The Washington Post National Weekly - December 20, 2015

Worst Week Secretary of Defense Ash Carter 3

Politics Cruz really knows his backers 4

Health The secret to long life is in you 16

5 Myths Family dinners 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2015

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

SAFE HARBOR

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PAGE 12

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2015

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Ashton Carter

by Chris Cillizza

A

shton B. Carter must have spent the past year on another planet. That’s the only logical explanation for the revelation, first reported Wednesday by the New York Times, that the defense secretary conducted a portion of his government business via a personal email address — in direct violation of the department’s rules.

Carter must have never heard of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic presidential front­runner who spent most of 2015 dealing with the fallout from her use of a private email account and server during her time as the country’s top diplomat.

While Carter and his team insisted that he had never dealt in classified information while using his private email account and that all emails he sent from that account were copied to his government one, it doesn’t exactly solve the problem. What about potentially exposing his emails to hackers, for instance?

“After reviewing his email practices earlier this year, the secretary believes that his previous, occasional use of personal email for work­related business, even for routine administrative issues and backed up to his official account, was a mistake,” a Pentagon spokesman said. Um, you think?

While his email setup was Carter’s main problem this past week, it wasn’t his only one. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al­Abadi rejected the Defense Department’s offer to use American Apache helicopters in the fight to take

KLMNO WEEKLY

To our readers: The Washington Post National Weekly edition will not publish on Dec 27. The next edition will be distributed on Jan. 3.

CLIFF OWEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

back the city of Ramadi from the Islamic State. While Carter played down the significance of that decision, it speaks to the broader difficulty of U.S. attempts to counter Iranian influence in the region and destroy the Islamic State.

Ash Carter, for forgetting (very recent) history and, therefore, being doomed to repeat it, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Migrants arrive on Lesbos, Greece, from the Turkish coast last month. “This will continue for another two or three years — at least,” said a spokesman for the beleaguered local government. Photograph by SANTI PALACIOS, Associated Press

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POLITICS

Cruz’s success aided by big data

MARK KAUZLARICH/REUTERS

A vast dossier of personal details, ‘psychographic targeting’ help send him to top tier T OM H AMBURGER Urbandale, Iowa BY

A

s Cecil Stinemetz walked up to a gray clapboard house in suburban Des Moines recently wearing his “Cruz 2016” cap, a program on his iPhone was determining what kind of person would answer the door.

Would she be a “relaxed leader”?

A “temperamental conservative”?

Maybe even a “true believer”?

Nope. It turned out that Birdie Harms, a 64-year-old grandmoth-

er, part-time real-estate agent and longtime Republican was, by the Cruz campaign’s calculations, a “stoic traditionalist” — a conservative whose top concerns included President Obama’s use of executive orders on immigration.

Which meant that Stinemetz was instructed to talk to her in a tone that was “confident and warm and straight to the point” and ask about her concerns regarding the Obama administration’s positions on immigration, guns and other topics.

The outreach to Harms and oth-

ers like her is part of a monthslong effort by the Cruz campaign to profile and target potential supporters, an approach that campaign officials believe has helped propel the senator from Texas to the top tier in many states, including Iowa, where he is now in first place, according to two recent polls. It’s also a multimilliondollar bet that such efforts still matter in an age of pop-culture personalities and social media messaging.

So far, the Republican primary season has been dominated by

Sen. Ted Cruz (RTex.) takes the stage during Sunday worship at Christian Life Assembly of God Church in Des Moines last month.

Donald Trump, a businessman who is running a race based almost entirely on his personality and mass-media appeal. The campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has also placed a limited emphasis on the door-knocking tactics of the past, while others, such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are hoping that a strong finish in the New Hampshire primary will help them reach voters through free media coverage.

Cruz has largely built his program out of his Houston head-

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POLITICS quarters, where a team of statisticians and behavioral psychologists who subscribe to the burgeoning practice of “psychographic targeting” built their own version of a Myers-Briggs personality test. The test data is supplemented by recent issue surveys, and together they are used to categorize supporters, who then receive specially tailored messages, phone calls and visits. Microtargeting of voters has been around for well over a decade, but the Cruz operation has deepened the intensity of the effort and the use of psychological data.

Cruz, a critic of excessive government data collection, has been notably aggressive about gathering personal information for his campaign. Some of the data comes from typical sources, such as voters’ consumer habits and Facebook posts. Some is homegrown, such as a new smartphone app that keeps supporters in touch while giving the campaign the ability to scrape their phones for additional contacts.

Another emerging tactic that the campaign has employed is “geo-fencing,” a technique that allows people to send messages to digital devices in narrow areas, such as a city block or single building.

When the Republican Jewish Committee was meeting at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in May, for instance, the Cruz campaign unleashed a series of Web-based advertisements visible only inside the hotel complex that emphasized Cruz’s devotion to Israel and its security.

Cruz has also applied geofencing to woo National Rifle Association members at a recent annual meeting and to similar gatherings elsewhere.

The personality and political scores applied by the campaign are used to tightly tailor outreach to individuals. For example, personalities that have received high scores for “neuroticism” are believed to be generally fearful, so a pro-gun pitch to them would emphasize the use of firearms for personal safety and might include a picture of a burglar breaking in to a home.

But those who score high for “openness” or traditional values are more likely to receive a message that promotes hunting as a family activity, perhaps accompanied by an image of a father taking his son duck hunting.

Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff

The personality and political scores applied by the campaign are used to tightly tailor outreach to individuals. For example, personalities that have received high scores for “neuroticism” are believed to be generally fearful, so a pro-gun pitch to them would emphasize the use of firearms for personal safety and might include a picture of a burglar breaking in to a home. But those who score high for “openness” or traditional values are more likely to receive a message that promotes hunting as a family activity, perhaps accompanied by an image of a father taking his son duck hunting.

Roe, spit chewing tobacco into a soft drink bottle as he explained the campaign’s heavy investment in data and analysis. It’s critical because of changes in the nature of the electorate, popular media, polling and campaign finance law, which make many of the old axioms of campaigning — gathering endorsements, purchasing highcost broadcast ads — less valuable.

“There is no handbook for this,” the Missouri-based political consultant said of running a presidential campaign in 2016. “The conventional wisdom has been destroyed. What you can do is rely on data.”

To build its data-gathering operation widely, the Cruz campaign hired Cambridge Analytica, a Massachusetts company reportedly owned in part by hedge fund executive Robert Mercer, who has given $11 million to a super PAC supporting Cruz. Cambridge, the U.S. affiliate of London-based behavioral research company SCL Group, has been paid more than $750,000 by the Cruz campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records.

To develop its psychographic models, Cambridge surveyed more than 150,000 households across the country and scored in-

dividuals using five basic traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. A top Cambridge official didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Cruz campaign officials said the company developed its correlations in part by using data from Facebook that included subscribers’ likes. That data helped make the Cambridge data particularly powerful, campaign officials said.

The Cruz campaign modified the Cambridge template, renaming some psychological categories and adding subcategories to the list, such as “stoic traditionalist” and “true believer.” The campaign then did its own field surveys in battleground states to develop a more precise predictive model based on issue preferences.

The Cruz algorithm was then applied to what the campaign calls an “enhanced voter file,” which can contain as many as 50,000 data points gathered from voting records,popularwebsitesandconsumer information such as magazine subscriptions, car ownership and preferences for food and clothing.

Cambridge, which has staffers embedded in the Cruz for President headquarters in Houston, makes behavioral psychologists

150K To develop its psychographic models, Cambridge surveyed more than 150,000 households across the country.

KLMNO WEEKLY

available for consultation as ads and scripts are drafted.

An email will be tweaked based on the personality of the recipient.

If a respondent were a “stoic traditionalist,” the conversation would be very direct and to the point. If a potential supporter was labeled “temperamental,” the language and approach would change, according to Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research and analytics, who has taken a leave from the polling firm he leads, WPA Opinion Research. “The tone would be inspiring and become more and more positive as the conversation progresses,” he said.

The Cruz campaign has also persuaded nearly 34,000 supporters to download the “Cruz Crew” mobile app. Subscribers compete for points and prizes as they reach out to like-minded potential supporters whose names are provided after the subscriber gives the campaign access to contact lists.

Other campaigns also offer apps to supporters, but few are as far-reaching as Cruz’s. Wilson said he didn’t know what the campaign would do with the personal information it gathered after the election. “We will take great care,” he said, “knowing that our supporters provided this data to us for a limited purpose.”

One key purpose of the Cruz campaign’s data focus has been to connect the candidate to evangelical Christian voters, who represent an enormous bloc of caucus-goers in Iowa and are a major factor in other early-voting states. That’s part of the reason Cruz courted this group, starting with his announcement speech at Virginia’s Liberty University in the spring.

The campaign’s big data operation is not deployed in just voter and supporter outreach. It also is used daily to help make key decisions — where Cruz should travel, what he should say. It has even informed the selection of precinct captains.

The other week, Cruz volunteers in Iowa were calling people identified as extraverts to be precinct captains and take on other leadership roles. Stinemetz went through his call list one evening and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly people signed up.

“I got three precinct captains to sign up just now,” Stinemetz said, after dialing just a handful of potential volunteers. “It’s like they were just waiting for us to call.” n

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POLITICS

GOP candidates take hawkish stance

BY P HILIP R UCKER, C OSTA AND J OSE A .

Las Vegas

R OBERT D EL R EAL

T

here were calls to “carpet bomb” gathering places of Islamic State troops and kill family members of suspected terrorists. There were proposals to arm Kurdish forces, shoot down a Russian jet if it flew over a no-fly zone and shut down the Internet in global hot spots.

And there were suggestions of banning Muslims from entering the United States and monitoring activity inside mosques.

The presidential debate last week crystallized the Republican Party’s growing consensus around a strikingly hawkish response to the threat from Islamic State terrorists, as the candidates vividly channeled the alarm and fear coursing through the GOP base.

“America is at war,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas declared in his opening statement. “Our enemy is not violent extremism. It is not some unnamed malevolent force. It is radical Islamic terrorists. . . . If I am elected president, we will hunt down and kill the terrorists. We will utterly destroy ISIS.” Using bellicose language at a moment of pitched voter anxiety, many of the candidates committed themselves to a confrontational set of policies that, while energizing conservative activists, could prove difficult to carry out internationally and which poses the risk of a backlash from warweary swing voters next fall.

Thomas H. Kean, a former New Jersey governor who chaired the 9/11 Commission, said the GOP candidates were probably reacting to the suddenly hawkish mood of the electorate that is showing up in polls.

But Kean warned, “You can get locked into some of these positions if you get elected. It all sounds fine now in a primary, but Republicans might be sorry at the end of the year if they’re in the White House and the new president has to adjust to changing circumstances.”

Pollster Geoff Garin, who advises a super PAC backing Democrat-

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

In response to Islamic State, they may risk alienating swing voters ic front-runner Hillary Clinton, said the GOP debate opens the door for Clinton to be “the strong and steady grown-up in the room.”

“What [voters] appreciate in a presidential leader is quiet strength and what they heard last night was a ton of dangerous bluster,” Garin said Wednesday. “Being the party of military adventurism may be passable politics for their nominating process, but it is very likely to cause lots of doubts and concerns in a general election.”

In a Tuesday speech before the GOP debate, Clinton said that “shallow slogans don’t add up to a strategy. Promising to carpet bomb until the desert glows doesn’t make you sound strong, it makes you sound like you’re in over your head. Bluster and bigotry are not credentials for becoming commander in chief.”

The GOP hopefuls on the debate stage painted a dark and frightening portrait of the homeland’s security, warning that the military is not equipped to wage war against terrorists and that no community is safe after recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardi-

no, Calif.

The candidates portrayed President Obama as feckless and unknowing and posited that the Islamic State could be extinguished if onlyAmerica’spresidentweremore decisive and used massive force.

“Look, we need toughness, we need strength,” said Donald Trump, the billionaire mogul and national front-runner. “We’re not respected, you know, as a nation anymore. We don’t have that level of respect that we need. And if we don’t get it back fast, we’re just going to go weaker, weaker and just disintegrate.”

The problems America confronts around the world are far more complicated than the candidates portrayed them, however, with global consequences that would ripple from each proposed action. For example, arming the Kurds, which many candidates supported, would alienate Turkey, a key U.S. ally in the Syrian conflict that is opposed to creating a de facto Kurdish state. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who warned that every community is in danger after the carnage in San Bernardi-

At last week’s debate, the Republican presidential candidates, including, from left, Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Jeb Bush, took an aggressive stance on foreign policy and dealing with the Islamic State, though there were some differences regarding military interventions in the Middle East.

no, showed a willingness to engage in military confrontation with Russia.

Asked whether he would shot down a Russian aircraft if it encroached a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone over Syria, Christie said, “Not only would I be prepared to do it, I would do it. . . . Yes, we would shoot down the planes of Russian pilots if in fact they were stupid enough to think that this president was the same feckless weakling.”

But the CNN debate also exposed fault lines among the candidates — especially over the breadth of federal surveillance and counterterrorism programs — and showed how much the legacy of George W. Bush’s Iraq war still hovers over the party.

One of the most meaningful differences came on the subject of military interventions in the Middle East since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some candidates, including Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and former Florida governor Jeb Bush, said they believe the United States has a moral and pragmatic obligation to maintain a forceful presence abroad.

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POLITICS But other candidates, including Trump and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, condemned past interventions in the Middle East — and made little distinction between those led by George W. Bush or Obama. “The policies that we’ve suffered under other presidents have been a disaster for our country,” Trump said, noting his longstated opposition to Bush’s Iraq war.

Paul explicitly blasted fellow Republicans for having supported past regime changes. “They want it in Syria, they wanted it in Iraq, they want it in Libya,” he said. “It has not worked. Out of regime change you get chaos. From the chaos you have seen repeatedly the rise of radical Islam.”

Despite such differences, the overall tone of the nine debaters on the main stage Tuesday night was uniformly aggressive.

Ben Carson said surveillance of suspected terrorists should extend to “a mosque, a school, a supermarket, a theater, you know it doesn’t matter. If there are a lot of people getting there and engaging in radicalizing activities then we need to be suspicious of it.”

Trump offered some of the most hard-line positions of the night.

He defended his controversial proposal to ban most Muslims from the country and called for enlisting Silicon Valley engineers to help cut off Internet access in global hot spots and for suspected jihadists. He also reiterated his vow to kill family members of suspected terrorists.

“I would be very, very firm with families,” Trump said. “Frankly, that will make people think — because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their families’ lives.”

On the campaign trail, Cruz has used tough and withering rhetoric on terrorism. He said recently in Iowa that he would “carpet bomb [ISIS] into oblivion” and wanted to “see if sand can glow in the dark.”

Asked in the debate about his “carpet bomb” plan, Cruz said he would target places where Islamic State troops convene, although such an air assault undoubtedly could result in a large civilian death toll.

Under a Cruz presidency, he argued, “militants across the globe see that when you join ISIS that you are giving up your life, you are signing your death warrant.” n

CAMPAIGN

KLMNO WEEKLY

2016 THE FIX

Debate winners, losers BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

T

uesday’s Las Vegas debate featured a series of highprofile skirmishes. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio battled over the National Security Agency and its metadata program as well as their stances on immigration. Jeb Bush went after Donald Trump hard, casting him as an unserious person; The Donald dismissed Bush as irrelevant because of his low poll numbers.

Below is my take on the best and the worst.

into an extended back and forth between Cruz and Rubio on the NSA to say, essentially, regular people don’t have any idea what the hell you guys are talking about and they don’t care. Christie went into this debate with momentum in New Hampshire; nothing he said or did Tuesday will hurt that roll 1st hour Donald Trump: About halfway through, I thought Trump was clearly in the winner’s circle. He was measured in his responses, unruffled under attack and avoided the epic cliches — we

ernor needed a moment and just couldn’t find one. Thankfully he abandoned the “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” persona he had adopted for the last debate and got back to who he really is: a committed pragmatist with an impressive record of results in Ohio.

Ted Cruz: Cruz wasn’t actively bad in this debate. His skills as a presenter and performer ensure he will never be genuinely bad.

But he seemed to bite off more than he could chew on several occasions. His face-off with Rubio

WINNERS

Jeb Bush: Finally, John Ellis Bush showed some spirit and fight. Bush repeatedly took it to Trump and refused to back down amid a cascade of insults the real estate magnate launched at him.

It’s somewhat remarkable given Trump’s clear status as the Republican front-runner — and, make no mistake, he is — that Bush was the only candidate willing to go at the billionaire. Bush deserves significant credit for, largely, fighting that fight alone.

The issue for Bush is that his performance may be (and probably is) too little, too late.

Marco Rubio: The senator from Florida proved (again) that he is the best natural debater in the field. Totally in control. Relaxed. Extremely knowledgeable.

He won, rhetorically speaking, a face-off with Cruz over metadata and held his own when Cruz attacked him on his participation in the Senate push for comprehensive immigration reform.

The debate focused a bit too much on his Senate record on immigration for Rubio to be a slamdunk winner. But he reaffirmed that he is a top-tier candidate — and deserves to be.

Chris Christie: The New Jersey governor had one goal in this debate: distinguish himself from the likes of Cruz and Rubio as someone who has never spent any time in Washington. He did so — repeatedly and successfully.

He effectively injected himself

MARK J. TERRILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Amid all the blue suits and red ties, fashion was a loser of the debate.

don’t win anymore, you will be so happy, etc. — that he typically falls back on. That hour was the best hour of any debate thus far for Trump. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t a one-hour debate.

LOSERS

Ben Carson: There’s no debate that Carson is a brilliant doctor. There should also be no debate that he is just not a very good political candidate. Carson’s refusal to offer an opinion on where he came down on the debate over security versus freedom — as articulated by Cruz and Rubio — was a giant head-scratcher.

Time and again when asked about foreign policy and national security, Carson would say lots of words but very few of them made sense together. Aside from his opening statement, which I thought was quite good, he looked out of his depth.

John Kasich: The Ohio gov-

early in the debate over the NSA didn’t end well for him, and his extended attempt to interrupt moderator Wolf Blitzer didn’t either. Cruz got almost 16 minutes of speaking time — the most of any candidate — but didn’t do as much as I expected he would with it. Not a terrible performance. But short of expectations.

2nd hour Donald Trump: Trump showed his thin skin when, under attack from Jeb, he dismissed the Florida governor with this polling slam: “I’m at 42 and you’re at 3.” Later in the debate, Trump clearly had no idea what the nuclear triad was and, in a transparent attempt to cover his tracks, resorted to his “we need to be so strong” crutch.

Men’s fashion: Eight dudes on the stage. All dressed almost exactly the same. Can someone try something other than a blue suit, white shirt and red tie? Come on man! n

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NATION

Where God and guns go together N ICK A NDERSON Lynchburg, Va. BY

A

t Liberty University, the conservative Christian school founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, talk these days in hallways, cafeterias and arenas flows easily from God to guns.

University President Jerry Falwell Jr. kick-started the conversation with a fiery call for the campus community to take up arms to deter terrorist threats after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif.

“Let’s teach them a lesson if they ever show up here,” Falwell told thousands of students here Dec. 4, with an unsubtle reference to a pistol in his back pocket. Five days later, he announced plans to let qualified students store guns in residence halls for the first time.

Many students, faculty members and administrators said they agreed with his views. Hundreds said they planned to take free classes from Liberty police on gun safety, a step toward obtaining a state permit to carry a concealed weapon. Among them were 21year-old students Alvonta Tarrant and Dominique Richburg.

“It never hurts to be prepared,” said Tarrant, a commercial music major from Detroit. He and Richburg, a biomedical-sciences major from Westminster, Md., had just finished bacon burgers one recent evening in a student dining hall.

They said they felt totally safe here. “But anything could happen,” Richburg said.

Falwell’s comments on guns — including pointed language about “those Muslims,” which he later said was referring only to Islamic terrorists — put a fresh spotlight on a fast-growing university with a distinctive blend of cultural conservatism, religious faith and academic ambition. Liberty aspires to be a flagship for the nation’s evangelical Christians, a position that would offer power to influence society far beyond the campus.

Politicians already recognize the potency of Liberty’s stage, which can reach the nation’s evangelical audience on a mass scale.

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

At Liberty University, students and faculty take up Jerry Falwell Jr.’s call to arms to deter terrorists Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) launched his presidential bid here in March, and Lynchburg is a regular stop on the GOP campaign trail. A Democratic hopeful, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), addressed Liberty students in September. Well aware that his politics are far to the left of most students here, he told them that “it is important to see where if possible, and I do believe it is possible, we can find common ground.”

Some observers say Falwell is seeking to use Liberty’s influence to steer national debate in the way his blunt-spoken father, who died in 2007, once did through his Moral Majority political movement. Jonathan Merritt, a Liberty graduate who writes about evangelicals in the United States, said recent events show “a more aggressive posture both for him and for the university, to reengage in the cultural conversation in a similar way and with a similar tone to his father.”

Falwell said he has no desire to inject his voice further into the

national gun debate, or any other.

“That’s not what I’m going to spend time doing in the future, commenting publicly on political issues,” Falwell said in an interview in his suite overlooking the campus ballpark and football stadium. “That’s not why we’re here.”

Liberty will wield influence through its graduates, he said.

“Our mission is only to provide a world-class Christian education to our students and let them be the world-changers, not us,” he said.

Some evangelical students elsewhere said Falwell does not speak for them. Student leaders at Wheaton College in Illinois, a Christian school, condemned Falwell’s comments about guns and Muslims. “We desire to stand in solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters, supporting the shared principles of justice, wellbeing and compassion,” they wrote in an open letter.

With 14,000 students in Lynchburg this fall and 66,000 more connected from afar via computer, Lib-

Paige Hardy, left, and Sydney Blackman sing during a convocation at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. The school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., has encouraged students to get concealed-carry permits.

erty is one of the largest universities in the country and is known as an innovator in online education.

A showcase of campus life is the convocation — a religious, spiritual and cultural gathering that helps set Liberty apart from colleges elsewhere. Three mornings a week, more than 10,000 students pack the Vines Center sports arena to hear high-decibel Christian music, sermons and speeches. The gatherings are mandatory, but many say they are rewarding.

“Even if I’m having a stressful day, it helps me relax,” Madeline Cartwright, 18, a nursing student from Grandy, N.C., said after a convocation Wednesday as final exams were nearing. “I feel so close to the Lord here.”

Many colleges have Christian connections. Among the most highly regarded are the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University and Boston College, all Catholic; Pepperdine University, tied to Churches of Christ; Southern Methodist University; and Baptist-affiliated Baylor University. Brigham Young University is the premier school of the Mormon faith. U.S. News & World Report ranks all seven among the top 75 universities nationally.

Liberty’s reputation has not reached their level. U.S. News judges it 80th among Southern regional universities, tied with Florida Gulf Coast and Northern Kentucky.

Founded in 1971, Liberty was at first a small Baptist college that sometimes struggled to stay afloat.

Nowadays it has enviable financial reserves of more than $1 billion.

The campus in central Virginia, near the Blue Ridge Mountains, is abuzz with construction in a multiyear overhaul estimated to cost $500 million. The Jerry Falwell Library and the College of Osteopathic Medicine opened last year. A new science hall opened this year.

A new student center is expected to open next year, and the 275-foot Freedom Tower, home to the divinity school, is planned for 2017.

The campus teems with fervent believers in the school’s mission, “Training Champions for Christ.”

Many students and faculty mem-

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NATION bers talk freely about education, faith, ambition — and guns.

In the cinematic arts program, which boasts high-tech sound mixing and editing equipment, students help produce short and full-length films. “God’s Compass,” a 90-minute drama, is scheduled for release in May. Emily Mance, a senior from Charlotte, earned a credit on the film as a grip and camera production assistant. She said faith drew her to Liberty.

“God was calling me to go live in a community that was really Christ-based,” she said.

Now that she is 21, Mance is eligible to obtain a permit from Virginia to carry a concealed weapon. She said she plans to take a gun safety class, a first step. “You just never know what happens out there,” she said. “You want to be safe, protect yourself, your family.”

Ralph Linstra, dean of the School of Health Sciences, said he intends to get a concealed-carry permit. He said the school’s policy will deter would-be attackers. “We don’t want to be a soft target,” he said.

Debates about college campus gun policies have arisen elsewhere. A panel at the University of Texas reluctantly recommended Thursday that the school allow concealed handguns in classrooms as UT weighs how to comply with a new state campus-carry law.

Kyle Garcia, 24, a senior from Costa Mesa, Calif., plays right wing on the top men’s team. He played junior hockey in Canada and came to Liberty in part because of the university’s affinity for the sport.

He also liked the Christian atmosphere and academic opportunities. His major is electrical engineering.

What is his take on the school gun policy? He is all for it. But he does not carry any firearms.

“It’s not about Christians waving guns around,” Garcia said. “It’s about protecting yourselves from some people who want to kill.”

On Thursday night, roughly 200 people, many of them students, came to the law school for what was said to be one of Liberty’s largest gun safety classes to date.

“The day they take our guns away is the day we lose our religious freedom as well,” a training officer said. Then police led the crowd in prayer before starting a lesson on muzzle and triggerfinger discipline. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Pay off parking tickets by raiding your pantry BY

C OLBY I TKOWITZ

I

f you forgot to feed the parking meter, in some cities you can feed the hungry instead.

For several weeks ahead of Christmas, drivers in Lexington, Ky., can clear their records with a little charity. The local parking authority, for the second consecutive year, has made the dreaded punishment into a feel-good experience by giving offenders the option to pay off their fines with food.

To reduce a ticket by $15 costs 10 cans of food and there’s no limit on how many cans can be traded. So, to pay a pricier citation, like the $250 for parking in a handicapped spot, would take donating 170 cans. One driver dragged in a suitcase filled with cans to pay one of those more expensive fines, said Gary Means, executive director of the Lexington Parking Authority.

“There are people out there who have a citation or two who we never would have received their payment,” Means said. “People are coming in with a good mind-set.”

Drivers paid about $14,500 worth of tickets last year with food items. It’s a small loss to an organization that collects as much as $800,000 in fines annually.

“We could write a check for $14,500 to charity, but this gives people the chance to clear their record and feel good about what they are doing,” Means said.

He borrowed the idea from Boston, which has run a similar toys for tickets program for several years around the holidays. He’d also heard of universities allowing students to pay their parking fines with food donations. He liked the food idea because it meets a basic necessity, he said.

Since he implemented it last year, several cities around the country have done so, too. He has also received calls from officials in cities such as Allentown, Pa., and Greenville, S.C., who want his advice on whether to do it and how.

He gives them pointers, but his general take is, it’s a “no-brainer.”

GARY MEANS/LEXINGTON PARKING AUTHORITY

Barrels filled with canned goods sit at the Lexington Parking Authority.

Drivers paid about $14,500 worth of tickets last year with food items.

Not only does it flip the negative association people have with parking fines, but it’s been a pleasure for the employees of the parking authority, who are accustomed to angry exchanges. Now, Means said, people walk through the door with a big smile, feeling good about giving back.

And studies have shown that people are more charitable when there is an incentive, so it’s a creative way to get people to give.

In Tallahassee, Fla., which started a version this year allowing first-time offenders to donate one canned good for every $1 of a fine up to $50, the city commissioners hoped it would encourage further altruism.

“I’d rather forego those dollars during the holiday season and allow people to spread a little goodwill and good cheer. If you

pay your parking ticket with crucial food items for families that are in need, perhaps you’ll be more giving in other ways as well,” Commissioner Scott Maddox told the Tallahassee Democrat.

So far this year (the program is in its final week), the Lexington Parking Authority has collected more than 6,000 food items for the God’s Pantry Food Bank. That equates to about 4,000 meals to feed the hungry this holiday season.

“No one likes to get a parking ticket, but this is a great way . . . to make amends and help your neighbors in need as you rectify your parking ticket,” said Marian Guinn, the CEO of the God’s Pantry Food Bank. “Hunger is a huge issue. But if everyone took some action to help and to ease the situation it would look much different in this country.” n

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‘Liberating’ cradle of Tibetan culture E MILY R AUHALA Tongren, China BY

T

wo photographs grace the walls of the Tibetan farmer’s home. In the courtyard, affixed with silver tacks: Xi Jinping, smiling. Inside, by the light of a yak-butter candle: the Dalai Lama in monk’s robes.

Here, in a region called Qinghai in Chinese and Amdo in Tibetan, in a town known as Tongren or Rebkong, depending on whom you ask, things exist in disparate pairs: Two portraits. Two languages. A public face and a private heart.

Even that, it seems, is not enough.

Local officials this year issued a 20-point notice that reaches ever further into the lives of Tibetans here in what’s long been a cradle of Tibetan culture, a thriving monastery town where people proudly speak their native tongue and tout the artists who paint scrolls called thangkas.

The man whom many Tibetans love like a father, the Dalai Lama, was born not far from here. After a failed anti-Chinese uprising, he fled over the mountains to India in 1959 and has not been allowed to return.

In his native Amdo, and across the Tibetan plateau, his absence is a source of anguish. Many, like the farmer, keep a framed picture in their private quarters or tuck a small photograph into the folds of their clothes. They pray for him.

But the Chinese authorities’ new rules, reminiscent of restrictions in the Tibet Autonomous Region to the west, treat these everyday acts of faith as potential crimes against the state: You shall not pray for the Dalai Lama at a religious festival, the notice says. Nor shall you carry his picture in public.

According to the directives, Tibetan calls for “protecting the mother tongue,” “food safety,” “literacy” or “wildlife protection” are merely a “pretext” for separatism, and therefore a threat to “social stability” — a Communist Party buzzword that presages political crackdowns.

Now, as frost settles on the hills and farmers take temporary leave

EMILY RAUHALA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Near Dalai Lama’s birthplace, Beijing bans acts of faith and advocacy and pushes major projects from the land, local officials are readying for what some euphemistically call “stability maintenance season.” They believe that tighter controls will keep the peace throughtherestlesswintermonths.

Tibetans in exile, rights groups and academics counter that ever more aggressive policing fuels unrest. They fear that what is happening in Rebkong may mark a shift toward the type of security that has suffocated other Tibetan areas, especially Lhasa.

“This security-run notion of politics — stability first, as they put it — is spreading from central Tibet to eastern Tibetan areas,” said Robert Barnett, director of Columbia University’s Modern Tibetan Studies Program.“Thesedays,everythingis stability maintenance — it’s a big theme of Tibetan life.”

In Rebkong, that life is very much in flux.

Set among low hills at the far eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, Rebkong is known as the birthplace of several significant

writers and the home of the centuries-old Rongwo Monastery.

The monastery has long been the city’s center — but that is changing, fast. In a regionwide building boom that intensified after the 2008 riots in Lhasa, the government has expanded or renovated many public spaces, sprucing up Dolma Square, at the monastery’s gate.

State funds — including a much-advertised sponsorship from the coastal city of Tianjin — have since fueled the construction of a second square on the other side of town, as well as new roads and half-built high-rises wellsuited to migrants from the east.

But even as “courtesy of Tianjin” garbage trucks roll down freshly paved streets, there are questions about what is gained and what is lostinrapid,state-leddevelopment.

“All construction, all the roads, the majority of the benefit goes to migrants,” said Yangdon Dhondup, a research associate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Dolma Square stands at the gate of centuries-old Rongwo Monastery, in a town known as Tongren in Chinese and Rebkong in Tibetan.

“I think Rebkong will follow the same path as Lhasa,” she said.

“Thanks to migration, it will soon look like any other Chinese town — and that’s the aim: dilute Tibetan identity as much as possible.”

That fear is turning the city’s vast public squares and smooth roads into sites of resistance.

In 2010, several thousand students took to the streets to protest plans to change the language of instruction from Tibetan to Chinese. Their slogan: “Equality of people, freedom of language.”

The area around Rebkong has also seen several self-immolations, part of a wave of fiery protests that have claimed more than 140 lives.

In the early winter of 2012, six people set themselves on fire in a single month, prompting the police to put SWAT vehicles and fire extinguishers in Dolma Square.

A government memo that leaked after the suicides urged officials to withhold state support to the families of the dead — and their home towns. “All projects running on state funds in selfimmolators’ villages must be stopped,” it read.

This year’s notice takes things a step further, prohibiting people from “making incense offerings, reciting prayers, sparing the lives of animals or lighting butter lamps for self-immolators, or greeting their family members.”

The goal of such rules is to scare would-be “separatists” into submission. Given the range of acts that are now considered threats to China’s stability, some wonder if the 20-point notice could have the opposite effect, widening the distance between the local government and local Tibetans, most of whom want to be able to pray, speak and study as they please.

Mark Stevenson, a senior lecturer at Australia’s Victoria University who studies Tibetan art and regularly visits Rebkong, said the gap is only growing as the “new” Rebkong grows.

“These days, you have the government end of town and the monastery end of town,” he said. “Instead of communities coming together, the divisions are getting sharper still.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

At toilet museum, flushed with pride A NNA F IFIELD Kita­Kyushu, Japan BY

J

apan gave the world the Walkman and the PlayStation and karaoke. But the thing Japan is really proud of: the Washlet, the hightech, derriere-washing, tushiewarming toilet.

So much so that Toto, the maker of the beloved Washlet, has built a $60 million museum devoted to it here on the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands.

Designed to celebrate the company’s 100th anniversary in 2017, the museum has already welcomed 30,000 visitors in the three months that it’s been open. On a recent day, large groups of men in suits were being shown through the galleries, listening attentively to their guide.

The museum has thousands of items on display, charting the evolution of the Japanese toilet from the ceramic squatters of the 19th century to Toto’s renowned Washlet, a toilet seat with a built-in bidet. It’s the convergence point for Japan’s attention to personal hygiene, its commitment to providing good hospitality (going to a bathroom with a Washlet helps people relax, Toto says) and its technological expertise.

This month, Toto shipped its 40 millionth Washlet.

“The Washlet is so popular in Japan, but unfortunately we don’t see it in Canada,” said Mami Yoshida, who visited the museum during a trip home with her husband after a decade living in Montreal.

“I think that [Western] people are missing out on such an innovative product, such a cool gadget. And I wanted to impress my husband, so we decided to come here.”

In the museum, Toto is displaying multiple generations of the Washlet, from the first rudimentary model with cords and dials, launched in 1980, to the top-ofthe-line Neorest.

The core of the Washlet is the bidet system that’s built into the seat, which sprays every — ahem — nook and cranny. These are standard in Japanese homes but also in many restaurants and pub-

ANNA FIFIELD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Japan’s obsession with hygiene and hospitality has helped produce some of the best bathrooms lic buildings, from subway stations to government offices.

But the newest models don’t stop at washing. They have seat warmers. They let the user control water temperature and pressure.

Some have a water massage function and a warm air dryer.

In public restrooms, there’s often a “power deodorizer” function, and many play a flushing music — called “otohime,” literally “sound of a princess” — to mask any embarrassing noises.

Some have automatic sensors, so they lift the seat cover when a person approaches the toilet, and they spray an antibacterial water into the illuminated bowl so you know it’s clean.

The Washlet has proven popular in bottom-bathing cultures, such as the Middle East, and it’s not unusual to see Chinese tourists with two or three Washlet boxes stacked on their carts checking in at Tokyo’s main airport.

But Japanese toilets have not exactly taken off in the West. Toto is promoting Washlet loos in the

United States and now has showrooms in Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago, with another opening soon in New York.

In the United States, this technology isn’t cheap. The most simple Washlet — a toilet seat with built-in bidet — costs $599, while the top-of-the-line Neorest toilet retails for $6,500. Plus, you need a power outlet next to the potty.

Also on display: one of the extra-wide, extra-load-bearing toilets Toto makes for sumo wrestling stadiums, restrooms from the Japanese parliament and a “module” bathroom from a Tokyo hotel, built to be plonked into a hotel room during the building boom before the 1964 Olympics. There’s even the bathroom suite used by Douglas MacArthur, the American general who oversaw the occupation of Japan after World War II. There are some funny exhibits, too, such as the “Toto talk” motorbike that toured the country powered by biogas (yes, that’s what you think it is).

Indeed, toilets are a hot topic

The new $60 million Toto toilet museum in Kita-Kyushu, Japan, displays toilets throughout the ages.

here.

The government this year launched the Japan Toilet Prize, part of a campaign to improve quality of life by improving the quality of restrooms. No matter that Japanese public facilities are usually spotless.

The task is to ensure that washrooms are always clean and safe and to tackle one of the thorniest of bathroom problems: how to reduce the lines outside ladies’ lavatories.

The government links its toilet campaign with another key initiative: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s goal to “let women shine” and increase their participation in Japan’s lackluster economy.

"Without appropriate environments where women can use sanitation facilities, their access to social participation in schools and workplaces is restricted,” Haruko Arimura, the Japanese minister for women’s empowerment, told the government's “World Assembly of Women” forum in Tokyo in August.

In fact, she said that restrooms are so pivotal to women’s advancement that she doesn’t mind if she’s known as “minister of toilets.”

Akito Yokoyama, an architect who’s part of the toilet challenge project, said Arimura had explained why she wanted to concentrate on restrooms.

“Women are unable to bring themselves to enter filthy toilets in public parks,” she quoted Arimura as saying, according to the Shukan Shincho magazine. “To enable women who work outside the home to thrive, it’s necessary to improve the environment in public toilets.”

Helping women “shine” is a catchphrase for Abe, to describe his effort to improve Japan’s dismal gender equality rankings — and making washrooms better, he said at the same forum, would help to do just that.

“In terms of sanitation, toilets are a way to encourage women’s participation in society, and there is a lot more Japan can do,” he said, according to reports from the conference. “Japan has very advanced technology in terms of toilets in particular.” n

ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES

CARL COURT/GETTY IMAGES

A 21st-century Ellis Island emerges in Greece

W Opposite page, top: Immigrants on New York’s Ellis Island after their arrival by ship in 1902.

Bottom: In the Greek port of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, migrants wait to board a ferry to Athens last month.

BY GRIFF WITTE in Lesbos, Greece

ith its aqua-blue waters, olive-tree-studded hills and well-preserved ancient ruins, this jewel in the Aegean Sea can hardly be compared to an island built of landfill in the mouth of New York Harbor.

Yet in a year of unparalleled migration to Europe, Lesbos has been transformed from a quietly sublime slice of paradise to a modernday Ellis Island. It’s the first port of call for a multiethnic, multinational tide of humanity seeking relief from war, persecution and poverty — the funnel through which thousands pass daily in search of a better life.

In recent months, the extraordinary pace of landings here has rivaled the historic peaks on the island that for decades formed the main gateway to the United States and that is still known worldwide as a byword for immigration.

But unlike Ellis Island, which was developed by the U.S. government specifically to process new arrivals, Lesbos’s role has emerged largely by happenstance. The solutions to the crisis are a patchwork thrown together by aid organizations, volunteers and local authorities, with comparatively little evidence of help from the Greek government or the European Union.

“Who’s in charge?” said Lani Fortier, who leads the International Rescue Committee’s efforts in Lesbos. “There’s no answer.”

Despite recent improvements that have calmed a situation once defined by chaos and squalor, the infrastructure here for welcoming, screening and registering people on their way into Europe remains inadequate given excontinues on next page

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COVER STORY pectations of another surge in numbers come spring.

Lesbos’s emergence as a global migration center, officials here say, is no short-term anomaly.

“This will continue for another two or three years — at least,” said Marios Andriotios, spokesman for a beleaguered municipal government that has been crying out for help for much of this year. “We didn’t choose to be a hot spot in this crisis. The smugglers chose Lesbos.”

It’s easy to see why: Separated from the Turkish coast by a mere five miles, the island allows refugees and migrants to arrive here after a journey of hours on flimsy rubber dinghies, compared with the weeks people spent on giant steamships to reach Ellis Island. The new arrivals in the early-20th-century United States were largely fleeing from Europe; today, people are fleeing to Europe, having left behind a broad swath of man-made destruction stretching from South Asia to North Africa.

The boat bearing Husam Almasalmh to his new life came ashore in Lesbos soon after dawn one recent morning, just as the first light arced over the hazily blue Turkish mountains and splashed down into the crystal-clear waves lapping the Greek coast.

“My dream is real now!” the 19-year-old exulted as he ripped layers of packing tape — a crude attempt at waterproofing — from his cold, skinny legs.

But the culmination of Almasalmh’s journey from war-ravaged Syria to the peaceful sanctuary of Europe was just another Wednesday on Lesbos. As volunteers tended to a woman shivering uncontrollably from her hours at sea, a local couple walking their dog paused for a moment, then kept moving. Cars speeding to the nearby airport hardly braked.

Evidence of Lesbos’s transformation is everywhere. Buses that once ferried tourists to quiet coves now zip through the island day and night, transporting asylum seekers from remote landing spots to the central registration center, a barbed-wire-laden colossus set on a rocky hillside amid grazing sheep.

Lifeguards accustomed to standing watch over sunbathers now wade into the chilly surf in wet suits to ensure no one drowns as the heaving rubber boats motor onto shore.

In the shadow of a bronze Statue of Liberty look-alike — her torch held aloft, her green gaze steady — thousands of asylum seekers gather at the port clutching tickets affording them passage on a mega-ship bound for Athens.

Of the nearly 1 million refugees and migrants who have arrived in Europe by sea this year, 800,000 have come through the Greek islands. More than half of those have landed on Lesbos. That compares with just over 1 million arrivals during Ellis Island’s busiest year, 1907.

But the flows to Europe began to surge only in August. In October alone, 135,021 people landed here — more than 10 times the total from all of last year.

Even now, when winter winds foam the sea, some 2,500 people arrive daily, more than the number who arrived during all of December

KLMNO WEEKLY

from previous page

BAIN NEWS SERVICE/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

BULENT KILIC/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Top: Immigrants to the United States on Ellis Island. Above: A Yazidi man from Iraq’s Sinjar mountain region sits near his wife after their arrival on the island of Lesbos last month.

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COVER STORY

Europe’s main gate for refugees

last year. If spring begins on the same scale, officials say the island will be unprepared to cope.

At the moment, there are accommodations This year, the Greek island of Lesbos became the main entry point for for just 2,800 people. But in October, daily arrefugees and economic migrants to the European Union.

Sumy Belgorod Prague Nurnberg rivals peaked at more than 6,000 — a number Krakow Kiev Stuttgart Zhytomyr Kharkiv Lvov that could well be replicated in March or April.

The arrivals by sea to Lesbos represent 59% of the arrivals to Greece in 2015 Munich “There needs to be a rapid expansion of the isZürich Vienna Bratislava Dnipropetrovsk Vaduz Donetsk Volgodonsk land’s capacity,” said Boris Cheshirkov, the LesBudapest LESBOS 466,856 REST OF GREECE 325,256 Rostov Mariupol bos-based spokesman for the U.N.’s refugee agenHUNGARY Iasi Chisinau UKRAINE Cluj-Napoca Milan Venice Ljubljana Odessa cy, UNHCR. “We need to use winter to get ready.”

Zagreb E That process seems to be underway. The isP RUSSIA Crimea Krasnodar OBelgrade Novorossiysk Florence San Marino R land’s two refugee camps have doubled in size Yalta Sevastapol Bucharest SERBIA Sarajevo Constanta in recent months, with hundreds of plastic, Sochi U Black Sukhumi BULGARIA Ikea-made housing units replacing the worn Sea 0 250 Vatican Pristina Rome E City Podgorica Sofia Burgas MILES canvas tents that had offered shade, but little Skopje MACE. Naples Tirana else, through the summer and fall.

Istanbul Samsun Trabzon Kavala ITALY ALB. Istanbul Adapazari The new units will soon be equipped with Thessaloniki Bursa Ankara wood floors and gas heaters to help ward off Lesbos Eskisehir Ankara GREECE the rain and the cold as temperatures at night Palermo Kayseri Athens Athens Patra Izmir Izmir dip close to freezing. Bulldozers, meanwhile, Catania Konya Sanliurfa are clearing land to make room for more, Gaziantep Kalamata Adana Antalya while plumbers install hot showers.

Valletta Greek islands with the Aleppo largest migrant arrivals “We don’t have a resort here. We don’t have a Iraklio SYRIA five-star hotel. But we’re trying,” said Stavros Nicosia Hims Med. Sea CYPRUS Trablous Mirogiannis, the effusively affectionate retired Sources: SAMUEL GRANADOS / THELEB. WASHINGTON POST Beirut Tripoli UNHCR and staff reports Damascus military officer who was hired by the mayor to Misratahby sea to Lesbos in December...

Arrivals Darnah run a camp reserved for Syrian families. “I say to Banghazi Tubruq ISRAELTel Aviv-Yafo Amman Surt everyone who comes here, ‘Welcome to Europe.’

Jerusalem Gaza 33% Syrians LIBYA Bur Said Ajdabiya All these people are our guests, and we have to Alexandria JOR. EGYPT Cairo give them the best hospitality that we can.”

29% Afghans a El Suweis Hun 250 miles Cairo The fact that the camp is being managed at Awjilah El Faiyum Siwa 24% Iraqis all is a relatively new development; for Birak Tabuk El Minya Sabha months, it was an anarchic sprawl of squalor 4% Iranians Hurghada Tmassah Asyut that veteran international aid workers said Marzuq Al Wajh was among the worst they had seen.

3% Moroccans El Kharga Luxor Now it is relatively clean and orderly, and it 7% Other has won appreciation from its residents.

Kom Ombo Al Jawf Aswan “I’d heard that Greece had many economic problems. I didn’t expect that they would treat Daily snapshots us like friends,” said Mohammed Abdullah, a 44-year-old who said both his home and his Each dot represents 100 arrivals to Lesbos. electronics shop had been obliterated by Dec. 5 1,414 arrivals bombs in Syria. “But they’re very nice. They gave us things to eat and a place to sleep.

Dec. 6 1,891 They’re treating us like human beings. There are good people in this world.”

Dec. 7 3,231 The bus service, too, has dramatically Dec. 8 2,654 changed life here, eliminating the need for new arrivals to trek 40 or more miles along Dec. 9 2,388 twisting mountain roads. And the presence of dozens of highly trained, professional lifeguards along the coast has undoubtedly Monthly arrivals in 2015 helped to limit a death toll that had been rapAn average of 2,972 people arrived each day to Lesbos in November. idly climbing as the seas turned rougher.

“I didn’t want these refugees to come at 150,000 135,021 first,” said Dimitris Amygdalos, a 26-year-old 89,183 Greek lifeguard who has been volunteering on Lesbos. “But then I saw there are infants on the boats. There are children on the boats.

They’re not terrorists, as most locals think.

23,721 They are people almost like us who were 737 thrown out of their country by their govern0 ment and by ISIS. If that happened in Greece, JAN JUL OCT NOV I’d want another country to help us out.”

Source: UNHCR, as of Dec. 9, 2015 SAMUEL GRANADOS / THE WASHINGTON POST The government of Greece, beset by profound financial woes, is actually doing relatively little compared with the scale of the problem. The European Union, too, is hardly in evidence here, beyond the occasional visit

from a passing dignitary.

The burden has instead fallen on local authorities, volunteers and a roll call of international aid organizations — many of which have had to divert resources from the world’s poorest countries to a crisis on European shores.

“The E.U. is the richest union on earth. It should be managing this shoulder to shoulder with Greek authorities,” said Cheshirkov, the UNHCR spokesman.

At least in some areas, the E.U.’s presence is poised to expand. Following an emergency request from the Greek government, the European border-security agency Frontex announced Thursday that it would send additional boats to patrol Greek shores and officers to help screen and register new arrivals.

“The aim is that everyone who arrives here is thoroughly checked and registered. But we’re not there yet,” said Frontex spokeswoman Izabella Cooper. “The Paris attacks have

“I say to everyone who comes here, ‘Welcome to Europe.’ All these people are our guests, and we have to give them the best hospitality that we can.”

Stavros Mirogiannis, who runs a camp for Syrian families

only underlined the need to ensure that we know who is entering the E.U.” Another E.U. initiative, meanwhile, is off to a slow start in Lesbos. The island is supposed to be a “hot spot” in which authorities sort out those deemed eligible for asylum.

The plan is critical to the E.U.’s strategy of reducing the number of people wending their way through Europe. But there is no infrastructure here to return failed asylum seekers to their home countries, and there are few takers on the E.U.’s offer to relocate those deemed eligible to member states across the continent.

Out of a planned 160,000 relocations, just 159 have been completed — and only 30 from Greece. Although the system allows people to bypass the arduous journey that lies ahead after Lesbos, it can significantly delay their departure from the island and gives them no control over where they end up.

That wouldn’t work for Abdullah, the 44year-old from Syria. His family has already been scattered by war: a wife and two children in Jordan, a son in Germany and Abdullah on an island in the Aegean. But not for long.

Only a day after his arrival, he was preparing to leave, with plans to follow the well-worn path up through the continent until he reached his destination: Germany.

“My son,” he said longingly, “will be there to meet me on the border.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

HEALTH

The secret to live long and prosper?

Lifestyle will get you part of the way, but genes can push you past 100

“It’s one thing to live to be 100 and quite another to live to be 100 and be in good shape,’’ says Winifred K. Rossi, deputy director of the Division of Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology at the National Institute on Aging. The institute is sponsoring an ongoing study of more than 500 families with long-lived members that involves nearly 5,000 individuals.

“Something is going on that has protected them from the bad stuff that causes problems for other people earlier in life.’’

Experts attribute healthy longevity to a combination of good genes and good behaviors. Good behaviors play a greater role than genes in getting you to your midto-late 80s — don’t smoke or drink alcohol, exercise regularly and eat healthfully — while getting beyond 90, and to 100 or even older, probably depends more heavily on genes, they say. Families with a cluster of members with exceptional longevity don’t occur by chance, they say, but probably from familial factors they all share.

MARTIN TOGNOLA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

BY

M ARLENE C IMONS

M

ary Harada’s father lived to 102, healthy and sharp to the end.

She wouldn’t mind living that long, if she could stay as mentally and physically fit as he was. “He died sitting in his chair,’’ says Harada, 80, a retired history professor who lives in West Newbury, Mass. “He was in excellent shape until his heart stopped.’’

She may, in fact, have a good chance of getting there. Longevity experts believe that extreme old age — 100 or older — runs in

families, and often is strikingly apparent in families where there are several siblings or other close relatives who have reached that milestone. (Harada’s great-aunt — her father’s aunt — also lived an extremely long life, to 104.)

Moreover, researchers are finding that many of those who live to extreme old age remain in remarkably good condition, delaying the onset of such chronic and debilitating age-related illnesses as cancer, heart disease and diabetes until close to the end of their lives, and a certain percentage don’t get them at all.

Growing numbers Centenarians have become a fast-growing group in this country.

In 1980, there were 32,194 Americans age 100 or older. By 2010, the number had grown to 53,364, or 1.73 centenarians per 10,000 people, according to the Census Bureau. This represents a 65.8 percent increase during that period, compared with a 36.3 percent rise in the general population.

Moreover, the number of Americans 90 and older nearly tripled during the past three decades, reaching 1.9 million in 2010, and is expected to more than quadruple between 2010 and 2050, according to the bureau. Globally, the number of centenarians is expected to increase tenfold during that time, according to the aging institute.

This is probably due to numerous factors, among them improved health care, dietary changes and reduced rates of smoking.

“When I started practicing, it was rare to see someone of 100, but now it’s not that strange at all,’’ says Anne B. Newman, director of the

Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Pittsburgh. “More people have had the opportunity to get there,’’ largely because of advances in public health and medicine.

But as the numbers of very old have increased and the examination of human genetics has become more sophisticated, researchers have been trying to discover the genetic and biological factors that contribute to a life span of 100 or older and why some centenarians stay healthy for so long. Not surprisingly, what they are finding is complicated and far from a one-size-fits-all answer.

“Aging is not simple,’’ says Thomas Perls, a professor of medicine at Boston University and director of the New England Centenarian Study. “There are many different biological mechanisms involved in aging, so it makes sense that there are different genes involved. We are still in the infancy of figuring this out.’’

Perls and his colleagues, in a study released almost four years ago, concluded there is no single common gene variant responsible for exceptional longevity. Rather, after examining about 280 gene variations, they discovered a series of gene combinations — nearly two dozen, in fact — that they believe contribute to long lives, “meaning there are different ways to get to these old ages,’’ Perls says.

“It’s like playing the lottery. If you get all seven numbers, you’ll hit the jackpot.’’

These genetic groupings also seem to be involved in protecting against developing age-related diseases, since the scientists did not find an absence of diseasecausing genes in their study group. “They have just as many as everybody else, which was a big surprise to us,’’ Perls says.

Also, the researchers found that the children of these healthy centenarians stay healthy longer than their same-age counterparts.

The offspring of centenarians show 60 percent less heart disease, stroke, diabetes and hypertension, and 80 percent fewer overall deaths when they are in their early 70s, than those who

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2015

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TRENDS were born at the same time but who do not have longevity in their families.

“They remain incredibly healthy into their 70s and 80s, and their mortality rate is very low, compared to others born at the same time,’’ Perls says.

Perls has studied 2,300 centenarians since 1995, including “super-centenarians’’ of 110 or older, and their offspring. He says about 45 percent of those who reach 100 manage to delay chronic age-related diseases until after they turn 80, and about 15 percent never get them at all.

Furthermore, he found that “semi-super-centenarians’’ — that is, those who are 105 to 109 — and super-centenarians don’t develop those diseases until roughly the final 5 percent of their very long lives. “They are dealing with diseases much better than the average person,’’ he says, who is more likely to develop these diseases in their 60s and 70s.

‘An additional 10 years’ Perls says that if you want to know whether you will live to 100, “you don’t have to do all this complicated genetic testing. Just look at your family and your health-related behaviors.’’ If you engage in healthful practices, you could reach your late 80s. “If you have the genes for longevity and you fight them [with risky behaviors], you will chop time off,’’ he says. “But if there is longevity in your family and you don’t do those things, you might get an additional 10 years past 90.’’

Newman agrees. “Don’t underestimate how powerful lifestyle is in longevity,’’ she says. “Even if longevity runs in your family, your life expectancy still will be more influenced by how you take care of yourself. If you have a centenarian parent, don’t count on living to 100 if you smoke, drink, eat a high-fat diet, and are sedentary and sleep-deprived.’’

Mary Harada thinks less about her genes and more about the unexpected event — breaking a bone, for example — that could make her a burden to her adult children.

“I don’t spend much time thinking about how long I’m going to live,’’ she says. “Whatever happens, happens. I spend more time thinking about how long I’m going to stay in my current house.’’ n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Your gift Googling speaks volumes about your gender BY

C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

I’

m not sure exactly when my wife finished her Christmas shopping, but it seems like a long time ago. And ever since, she’s been issuing subtle warnings disguised as questions.

“Isn’t it great to be done with Christmas shopping? I sure feel bad for all the people who haven’t even started.”

“Wouldn’t it be incredibly tragic and sad, not to mention potentially marriage-destroying, if it were already December and somebody — SOMEBODY — hadn’t even started thinking about Christmas yet?”

Now I know I’m not alone in this, because conventional wisdom states that husbands and boyfriends wait until the very last minute to do their holiday shopping. In fact, Google search data suggests there’s something to this notion. Consider searches for “gift for husband” and “gift for wife.”

In the Google data, there’s a bump in mid-February for Valentine’s Day. Interestingly, for that holiday there are more wives searching for husband gifts than vice-versa. (Presumably men are simply defaulting to chocolate and/or flowers.)

But searches for “gift for wife” positively explode in December, peaking the week before Christmas. “Gift for husband” increases, too, but not by nearly as much.

Those numbers suggest that in the weeks before Christmas, men are more than twice as likely as women to be frantically Googling gift ideas for their spouse.

Looking at the daily search volume we see that Dec. 22 — the Monday before Christmas — was peak Holiday Gift Panic last year.

Some husbands are still searching for “gift for wife” on Christmas Day. By contrast, according to Google’s data there are approximately zero wives still searching for gifts on Christmas Day. Here’s one final wrinkle though.

The search patterns for “gift for boyfriend” and “gift for girlfriend” are much more similar than the

Frantic holiday gift-Googling Relative weekly search volume, Jan. 2014 -- Dec. 2014 100

80 “Gift for wife” 60

40 “Gift for husband” 20

0 Jan.

Feb. Mar.

Apr.

May

Jun.

Jul.

Aug. Sep.

Oct.

WAPO.ST/WONKBLOG

Nov. Dec. Source: Google Trends

Boyfriends and girlfriends Relative weekly search volume, Jan. 2014 -- Dec. 2014 100

“Gift for boyfriend” 80 “Gift for girlfriend” 60

40

20

0 Jan.

Feb. Mar.

Apr.

May

Jun.

Jul.

WAPO.ST/WONKBLOG WAPO.ST/WONKBLOG

wife and husband searches are.

And the numbers on Valentine’s Day suggest a huge spike in women experiencing boyfriend-related gift anxiety.

Taken as a whole, the numbers suggest that when a couple are

Aug. Sep.

Oct.

Nov. Dec. SOURCE:Google GOOGLE TRENDS Source: Trends

dating, women and men experience difficulty finding Christmas gifts at similar rates. But once they are married, wives get their act together while husbands still leave their holiday shopping to the last minute. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2015

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Did Lincoln promote middle class?

N ON-FICTION

I A JUST AND GENEROUS NATION Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity

By Harold Holzer and Norton Garfinkle Basic. 311 pp. $27.99

l

REVIEWED BY

H OWELL R AINES

n one respect, “A Just and Generous Nation” calls to mind a Watergate-era tome by James David Barber titled “The Presidential Character.” That is to say, it is popular history written with an eye on the next presidential election. This new book is not likely to please members of the party of Abraham Lincoln already disenchanted by watching the GOP candidates on the campaign trail.

In Part One of their book, Harold Holzer and Norton Garfinkle give us Lincoln as a pioneering economic thinker who opened the doors of opportunity for the modern middle class. The latter half argues that only an Obama-esque Democrat can be relied upon to end the alleged Republican “war on the middle class.” In an eyecatching statistical appendix, they martial evidence that marginal income-tax rates for the wealthy hurt gross domestic product and employment when they fall below 35 percent.

In other words, this book is a vigorous polemic in the classical sense of that word — a sharply focused argument in support of a debatable point of view. By cutting to the meat of their political argument, this reviewer does not intend to denigrate the authors’ Civil War scholarship. Holzer is a Metropolitan Museum executive with a solid national reputation among Lincoln experts. Garfinkle is a liberal economist whose thinking and business activities are summed up in the title of his previous book, “The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth: The Fight for a Productive Middle-Class Economy.”

The co-authors preface their book with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s eulogy at Lincoln’s funeral service in 1865: “This middle-class country had got a middle-class president, at last.” Indeed, Lincoln was the first chief executive not elected from the ranks of the agrarian aristocrats who founded the republic. His life, he liked to say, reflected “the short and simple annals of the poor,”

ALEXANDER GARDNER VIA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION

President Abraham Lincoln gives his second inaugural address in 1865.

whose descendants rose, as Lincoln had, in commerce and the professions based on their forebearers’ opportunity to buy cheap land on the western frontier. The federal government, in his view, was to be the activist facilitator of an equitable economic order, manipulating its trade policies to benefit agriculture and industry, and paying for the transportation and banking infrastructure needed to create jobs.

The game plan of Lincolnomics was to grow a prosperous middle class, not to enrich owners of factories and plantations.

Was the Great Emancipator also the Great Redistributor? Lincoln scholars may quibble with the sweeping conclusion that in taking office, the 16th president purposely “assumed the role of chief executive of the American economy.” But the premise is well argued and documented, and the abundant quotations seem apt in an election year when voters may make a watershed decision between an enabling governance

and a withholding one.

In the authors’ view, Lincoln intended to be an “activist President” in promoting, as a national model and on an ever-expanding scale, the up-from-poverty pattern of his own life. “Lincoln was the first president to use the federal government as an agent to support Americans in their effort to achieve and sustain a middleclass life,” they write. “Even as the Civil War commenced, Lincoln supported a program of direct government action to support his vision of America’s middle-class society.”

Lincoln’s main goals as president reflected the 1860 platform of his vigorous new party. He would work to end slavery, expand federal aid for builders of a Pacific railroad, seek congresssionally funded river and harbor improvements and free land for homesteaders, and even pursue “liberal wages” for the working man.

Part Two of the book is a swift tour d’horizon of post-Lincoln eco-

nomic history in which Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt carry forward Lincoln’s pro-middle-class, anti-monopolist policies. But over time, economic advantage is tilted back toward the plutocrats by the Industrial Revolution,AdamSmith and laissez-faire economics, supply-side economics and tax windfalls dumped on the rich by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Had he lived, Lincoln might have been chagrined by a contemporary-sounding consequence of the industrial growth he promoted.

“By 1890 the richest 1 percent of the population was absorbing half of the entire national income and controlled more than half the nation’s wealth,” the authors assert.

“Within three decades after Lincoln’s death, his American Dream of a middle-class society was no longer available to most Americans.” n Raines is a former executive editor of the New York Times and is working on a novel set during the Civil War.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2015

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Book’s suspense drowns in despair

Rainn Wilson gets out of ‘The Office’

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

T

l

REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

he opening scene of Scottish suspense master Denise Mina’s new novel is as odd as its title: “Blood, Salt, Water.”

In a deserted area near Loch Lomond, two men and a woman get out of their van and begin walking toward the water. The woman is clearly a prisoner of some sort, but she doesn’t put up a fight; in fact, as one of the men thinks to himself: “She’d been as biddable as a heifer for the two days they had her.” The victim even smiles as she walks in single file with her escorts, one in the lead, one guarding her from the rear. The woman’s air of calm, however, dissipates in an instant once she spots a boat waiting for them at lochside. She screams and kicks at the men and then tries to run.

Quickly, one of the men employs “an old prison trick” and smacks her on the jaw. She drops, unconscious, to the ground. The inevitable denouement unfolds in silence.

More than the violence, it’s the off-kilter serenity of the first moments of that scene that makes it so disturbing. We readers don’t quite understand what we’re witnessing, but, in our bafflement, we’re still way ahead of the police.

Detective Alex Morrow and her team are searching for that woman, whose name turns out to be Roxanna Fuentecilla. They’ve had her under surveillance in Glasgow for weeks. Precious hours pass before Morrow realizes with sick certainty that Fuentecilla hasn’t voluntarily given them the slip.

Even among the other practitioners of so-called Tartan Noir — fellow Scots like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and William McIlvanney — Mina has distinguished herself by her particularly dour worldview. Criminal and cop are separated only by a hairsbreadth of circumstance. Some of Mina’s offenders are just “born that way”; others have been shaped by their bad environment and worse luck.

Free will counts for less in Mina’s chill universe than a good roll of

the dice.

All of Mina’s novels — whether they’re part of the Morrow series or one of her Garnethill or Paddy Meehan books — are bleak.

“Blood, Salt, Water,” however, is so relentless in exploring the despair that blankets Morrow’s corner of Scotland that the suspense plot becomes obscured. Readers eventually learn why Fuentecilla has been under police surveillance (it has something to do with drugs, of course), but not before many other characters and their grim backstories trail through the novel.

“Blood, Salt, Water” is primarily set in the quaint seaside town of Helensburgh, a real town in Scotland that looks like a place Miss Marple might have chosen for holiday. But in Mina’s hands it turns out to be a stagnant pool of rancid ambitions and slimy personalities.

Morrow, our guide through this murkiness, has to be one of the most diffident detectives ever to pound a major crime fiction beat. She boasts neither eccentricities nor catchphrases nor telltale vulnerabilities — unless you count her love for her 18-month twins, who have marked the shoulders of her work blazers with drool.

Instead, Morrow serves as the bulwarkofthemundaneagainstthe unimaginable. Here she is basking in a bit of downtime with her husband: “She felt the warmth of the nice man next to her, savoured the health of her children. She even had a cup of tea and a biscuit. She found happiness hard to recall most of the time — misery was stickier, puzzling, more intense — but she could be happy in the moment.”

The power of Mina’s writing is such that she can transport readers from placidity to violent pandemonium in the space of a paragraph.

The plot of “Blood, Salt, Water” may be a blur, but its disquieting atmosphere lingers long after everything else fades into black. n Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air.”

D BLOOD, SALT, WATER An Alex Morrow Novel

By Denise Mina Little, Brown. 295 pp. $26

THE BASSOON KING My Life in Art, Faith and Idiocy

By Rainn Wilson Dutton. 320 pp. $26.95

l

REVIEWED BY

L OUIS B AYARD

wight Schrute, when last we left him, was regional manager of Dunder Mifflin Paper in Scranton, Pa. But that exalted title doesn’t begin to pin him down. He was also a corporate suck-up, a “Battlestar Galactica” fanatic, a martial artist, a crossbow archer, a bed-andbreakfast owner and a beet farmer. He was vainglorious, unctuous, gullible, humorless, vulnerable, fascistic. He sported one of the worst haircuts this side of the Appalachians but was surprisingly lucky with the ladies. More than anything else, Dwight was so incandescent with rage that, over nine seasons of “The Office,” I kept waiting for him to turn an Uzi on his fellow paper pushers.

One might assume that an actor who could bring such a rancorous character to life would know a thing or two about buried anger, but you won’t find many cross words in Rainn Wilson’s breezy those-were-the-days memoir. No, for the most part, “The Bassoon King” follows the template of commercial self-deprecation laid out

by Tina Fey’s “Bossypants”: 1. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

2. Don’t take anything else too seriously.

3. When in doubt, choose entertainment over confession.

Fortunately, Wilson is just the kind of quirky, witty, literate fellow who can thrive within those parameters. He guides us through his peripatetic childhood (Seattle to Nicaragua to the North Side of Chicago), through his geek martyrdom in high school (bassoons were involved, yes, and so were “Dungeons & Dragons” and Model United Nations) and his apprenticeship in the bohemian Village theater scene of the 1990s (where he struggled with drugs and alcohol). We follow his first forays into the tar pool of Hollywood, and, with some relief, we arrive at his career-making break: a singlecamera mockumentary with one of the lowest-testing pilot epi-

sodes in NBC history.

Many years before, an acting teacher had isolated Wilson’s affinity for “alienated outsiders.” With “TheOffice,”hepliedthattalentinto becoming a national nerd fixture, with three Emmy nominations to prove it. Wisely, though, Wilson devotes most of these pages to the lean years: the sort of “Office”-style mortifications that tend to beset aspiring actors: living in an abandoned Brooklyn beer brewery with “surly rats the size of poodles”; freaking out on pot; bathing in Al Pacino’s “manic spittle” during a production of “Salome”; cold-calling CEOs for a sleazy insurance company; picking berries for $1.25 a flat.

Wilson gives us listicles — “Compendium of Comic Sidekicks,” “Greatest Albums of the Early Eighties” — plus a not-easilyshaken description of intestinal worms and a vivid portrait of Baby Rainn: “My white, bloated, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade head loll[ed] about on my snowy, damp potato-sack body. I was like some kind of larva. . . . Picture an ashen manatee with a tiny human face.”

Inevitably, Wilson puts in a plug for SoulPancake, his “little media company with a heart of gold.” With recurring features like Kid President, Metaphysical Milkshake and cat videos, SoulPancake is, in fact, an exercise in monetized YouTube uplift, premised on the notion that “balancing profit and heart” is not, as you might have thought, a contradiction in terms but simply “a difficult tightrope to walk.”

The real tightrope, perhaps, is writing memoirs, and from that ordeal, Wilson has emerged unmolested — happier, no doubt, for not having to express anger at the mother who abandoned him at a young age. The two have since reconciled, and Wilson now considers himself “the luckiest man on the planet.” Somewhere, in the Scranton of his soul, I still hear Dwight Schrute screaming. n Bayard is a novelist and reviewer in Washington.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2015

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Women in combat will put men at greater risk KATHLEEN PARKER writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture.

Crickets.

This was the sound of the United States reacting to news this month that all military positions, including ground combat, will be opened to women.

It is axiomatic that the White House, and not just this one, makes controversial announcements when people are otherwise distracted. Usually, this means late Friday afternoons when there isn’t much time for the media to make trouble. This particular announcement came on a Thursday, the day after two vicious killers opened fire on a holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif.

Ever since, all eyes have been on the assault and aftermath, as well as the antics of Donald Trump, while the notion of women in combat faded from the nation’s peripheral vision.

Arguments against this move are many, some of which I touched upon in a previous column that focused on women’s unequal opportunity to survive because of various physical differences. This time, I submit another crucially important but politically incorrect proposition: Men’s lives will also be put at greater risk if women are in combat.

The reasoning should be obvious. Plainly put, men tend to like women quite a lot and either will be tempted to express their attraction, and/or will want to protect their female companions.

Scoff if you must, but blame Nature.

Any combat veteran will tell you that unit cohesion is everything in battle. Common sense tells us that putting young men and women in the prime of their sexual lives together in the field, where the possibility of death is potentially imminent, is a potential — and unnecessary — gamble on unit cohesion.

There is, after all, nothing like a

funeral to remind the living of their mortal imperative.

Sexual tension is a most delightful distraction in civilian life. But in close quarters, where men likely would vastly outnumber the few women who qualify for combat, other human emotions — envy, jealousy and resentment — enter into a fray that’s already complicated enough.

This is certainly not to blame women for men’s weaknesses.

Both sexes are equally responsible for — or perhaps I should say, equally victims of — Nature’s own agenda. There is, meanwhile, only one pertinent question in this debate: Does putting women in combat improve military effectiveness?

If not, then it’s a mistake.

My mailbox is full of letters from combat veterans opposing this move. A frequent comment comes in the form of a question: What happens to women when they’re captured? We know what happens. Will our men be able to withstand the screams of their female companions as they

U.S. ARMY VIA REUTERS

Pfc. Janelle Zalkovsky of the 101st Airborne Division provides security in Iraq in 2005. The U.S. military will open all combat jobs to women.

are raped or tortured?

The Defense Department has tried to find out through its Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, which provides training for evading capture and survival skills in a POW environment.

The training simulates a variety of possible scenarios, including torture and, in some cases, at least the perception of a woman being raped. The soldier, who doesn’t know who the woman is, can stop it if he cooperates.

Feminists, among whom I count myself with an asterisk, will protest that blocking women from any military job undermines women’s capacity for self-determination. While needlessly true, there’s another feminist creed that should prevail in this case: choice.

But no-choice could foreseeably become the rule should the military ever again need to reinstate the draft.

Already there’s discussion about requiring young women to tender themselves to the Selective Service System on their 18th birthdays, the same as young men. This makes logical

sense in theory even if it defies sanity in application.

The reason women have never been required to register with the Selective Service is because they weren’t allowed in combat.

Now that they are, there’s no valid argument against their also being eligible for conscription. You can go to the bank on this one.

You may be wondering when and where women have a chance to debate this change in a world that will affect all women in the future. Civilians may have missed it, but the Pentagon has been heading in this direction for decades.

For now, as America is focused on the Islamic State and the presidential election, women in combat will just happen one day sometime in the not-distant future. Eventually, we’ll avert our eyes from footage of a young woman’s tortured body — someone’s wife, mother, daughter, sister or lover — as she is crucified, burned or beheaded in the name of God knows what.

That will be a day no civilized nation should have invited upon itself. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The Fed’s oversight on rate hikes HAROLD MEYERSON writes a weekly political column that appears on Thursdays and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

The Federal Reserve’s decision Wednesday to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006 highlights a glaring weakness of conventional economic analysis: its failure to understand the role that power plays in shaping the economy.

By all the usual metrics, wages should be bounding upward now that unemployment has been reduced to 5 percent and 13 million jobs have been added to the economy since the depths of the Great Recession. It’s to counter the inflationary pressures that such wage increases would engender that the Fed finally decided to hike rates.

The only problem with this analysis is that wages are not bounding upward, and inflation has remained below — not above — the Fed’s preferred rate of 2 percent. In essence, the Fed decided to act on mainstream economists’ theories — wages and inflation should be increasing, dammit — rather than observable facts.

A similar preference for theory over empiricism has informed one argument that many economists have made for the “Cadillac tax,” a levy on more costly health insurance policies that is scheduled to take effect in 2018, but whose implementation will be delayed if the congressional budget deal unveiled Tuesday night is enacted. Employees whose coverage is scaled back as a result

of the tax, the argument goes, shouldn’t fret, since employers will pass along the savings to them in the form of wage increases.

What the Fed’s decision and this argument supporting the Cadillac tax both miss is that the traditional theories of how wages rise have been negated by major structural changes to the U.S. economy. Time was when tightened labor markets and increases in employers’ retained revenue did lead to wage increases, but that time is clearly long gone.

What the conventional theories have failed to factor in is power: the fact that workers have lost their ability to bargain with employers, the fact that major shareholders have gained the ability to compel corporate

executives — often, on penalty of losing their jobs — to funnel all available revenue to them. A cursory glance at, or in-depth survey of, U.S. business shows that companies are engaged in bargaining aplenty — not with their employees, who, with the rate of private-sector unionization reduced beneath 7 percent, have no means of bargaining. Rather, they’re contending with “activist investors,” who are reshaping the economic landscape by successfully pressuring companies to buy back their shares and merge with competitors, in the cause of enriching themselves.

John Kenneth Galbraith, in his 1952 book “American Capitalism,” painted a picture of an economy dominated by major corporations, whose power was offset by the countervailing power of other businesses, unions and government regulations.

Because Galbraith stressed the crucial role of power relations rather than the mathematical beauty of free markets, his work was dismissed by many mainstream economists. Today, however, it’s a far better guide to what’s happened to our economy than the work of his critics.

What’s happened, of course, is that the countervailing powers

that Galbraith identified have largely been crippled. Unions have been eviscerated.

Consumers have lost much of their legal ability to seek redress from corporate misconduct, as courts have upheld compulsory arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. Decades of government neglect of its antitrust obligations have enabled the rise of monopoly power in Silicon Valley, of Walmart’s ability to compel consumer-goods manufacturers to offshore their production to cheap labor markets, and of a record wave of mega-corporate mergers.

To be sure, genuine full employment would boost workers’ ability to secure better pay, but the globalization of U.S. corporations, the deterrent effect of monopoly power on new business formation, the chronic underconsumption by underpaid U.S. workers and the underinvestment of the public sector in necessary and jobgenerating projects all make full employment ever more improbable.

So — wage increases? Wage inflation? Please remove noses from textbooks, dear Fed governors, and look around you.

American workers won’t win raises until they win back their power. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2015

22

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOTH BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

Athletes’ voices should be heard KEVIN B. BLACKISTONE ESPN panelist and visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, writes sports commentary for The Post.

The phraseology chosen Monday by Missouri lawmakers Rick Brattin and Kurt Bahr — “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any college athlete who calls, incites, supports, or participates in any strike or concerted refusal to play a scheduled game, shall have his or her scholarship revoked” — harkened to an earlier time in their home state.

More than 200 years ago, the governor and judges of the Louisiana Territory, which eventually bore Missouri, adopted “codes . . . against slaves . . . making riots, gathering in unlawful assemblies, making assaults upon their masters, plotting conspiracy, offering of resistance to making arrest, and engaging in trade.”

The college athletes at whom Brattin and Bahr aimed their proposed legislation are not slaves. They are, however, mostly progeny of enslaved Africans, a reported 30 or more black football players at the state’s flagship university in Columbia who last month joined a burgeoning student-body protest there calling for the ouster of then-university president Tim Wolfe over his handling of racial tensions on campus.

The players, who racially represented just about half of the team’s 124-man roster, said

they wouldn’t play another down unless the president resigned. Two days after they stood up, Wolfe stepped down.

Brattin deemed the successful protest “anarchy.” He vowed with his co-written bill that there would be repercussions should there be a fire next time (my James Baldwin hat tip, obviously, not his).

It is easy to dismiss Missouri HB 1743 as little more than bluster. After all, there is the small matter of First Amendment rights in this country, which this bill appears to trample.

Then there is the admission in its penalty that college athletes are what many of us, including judges and a National Labor Relations Board regional director, have argued they are: university employees. That is not an argument those who lord over the college athletic industrial complex want to

make, lest they be forced to reward football and basketball players, in particular, with health care, workers’ compensation and a far more equitable share of its multibillion-dollar pie than tuition, room and board.

Indications from the legislative tracking tool FiscalNote showed thus far that the Missouri bill probably will not pass because of a lack of support and the degree of injury it could cause.

And there is the practical application. As a comrade of mine wondered: “What is supposed to happen when the GIA [grant-in-aid, or scholarship] is ‘revoked’ under this bill? Does the university have to sue the athletes for reimbursement of money that the university never gave them to begin with? Do the cops go grab the athletes out of class if they don’t go to the registrar’s office and reimburse the cost of tuition, room, board and books that was waived by the university? And the proposed bill says a coach who ‘encourages or enables’ (whatever that means) must be fined an unspecified amount . . .”

That, too, harkened to the black codes adopted in the Louisiana Territory, some of

which penalized slave owners for abetting freedoms sought by their human property.

But it cannot be ignored that this is part of a growing reactionary effort in parts of the country to curtail, if not completely eliminate, the rights of college athletes, who over the past couple of years began to flex their collective strength and find fresh air.

Last December, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law a legislative proposal prohibiting college athletes at his state’s public universities from unionizing. The law blocked college players from the ability to collectively bargain by stating they aren’t employees.

In the summer of 2014, Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has since announced his candidacy for the presidency, signed Ohio HB 483 that included among several provisions language that prohibited the state’s college athletes from organizing into unions.

There is as long a history of retribution to athletes protesting as there is of athletes protesting.

But it is a particularly sad chapter when lawmakers would muster the temerity to attempt an abridgement of athletes’ — or anyone’s — freedom of speech. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Family dinners BY

A NNE F ISHEL

Each year, Americans gather around the table with family and friends for the holidays. But only 50 percent of us eat with our families on a regular basis. That’s too bad. Twenty years of research has shown that family dinners are great for the brain (enhancing preschool vocabu­ lary and raising test scores), body (improving cardiovascular health in teens and lowering the odds of obesity) and spirit (reducing rates of behavioral problems, stress and substance abuse). But in extolling the virtues of the family dinner, we may have obscured what the meal is actually about and why it serves parents and children. In that gap lies a thick stew of myths.

1

Teens don’t want to eat with their parents.

A sullen teenager at the table is a common pop-culture trope. And for some families, it’s reality. One Time magazine writer complained about “the deep world-weariness my older daughter has begun bringing with her to meals, one that, if she’s feeling especially 13-ish, squashes even the most benign conversational gambit.” For this reason, he said, he’d rather eat alone with his wife.

Yet the scientific literature paints a different picture. Most teens value their relationships with their parents. This is true at the dinner table, as well. About 80 percent of teenagers say they’d rather have dinner with their families than by themselves.

Teens say dinnertime is when they’re most likely to talk to their parents. And having a nightly opportunity to connect offers a seat belt on the potholed road of adolescence. This connection may explain why family dinners are associated with a host of behaviors parents hope for: lower rates of tobacco use, teenage pregnancy, depression, anxiety and eating disorders.

2

Family dinners are antifeminist.

Historically, women have borne the brunt of family dinner prep, and many worry

that the burden continues to fall mostly on them. As Slate put it, “The stress that cooking puts on people, particularly women, may not be worth the trade-off.”

But embracing family dinners doesn’t have to mean conjuring a vision of June Cleaver in her spotless 1950s kitchen. Today, men are far more likely to help.

Between 1965 and 2008, men nearly doubled their time spent cooking, and 42 percent of men now cook. Of course, disparities remain, but family dinners provide an opportunity to move toward more gender equity. Just as women can “lean in” at work, men can “lean in” at home.

Some studies also show that finding time to eat with family helps working mothers, in particular, reduce the tension and strain of long days at the office.

3

Family dinners depend on a homemade meal.

Homemade meals are usually healthier and lower in fats, salt, sugar and calories than store-bought alternatives. But more important than what you eat is the opportunity to engage with your children and learn about their day-to-day lives.

Dinner is also a prime time to tell stories about family members — love stories, acts of derring-do, immigration tales and silly anecdotes about mishaps. Kids

JODI JACOBSON/ISTOCKPHOTO

who know their family stories are more resilient and have higher self-esteem.

In truth, watching TV during dinner is much more detrimental than sharing the occasional takeout meal with your kids.

4

Families don’t have time to pull it off.

In my work with families, lack of time is the top reason families give for not eating together more often. Kids and parents feel rushed, stretched by hectic schedules and exhausted by screens that keep us tethered to work around the clock.

It is true that the share of lowincome youth who regularly ate meals with their families dropped from 47 percent to 39 percent between 1999 and 2010.

For these families, erratic work schedules can make setting mealtimes especially challenging.

Tight budgets also make it harder for low-income parents to buy fresh fruits and veggies.

But not every American family is struggling to have dinner together. During the same period, other families started eating together more — the percentage of adolescents in the highest socioeconomic bracket who shared regular meals with their families rose from 56 percent to

61 percent. This disparity is alarming.

Further, families don’t need to gather at the table every night to reap the benefits. Most studies have found that eating together five times a week, which could include breakfast or even a snack, can yield positive benefits.

5

Food fights make family dinners impossible.

Many parents shy away from family meals because they don’t think they can make a meal everyone will eat, and they don’t relish arguing with their kids about it.

Studies have shown that the best way to avoid food fights isn’t by forcing kids to eat — it’s for parents to model good eating habits and introduce a wide variety of foods before age 4, when children are more open to them. Tactile play, such as having kids smear oil on vegetables for roasting, has also been shown to reduce food aversions in children. And, finally, kids crave familiarity, so nutritionists offer the rule of 15: Keep presenting a new food up to 15 times until it is no longer novel. n

Fishel is a co-founder of the Family Dinner Project, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of “Home for Dinner.”

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2015

24

Foothills Magazine presents its 4th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

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

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

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