The Washington Post National Weekly - December 13, 2015

Worst Year Bush and Clinton for the win 3

World Canada’s marijuana milestone 10

Business A company with no bosses 16

Opinions Tablets + teaching = trouble 20

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

A survivor’s life

.

Her fourth day of college was a mass shooting. Now she’s left trying to cope with anxiety, anger and a bullet in her ribs. PAGE 12

IN COLLABORATION WITH

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

2

BWORLD y Wenatchee Valle

USINESS OWNED BUSINES YOUR LOCALLY

DELIG HTFUL4 D’Olivo

S , DELIC IOU

See PAGE

PI CK TAKE YOURBistro & Sushi Bar Blue Flame Asian

See PAGE 7

DECEMBER 2015

$2

S MAGAZINE

g Caterin n

Seaso

Local catering ep companies ke fied tis customers sa ge ed with cutting ategies business str See PAGE 20

We publish a World of business news every month.

If you’re not already receiving a copy of this region’s leading business publication, Wenatchee Valley Business World, stop by our office and purchase a copy of our December edition.

WORLD’S BUSINESS

G PRESENTIN SPONSORS

You’ll find features on:

DISHING IT UP FOR THE HOLIDAYS

We check in on this region’s caterers and how they each stand out among a crowded field of competitors.

BOTTLED GOODNESS

You’re guaranteed a distinctive sampling experience at D’Olivo Quality Oils and Vinegars in Pybus Market.

SUSHI AND SO MUCH MORE

We profile Blue Flame Asian Bistro & Sushi Bar in East Wenatchee, where they take a fresh approach to everything they prepare.

Plus Rick Steigmeyer’s wine column, business briefs, real estate transactions and building permits, lively guest columnists, the Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce newsletter, local business achievements and much more.

You can find Business World and daily business news updates on our website at wvbusinessworld.com.

Business orld Wenatchee Valley

W

PICK UP A COPY OF BUSINESS WORLD AT ALL AUT-TO MOCHA LOCATIONS, AND LES SCHWAB IN WENATCHEE AND EAST WENATCHEE. TO SUBSCRIBE BY MAIL, CALL OUR CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT AT 509-663-5161 OR ONLINE AT WVBUSINESSWORLD.COM/SUBSCRIBE/BW/ CAN’T GET ENOUGH BUSINESS NEWS? FOLLOW US ON LINKEDIN.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

3

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST YEAR IN WASHINGTON

Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

F

amous last names. Enviable poll numbers. Establishment support. Lots and lots of money. The whiff of inevitability.

That’s where Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton started 2015. Both were expected to cruise to their respective parties’ presidential nominations.

That’s not how things played out.

Bush ends the year in the far more hopeless position. He is mired in single digits in every national and key early-state poll, placing fifth amongRepublicancandidatesinthelatestWashington Post-ABC News survey. Clinton is way ahead of her closest Democratic rival — Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders — nationally.

But the similarities in the un-dynamic duo’s year are striking: hot starts followed by the realization that their built-in advantages mattered a whole lot less than they thought. Name recognition and organization and all the money in the world can’t sell a message that voters aren’t all that interested in buying.

Jeb!

Here’s Bush’s campaign, and 2015, in one story. In September, he went on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” — to show his “fun” side, presumably. Colbert asked, somewhat mockingly, about the exclamation point on his campaign logo. “I’ve been using ‘Jeb!’ since 1994,” the former Florida governor responded. “It connotes excitement.” It. Connotes. Excitement.

When Bush was still the GOP front-runner and considered almost unstoppable, there were whispers here and there among the political class that he wasn’t all that good a candidate. His people used words like “wonky” and “a real policy guy” to explain away his decided lack of charisma. A serious man for serious times and all that. Donors bought it. His Right

KLMNO WEEKLY

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAVIER MUNOZ FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

to Rise super PAC raised a stunning $103 million in the first six months of 2015.

But after Bush officially entered the race in June, his weaknesses as a candidate became clear. He was out of step with the Republican baseonissues—supportforimmigrationreform and Common Core education standards — and tonally his soft-spoken niceness didn’t match voters’ angry mood. He sank in the polls, and major donors threatened defection. He raised a little more than $13 million in July, August and September and ended the third quarter with just $10 million in the bank. That led to across-the-

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 9

board salary and staff cuts and put an end to his campaign’s “shock and awe” strategy.

By late October, Bush was losing the “electable establishment guy” mantle to Marco Rubio, the 44-year-old Senate wunderkind who was his protege in Florida. Rubio has a natural ease and charisma that made Bush look especially stiff in the first two GOP presidential debates. In the third, Bush tried to reassert the master-student dynamic.

“When you signed up for this, this is a six-year term, and you should be showing up to continues on next page

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY BUSINESS BOOKS OPINION THE TAKE

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, 16, sits in exhaustion with her puppy. She was the youngest person shot at Umpqua Community College in Oregon in October.

Photograph by JABIN BOTSFORD, The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

4

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

from previous page

work,” he ventured, trying to pick up on the frankly overrated issue of all the Senate votes Rubio has missed. “You can campaign, or just resign and let someone else take the job.”

Rubio was ready and, unlike Bush, seemed up for the fight. “The only reason why you’re [bringing this up] now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”

And scene. Rubio became the establishment guy. Bush, just another guy in the race. (He won his fourth Worst Week in Washington that week.)

Bush’s campaign was premised on an early show of strength — big staff, big money, big poll numbers — to keep serious challengers from ever sniffing the top tier he occupied alone in the first days of the contest. His strongest message to donors and voters was: Be with me, because I’m going to win. Robbed of that conceit, he and his team have fumbled for something, anything, that might turn the campaign in a better direction. The year ends with Bush way outside the top tier. He would need Rubio and a few others to stumble to even have a chance at the nomination that once seemed such a sure thing.

Clinton and the server

Hillary Clinton, for her many gifts as a politician and a policymaker, has never been the best reader of the political landscape. She, like her husband, tends to mistake mountains for molehills and vice versa.

Which brings me to the revelation — first reported by the New York Times in early March — that Clinton corresponded exclusively over a private email server during her time as secretary of state. Clinton’s response was characteristically dismissive. At a March 10 news conference, she explained that the setup was a mere matter of convenience. “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two,” she said.

And for the next several months, whenever she was asked about it, Clinton came across as angry, annoyed and overly legalistic. “What I did was legally permitted, number one, first and foremost, okay?” she told Fox News Channel’s Ed Henry in August. (“What I did was legally permitted” is not exactly an inspiring campaign slogan.)

What neither Clinton nor her team seemed to grasp was that the private server reinforced and reminded people of things they didn’t (and don’t) like about the former first family. Some of those perceptions: that they think they are above the rules, that they’re paranoid and that they always have something to hide. An August Quinnipiac poll found that “liar” comes to mind more than any other word when people think of Clinton.

It wasn’t until shortly after Labor Day that she addressed the email controversy head-on.

(She apologized fully for setting up the server, casting it as a dumb but innocent mistake.)

Almost immediately, things began to turn around. The first Democratic debate, on Oct. 13, featured Clinton at her competent, student-

Clinton ends 2015 on a far better note than seemed possible in August. But, like Bush, she took home Worst Week in Washington four times this year.

every-teacher-loves best. Days later, Vice President Biden put an end to speculation and announced that he would not run for president — a candidacy that would have complicated Clinton’s winning math. She capped off the month with an 11-hour marathon appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, in which Republicans did everything they could to damage her reputation but, as is often the case in Clinton-vs.-GOP fights, wound up making themselves look small and petty and allowing her to come across as magnanimous and tough.

Clinton ends 2015 on a far better note than seemed possible in the doldrums of August.

But, like Bush, she took home Worst Week in Washington four times this year. And problems remain. She’s locked in competitive contests with Sanders in Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. Her trustworthiness remains questionable for some voters. In a December Quinnipiac University poll, 60 percent of people said they found Clinton neither honest nor trustworthy; 68 percent of independents felt that way. Meanwhile, the Justice Department continues its inquiry into whether she sent or received classified emails on her homebrew server. (She insists she did neither.)

How will she handle these hurdles? Her supporters have to hope she’s learned her lessons from the Great Email Debacle of 2015.

jury’s still out

John Roberts

I

n 2005, John Roberts won the unanimous support of Republican senators on his way to a walk-in-the-park confirmation as the Supreme Court’s chief justice. A decade later, two Republicans running for president — Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — insisted that his nomination by President George W. Bush was a mistake. The Wall Street Journal editorial board accused him of being “a most political Justice.” And the National Review declared: “He is a disgrace.”

What the heck happened in those 10 years?

The Affordable Care Act, mainly. In 2012, Roberts was the decisive vote that upheld Obamacare — to conservative dismay. He incensed Republicans further this year when he rejected another conservative-backed challenge to the health-care law. Writing the majority opinion in King v. Burwell, Roberts affirmed that people participating in federally run insurance marketplaces are potentially eligible for subsidies, even though the law specifies only those who use marketplaces “established by the state.” His opinion protected 6.4 million people in 34 states from losing their coverage. And his reasoning — looking broadly at the law’s intent — protects it from other potential challenges and takes the urgency out of Republican calls for repeal.

Roberts’s overall record remains conservative. Most significant this year, he dissented from the court’s landmark opinion declaring same-sex marriage legal in all states. Yet some Republicans are calling him the new David Souter — the George H.W. Bush nominee who ended up disappointing many conservatives during his time on the court. The conservative Judicial Crisis Network is featuring Roberts in an ad warning that “we can’t afford more surprises” from future court nominees. And with the aging Supreme Court a big topic in the 2016 presidential race, we can expect Roberts to receive more pummeling from candidates trying to highlight their conservative cred.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

5

POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

pretty good year

Amy Schumer

B

efore this year, if you said the name “Schumer” anywhere in the vicinity of Washington, everyone would assume you were talking about Chuck — the fast-talking, camerahogging, Senate Democratic leader-in-waiting.

No longer! 2015 marked the arrival — in Hollywood and in political Washington — of comedian Amy Schumer, who, yes, is related to the Chuckwagon. (They are second cousins once removed.)

Schumer’s breakthrough moment in Hollywood came over the summer, when “Trainwreck,” the movie she wrote about a woman who is, well, a train wreck, became a smash hit.

Made for $35 million, it grossed almost four times that, turning Schumer, who was already a cult star thanks to her “Inside Amy Schumer” sketch-comedy show, into a household name.

It was “Trainwreck” that also turned official Washington on to Schumer — and she to it. In late July, a man shot and killed two people and injured nine others during a showing of the movie in Lafayette, La. Days later, the Schumers — Amy and Chuck — stood outside the senator’s Manhattan office to push for stricter gun-control measures. “The pain I share with so many other Americans on the issue of gun violence was made extremely personal to me,” the actress said, fighting back tears. “I’ve thought about these victims each day since the tragedy.”

In October, they were at it again — this time appearing on the steps of New York’s City Hall to push for the closure of background-check loopholes. “I just felt the need to get involved because of how personal that event felt and how upset it made me feel,” she said at an earlier event.

Schumer’s use of her rising celebrity to influence politics on an issue dear to her provided a blueprint for how to exert bicoastal power. Not only that, but she made people laugh. That’s a pretty good year in Hollywood or D.C.

best year

Donald Trump

I

n June, I wrote a blog post with a direct — and clicky! — headline: “Why no one should take Donald Trump seriously, in one very simple chart.” The argument was, as it said, very simple. Poll after poll of likely Republican primary voters showed that absolutely everyone had an opinion about Trump. And among large majorities of voters, that opinion was unfavorable. Being totally known and roundly disliked by the people you need to persuade to vote for you is as close to a political death sentence as you can get. Period. Close the book.

Except that Trump defied every rule of politics after that.

He fashioned a meteoric polling rise on his outspoken opposition to anything but the hardest-line policies on immigration, despite the fact that the issue was an afterthought in his campaign announcement speech. Once at the top of the field, he feuded with Fox News Chan-

nel and its star anchor, Megyn Kelly. He suggested thatMuslims in NewJerseyopenlycelebrated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, even after fact-checkers the world over insisted that it never happened. He called his rivals for the GOP nomination “low energy” and sweaty and even attacked their religious beliefs. Now, he’s proposing increasingly outlandish (and unconstitutional) plans to fight terrorism.

And, somehow, it all worked for him. Trump’s dismal favorable/unfavorable numbers reversed themselves, a transformation absolutely unprecedented in my two decades covering national politics. With the exception of a very brief dip in early November, Trump has held the lead in national polling steadily since mid-July. Republican voters say he is the candidate best equipped to handle national security, the economy and virtually every other issue.

The Republican race is Donald Trump and then everyone else. That’s been true for the better part of the past six months. Those are two sentences I never thought I would write.

Ever. n

Trump’s dismal favorable/ unfavorable numbers reversed themselves, a transformation absolutely unprecedented.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

6

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Obama’s quiet yet momentous shift BY

J ULIET E ILPERIN

Y

ears before the White House was lit in rainbow colors celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage, President Obama used a routine bureaucratic tool that ended up significantly changing the government’s understanding of gender and how it can be changed.

The process began during Obama’s first year in office, when he issued a memo in June 2009 instructing agencies to extend to partners in same-sex couples some benefits that spouses of federal employees receive. Over time, that directive led to a decision by the Social Security Administration to lower the threshold requirements for changing one’s sex on official government documents, a shift that would determine how a person’s gender is recorded on passports, tax returns, marriage licenses and other records.

Since June 2013, people wishing to change their sex on their Social Security cards have needed to provide only a doctor’s note guaranteeing that “appropriate clinical treatment” is underway.

Before then, people seeking to change their sex on the document had to undergo sex-reassignment surgery, an expensive and, many LGBT advocates and doctors say, unnecessary procedure for a transition to take place.

Suddenly, gender — once thought by many, including a rigid federal government, to be immutable from birth — could be changed on Social Security cards with only a note from a medical professional overseeing such a transition, such as the one Elishe Wittes carried with him to the Social Security Administration last summer.

Wittes, 17, a District resident who was born with the physical attributes of a female, filled out paperwork, submitted his doctor’s letter and began the process for changing his sex on government documents to male.

“Not having any kind of legal

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

A 2009 memo on gender identification began government’s easing of its stance on sex change record that you exist is really problematic,” said Wittes, his eyebrows arching as he described how he used to cringe at the idea of flying with an outdated passport and getting paychecks bearing a girl’s name he had abandoned legally.

Although the Census Bureau does not collect data on transgender Americans as a distinct population, Gary Gates, a demographer at UCLA, said they number about 700,000, or between 0.2 and 0.3 percent of the population. But many say this estimate, based on a couple of state surveys, is too low.

In part because of bureaucratic hurdles, one-third of people in the most recent National Transgender Discrimination Survey, from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality, reported not having formal identification that matched their gender.

For an administration that has elevated lesbian, gay, bisexual

and transgender rights to a national civil rights issue, the public signs of its commitment are obvious. Last month, the White House Champions of Change program focused on the LGBT community, holding an event that featured a bisexual filmmaker who documents the lives of transgender men and women serving in the military and also highlighted an artist who uses musical theater to tell the life stories of transgender men and young people of color.

Three days before that, Obama, in an official presidential message, marked the annual commemoration of transgender people who have been killed.

“The president always says ‘LGBT,’ ” White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said in a recent interview. “I can’t think of a time where he left off the T.” But some of the administration’s low-profile policy shifts reverberate just as deeply.

The Department of Health and

Elishe Wittes, a 17year-old transgender boy, changed his sex on his Social Security card under policies that the Obama administration adopted a few years ago. Obama’s evolution on transgender rights has been without splashy speeches but not without farreaching effects.

Human Services now allows Medicare funding to offset the medical costs of a gender transition and has warned insurers that prohibiting coverage for such transitions can be discriminatory.

The Agriculture Department bars discrimination based on gender identity in any USDA program, while the Department of Housing and Urban Development has applied a similar provision to its federal housing programs.

The changes began quietly when Obama ordered all agencies in 2009 to review what could be done to eliminate disparities between same-sex and straight couples, a directive that administration officials ultimately interpreted much more broadly.

At the time, transgender activists felt slighted. Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said that the memo left her and other activists annoyed because it paled in comparison with what they expected of the president.

“We thought, ‘You were going to do stuff, and now you just put out a memo about doing stuff ?’

That memo turned out to be one of the most important things the president ever did,” she said.

Over time, that directive — and two others, in 2010 and 2013 — triggered the review of more than 1,000 statutes and hundreds of regulations across the U.S. government, including the change that allowed Wittes to declare himself male and have that affirmation reflected on his Social Security card.

The change was a culmination of years of lobbying by LGBT advocates and underscores how modest administrative actions, not just high-profile executive orders or lofty speeches, can reverberate in the lives of ordinary Americans.

“We are making every effort to make sure that the federal government is recognizing gender identity as a priority,” Jarrett said, “and that we should be ensuring that the civil rights of the transgender community are fully protected.” n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

7

POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Conservative bloc looks to 2016 BY

M IKE D E B ONIS

I

n the early days of the House Freedom Caucus, the running joke among the secretive group of hard-core conservatives was that it was a lot like a congressional version of movie cult classic “Fight Club”: The first rule was not to talk about it.

Now, it seems, just about everyone on Capitol Hill is talking about the Freedom Caucus.

In less than a year, the group has unseated a House speaker, prompted management changes inside the GOP conference and pushed for an ever-harder line in congressional dealings with President Obama.

In doing so, the Freedom Caucus became a household name in Washington and in conservative activist circles around the country, wielding influence that its leaders are now hoping to extend in the coming election year.

Members of the close-knit group of 39 lawmakers — including its chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (ROhio) — have met with candidates vying for open House seats and have established a political action committee that would allow it to raise money for candidates who share its hard-nosed approach.

Among the seats in play is the southwestern Ohio district vacated lastmonthbyJohnA.Boehner,who was drummed out of the speaker’s chair by a conservative revolt.

Jordan declined to elaborate when asked in a recent interview what message it would send for a Freedom Caucus endorsee to replace Boehner: “I don’t know that we’re going to [endorse], but we’ve talked to some of the candidates, so we’ll see.”

Other members are more openly excited about the prospect of drawing new members and giving the House Republican Conference an even more conservative bent.

“We fully expect to start our own separate fundraising, our own separate vetting for candidates, and you’ll see us trying to get good conservatives elected in open races,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), a caucus co-founder. “We recognize the fact that we have a

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

In 10 months, the House Freedom Caucus has become a force and must decide what’s next brand, and we’re going to try to use that to further our mission.”

The caucus quietly set up a political arm, the House Freedom Fund, earlier this year by renaming a little-used leadership PAC set up in 2013 by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.). The group, now under Jordan’s sponsorship, raised $23,000 in the first half of 2015, but Meadows said preparations for a serious fundraising push are underway.

The leap into campaign politics comes at a crucial moment for the Freedom Caucus, which was formed in January by a cadre of conservatives who felt marginalized by the mainstream Republican leadership—startingwithBoehner.

Their strength has been less about their numbers and more about their resolve. Though they represent less than a fifth of House Republicans, the group includes enough votes to deny GOP leadership a majority on any issue they choose to oppose en bloc. And the mere threat that the group’s members might call a rare vote to vacate

the speaker’s chair was enough to prompt Boehner’s retirement and set off a reshuffling on Capitol Hill that has left the Freedom Caucus in a very influential position.

New Speaker Paul D. Ryan (RWis.) won the backing of most caucus members by pledging to adopt their ideas for a more inclusive governing process, in some cases by ceding some of his power.

Republicans recently ratified changes to the party steering committee, which makes important personnel decisions such as committee assignments, that slightly reduced the speaker’s clout. And Ryan includes the Freedom Caucus in a “kitchen cabinet” of House GOP subgroups alongside the moderate Tuesday Group and the mainstream conservative Republican Study Committee.

For a group that started out with a working title of the “Reasonable Nutjob Caucus,” Mulvaney said, that’s not too shabby.

“We’re seen as an equal partner within the party organization,” he

Rep. Jim Jordan (ROhio), center, during the vote for Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) as House speaker.

The House Freedom Caucus, chaired by Jordan, was influential in former speaker John A. Boehner’s departure and is trying to get conservatives elected to open House seats.

said. “That’s success.”

“To have that happen in 10months’timeisunheardofinthis place,” added Rep. Matt Salmon (RAriz.). “It has a very different feel, and that wouldn’t have happened without the Freedom Caucus.”

With Ryan handing conservatives the seat at the table they wanted, the Freedom Caucus is pondering what comes next. They haven’t become the establishment, by any means, but they have a new institutional role that could give them spots on key committees and a regular role in setting the House agenda.

But there is some decision about what comes next. A few members started drawing up an agenda, tentatively titled “Contract With America II,” after Newt Gingrich’s 1994 campaign manifesto. But that document, first reported by Bloomberg News this month, doesn’t yet have widespread buy-in among caucus members, and several have disclaimed any effort to draft a formal agenda.

That speaks to the fragile nature of a caucus made up of independent-minded members who have thus far been united around what they oppose rather than what they support. But Jordan said the group has played a valuable role in rallying conservatives regardless of whether the group has a formal agenda.

“If three years ago, the day after [Obama’s] election, if someone would have then said to conservatives: ‘Hey, there’s going to be this group of members in Congress who are going to be shaking things up a little, that Paul Ryan is going to be the speaker of the House, and that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are going to have a real chance to be president of the United States,’ a lot of folks would have said, ‘Okay, that’s not bad,’ ” he said.

Despite the splash it made in the past year, Salmon said, the caucus’s impact has yet to be felt.

“Our goal truly is to fix this place — not just to pontificate, not just to get our name in the paper, not just to do message legislation,” he said.

“The reason that we did the outside thing was to get in the inside and actually make a difference.” n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Weak evidence for ‘Ferguson effect’ D ARRYL F EARS Milwaukee BY

E

ven before he steered his squad car out of the station garage,policeofficerOmarlo Phillips got stuck with the kind of strange domestic call he dreads: A guy was threatening to kill himself because his girlfriend wouldn’t bake him corn bread.

The dispatcher said the man had threatened violence in the past, so Phillips and his partner for the night, Kayeng Kue, made a beeline for a drab apartment complex in northwest Milwaukee.

What happened next helps explain why the homicide rate in this city has soared faster this year than almost anywhere else in the nation. While some have blamed the “Ferguson effect” — the theory that police are shirking their duty to fight crime for fear of getting caught on camera — police in Milwaukee say the problem is far more complicated.

It took Phillips and Kue nearly 20 minutes to drive to the apartment of Brian Elsa, who had recently undergone gall bladder surgery and was not allowed to eat corn bread, which is why his girlfriend was refusing to make it.

Apart from his appetite for forbidden treats, Elsa seemed fine: He had no weapons, made no threats, exhibited no crazy behavior.

But a routine name check conjured an outstanding traffic warrant in Missouri. That meant Elsa had to be arrested. And that meant Phillips and Kue would be taken off the streets for hours.

The officers soon had Elsa locked in a holding cell back at the District 7 station. Phillips and Kue sat nearby filling out reams of paperwork while 44 emergency calls went unanswered, including a report of a woman being punched and thrown against a wall.

By the time they were done, nearly a third of their 3:30 p.m.to-midnight shift had been lost on a case they said was better suited for social workers.

“Honestly, I think this is what’s deterring us from going out and deterring violent crime,” Kue said.

Her partner sighed.

RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST

Milwaukee police chief: State budget cuts and gun laws are more likely behind homicide spike “A majority of our time,” Phillips said, “is spent on cases like this.”

‘Under a relentless assault’ In Milwaukee and a few other major cities, the homicide rate is soaring. Homicides in Milwaukee increased 75 percent between January and October compared with the same period in 2014, one of the biggest spikes in the nation.

In October, FBI Director James B. Comey said public demonstrations against police brutality and smartphone videos of police behavior are in part to blame. The scrutiny, he said “is a chill wind that has blown through law enforcement over the last year, and that wind is surely changing behavior.”

Comey didn’t use the words “Ferguson effect,” but his message was clear. And although he acknowledgedthatnoevidenceexists to support the theory, others have endorsed it, including the Drug Enforcement Administration’s acting chief,ChuckRosenberg, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D), who has described Chicago police as being “in a fetal position.”

“Intoday’sYouTubeworld,”Com-

ey asked, “are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime?”

In Milwaukee, at least, the answer is no, said Police Chief Edward Flynn.

Flynn said there’s no denying that anti-police protests and viral videos that emerged after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., have unnerved the rank and file.

“Our young men and women recently have felt that they are under a relentless assault,” Flynn said in an interview.

But that alone doesn’t explain the increase in violent crime, he said — certainly not in Milwaukee, where homicides and a few other violent crime categories started trending upward in 2013, well before the Ferguson shooting.

Instead, Flynn pointed to two more likely culprits: State budget cuts that reduced mental health services and other social programs, and a 2011 law that dramatically weakened the power of police to arrest people with guns.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is responsible for both devel-

Milwaukee police officer Omarlo Phillips, who patrols one of the city’s deadliest police districts, helps a family push their car to a gas station after it ran out of gas.

opments. Flynn said the new gun law, which Walker said would make the state “safer for all responsible, law-abiding citizens,” has been particularly damaging.

For the first time in nearly 150 years, it is legal to carry a concealed weapon in Wisconsin. People are supposed to register for permits, but carrying a concealed gun without a permit is a misdemeanor if the carrier isn’t a convicted felon or mentally unstable.

So police can do little more than confiscate unlicensed guns, even from an offender who is stopped multiple times.

Walker spokeswoman Laurel Patrick defended Walker’s record, saying he has recently increased mental health funding. As for the new gun law, Patrick said Walker will not apologize for being astrong supporter of gun rights. But the governor is also concerned about gun violence, she said, which is why he funded sensors last year that pinpoint gunfire and report the information to city police.

Flynn is unimpressed. He called the concealed-carry law “ludicrously weak” and said it has “undeniably increased crime in Milwaukee.”

“The ingredients of violence are here for so many reasons,” he said.

“But the tools have been put into the hands of criminals by a foolish and ideological gun law.”

No more than a gut feeling The origin of the term “Ferguson effect” is hazy. A search of digital news archives traces the first mention to a newspaper column by Mary Mitchell of the Chicago Sun-Times on Sept. 18, 2014, a little more than a month after the shooting.

But Mitchell used the term to describe an increase in claims of abusive policing against black suspects, not a chilling effect on the force.

“Whether these accusations are a reflection of the police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., that some have dubbed the ‘Ferguson Effect’ or something else, African-Americans are claiming with increased urgency that police are shooting ‘unarmed’ or ‘compliant’ sus-

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

9

NATION pects,” Mitchell wrote.

By the spring of 2015, however, the term had come to mean something else entirely. Police brass, union representatives, a few mayors and conservative TV commentators began using it to refer to a siege mentality among police, arguing that it could explain increases in violent crime that were starting to show up in some cities.

“I think you’ll see . . . the rise in murders in 30 cities, that’s the so-called Ferguson effect where cops are less reluctant to engage in proactive policing,” former New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly said this fall.

Criminologists say the theory is no more than a gut feeling. In a recent report looking at 30 of the nation’s largest cities, the Brennan Center for Justice in New York projected that overall crime rates will be about the same in 2015 as they were last year — and may even decrease by about 2 percent.

Although the number of homicides is up by about 11 percent, “this increase is not as startling as it may first seem,” the report said.

“Because the underlying rate of murders is already so low, a relatively small increase in the numbers can result in a large percentage increase.”

Moreover, most of the increase has occurred in five cities — St. Louis, a few miles from suburban Ferguson; Baltimore; Detroit; New Orleans; and Milwaukee.

These cities “also have significantly lower incomes, higher poverty rates, higher unemployment, and falling populations than the national average,” the report said.

“In all but a few cities, those reports [of a spike in crime] are overblown, and have little statistical backing,” said Naren Daniel, a spokeswoman for the center.

For police in Milwaukee, the real Ferguson effect has been a sudden and harsh cold shoulder from the public.

“You have people blatantly doing things they wouldn’t do years ago. You have more people challenging cops. They say, ‘I know my rights.’ They say, ‘They can’t tell us what to do.’ Before, it wasn’t this bad,” Phillips said.

The way Phillips sees it, protests and viral videos have not sparked a slowdown in policing but instead have fueled a disdain for police that may be even more damaging.

“Nowadays,” he said, “it’s difficult to do our jobs.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Young nonsmokers receive shocking news: Lung cancer BY

L ENNY B ERNSTEIN

I

t was just a tiny bump behind Corey Wood’s right eye, but her doctor was concerned.

The college senior and marathon runner felt fine, but a fullbody scan revealed that she had Stage 4 lung cancer.

The diagnosis was stunning, both because of Wood’s age and the fact that she has never smoked. Every year, though, a couple thousand Americans younger than 40 receive the same mind-bending news, despite having none of the usual risk factors for the disease.

“When I got the diagnosis . . . I didn’t understand,” recalled Wood, who is now 23. Her adenocarcinoma, the most common form of non-small cell lung cancer, had already spread to her lymph nodes and bones. Her chance of surviving five years was less than 5 percent. “I didn’t even cry in [the doctor’s] office, because I couldn’t follow what she was saying.”

Little attention has been paid historically to the small population of younger adults with lung cancer.

Yet as science begins to link many lung cancers to genetic mutations, a group of researchers is trying to identify more abnormalities among younger patients. The researchers are finding disease types that are treatable with existing medications, giving people hope they did not have before.

“The young are a population who need this kind of extra testing, turning over every rock to find that hidden genetic signature, which may be something you’ve heard of or something that you haven’t,” said Geoff Oxnard, an assistant professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.

Oxnard co-leads the Genomics of Young Lung Cancer Study, which was organized and funded by a former oil company executive who survived lung cancer in her 50s. Bonnie Addario, who also has

lost four family members to the disease, embraced unorthodox approaches to the study, recruiting subjects via social media and establishing a central clearinghouse for information from participating institutions. Typically, researchers don’t share data.

Seventy-four people have been tested to date, and 80 percent have some form of genetic alteration, said Barbara Gitlitz, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Southern Califor-

ERIN HULL FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Corey Wood, 23, underwent treatment for advanced lung cancer. She has never smoked.

nia’s Keck School of Medicine and the study’s other co-leader. Three targetable mutations are proving common, she said, and the next step would be a large epidemiological study to determine why young people are getting these types of lung cancers.

“Our goal and our belief system is that at some point we’re going to be able to manage lung cancer chronically by looking at the genomic subsets . . . and treat the disease by the genomic subsets,” Addario said. Should the study find a bigger population of young patients, researchers hope that pharmaceutical companies will do more to develop drugs specifically for them.

In the United States, lung cancer kills more people each year than any other cancer. The American Cancer Society estimates that it will claim more than 158,000 lives this year. The vast majority will be smokers 65 and older.

In younger people, finding ge-

netic mutations treatable with existing cancer medications should not be confused with a cure, even for those who fare well. Many are not diagnosed until their disease has progressed quite far, because healthy nonsmokers in their 20s don’t often see doctors. When they complain of symptoms, such as a persistent cough, physicians don’t tend to think of cancer and may treat them for bronchitis or pneumonia for an extended period.

And for some reason, Oxnard said, younger people with these forms of lung cancer fare worse than older patients. Finding an appropriate targeted treatment buys time — sometimes years — until a better medication can be developed or researchers are able to try new combinations of existing therapies.

This is a cancer “that you live with until the next discovery and the next discovery,” Oxnard said.

Maki Inada, a 43-year-old assistant biology professor at Ithaca College in New York, has defied expectations by surviving the lung cancer that was discovered seven years ago. She has one of the most common mutations, in the gene known as EGFR, and the drug erlotinib (Tarceva) kept her cancer-free until 2010.

“I thought I was done with cancer,” said Inada, who gave birth to a daughter in 2011. “It never really crossed my mind that I was still a cancer patient.”

But she became resistant to the treatment and suffered recurrences that led to surgeries to excise pieces of her left lung. Eventually, the entire lung was removed. Today, she is more cautious about assuming she has beaten the disease.

Within four months of starting treatment in the summer of 2014, Wood said, her chest scans were clear. The tumor behind her eye was treated with radiation before it could affect her vision.

In February, she received official notice that there was “no evidence of disease” in her body. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Canada moves closer to legal pot W ILLIAM M ARSDEN Montreal BY

F

or police forces across Canada, the month of August is harvest time.

Officers slip on their coveralls, grab thick gardening gloves, shoulder machetes and begin the annual ritual of chopping down marijuana plants hidden in cornfields, remote mountain valleys and forest clearings.

If growers are unlucky enough to be caught red-handed, they are cuffed and taken to court. Each police unit hits two or three of these hidden marijuana plantations, with the confiscated pot taken to incinerators. The destruction of marijuana plants goes on for about two weeks, and then it’s back to normal police work.

Has this war on pot worked?

“No, it hasn’t,” said Clive Weighill, chief of the Saskatoon police force, president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and a veteran of the August raids.

Times, however, are beginning to change in Canada.

The new Liberal government has promised to act quickly to legalize marijuana for general use, which would make Canada the first Group of 20 country to end cannabis prohibition on a national level.

Weighill is among those in favor. “We are looking to the United States and the Colorado experience, the Washington experience, and we hope to learn from that.”

The opposition Conservative Party strongly opposes legalization, arguing that it would make cannabis “more easily available to youth.” But faced with a large Liberal majority supported by the socialist New Democratic Party, the Conservatives are powerless to stop it.

Although the war on drugs in Canada has been nowhere near as dramatic as the ones waged in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and the United States, it has nonetheless involvedviolenceand consumed considerable financial and human resources. In the late 1990s in Montreal, a biker gang war claimed 165 lives and ended only after a reporter was shot seven times (he lived) and the Hells Angels threat-

JONATHAN HAYWARD/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The new government promises to make country the first G-20 nation to allow recreational use ened to assassinate politicians. The violence was all about the control of illegal drugs, including pot.

The Liberals point out that more than 600,000 Canadians have criminal records for simple possession of marijuana and it is a needless destruction of lives.

Each year, the federal government spends as much as 500 million Canadian dollars (roughly $374 million) on drug enforcement and prosecution, according to the auditor general. About 50 million Canadian dollars go to raiding marijuana plantations.

Yet a large number of people still use cannabis. For about a decade, studies have shown that pastyear use among Canadians ages 15 to 24 is the highest in the developed world, with a recent study putting the rate at 24.6 percent.

For adults 25 and over, the figure drops to 8 percent.

“Our system is badly, badly flawed,” said Eugene Oscapella, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and a longtime advocate for legalization. “I keep asking my-

self a question that I have been asking for 30 years: ‘Could we have done a worse job if we tried? Could we have found a way to create more dysfunction than we managed to create?’ ” The Canadian Center on Substance Abuse, which is federally funded, has cautioned against rushing into legalization. After a fact-finding mission to Colorado and Washington, the organization’s answer was to “go slow.”

“We have to be clear on what our goal is, why are we doing this,” said Rebecca Jesseman, a specialist in performance mechanisms. “Are we looking to promote public health? Are we looking to reduce youth access? Are we looking to cut out the black market? What is the primary goal, because that will also help us shape regulations, monitor our progress towards that goal and monitor our success.”

One of the more important lessons from Colorado was that the state appears to have lacked a sense of clear purpose and finds itself unable to control a growing

Thousands attend a pro-legalization event in Vancouver on April 20 (or 4/20, a number that is symbolic of marijuana use).

industry that is clearly targeting young people, Jesseman said.

“They are selling cannabis as candy,” she said, referring to products laced with THC (the main psychoactive element in cannabis).

Canada legalized medical marijuana about 15 years ago. Canada’s health department has so far issued 26 production and distribution licenses to about 20 companies.

Recent mergers and acquisitions indicate an industry consolidation as companies compete for a bigger share of a still-developing business, which Canada’s health department claims has about 450,000 potential daily customers.

At current prices, that represents an industry worth 1.2 billion Canadian dollars — about $900 million.

Canopy Growth, which operates out of a former Hershey’s chocolate factory in the small town of Smiths Falls, Ontario, recently bought two additional medical pot producers and is eager to expand into the recreational market.

So too are investors. When Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won the October election, Canopy’s stock price jumped to $3.65, from $1.50, before falling back to the $2.30-$2.50 range, which puts the company’s value at about 220 million Canadian dollars (roughly $164 million).

Canopy, the largest medical marijuana company in Canada, has 7,300 registered medical customers and is “very well positioned” to jump into the recreational market, company founder and chief executive Bruce Linton said.

“We already have been ramping up to be ready for that,” he said.

He said the medical marijuana production model should be transferred to general use.

Law professor Oscapella, however, looks at the growth of companies like Canopy as a potential nightmare. He fears the concentration of corporate power into “Big Pot,” with the kind of vested interests associated with global alcohol and tobacco companies.

“My goal is to have what is inevitable in our society be as safe as possible and to try to discourage harmful use,” he said. “That is very different from what big industry would want with cannabis.” n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Cubans stream north into U.S. Fear of a possible end to privileges the U.S. has given to Cubans spurs huge migration influx

N ICK M IROFF Havana BY

A

year after President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro announced with great fanfare their plans to normalize relations, an old source of tension has stubbornly returned, with a rush of Cubans trying to get to the United States.

The number of unauthorized Cubans arriving in the United States nearly doubled in fiscal 2015, rising to 43,159 from 24,278 the previous year, according to U.S. border officials, and the surge appears to be accelerating. The vast majority are coming not in rickety boats or rafts but right through U.S. ports of entry at the border with Mexico. Combined with the more than 20,000 who are issued immigration visas annually under existing accords, it amounts to the largest influx of Cubans into the United States in decades.

“It is three times as large as the rafter crisis of 1994,” said Miami immigrationlawyerWilfredoAllen.

Not since the Mariel boatlift of 1980, he said, when 125,000 landed in South Florida, have so many Cubans headed north.

The migration wave has complicated the Obama administration’s plans to overcome decades of bitter relations with the governments of Fidel and Raúl Castro. It has also revealed the acute sensitivity on the island to any talk — even rumors — of a possible end to the immigration privileges the United States has extended to Cubans for the past 50 years.

The flood of migrants is creating — on a far smaller scale — the kinds of scenes that Europe has experienced as Middle Eastern and South Asian migrants have poured over the borders. As many as 4,000 U.S.-bound Cubans have become stranded in Costa Rica since last month, when Nicaragua stopped letting them pass through. One thousand overwhelmed a tiny Panamanian border town, where officials declared a “sanitary emergency” because there wasn’t enough food, water or shelter. Others are held at immi-

Number of unauthorized Cubans who entered the U.S. In addition to the 20,000 Cubans issued U.S. immigration visas each year, more than 43,000 unauthorized Cuban migrants arrived during the government’s 2015 fiscal year, most coming through Mexico. The Coast Guard picked up nearly 4,500 at sea.

43,159

30,000

20

10

0

2005

2010

2015

Note: Fiscal years start in October.

Sources: Pew Research Center; U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security THE WASHINGTON POST

grant detention centers in Mexico.

Like the asylum seekers streaming into Europe, the Cuban travelers rely on smartphones and social media to share the latest travel information and to keep in touch with friends and relatives who can wire money. A few hire smuggling guides, but most appear to journey in large groups.

So many Cubans are on the move that authorities in Havana and in countries across the region are tightening travel rules. Central American nations are reinforcing their borders. Ecuador has announced new visa requirements for Cubans, sparking rare protests in Havana.

Old and new factors are driving the outflow, from the island’s perpetually pitiful wages to the extraordinary sight of Obama and Castro shaking hands and the American flag flying outside the U.S. Embassy in Havana.

Those images were widely cheered on the island. But they also set off alarms.

Cubans have a saying, “Lo que te den, cógelo,” for the moment when a coveted item such as chicken or laundry detergent arrives at one of the neighborhood bodegas where government rations are distributed. It means, roughly, “Whatever they’re giving, take it.”

It is a rational response to the chronic scarcities of a state-run economy. But the phrase also applies to fleeting moments of opportunity and a particularly Cuban determination to seize them.

Embraced as refugees from totalitarianism, Cubans have for 50 years enjoyed perks offered by the U.S. government to no other immigrant group. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 includes the “wet-foot, dry-foot” rule, which essentially bestows U.S. residency and welfare benefits on any islander who touches American soil.

Cuban American lawmakers are calling for a tightening of the rules, adding to fears of the act’s demise.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) say American generosity is being abused by Cuban migrants who obtain U.S. residency and then begin traveling back to the island to ferry merchandise, run small businesses or get cheap dental work.

To the Obama administration, those Cubans can be agents of change who spread democratic values and a spirit of entrepreneurialism. But older emigres say those circular travel habits make a mockery of the idea that Cubans are so uniquely oppressed that they deserve their own system of

political asylum.

The noise of this debate has reached the island, joining the buzz about mending U.S.-Cuba relations. Now, the rush is on.

Cubans have been streaming north by land, sea and air all year.

The U.S. Coast Guard picked up 4,462 at sea during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 and has retrieved more than 900 since then.

Several thousand asylum-seeking Cubans have landed in Miami, flying via the Bahamas or Cayman Islands with European passports issued in recent years to the descendants of Spanish immigrants.

The largest number have come overland from Ecuador, traveling by bus and taxi through Colombia, Central America and Mexico to reach the United States.

U.S. officials insist that the Cuban Adjustment Act will remain unchanged, not least because its repeal would require an act of Congress. Obama has the power to alter elements of it, but State Department officials, in their regularly held migration talks recently with Cuban diplomats, reiterated that the policy is not up for debate.

Cuban authorities say the Adjustment Act is a huge obstacle to normal relations, and the Castro government has announced that it would reinstate exit visa requirements for most of the island’s doctors, only three years after Raúl Castro eliminated the widely despised travel restrictions.

Cuba has tens of thousands of medical professionals deployed on “missions” around the world, some taking part in humanitarian relief efforts in countries such as Haiti, and others in Brazil, Angola, Qatar and other nations that pay for their services, providing a major source of revenue to the Castro government.

A U.S. program created in 2006 that offers special assistance to Cuban doctors who defect from those missions is a particular sore point for Havana, which singled it out for scorn in a statement issued Tuesday.

So many doctors have left — 1,000 a year, by some estimates — that staffing at Cuban hospitals and clinics has suffered. n

T Another mass shooting was over. The country had moved on. But inside one house in Oregon, a family was discovering the unending extent of a wound.

COVER STORY

S

BY ELI SASLOW in Roseburg, Ore.

he approached her daughter just as the doctors and psychologists had suggested: calmly, deliberately, stepping on the carpet so the floorboards didn’t squeak, picking her way around the wheelchair, the walker, the sagging balloons and wilted flowers.

She held her arms out in front where her daughter could see them. She announced her arrival so as not to surprise her.

“It’s just me, your mom,” she said, and then she reached out to place a reassuring hand on her daughter’s back, making sure to touch below the bullet wound and away from the incision.

“I was thinking, if you’re ready for it, maybe I’d make a quick run to the store,” said Bonnie Schaan, 52.

“Wait. For how long?” asked Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, 16.

“Not long. Are you ready to be alone? I’m not sure.”

It had been 20 days since the last time Bonnie left Cheyeanne by herself — 20 days since she was shot along with 15 others in a classroom at Umpqua Community College. Nine people were killed that day, adding to the hundreds of Americans who have died in mass shootings in recent years.Andsevenpeoplewerewoundedbutdidn’t die, joining the ever-expanding ranks of massshooting survivors. There are thousands of them.

Fifty-eight gunshot survivors at the movie theaterinAurora,Colo.ThreeattheWashingtonNavy Yard. One at a church in Charleston, S.C. Nine in Colorado Springs. Twenty-one in San Bernardino, Calif. And seven more in Roseburg, Ore., where Cheyeanne had been sent home from the hospital to a flea- infested rental with reinforced locks and curtains darkening the living room.

A doctor had given her a booklet called “Creating a Safe Space to Recover,” and Bonnie had taken a break from waitressing to become a full-time caregiver. She had turned a $5 garagesale recliner into Cheyeanne’s hospital bed and postedasignontheirfrontdoor:“Noloudnoises!

Please do NOT knock.” She had set her alarm for every four hours to bring Cheyeanne her medicines and anything else that might make her feel

PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, 16, has her temperature taken by a physical therapist. She survived the Oct. 1 mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore.

safe again. Here came more Percocet to numb the pain and anti-anxieties to ease her panic attacks.

Here came her purple blanket, her new puppy and her condolence letter from President Obama. Here came the old Little League baseball bats she wanted nearby for protection and the rifle she had used to kill her first deer.

“I’m talking about five minutes,” Bonnie said. “We need juice and ice.”

“Fine. Go,” Cheyeanne said.

She had been the youngest one shot on just her fourth day of college, and she was also one of the survivors in the worst shape: Lung punctured. Kidney pierced. Ribs cracked.

Nerves compressed. Stomach stapled. Abdominals torn. She couldn’t yet sleep flat in bed, or walk unassisted, or do much of anything beyond lie in the recliner on her left side. “Very lucky, considering,” was what she had been told by one trauma medic, who specialized in treating soldiers after combat. But Cheyeanne had signed up for Writing 115, not a war, and the idea of luck hadn’t occurred to her yet.

“Do you want me to call someone to come sit with you?” Bonnie asked.

“No. Jesus. I can take care of myself.”

“Blinds opened or closed?”

“Damn it, Mom. Just go!”

Bonnie grabbed her coat and opened the door. She could see the market across the street.

“You’ll be okay?” she asked, but Cheyeanne din’t answer.

his, she was realizing more and more, was the role of a survivor in a mass shooting: to be okay, to get better, to exemplify resilience for a country always rushing to heal and continue on. There had been a public vigil during her surgery, a news conference when she was upgraded from critical to stable and then a small celebration when she was sent home after two weeks with a handmade card signed by the hospital staff. “Strong and Moving On,” it had read.

By then, the college had reopened. What remained of her Writing 115 class had been moved across campus to an airy art building with windows that looked out on Douglas firs. They were forging ahead and coming back stronger, always stronger. That’s what the college dean had said.

Except inside the rental, where every day was just like the one before: awake again in the recliner. Asleep again in the recliner. Cheyeanne dressed in the same baggy pajamas that hung loose and away from her wounds. She was wrapped in an abdominal binder that helped hold her major organs in place. Her hair was greasy because her injuries made it painful to take a bath. Five medications sat on the coffee table,nexttoabucketshereachedforwhenthose medicines made her throw up. She couldn’t go back to school, or play her guitar, or drive her truck, or hold a long conversation without losing her breath, so she mostly sat in silence and thought about the same seven minutes everyone else was so purposefully moving past. The shooter was standing over her. The hollow-point bullet was burning through her upper back.

She wanted to talk about it. She needed to tell someone who knew her — someone other than a psychologist — what she’d been thinking ever since that day: “I just lied there. I didn’t save anybody. I couldn’t even get up off the ground.”

But what everyone else around her seemed to want was for the shooting to be over and for her to be better, so they came to urge her along at all hours of the day and night.

In came the assistant district attorney with a bouquet of flowers and a check for $7,200 in victim restitution. “On to better days,” he said.

In came her best friend, Savannah, with a special anti-stress coloring book. “For your nightmares,” she said.

In came Bonnie, always Bonnie, rushing between the kitchen and the living room, her eyes bloodshot from sleep deprivation and hands shaking from a heart condition. “Think positive. Think positive,” she said, because a therapist had suggested that as a mantra.

In came one of her brothers, Raimey, 24.

“Can I get you something?” he asked. And then in came her other brother, Jessy, carrying two large boxes and handing one to her. “A present,” he said. “Open it.” She lifted the lid and reached inside, removing what looked like a small gun.

She had owned guns since she was 6, when her father had given her a hot-pink youth model .22 for Christmas. She’d killed her first deer at 12 and another two years later. “A gun person all the way,” she had said of herself, and now she was fingering the trigger of what was not a real gun but a replica, a self-defense weapon designed to shoot lasers and pepper spray. Her palm found the barrel. Her index finger found the trigger.

“It’s got a nice feel to it, right?” Jessy said, as Cheyeanne began to think about the last time she had been this close to a gun.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

13

COVER STORY “It’s small enough you could put it in your purse for school,” Jessy said, and suddenly Cheyeanne was smelling salt, metal and blood.

It had smelled nothing like deer.

“Do you want me to set it up for you?” Jessy asked, and Cheyeanne shook her head. She put the weapon back in the box. “Not yet. Thanks.”

They turned the TV to an old Western. It got dark, and Jessy left. “Do you want to watch something else?” Bonnie asked, but Cheyeanne wasn’t paying attention. She was still thinking about the school. She had told the story of those seven minutes only once, to the psychologist from Veterans Affairs while Bonnie sat nearby, and before Cheyeanne had finished Bonnie’s pacemaker had started acting up. “This is too hard for me to hear,” she had said, and then she had gone outside to feed their hens. Now Cheyeanne decided to try again.

“The thing I keep thinking about is how that bastard stepped on me,” she said.

Bonnie shifted on the couch. She flicked dust off the armrest. She noticed a dirty plate on Cheyeanne’s bedside table and reached over to grab it.

“Like I wasn’t even human,” Cheyeanne said.

“Like I was nothing.”

Bonnie stood up. “Can I get you something?

Maybe some juice?” She walked into the kitchen beforeCheyeannecouldanswerandfilledaglass.

She could feel her heart trying to accelerate and the pacemaker working in her chest. She reached into the freezer to add ice cubes to Cheyeanne’s drink, but the bag had frozen into one gigantic mass. She called out to Cheyeanne in the living room. “I’m going to break apart some ice,” she said. “You’re going to hear a few loud bangs.”

“How many bangs?” Cheyeanne asked. Bonnie lifted the bag up over her head. “One or two,” she said. She dropped it onto the counter. Bang.

She lifted it again. Bang.

Cheyeanne covered her ears. She grimaced and stared at her phone.

Bang.

Her eyes went wide. “What the hell was that?” she screamed. “What was the third bang?”

“It’s still stuck together,” Bonnie said. “Get ready for another.”

Bang.

“Jesus. How many more?”

Bang, bang, and by the time Bonnie returned to the living room, Cheyeanne had lifted her legs into her chest and pulled the blanket up to her head.

“S

omebody get me the hell out of here,” Cheyeanne was saying one afternoon.

“I don’t even care where I go. I just need to leave.”

Bonnie brought Cheyeanne an outfit. She helped tie her shoes. She loaded the walker and the wheelchair into the car. She cushioned the passenger seat with pillows so Cheyeanne could lie down on her side. She put a baseball bat within reach behind the seat. Then off they went for drive-through coffees.

Bonnie had always considered Cheyeanne, her third and final child, to be the most capable

member of their family — its true “independent adult,” she said. Raimey was awaiting a court date on a drug charge, and Jessy had also fought addiction before getting a good job and steadying his life. Cheyeanne was the one who stayed away from drugs, who helped track the family finances, who cared for their pets, who figured out how to fix her own truck, who was always in a hurry to grow up and move away. She had dropped out of high school midway through her sophomore year, scored well on her GED and then enrolled in community college — the first in her family to go. On the second day of class she had decided she wanted to become a nurse.

On the third day she had said maybe neonatal.

On the fourth day she had shown up early for Writing 115 and came home utterly dependent.

On Cheyeanne’s only other trip out of the house since coming home, she had tried going to the mall with friends who offered to push her wheelchair, and she had ended up back in the hospital, dehydrated and running a fever. But now she was feeling good and wanted to stay out.

“I need a new sweatshirt,” she said, because she had lost 20 pounds since the surgery and none of herclothesfit.BonniedroveCheyeannetoastore she liked and lifted the wheelchair from the trunk. She rolled Cheyeanne toward the entrance, but it was an old store with no ramp. She tried to lift the chair over the curb and fell just short. The metal frame banged back against her ankle, and the wheel slammed down on her foot.

“What was that?” Cheyeanne asked. “Nothing,”

Top, Bonnie Schaan cries as she calls friends and family while trying to figure out if her daughter will ever be okay.

Above, Cheyeanne tries to sleep as her dog, Sounder, stands guard.

She often wakes up to sore ribs, nausea or nightmares.

KLMNO WEEKLY

Bonnie answered, as a welt rose up on her leg.

She gritted her teeth and lifted the chair over the curb again. They waited at the door for someone to open it. They wheeled circles through tight clothing racks. The women’s sweatshirts were upstairs. The store had no escalator or elevator.

“Screw this,” Cheyeanne said, climbing out of the chair, starting up the stairs on foot.

“What are you doing?” Bonnie said, chasing after her.

“I’m fine,” Cheyeanne said, but now she was halfway up and out of breath. Her right leg buckled. She leaned hard on the railing.

“You can’t do this,” Bonnie said.

“Stop telling me what to do!” Cheyeanne said, and now she was at the top of the stairs, where there were no women’s sweatshirts either. “Are you kidding me?” she said. Her legs began to wobble. She wheezed and gasped for air. Her chest expanded and her ribs throbbed.

She turned around, went back downstairs and collapsed into the chair.

“Get me out of here,” she demanded, and Bonnie hurried over to push the wheelchair.

“Move!” Cheyeanne said, and Bonnie searched for a path back through the racks.

“Jesus! Are you this stupid? Can’t you do anything right?” Cheyeanne shouted, as Bonnie tried to navigate the curb again, her body buckling under the weight of a 16-year-old girl and a 50-pound wheelchair, its frame slamming back into her ankle.

“Hey, I’m a waitress, not a nurse,” Bonnie said. “Quit giving me alligator ass. I’m trying.”

She loaded Cheyeanne back into the car and started to fold the wheelchair so it would fit in the trunk. She pushed the sides together, but the chair wouldn’t fold. She tried again and nothing happened.

“Are you serious?” Cheyeanne said, watching her. “How many times until you figure this out?

Lift and then pull. Lift and then pull. How hard is that?”

“Okay. Thanks,” Bonnie said. She stepped back and studied the chair. Think positive, she thought to herself. She pulled and then lifted.

The chair didn’t move.

Cheyeanne stepped out of the car. She stumbled and caught herself on the door. She pushed Bonnie away and reached for the wheelchair.

“Stop. I’ll do it,” she said. “Apparently you’re too stupid to figure it out.”

S

he knew how she could sound in those moments. “Sorry, Mom,” she would eventually say after each outburst, but another always came. The fact was it felt good to be angry, to yell and curse, because if she wasn’t angry then she was mostly afraid: of nightmares, of being alone, of the shadows in the church parking lot across the street, of cars backfiring, of the sound of knocking coming now at the door.

“What the hell is that?” she said, twisting deeper into the recliner, covering her ears.

It was Dustin, one of her brother Raimey’s friends. “Oh, hey, Chy,” he said. He looked her over, taking account of her injuries. “Would it be okay if I asked you some questions about it? continues on next page

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

I’m kind of curious.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That would be good.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

She sat in the recliner and waited. Maybe she couldn’t get her mother to listen to what had happened in the classroom, but Dustin wanted to know. Other than the psychologist, only one person had asked her about it directly, a hospital nurse who wondered what it felt like to get shot.

Everyone else had come with balloons and greeting cards with slogans about courage and perseverance without ever asking how, exactly, she had persevered or if, in fact, she had been courageous. Dustin would ask. She would tell him.

She adjusted her heating pad and took a Percocet. Dustin went into Raimey’s bedroom and locked the door. He came back out and walked past her to the porch. She watched him smoke a cigarette and dance to music nobody else could hear. She watched him go back to her brother’s bedroom, this time for more than an hour. She took a second Percocet. She practiced standing up from the chair with the support of herwalkerandthensittingbackdown,justasthe physical therapist had taught her. Dustin came back into the living room, this time wearing headphones. He pulled at the fuzz on his socks.

“Mom, I’m starving,” Cheyeanne said. Her right leg had gone numb. Her side ached. “Why isn’t there any food in this house?” she said. “I want Chinese.”

“Okay, honey,” Bonnie said, and since Raimey and Dustin were there and Cheyeanne wouldn’t have to be alone, Bonnie got in her car and drove to a takeout restaurant. Sunlight flooded the truck. She rolled down the window.

“Air,” she said.

She picked up the Chinese and drove it home to Cheyeanne. The chicken was too spicy for her. The rice wasn’t as sticky as she liked it.

“I lost my appetite,” she said. “Get this stuff away from me.”

Bonnie turned on the TV as Dustin emerged again from Raimey’s room. It had been eight hours since he had told Cheyeanne he wanted to hear about the shooting. “Are we going to talk or what?” Cheyeanne asked him. He stared back at her blankly. He shrugged his shoulders.

She watched him go back to her brother’s room for another hour. She watched him come out again and eat her leftover Chinese.

“Dustin has to leave,” Cheyeanne told Bonnie. “He’s bothering me.”

“I never got to ask my questions,” he told Cheyeanne, but now she didn’t want to talk to him anyway because it was getting dark and soon she would be trying to sleep. “I can’t talk about this right before bed,” she said.

S

he had so many reasons to be afraid, to be angry. Meanwhile, Bonnie could feel the battery running low inside her fourth pacemaker, and what she needed most of all was to stay calm. She took her Valium. She scheduled an extra visit with her heart doctor.

She repeated her mantra. She worked to memorize the names of Cheyeanne’s 11 new doctors, and when she continued to forget she wrote

them down on her hand.

She had spent much of her life dealing with crisis: pregnant at 17, an abusive relationship, eight heart surgeries, jail for one son and addiction for the other. She wore a locket around her neck that Jessy had given to her: “A mother understands what a child never has to say,” it read, and somehow Bonnie had known what to do on the morning of the shooting, too. “Where are you?” she had texted Cheyeanne in those first minutes. “ANSWER!” she had texted again. And then even though UCC was directing all parents to meet at the fairgrounds, Bonnie had driven instead to the local emergency room. She had arrived just in time to see a stretcher rolling by into surgery, and on that stretcher was Cheyeanne — blood caked into her hair, clothes cut off, a medic asking her to repeat her birth date in an attempt to keep her awake.

Bonnie had spent the past weeks trying to forget those images. She knew her daughter needed to talk about the shooting, but she didn’t think she could deal with hearing it. “It’s pure evil, and it gives me the shakes,” Bonnie had told her own doctor. It was hard enough for her to sit through Cheyeanne’s medical consults and hear her daughter discussed in clinical terms, each appointment bringing a new revelation about what recovery would require.

Her right leg was buckling because of damage to her sciatic nerve, the physical therapist said.

Her anger and insomnia suggested a possi-

Top, Cheyeanne storms inside the house, screaming and hitting her mother after an argument. She has been angry since the shooting, and sometimes the anger surprises even her. Above, Cheyeanne grabs the wall as she briefly loses her balance after a long day of walking around. .

ble anxiety disorder, a psychologist said.

Her high pulse needed to be examined by a specialist, the home nurse said.

A small piece of the bullet was still embedded in her rib, where it would remain, the urologist said.

“Positive thinking leads to positive results,” Bonnie said to Cheyeanne as they prepared to leave for one of the five doctor appointments they had scheduled for a single day. She drove them to the hospital and they met with the surgeon, who took X-rays and noticed more fluid building in her lungs. “Something to watch,” he said, explaining that she would need to come back for another follow-up. If there was still fluid, they would go in and drain it.

Bonnie pushed Cheyeanne back toward the office lobby, and she banged the side of the wheelchair against the frame of the door. “You idiot. You’re unbelievable,” Cheyeanne said, taking control of the chair with her arms, wheeling herself toward the exit. Bonnie stopped at the front desk, and the receptionist handed her paperwork. “How about you don’t spell my name wrong this time, okay?” Cheyeanne said. She sat in her wheelchair and tapped her foot against the floor. “Jesus. Hurry up,” she said a minute later. “Do you need me to do it for you?”

“I think she’s doing just fine, thanks,” the receptionist said, glaring at Cheyeanne.

“Screw this. I’m going downstairs,” Cheyeanne said. She wheeled to the door, kicked it open and disappeared into the hall.

Bonnie looked up at the receptionist and smiled. “Sorry about us,” she said.

“I know she has a right to be angry, but are you okay?” the receptionist asked.

“Yeah. I am,” Bonnie said, but she set the paperwork on the counter and started to shake her head.

“Yeah. I really am,” she said again, but now her hands were shaking and she was beginning to cry. The receptionist reached over to touch her arm. “What’s going on?” she said, and since no one else had asked, Bonnie began to explain what her life had become. The tiptoeing. The whispering. The alligator ass. The cursing. The panic attacks. The baseball bats in the living room and the guns in the bedroom. The way Cheyeanne would twitch and grimace and then cry out for her in the night, reaching for her hand, asking her to stay close, until the night ended and the sun rose and Cheyeanne cursed and pushed her away.

“She didn’t used to be like this,” Bonnie said.

“Every day just rolls into the next day, and none of them get better. I’m not seeing my daughter anywhere. Does that make sense? Is that crazy?”

“No. That’s not crazy, ” the receptionist said, and she started to say something more, but Bonnie interrupted.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she said. “I’m a waitress, okay? I don’t know where I’m supposed to draw the line with her and what willmakeherbetterorwhatwillmakeherworse.

She’s scared. She’s angry. She doesn’t listen. Everybody is moving on, and we’re supposed to be getting back to normal and I think she’s getting

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

15

COVER STORY worse. We need help. That’s what I’m saying. We need help right now, because I don’t know what she’s going to do. I can’t take this much longer.

My heart — okay? I run on batteries — okay?

We’re coming right up to the edge.”

Her cellphone started to ring. It was Cheyeanne. She took a deep breath and answered.

“Hi, Chy-Chy,” she said. On the other end of the line there was muffled yelling. “I know, Chy. I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m coming. I’ll be right there.”

Bonnie put the phone back in her purse and thanked the receptionist. “I have to go,” she said, and the receptionist handed her a number for a psychologist, in case she wanted to call.

Bonnie hurried out to the hall and took the elevator downstairs and saw her daughter sitting in her wheelchair — bullet in her rib, back hunched, fists clenched, fluid building in her lungs. “Think positive,” Bonnie thought to herself. She walked over and put her hand on Cheyeanne’s back, just below the bullet wound, just away from the incision. “I’m here,” she said.

“What took you so long?” Cheyeanne said. “Is there something wrong?”

“No, it’s just that you know me with paperwork,”Bonnie said,laughingatherself,wheeling Cheyeanne out the door. “I didn’t understand some of the questions. I’m a little bit slow.”

“Yeah,” Cheyeanne said. “No shit.”

“B

astard shot me in the back.”

Cheyeanne was trying again. It was the same detail she had told her mother, but this time she was saying it to Raimey as he walked by her in the living room. If it couldn’t be Bonnie, or Dustin, or anyone else in a town that was moving on, then maybe Raimey would stop for a minute and listen. He had headphones in his ears. “Hey, sis,” he said.

“He shot me in the back,” she said again.

Raimey slowed down and pulled out one of his ear buds. “Can I get you something?” he asked. He started to walk away into the kitchen.

“No. Jesus,” she said. “Sit down, will you?”

Raimey came back into the room and leaned against the armrest of the couch. He took out his ear buds. “What’s up?” he said.

“When you see me sitting here, I’m always thinking about the same thing,” she said, and then when he didn’t get up she began to tell him about her writing class: 35 or so people. And her seat: “back right corner, furthest from the door.” And her teacher: a man in his late 60s who had just distributed a handout when they heard two deafening bangs. A young man Cheyeanne didn’t recognize came through the classroom door carrying a backpack and two handguns. “I’ve been waiting for this,” he said, and before Cheyeanne could make sense of what he meant or what was happening, he had walked to within a few feet of the teacher, pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. “One shot and then blood,” Cheyeanne said.

“Jesus,” Raimey said, putting down his remote-controlled car, sliding off the armrest onto the couch.

“He was almost casual about it,” Cheyeanne said, describing how the shooter had ordered

the students to gather in the center of the room.

She began to tell Raimey how she had huddled next to her friend, Ana, and how she had watched from the floor as the gunman shot a woman pleading in her wheelchair, and then a man who said, “I’m so sorry for whatever happened that made you this way,” and then a woman who tipped over her desk and ducked for cover. He had kept going into his backpack to reload. Cheyeanne had stayed on the ground as blood pooled closer, and then as footsteps came closer, too. She had reached for Ana’s hand. She had felt that hand flinch when Ana got shot. She had heard the shooter move above her and then felt the burn of the bullet and wetness on her back. She had closed her eyes and wished for shock, but it had never come.

“What’s your religion?” the shooter had asked, once it was clear she was still alive, and she had toldhimthatshedidn’tknow,thatshewas16and needed time to figure it out. “I don’t want to die,” she said, and for some reason he had given her a chance. “Get up and I’ll shoot somebody else,” he said. She tried to push herself off the floor, but her leg wouldn’t move. “Get up,” he said, but this time he was standing on her arm, pinning her down.

“Getup,”hesaidagain,butallshecoulddowaslie there next to her injured friend and wait for the next bullet. She knew it was coming. Any second now. But instead what came were sounds at the classroom door, and the shooter ran over to look.

Then there were voices down the hall, and more gunshots, and then the shooter was back into the

Top, Cheyeanne cries at Mercy Medical Center after checking herself back into the hospital with continued pain from the gunshot wound. Above, Cheyeanne takes a selfie with her boyfriend, Dan Talbert, during her birthday party at Abby’s Legendary Pizza.

KLMNO WEEKLY

classroom and pointing the gun at his head, pulling the trigger.

“That’s when I got hysterical,” she told Raimey now. “I was coughing and spitting up all this blood. I basically knew I was going to die.”

“Oh, man. Chy,” Raimey said. He sat on the couch and looked over at her. She had her baseball bats nearby, her pink hunting knife, her replica gun. He had accused her once of exaggerating her trauma to take advantage of Bonnie’s sympathy. “Milking it,” he had said then. Now he wasn’t sure what to tell her. “I’m sorry,” he said, finally. “I had no idea you were strong like that.”

She looked back at him. She adjusted her blanket.

“I wasn’t strong. That’s the thing,” she said. “I couldn’t even get up. I just laid there, like nothing.”

She leaned her head back against the recliner andclosedhereyes.Raimeystoodfromthecouch and came over to her chair. He reached down to grab the puppy and set it in her lap. “What do you need?” he asked. “What can I get you?”

“Nothing,” she said, and now the anger was gone and her voice was quiet. She had said it.

She had finally told someone, and wasn’t that supposed to be progress in the life of a survivor?

Wasn’t that resilience, recovery, moving on?

Then how come she still felt anything but okay?

She grabbed her blanket and pulled it up to her neck. She took out her coloring book and started filling in a dragon.

Bang.

“What was that,” Cheyeanne said, sitting back up in the chair. Bang, bang. Somebody was knocking at the door. It was Dustin. “Oh, sorry.

No knocking,” he said, letting himself in.

“Ugh, you scared me,” Cheyeanne said. Outside it was getting dark. The street lamp was casting shadows against the house and headlights from the road reflected off their window.

She pulled the blanket up a little higher and returned to her coloring book.

Bang, bang. More knocking.

“Jesus,” Cheyeanne said, twisting onto her side, clutching at her chest. It was Raimey’s girlfriend. “Sorry, Chy,” she said.

Bang. Cheyeanne covered her ears. “What the hell?” she screamed. It was Dustin again.

“Whoops,” he said.

“I can’t breathe,” Cheyeanne said, and Bonnie rushed in with water. She opened up the shades and Cheyeanne looked out the window, where now she could see somebody wandering in the parking lot of the church across the street. It was just another one of Raimey’s friends, but Cheyeanne didn’t recognize him.

All she could see was that he was young. He was tall. He was holding something in his hand. A handbag? A backpack? “Who’s that?” she asked, squeezing the armrests of her recliner. “What does he want? Where is he going?”

He was on their lawn.

He was at the porch.

He was coming toward the door.

“Stop!” Cheyeanne said. He was knocking, knocking, knocking.

“Mom!” she cried, forcing herself up from the recliner. “Mom, help! Please. I need you.” n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

16

KLMNO WEEKLY

BUSINESS

Tony Hsieh rid Zappos of bosses. What now?

When there is no corporate ladder to climb L ILLIAN C UNNINGHAM Las Vegas BY

O

OLIVER MUNDAY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

n Tony Hsieh’s desk, next to a jumble of trinkets and three Coke Zeros, is a stack of books topped by “Rocket: Eight Lessons to Secure Infinite Growth.” Aside from the title, with its pitch to the executive suite, you would never guess this was the chief executive’s work spot, defined as it is by the same low cubicle partitions as any other desk at Zappos.

Zappos disrupted retailing 15 years ago when it launched as an e-commerce platform for selling shoes, focusing its strategy on customer service in the form of friendly call centers as well as free shipping and returns. Hsieh projected this year that profits would nearly double in 2015, to $97 million. But there’s another reason people are studying the company these days: Its nearly 1,500 employees are operating without any managers.

Hsieh decided about a year ago to get rid of all bosses. And as the holiday crunch continues, many are watching how that decision is holding up under the strain of the retail industry’s most important and demanding season. No one reports to anyone anymore. Instead, employees self-manage and belong to different decisionmaking circles that keep the company operating. It’s called a “holacracy.”

Much has been made of Hsieh’s organizational daring. And many wonder: Is this experiment to create a supervisor-free workplace really working? But a more fundamental question might be: Why is he doing this?

That copy of “Rocket” might be

a clue.

The first thing to understand about Hsieh’s decision to introduce self-management to Zappos is that he sees it as a strategy, not an experiment. According to Hsieh, the restructuring is ultimately in service of an expansion into new industries. The longterm goal, he says, is to move Zappos beyond shoes or clothing or even e-commerce.

And blowing up the internal CEO Tony Hsieh says getting rid of bosses was a way to encourage employees to act like entrepreneurs.

bureaucracy is the first step.

He has long been interested in leadership and organizational research. He wrote a book on workplace culture, “Delivering Happiness,” five years ago to outline his philosophy on the topic. Hsieh’s first opportunity to shape an organization of his own came in 1996 when, at 23, he co-founded the Internet company LinkExchange. He sold it little more than two years later to Microsoft for $265 million.

In some ways, that wealth affords him the luxury of radical experimentation at Zappos. The shoe company’s headquarters seem a bit like a child’s dreamscape. On a fall day, old videogame music is piped outside through courtyard speakers, and employees play a live-action version of Pac-Man, donning cos-

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

17

TRENDS tumes and weaving their way through a maze. Inside, the decor echoes the colorful kitsch of downtown Las Vegas, where the company is now based. The office is a labyrinth of modular workspaces, disguised beneath several layers of arcade toys and decorations from holidays that have gone by, then come again.

But Hsieh is as tactical as he is whimsical. And to him, the new organizational structure is a competitive move.

“I guess in some ways it’s analogous to Virgin, where they started out in music and now they do airlines and a hundred other businesses,” Hsieh said. But where Virgin is “about being hip and cool,” he says, Zappos would keep its hallmark — customer service — at the crux of its new ventures. His corporate strategy team is looking to identify areas where the focus on a great customer experience could help Zappos disrupt and dominate a new market.

The team has brainstormed entering classic service industries, with something like a Zappos hotel or airline. And it has explored, seemingly in some depth, “even crazy stuff, like porta-potties,” Hsieh said, which is a $2 billion-ayear industry in the United States.

Although Hsieh may see customer service as the thread binding any new ventures, Scott Galloway, a branding expert and a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says that focus is unlikely to help Zappos transition to industries so far afield. “It’s lazy and naive to think that your brand could carry the day,” Galloway said. “This is an execution question.”

A more realistic expansion, Galloway offered, would be something like call centers or e-commerce platforms that Zappos could sell to other businesses.

Even at Virgin, he said, far more ideas have failed than succeeded.

And even Nike, with greater brand resonance and reach than Zappos, hasn’t broadened beyond sports and apparel.

But mastering the execution, to Hsieh’s thinking, is precisely where holacracy comes in.

He sees bureaucratic structure as the big hurdle to any company’s ability to transform itself and stay relevant as the market shifts.

If he could create an organization with the freedom to morph continually to fit new missions, Hsieh

posits, then he might have found a way to broaden the industries it can play in as well.

In lieu of bosses and a hierarchical management structure, Zappos comprises about 500 “circles” — each essentially a working group or committee of several employees.

Hsieh says the circles could ultimately represent new business lines or start-ups within Zappos.

The dismantling of management-by-supervisor, according to Hsieh, is a way to “really just have everyone at Zappos act like an entrepreneur.” By smashing the corporate ladder, he is hoping to keep and attract a specific kind of worker — the kind who is disruptive and bold and who would otherwise leave to realize his or her own great new idea.

Hsieh wants to offer entrepreneurial employees an enticing proposition: Pursue your idea with the resources and support of a major company without having to answer to a bunch of supervisors.

That would also let Hsieh recast his role to more closely resemble the one he had before becoming the chief executive of Zappos. After selling LinkExchange, he became a venture capitalist — investing in the ideas of other entrepreneurs. Zappos was one of those ideas, and it was an unplanned turn of events that led him to become its CEO 15 years ago. In 2009, Amazon bought Zappos for about $1.2 billion, but left Hsieh in charge and promised him autonomy in running the company. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)

Hsieh says he knows that “not everyone is comfortable with all this blank canvas.” And he’s not trying to make every worker happy; he’s trying to make the type of employees he wants happy.

“We’d lost the ability to adapt and change at the speed we wanted to,” says John Bunch, who is leading the management overhaul at Zappos. “The big win is that the transition has not gotten in the way of operations. The next phase is actually leveraging it.”

The first indication of the overhaul’s success may come early next year, when Hsieh anticipates Zappos will unveil its first venture in another field. What field? He says he’ll tackle that question once the company, without any bosses to crack a whip, gets every holiday package delivered. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Young whites also losing faith in dream More millennials say American Dream is ‘not really alive’ More millennials say American dream is ‘not really alive’

Q. Do you personally feel that the American Dream is very much alive today, Q: Do you personally feel that the American Dream is very much alive today, somewhat alive, or not really alive? somewhat alive or not really alive? The percentage saying “not really alive”: 2015

1986* All ages 18-35*

White

Non-college white

27

22

Non-white

College-educated white

29

12

29

10 20

7

33%

11

Note: 1986 data based on 18-34-year-olds. Fusion Issues poll conducted Nov. 4-18 among a random national sample of 935 U.S. adults ages 18 to 35 reached on cellular and landline phones.

Data from 1986 based on Roper/Wall Street Journal poll.

THE WASHINGTON POST

BY

J IM T ANKERSLEY

I

t’s about as hard for a 20-something worker to find a job today as it was in 1986. The economy is growing at a slightly slower pace, but not by much. Yet young workers today are significantly more pessimistic about the possibility of success in the United States than their counterparts were in 1986, according to a new Fusion 2016 Issues poll — reported in conjunction with The Washington Post — highlighting a shift that appears to reflect lingering damage from the Great Recession and more than a decade of wage stagnation for typical workers.

That rise in pessimism among millennials is concentrated among white people. It is most pronounced among whites without a college degree.

The Fusion poll replicated the questions from a Roper-Wall Street Journal poll of young Americans that was conducted in 1986, the year when Mr. Mister topped the pop charts and Bill Buckner’s error cost the Boston Red Sox a World Series title. Both polls posed a series of questions about the American Dream: what it meant to individuals, whether it actually existed and, if it did, how hard it was to attain.

In the three decades between

the surveys, pollsters found, the share of young Americans overall who said the American Dream “is not really alive” grew sharply from 12 to 29 percent. Among white people, it nearly tripled from 10 to 29 percent. One in 3 white noncollege graduates now say it is not alive, compared with one-fifth of white college graduates; the increase from 1986 was larger for non-graduates than for graduates.

The poll found no statistically significant change among young Americans of color over the decades. In 1986, they were about twice as likely as whites to say the American Dream does not exist.

Now, the groups are about equally pessimistic.

The divergence comes even though white and nonwhite young workers have had similar income trends over the past 30 years. The median household income for whites ages 25 to 34 was $58,197 last year, according to the Census Bureau, up only slightly from 1987 after adjusting for inflation. The median income for blacks of the same age was $43,957, also a slight increase from 1987. Hispanics saw a more significant increase, of about 7 percent from 1987 levels, to $42,916 last year.

The poll results have a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points for the full sample. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

The whiniest, funniest, creepiest & most memorable of 2015

THE FUNNIEST “How to Catch a Russian Spy: The True Story of an American Civilian Turned Double Agent” (Scribner) by Naveed Jamali with Ellis Henican A Cold War-style thriller, full of Russians, federal agents, code names and, in the lead, a New York techie who preps for his double-agent moments by practicing lines from “Goodfellas” and “Scarface.” Jamali makes his tough-guy dreams come true by outwitting a Borat-like Russian intelligence officer who recruits him to commit treason. The finale, like in every Bond film, goes down in a New Jersey Hooters. A hilarious book that is being made into a movie — a comedy, I hope —

by Twentieth Century Fox. THE WHINIEST “Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015” (Seven Stories Press) by Ralph Nader Anyone who says letter-writing is a lost art has never been Ralph Nader’s pen pal. This book collects more than 100 missives the consumer advocate sent to Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, including letters complaining about the lack of response to his prior letters. Some are prescient (in March 2003, Nader eviscerated Bush’s case for war in Iraq), but most are rude or just bizarre. My favorite is the one Nader writes from the point of view of a captured E.coli bacteria, to highlight non-human terrorist threats.

THE CREEPIEST “Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear” (Public Affairs) by Margee Kerr Kerr, a sociologist, offers a travelogue of fright, seeking out some of the scariest spots on Earth — the steepest roller coaster, abandoned prisons, Japan’s “Suicide Forest” — to test her guts and explore why, when so much of life freaks us out already, we still long to get scared. It’s hard to explain fear (you need to feel it), but Kerr’s stories are campfire-worthy.

BY

I

C ARLOS L OZADA

f you’re looking for the 10 best books of the year, or the 100 most notable titles of 2015, or the five tomes that explain the Islamic State, or the three books that go inside the struggle for the soul of the Republican Party, please go away. There are plenty of terrific lists out there for you, lists of weighty works by big­name authors tackling consequential subjects. ¶ This is not one of those lists. Too often, the books that earn the “best” or “notable” label can’t just be good or interesting, they must be terribly important. And importance isn’t the only reason we read.

It’s probably not even the most important one. Of the roughly 100 nonfiction books I’ve read this year, these are the ones that — for reasons trivial, profound or purely personal — I suspect I’ll remember most:

THE BITTEREST “The Quiet Man: The Indispensable Presidency of George H.W. Bush” (Broadside Books)

by John H. Sununu This is not a tell-all but a yell-all. Bush’s former chief of staff unloads on anyone, whether journalists or political rivals, who wronged him or the Bush White House. The two-plus decades that have passed since the events Sununu describes have done nothing to calm him down; the book could have been written the day Bush left office.

THE MOST MYTH-BUSTING “The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game” (Bloomsbury) by Mary Pilon I played Monopoly obsessively as a kid and learned then how out-of-work salesman Charles Darrow supposedly invented the game during the Great Depression and grew fabulously wealthy.

Wrong! Pilon describes how Monopoly’s true creator — unknown stenographer, poet and inventor Lizzie Magie — was robbed of her place in history. The tale is as infuriating as it is fascinating.

THE MOST GUILT-INDUCING “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age” (Penguin Press) by Sherry Turkle Turkle outlines the costs to family, work and friendship of staring at our screens all day. “We face a flight from conversation that is also a flight from self-reflection, empathy, and mentorship,” she explains.

Readers will find something to regret on nearly every page.

THE MOST HELPFUL “How to Be a Husband” (Blue Rider Press) by Tim Dowling A memoir of surviving 23 years of marriage, full of scheduled sex, passive aggression and unwinnable fights. (If you’re cramming, just read Chapter 8, “The Forty Guiding Principles of Gross Marital Happiness.”) My favorite piece of advice from this manifesto for

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

19

BOOKS

THE MOST DEPRESSINGLY TIMELY BOOK ON TERRORISM “Red Team: How to Succeed

by Thinking Like the Enemy” (Basic Books) by Micah Zenko I started reading this book before November’s Paris attacks; I finished it after. A look inside the specialized groups that imagine worst-case scenarios and probe vulnerabilities for militaries, intelligence agencies and businesses, the book made me more pessimistic that we can stop terrorism, but more hopeful about our efforts to learn from each attack.

THE BEST DONALD TRUMP BOOK “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” (St. Martin’s Press) by Michael D’Antonio Even though I read eight books

by Donald Trump this year, the best perspective I got on the Donald was in D’Antonio’s new biography. This is Trump as an enduring portrait of American excess — partying in Manhattan in the 1970s, getting rich in the 1980s, watching his marriages crumble in the 1990s and reinventing himself as a reality-TV star in the 2000s. “Donald Trump may blow his horn a little louder than other Americans,” D’Antonio writes, “but he is playing the right tune.”

THE STUNTIEST MEMOIR “The Wild Oats Project: One Woman’s Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost” (Sarah Crichton/Farrar Straus Giroux)

by Robin Rinaldi Regular memoirs are passe; you need a stunt to stand out. Rinaldi’s story of taking a year-long break from her marriage to sleep with strangers certainly qualifies. Despite all the sex scenes, this em-

WEEKLY

the decades of physical and psychological agony that followed, Southard shows what it’s like to wage nuclear war every day of your life. This one stays with you.

inadequate husbands: “Never underestimate the tremendous healing power of sitting down together from time to time to speak frankly and openly about the marital difficulties facing other couples you know.”

THE BIGGEST TEAR-JERKER “Every Day I Fight” (Blue Rider Press) by Stuart Scott with Larry Platt This memoir by the ESPN broadcaster is an emotional read, focusing on Scott’s career, his illness — he died of appendiceal cancer just weeks before the book was published — and his relationship with his two young daughters. It’s like Scott on television: over the top yet irresistibly sincere. “I’d talk smack to cancer like Ali talked to his opponents,” he writes, recapping his workouts.

“A third set of push-ups? Take that, cancer.” Scott was as cool as the other side of the pillow.

KLMNO

“I’d talk smack to cancer like Ali talked to his opponents. A third set of push-ups? Take that, cancer.”

— “EVERY DAY I FIGHT” BY STUART SCOTT

powerment narrative is more depressing than arousing. (Spoiler: When she and her husband try to get back together, things get complicated.) Runner up: Jonathan Gottschall’s “The Professor in the Cage,” about a college English instructor who, of course, takes up mixed martial arts.

fame), Swaim learns to write poorly to placate his boss, cope with scandal and keep himself from vomiting out of pure nerves on the way to work each day.

Covering how the governor talks to the public and to his staff, this slim book reveals so much about political communication.

THE MOST “INSTANT CLASSIC” “The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics” (Simon & Schuster) by Barton Swaim Think “Veep” meets “All the King’s Men.” As a speechwriter for then-South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (of Appalachian Trail

THE MOST PAINFUL “Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War” (Viking) by Susan Southard Reminiscent of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” Southard’s book traces the lives of five survivors of the second atomic bomb attack. From the aftermath of the explosion into

THE MOST “I WISH I COULD BE FRIENDS WITH THIS AUTHOR” “Ordinary Light: A Memoir” (Knopf) by Tracy K. Smith A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Smith beautifully renders her struggles with faith, family and belonging in this memoir. I felt kinship not just because we are the same age and grew up in the same area, but because Smith writes about the personal in ways that feel universal, and she captures childhood with an astonishing mix of immediacy and perspective.

“Did I ever wonder who my mother used to be,” she asks, “before she belonged to me?”

THE BEST BOOK

BY TA-NEHISI COATES “The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir” (Spiegel & Grau) For all the accolades bestowed on Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” including the National Book Award and a MacArthur “genius” grant for the author, I was more impressed with the book Coates wrote when no one was watching: his 2009 memoir, “The Beautiful Struggle,” a bracing and intimate book that I read just before picking up Coates’s latest.

A reminder that the most memorable books of the year don’t have to be this year’s books. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

I powered on their iPads and conversation stopped LAUNA HALL lives in Northern Virginia and is working on a book of essays about teaching.

I placed an iPad into the outstretched hands of each of my third­grade students, and a reverent, tech­induced hush descended on our classroom. We were circled together on our gathering rug, just finished with a conversation about “digital citizenship” and “online safety” and “our school district bought us these iPads to help us learn, so we are using them for learning purposes.” They’d nodded vigorously, thrilled by the thought of their very own iPads to take home every night and bring to school every day.

Some of them had never touched a tablet before, and I watched them cradle the sleek devices in their arms. They flashed their gap-toothed grins — not at each other but at their shining screens.

That was the first of many moments when I wished I could send the iPads back.

Some adult ears might welcome a room of hushed 8year-olds, but teachers of young children know that the chatter in a typical elementary classroom is what makes it a good place to learn. Yes, it’s sometimes too loud. These young humans are not great conversationalists.

They are often hurting someone’s feelings or getting hurt, misunderstanding or overreacting or completely missing the point. They need time to learn communication skills — how to hold your own and how to get along with others.

They need to talk and listen and talk some more at school, both with peers and with adults who can model conversation skills.

The iPads subtly undermined that important work. My lively little kids stopped talking and adopted the bent-neck, pluggedin posture of tap, tap, swipe.

My colleagues and I had tried to anticipate all sorts of issues before the new tablet initiative rolled into our third-grade classrooms last year. Our planning helped, but there was so much we didn’t

anticipate: alarms going off throughout the day, bandwidth issues that slowed our lessons to a crawl, username issues followed by password issues followed by hundreds of selfies. All these things sucked instructional time. I tried to harness the benefits and overcome the avalanche of distracting minutiae the devices brought.

Veteran teachers of tabletfriendly classrooms will tell you that these were simply rollout problems. They may mention how tablets can help teachers tailor lessons to each child, or how they can provide an instant snapshot into whether a child understood a concept. They talk about apps that connect classmates to one another and to students across the globe, that foster creativity and a sense of newness that makes over a stale classroom.

Those early-adopter teachers are right: Tablets are portals to a million possibilities. Even with my rookie stumbles, my students did wonderful things. They made faux commercials that aired on our school’s morning news; they recorded themselves explaining math problems; they produced movies about explorers, complete with soundtracks. I recorded mini-lessons for my students to watch at home, so we could “flip our classroom” and discuss the information in small groups the next day. And I knew we were just

EUGENE AND LOUISE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

getting started.

But did the benefits offset what was lost?

Sherry Turkle, the author of “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age,” writes about how we are sacrificing connections, one quick check of our screens at a time. Her research finds that college students, with their ubiquitous phones, “are having a hard time with the give-and-take of face-toface conversation.” Eight-yearolds with iPads have the same struggles, minus any filters or perspective people might gain as they age. At the same time I was trying to encourage my students to appreciate the subtleties of human interaction, the iPads I gave them threatened to overwhelm their understanding.

One of my saddest days in my digital classroom was when the children rushed in from the lunchroom one rainy recess and dashed for their iPads. Wait, I implored, we play with Legos on rainy days! I dumped out the huge container of Legos that were pure magic just weeks ago, that prompted so much collaboration and conversation, but the delight was gone. My students looked at me with disdain. Some crossed their arms and pouted. Later, when I allowed their devices to hum to glowing life, conversation shut down altogether.

Districts all over the country are buying into one-to-one tablet initiatives, and for younger and younger students. These screens have been rebranded “digital learning devices,” carrying the promise of education success for

millions of our communities’ education dollars. Yet there is some evidence that tablets can be detrimental to learning.

A study released in September by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development looked at school tech initiatives in more than three dozen countries (although not the United States) and found that while students who use computers moderately show modest gains over those who rarely do, heavy technology use has a negative impact.

Some proponents of one-to-one initiatives portray “analog classrooms” as gray spaces where bored teachers hand worksheets to uninspired kids — and tablets are the energizing cure.

But jumping from the “sage on the stage” teaching model to a screen for each kid skips over critical territory in between, where children learn from, and build their social skills with, one another.

Teachers striving to preserve precious space for conversation are not lazy, or afraid of change, or obstructionist. They believe that if our dining tables should be protected for in-depth discussion and focused attention, so, too, should our classrooms. They know that their young students live in the digital age, but the way children learn has not evolved so very fast. Kids still have to use their five senses, and, most of all, they have to talk to each other.

My students already had so many challenges and so much ground to cover. We put tablets in their hands and made their loads that much heavier. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The hole in Obama’s ISIS strategy DAVID IGNATIUS writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column.

At the center of President Obama’s strategy for dealing with the Islamic State is an empty space. It’s supposed be filled by a hypothetical “Sunni ground force,” but after more than a year of effort, it’s still not there. Unless this gap is filled, Obama’s plan won’t work.

Otherwise, Obama made a reasonable case in his speech to the nation Sunday night. He’s right to argue for patience and persistence in fighting the Muslim terrorists, rather than “tough talk.” He’s correct that the United States shouldn’t feed the jihadists’ fantasies with “a long and costly ground war.” And especially right that we’ll be safer at home and abroad if most Muslims are allies against the extremists.

But there was a mysterious black box in the middle of Obama’s speech. Here’s how he tried to explain it: “The strategy that we are using now — airstrikes, special forces and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country — that is how we’ll achieve a more sustainable victory.”

What “local forces” is Obama talking about? If he means Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria, yes, they’ve performed admirably.

In Kurdish areas. They don’t want to clear and hold the Sunni heartland of the Islamic State, nor should they. If Obama is talking about the Shiite-led Iraqi military, their performance is still just barely adequate, even backed by American air power, and they’re disdained and mistrusted by the

Sunnis of Ramadi, Fallujah and Mosul. If he’s talking about the Islamist brigades in Syria armed

by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, it’s still not entirely clear whether they’re friend or foe.

The disturbing fact is that a strong, reliable, indigenous Sunni ground force doesn’t exist yet in Iraq or Syria. The United States has been trying to fix this problem since the fall of Mosul in June 2014, with very little success. We’re like the joke about the starving economist who needs to open a can of beans on a desert island and posits: “Assume we had a can opener!”

Consider the false hopes and missed connections over the past year: In Iraq, U.S. trainers were dispatched to Al Asad and Al Taqaddum air bases in Anbar province to train thousands of

Sunni tribal fighters. The tribesmen mostly didn’t show up, and no wonder: The Shiite-led government in Baghdad still refuses to approve a Sunni “national guard” with real power.

In Syria, Congress authorized a $500 million plan to train and equip a largely Sunni force to fight the Islamic State. Only a few hundred signed up, instead of the expected 5,000, and the first wave of fighters walked into a trap and was savaged by jihadists in northern Syria.

Why have these efforts gone so badly, and what needs to be fixed?

Basically, I’d argue that Sunnis don’t trust an America that turned their world upside down in the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Tribal leaders have been our default Sunni strategy ever since: We’re trying now to use them as mercenaries against the Islamic State. But it’s a corrupt bargain on both sides.

The Sunni no-show problem illustrates a deeper trauma.

Across the Middle East, Sunnis are experiencing a kind of vertigo.

The Sunni powerhouses — Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya — are in ruins.

The people feel dispossessed and disillusioned, disgusted with the autocrats who ruled them before and the religious fanatics who want to rule them today.

Filling this Sunni vacuum with

new self-confidence will be the work of a generation, but it must start now, for it’s an essential part of defeating the jihadists. The West’s best think tanks should be working on this problem; the Arab world’s brightest young activists should be making plans for governance and economic development. Global institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund should be developing plans for trusteeship, reconstruction and governance.

It’s 1944 in the Arab world: Defeating the jihadists demands the creation of a healthy Sunni body politic.

What would a revived Sunni heartland in Iraq and Syria look like? Well, you can get a pretty good idea by examining Iraqi Kurdistan. It flowered under a U.S. no-fly zone known as “Operation Provide Comfort” that started in 1991. Under this protective cover, investment, security and political stability came together in a virtuous cycle.

When we think about the future of Iraq and Syria, we should have in mind vibrant Sunni provinces that, like Kurdistan, are part of a loose federal state. In building a strategy for defeating the Islamic State, creating this “Sunnistan” will be the long pole in the tent. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

22

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY MARGULIES

BY MATT DAVIES

A cycle of naming and renaming LARRY WOLFF is Silver Professor of History at New York University, director of the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies and author of the book “Inventing Eastern Europe.”

In 1919 — after World War I had ended, the Hapsburg monarchy was abolished and the new state of Czechoslovakia declared independence — the Prague railway station, formerly named for Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, was renamed for U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. And so it remained until the Nazis occupied Prague. They removed Wilson’s name from the station and destroyed a giant bronze statue of him with the inscription: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Through the postwar period, the station was simply known as the “Prague Main Station.” But after the communist regime collapsed in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Wilson’s name was restored, and a new statue of him was unveiled in 2011.

In other words, although debate over Wilson has newly exploded on U.S. college campuses — especially at Princeton, where students are denouncing their school’s former president as racist and demanding that his name be removed from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs – the name of America’s 28th president has been part of a controversial cycle of naming and renaming for nearly a century.

The Princeton protesters point to Wilson’s regressive stance on desegregation. In 1909, he discouraged a black student from applying to the school, saying it was “altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter Princeton.”

And in 1918, he told African American leaders who came to the White House to denounce Jim Crow: “We all have to be patient with one another. Human nature doesn’t make giant strides in a single generation.”

Yet Wilson was impatient to bring about the lasting transformation of Europe all at once. Alluding to the American Civil War, he pronounced World War I to be “a war of emancipation — emancipation from the threat and attempted mastery of selfish groups of autocratic rulers.” His 14 points of January 1918 proposed an independent Poland and autonomy for the peoples of Hapsburg Austria-Hungary. (He discussed with his advisers

whether the whole Hapsburg monarchy should simply “disappear” to make way for new national states.) At the end of the war, the self-determination he promoted was confirmed by the Paris peace treaties in which he played such an influential part.

For all this, he was regarded as a hero in Eastern Europe. He received warm thanks during the war from Prince Alexander of Serbia for endorsing the rights of small nations in a world of Great Powers. He was saluted by Polish pianist and statesman Ignacy Paderewski: “You are the fosterfather of a chiefless land. You are Poland’s inspired protector. For many a month the spelling of your name has been the only comfort and joy of a starving nation.”

Historical reputations, however, are always in flux, and heroes can look different with the passing of time. When the names of statesmen are placed on the map, there is always the possibility of renaming as historical judgment shifts or the political wheel turns. And indeed, many of the statues, parks, streets and squares that were named in Wilson’s honor would be rechristened in the decades to come. The city briefly called Wilsonovo Mesto (Wilson City) became Bratislava when it was incorporated in Czechoslovakia.

In Warsaw, the public square Plac Wilsona was renamed for the revolutionary Paris Commune during Poland’s communist period; it is once more Plac Wilsona today. Danish American sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who created the presidential monument at Mount Rushmore, also sculpted a Woodrow Wilson monument for Wilson Park in Poznan, Poland, in the 1930s — but it was destroyed during the Nazi occupation. In Zagreb, Croatia, University Square became Woodrow Wilson Square in 1919, celebrating his role in the creation of Yugoslavia, but it was, predictably, renamed for Tito after World War II. Now, in postcommunist Croatia, there is debate about whether Tito’s name should also be dropped.

Naming and renaming in response to changing political circumstances has been common over the past century. Yet it’s worth keeping in mind that when nations rename cities, and when cities rename train stations, it is often with the hope that the public will forget the old name and its associations. Universities have a greater obligation to remember history, in all its complexity. Naming and renaming can be rather blunt instruments to come to terms with controversial legacies. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE TAKE

Raising the stakes BY

D AN B ALZ

D

onald Trump continues to go where no recent candidate for president has gone before, plunging the Republican Party — and the nation — into another round in the tumultuous debate about immigration, national identity, terrorism and the limits of tolerance.

Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States marked a sudden and sizable escalation — and in this case one that sent shockwaves around the world — in the inflammatory and sometimes demagogic rhetoric of the candidate who continues to lead virtually every national and state poll testing whom Republicans favor for their presidential nomination.

Nothing in modern politics equates with the kind of rhetoric now coming from candidate Trump. There are no perfect analogies. One must scroll back decades for echoes, however imperfect, of what he is saying, from the populist and racially based appeals of thenAlabama Gov. George Wallace in 1968 and 1972 to the anti-Semitic diatribes of the radio preacher Charles Coughlin during the 1930s.

Historian David Kennedy of Stanford University said there are few comparisons, adding that, in branding an entire religious class of people as not welcome, Trump “is further out there than almost anyone in the annals of [U.S.] history.”

From the day he announced his candidacy in June, Trump has continually tested the limits of what a candidate can say and do with apparent political impunity. In that sense, he has played by a different set of rules. In the wake of his latest provocation, the question arises once again: Will this finally stop him? Everything to date suggests those who believe it should be tentative in their predictions.

Those already drawn to Trump have shown remarkable willingness to accept the worst and continue to support him. In reality, it will be another 60 days or more for any definitive answers to emerge. Only when voters begin to make their decisions in the caucuses and primaries that begin in February will the final verdict be delivered on the size and strength of the movement that has rallied behind him.

“This is a new campaign for a new century in which viral populism, most conspicuous on the GOP side, is the engine of our politics,” Ross K. Baker of Rutgers University noted in an email the day before Trump’s latest outburst. “Trump, above all others, has sensed this and is profiting from it. His reading of the anger and anxiety of the GOP primary electorate is positively seismographic. He senses

what’s eating at people and, in his own bizarre way, is most attuned to the electorate of any of the hopefuls.”

Even as Trump on Tuesday sought to soften slightly what he had said on Monday, the condemnations mounted. He drew rebukes across the globe, from the leaders of two of America’s most important allies, Britain and France, to Syrian refugees in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

Rarely has a presidential candidate generated such alarm abroad as that now rising around the world aimed at Trump.

CHARLIE NEIBERGALL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

At home, the condemnations were just as swift and nearly universal. The harshest came from Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor seeking the Democratic nomination, who tweeted Monday that Trump “removes all doubt he is running for president as a fascist demagogue.”

GOP leaders, many of whom in the past have seemed hesitant to tangle with master of the political counterpunch, were quick to state their disagreement. Jeb Bush said Trump had become “unhinged.” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said this was not what the party stands for. Former vice president Dick Cheney said it “goes against everything we stand for.”

But as the political establishment rushed to criticize Trump, there is little doubt that he has tapped into a strain of anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiment that has ebbed and flowed through American history. There are a number of antecedents over the past century

that put Trump’s candidacy and the responses to it into historical context.

After World War I, a wave of immigration from Europe to the United States, coupled with fears of the spread of worldwide communism after the Bolshevik revolution, led to strikes, riots, violence, anarchism and ultimately a powerful backlash against immigrants. Then-Attorney General Mitchell Palmer led a series of infamous raids, rounding up suspected radicals and trying to deport them.

A rising nationalist and nativist strain fueled by the war and its aftermath eventually led Congress twice in three years in the early 1920s to enact strict new quotas on immigration, sharply limiting the influx of those fleeing a continent devastated by the war for opportunities in America.

In the past decade, illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America has repeatedly emerged as a hot-button issue of America’s politics, playing out most prominently inside the Republican Party.

Fears of terrorism have now been layered on top of the issue of illegal immigration. Longstanding fears about Islamic State terrorism have intensified since the recent attacks in Paris and now the mass shooting in San Bernardino by a young California couple who had been radicalized but managed to conceal the transformation until then.

Stanford’s Kennedy pointed to “inchoate, diffuse, free floating anxiety” brought on by economic strains, the nation’s inability to extract itself from Middle East wars and a generally unsettled world as other causes for Trump’s appeal.

What once might have seemed inconceivable in political debate has become acceptable, at least to a part of the population. That makes this moment a potential inflection point in the life of the country.

For the Republican Party, it highlights what has emerged as a deep split between the party elites and at least a portion of the rank-andfile. At this week’s debate in Las Vegas, Trump will be under fire, but he has been there before and survived, even prospered. Will this moment prove any different?

Beyond that, however, Trump has brought into sharper focus important questions that will play out during the coming election year: What can be done to make Americans feel safer? What will impede or encourage recruitment by Islamic State terrorists? What does it mean to be an American? What kind of image does this nation project around the world?

Along with the rhetoric of Donald Trump, the stakes for 2016 have escalated dramatically. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015

24

Wenatchee Mom Blog is a supportive, social gathering place for local moms to visit.

Read stories from the front lines of motherhood - the good, the bad, the funny.

We're all in this together.

T hank You to our Sponsors!

facebook.com/wenmomblog instagram.com/wenmomblog wenatcheemomblog.com #wenmomblog