceptions about it. Democracy is now a subject of debate, as populist movements abroad and at home prompt questions about the rule of the many. While we ponder this election, there are certain facts about democracies at large that are worth considering.

MYTH NO. 1 Voters are selfish.

Political scientists who have studied voter behavior have found little evidence for this claim. The young and the old are about equally in favor of Social Security. Men and women are about equally supportive of abortion rights. The rich and the poor have roughly the same attitudes toward taxes and redistribution. Self-interest is a weak predictor of voter behavior.

Voters are not selfish. Instead, they tend to vote for what they believe is in the national interest.

MYTH NO. 2 Democracy relies upon the consent of the governed.

We no more tacitly consent to our government than a person kidnapped and placed on a ship consents to the captain’s rule by refusing to jump overboard.

Democracy gives the masses the power to change government, but that doesn’t mean we consent to it.

Consider a consensual transaction. You order a pizza from Papa John’s. The pizza comes only if you do something that signals you want it. If you tell Papa John’s you don’t want pizza, it doesn’t send one.

Further, when you give the company your money, it has to hold up its end and give you pizza.

Your relationship to government isn’t like that, even in a democracy. Regardless of what you do — whether or how you vote, or if you dissent — the same laws are imposed upon you.

For government, your “no” means “yes.” Further, courts have

ruled (e.g., in Warren v. District of Columbia) that the government has no specific duty to protect you, even if you pay your taxes. Imagine if Papa John’s took your money but never sent you pizza; you wouldn’t say you consented to that deal.

MYTH NO. 3 Political participation helps bring us together.

From presidential debates to citizen comments at city council meetings, many of our attempts at political engagement center on efforts to hear one another out and join in the project of democracy. But does it really work that way?

Many political scientists have checked. The results are generally disappointing. As political scientist Tali Mendelberg summarizes, political deliberation tends to increase conflict rather than reduce it. Deliberators either avoid talking about heated issues or, if they do talk about them, tend to become angry, try to manipulate one another or even come to blows. Legal scholar Cass Sunstein finds that deliberation pushes people to more extreme versions of their ideology; after talking to people with whom they disagree, they become more rigid in their views. Political scientist Diana Mutz finds that when people do try to understand the other side, it causes them to lose enthusiasm and stop participating in political activity.

MYTH NO. 4 America is a democratic country.

The United States is a republic

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Though political participation might bring us into conversation with one another, talking about politics doesn’t always bring us together.

with democratic features. But we’re not all that democratic.

What’s supposedly distinctive about democracy is that elected leaders try to give the majority what they want. Or, perhaps more precisely, politicians try to implement the policy preferences of the median voter, i.e., the voter who falls right in the middle of the ideological distribution, regardless of income or other characteristics.

However, recent work puts this picture in doubt. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page asked: When voters at the 90th, 50th and 10th percentiles of income disagree about policy (keep in mind that they usually agree), with whom do presidents side? The answer: Presidents are much more likely to do what the wealthiest Americans want than what ordinary or poor Americans want. Surprisingly, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and President Obama tended to side with the rich even more than George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan did. Presidents respond more to what high-income voters want than what the ideological majority wants. Just why this pattern holds is still being researched.

One possible upside: Highincome voters tend to be better

informed, so perhaps siding with richer voters gets us better government.

MYTH NO. 5 Democracy is inevitable.

Each year, Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization, and the Economist magazine independently produce indexes measuring how many countries are democratic and how democratic they are. While the world generally became more democratic after the Cold War, in recent years, it’s grown more authoritarian. Some formerly democratic countries are becoming nondemocratic, and some democratic countries are becoming less democratic.

Freedom House says that 2015 was the “10th consecutive year of decline in global freedom,” meaning that political freedom and freedom of the press both regressed.

Anti-democratic attitudes also seem to be on the rise. Some recent polls have found that fewer than half of millennials in Canada, the United States and Australia believe that democracy is the best form of government or that it is essential for justice. n Brennan is the Flanagan Family Chair of Strategy, Economics, Ethics and Public Policy at Georgetown University.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

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