Deseret Magazine - November 2021

MAG AZ INE

ESCAPE

FROM

BY SCOTT CARRIER

AFGHANISTAN IS

AMERICA

PREPARED FOR THE

NEXT DISASTER?

By Niall Ferguson

THE

GOP ’S NEW

THREAT

FROM

WITHIN NOVEMBER 2021 ISSUE 09 Volume 01 deseret.com $4.95

By Miles Taylor

THE

GROWTH OF MIXED FAITH

FAMILIES

Don’t feed the moths.

Feed your restlessness.

DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT GOD, FAITH, SCRIPTURE, OR SPIRITUALITY?

THE VIEW FROM HERE

IN SEARCH OF EMPATHY

BY JESSE HYDE

B

ack in journalism school in New York, all my classmates knew what they wanted to do. Some dreamed of covering the White House. Others wanted to become sports writers. And some, it seemed, just wanted to stay in Manhattan. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Then I read “Enrique’s Journey,” a series published by the Los Angeles Times.

I stumbled across the first story one night in my campus apartment and couldn’t stop reading. It told of a teenage boy from Honduras and his quest to find his mother, who had emigrated north to earn money to feed her family. In painstaking detail, journalist Sonia Nazario retraced Enrique’s harrowing journey. She rode atop the same trains he stowed away on to get through central Mexico and even hitchhiked on an 18-wheeler, as Enrique had done, to get across the border. Her work let me see through the boy’s eyes.

That story forever changed how I saw immigration, but it also showed me something bigger, at least in my life: the power of journalism. I realized that, when it’s done right, journalism can take us to places we’ve never been, places we could never go. It can let us walk in the shoes of someone we might seem to have little in common with.

I thought of Enrique as I read Scott Carrier’s remarkable piece about one man’s quest to get his family out of Afghanistan as U.S. forces withdrew this summer and the Taliban closed in (“Escape from Afghanistan,” page 56). I’ve never been to Kabul, but through Scott’s courageous reporting and elegant prose, I walked with him and Najibullah through the war-ravaged landscape. I connected with Najib and felt his desperation as he tried to rescue his loved ones.

6 DESERET MAGAZINE

It’s hard to hate someone we see as fully human, hard to fear them when we understand that, beyond our differences in nationality, religion or political party, they share similar hopes and dreams of peace and prosperity for their family. This is called empathy, and there are warning signs in our own midst of what happens when we lose it, as we can see in Miles Taylor’s alarming essay on divisions within the Republican Party, which have grown from disagreement to hostility to outright threats of violence (“Inside the Fight Over the GOP’s Soul,” page 66).

There will be times we don’t agree. There is right and wrong, and sometimes we have to take a stand for those principles and for the safety of our own. In a candid interview, H.R. McMaster, the retired Army general and former national security adviser under former President Donald Trump, warns that we have no choice but to engage with the world, but reminds us of the good we can accomplish by dealing with the world as it is and not how we wish it could be, understanding that others might see it a little differently (“The Lost War,” page 20).

And that’s where journalism can help. Empathy doesn’t mean we agree about everything, especially with someone who harbors bad motives, but it can help us to understand where they’re coming from, and the best reporting out there does just that.

The night I read “Enrique’s Journey,” I made a promise to myself that I would be the type of journalist who works to promote empathy and compassion, even for those I disagree with. That also happens to be one of the missions of this magazine. We may not always get it right, but when we do we hope our reporting can make a messy world a little easier to navigate, and shine a light in its dark places.

CONTENTS

‘SH A RENT ING’ GO ES VIRA L

10

BY ETHA N BAU ER

TH E LOST WA R

20

BY H A L BOYD

UNIT E A ND CO NQUER ?

28

12

Adventures in interfaith marriage.

BY D. HUNT ER S C HWA R Z

F IF T Y WAYS TO ENDURE

UNDER ONE ROOF

By Mya Jaradat

FAMILY MATTERS

16

U.S. adults rank their concerns on finances, faith and more in a new poll.

by Lois M. Collins

MAILING IT IN

24

Why some of voting by mail’s biggest fans are fighting it.

By Sofia Jeremias

40

BY M ATT C ROS S MA N

WR I TING ON TH E WA L L

74

BY ETHA N BAU ER

A TESTA MENT

82

O F FA ITH

BY J U STIN G IBONEY

TO SAVE ONE ANOTHER

30

On a farm in Wyoming, convicts and mustangs get a shot at redemption.

by Lauren Steele

TH E L AST WORD

THE RETURN OF THE WORKFORCE

36

DOOM PATROL

48

An Idaho family brings back employees amid a public health crisis.

A renowned historian excavates past epidemics — and the inevitable next.

by Benoît Morenne

by Niall Ferguson

I N S I DE TH E F I G H T 66 OV E R TH E G O P ’ S S O U L

THE LOOMING PEASANT STATE

Can the party of Lincoln heal to find a path forward?

The disappearance of the middle class is the erosion of an American ideal.

84

BY LOIS M. C OL L INS

ESCAPE FROM AFGHANISTAN

56

A boy escapes the Taliban and 20 years later helps his family do the same. by scott carrier

8 DESERET MAGAZINE

by Miles Taylor

by Victor Davis Hanson

80

CONTRIBUTORS

Deseret, which was proposed as a state in 1849, spanned from the Sierras in California to the Rockies in Colorado, and from the border of Mexico north to Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming. Informed by our heritage and values, Deseret Magazine covers the people and culture of that territory and its intersection with broader culture.

NIALL FERGUSON

MICHELLE D’URBANO

MILES TAYLOR

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior faculty fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, the managing director of Greenmantle LLC and the author of 16 books, including his most recent work, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”

Michelle D’Urbano is a surface pattern designer and illustrator based in her hometown of Chingola, Zambia. She studied fashion and textiles at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa before gravitating toward a career in editorial illustration and has since worked with Adobe, Harper Collins Publishing and The Washington Post. Although D’Urbano’s work is primarily digital, she enjoys exploring traditional art mediums like painting and photography in her free time.

Miles Taylor is the co-founder for RenewAmerica, a former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and author of The New York Times bestselling memoir “Anonymous.” Taylor, a graduate of Indiana University and the University of Oxford, where he received a master’s in philosophy, worked in both the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, focusing on classics and military history. He studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and received his doctorate in classics from Stanford University. He has published many articles on Greek, agrarian and military history, and several books, including his latest, “The Case for Trump.”

JUSTIN GIBONEY MYA JARADAT

Mya Jaradat is a religion reporter for the Deseret News national team. A graduate of Columbia University’s Journalism School, she is the author of “The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others.” Jaradat lives in South Florida with her husband and their two children.

Justin Giboney is an attorney, political strategist and the head and co-founder of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic engagement group. He is a co-author of “Compassion and Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.” Giboney studied law at Vanderbilt University and has managed many successful political campaigns in Atlanta.

Deseret Magazine (ISSN PP324) is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in July/August and December/January. The Deseret News’ principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Suite 500, Salt Lake City, Utah. Subscriptions are $29 a year. To subscribe visit pages.deseret.com/subscribe. Copyright 2021 Deseret News Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

NOVEMBER 2021 9

MODERN FAMILY

‘SHARENTING’ GOES VIRAL THE UNSPOKEN RULES OF PUTTING YOUR KIDS ON THE INTERNET

BY ETHA N B AU ER

W

hen laney griner took her 11-month-old son to the beach in 2007, she hoped to capture a wholesome moment: her boy about to shove a fistful of sand in his mouth. She snapped a picture. She uploaded the picture to her Flickr account.

Two years later, the photo had taken on a life of its own. The image was plucked from Griner’s control, with her son’s clenched fist and focused gaze becoming shorthand for that feeling when you close a deal or treat yourself to expensive shoes. It had become a meme. Legions of internet users would eventually come to know Griner’s son only as “Success Kid.” Many parents create a digital footprint for their children from the first post of their baby’s ultrasound. Some details, like where the child goes to school, their birthday or other identifying information, can be used to exploit, experts advise. The Pragmatic Parent, for one, advises against posting kids’ full names, report cards or any sort of nudity, because these can be harmful in the wrong hands. But when any random picture could go viral, new questions are also emerging at the intersection of ethics, privacy and identity, forcing parents to ponder whether even posts that feel harmless actually are.

Parents often use social media to “perform their identities” — a phenomenon that everyone engages in by the clothing we wear or the car we drive; we’re always, consciously or not, presenting an image to the world. And as our social lives shift toward digital spaces, parents have turned to Facebook and Instagram to tell the world about their kids. “They need to be able to do that for their own psychological well-being,” says ­Jordan Shapiro, a senior fellow for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. And certainly some posts are harmless.

Celebrating a child’s kindergarten graduation, for example, is a nonproblematic example of “sharenting,” a term coined in 2012 to describe when parents share updates and graphics 10 DESERET MAGAZINE

about their kids online. Sharenting can carry some risk, like allowing embarrassing moments to remain accessible or providing potential ne’er-do-wells with identifying information.

Engaging responsibly is about striking a balance between expressing parental identity and preserving the child’s privacy. Experts advise letting common sense prevail, starting by taking the kids’ opinions and feelings into account early. “Make sure what you’re posting is not public. Make sure you’re only sharing with a close group of friends,” adds Titania Jordan, chief parent officer at online safety company Bark Technologies, who recommends tightening privacy settings. “Trust in friends. Trust in relatives. And even then, unfortunately, most abuse of children happens through people the family knows, so keep your guard up.”

Another concern is when sharenting becomes oversharing. Phoebe Maltz Bovy, ­ writing for The Atlantic in 2013, defined oversharing as having two components: identifiable information and the ambition to reach a mass audience. Consider The Holderness Family, a YouTube juggernaut with nearly 700,000 subscribers that posts family c­entered content. “I love their videos,” admits Angela Wentz ­Faulconer, a professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University. She sees them as fun and harmless, even if they do meet the criteria for oversharing. “But, of course, we only see what they’re presenting to us,” she adds.

“We don’t know what their kids are saying behind the scenes or what are the long-term impacts of being filmed all the time.”

Now consider a more queasy example: parents using social media to shame their children.

Does a parent have a right to permanently embarrass their kid in this way? Faulconer isn’t sure, but she says people should have at least some control over their personal information.

“The internet challenges that basic idea,” she says. Her research focuses on medical ethics, and from within that world, she points to an

instructive theory known as “the child’s right to an open future.” The idea is that kids have certain rights that must be “saved for the child until he is an adult.”

Social media amplifies content in a way that makes it more accessible than any content before it. Combined with a Big Tech business model that rewards engaging content with cash and social currency, it’s worth wondering whether a parent’s inherent motivation to pursue a child’s best interest can become corrupted by the incentive to overshare. The rewards can certainly be substantial — and often feel harmless. The Griners, for example, parlayed the “Success Kid” fame into an appearance at a comic-­con-like event for internet stars and put the original “Success Kid” image up for sale earlier this year as a nonfungible token. It sold at auction for over $41,000.

That’s nothing compared to Zöe Roth, better known as “Disaster Girl,” who sold the memefied photo of her four-year-old self standing in front of a burning house earlier this year for nearly $500,000. But perhaps the dilemma is best summed up by Jessica Curry Morton and her daughter Parker.

During a visit to the National Portrait Gallery in 2018, a random bystander snapped a picture of two-year-old Parker awestruck in front of Michelle Obama’s portrait. The next day, Jessica’s close friends texted her, all with the same question: “Is this ­Parker?” They’d attached a photo of a little girl in a pink jacket and rain boots looking up at M ­ ichelle Obama’s portrait.

Yes, it was Parker. But Jessica hadn’t posted that picture. In fact, she had a reputation for never sharing anything about her kids online. So when she saw the photo going viral, her first reaction was one of fear, then anger. “A layer of privacy that I wanted to maintain for my child just got stolen from me,” she says. Within a week, though, Michelle Obama got in touch and invited Parker to come meet her. Parker and Jessica also co-wrote a children’s book about the ILLUSTR ATION BY HA N N A H DECK ER

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s talked torsher daughter — moment, which has sold over 100,000 copies ir toe as one can einsomuch h t e n h t so 6 o talkingy to alltwo-year-old about questions and made Parker the youngest-­ever New York d 87when b Be an d y e r d o u so much bigger than themselves — who was far Times bestselling author. They’re publishing a yJ ons ! Spmore Bootwas stuck t g fi i t B u enthusiastic about TV appearances and sequel in November. Atd first, Jessica o by g her n Like She didn’t i v o interviews than she was.

So she went along with in an accidental paradox: want to exaL Llam and attention, ents but a_money it, despite her reservations. “I didn’t want her to ploit her daughter for m a M comm 7 8 ,0 9 go viral,” she says. “I wanted her to be her own she also didn’t wantwto close the door to opporall Vie individual. … There’s just something so sacred tunities like meeting the then-first lady or sharabout that.” ing her charming story with the world. So she

Her experience illustrates once more the fundamental tension of sharenting: how to balance the push and pull between a parent’s sharing impulse and a kid’s privacy — especially when the kid is too young to understand what privacy is. “It’s a really good question,” admits Sarah Coyne, associate director of BYU’s School of Family Life, “and we don’t have concrete answers.”

NOVEMBER 2021 11

MODERN FAMILY

UNDER ONE ROOF ADVENTURES IN NAVIGATING INTERFAITH MARRIAGE

BY MYA JA R A DAT

I

n mid-september my husband agreed to help me build a hut on our patio to prepare for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which celebrates the ancient Hebrews’ sojourn through the desert after they escaped Egypt.

Observant Jews build a sukkah, a temporary dwelling that symbolizes that journey.

I drew some rough sketches and my husband ran down to Home Depot to buy lumber.

“Do you think it will work?” I asked as I described my plan for the simple frame, using my arms — fingers to elbow to make a 90-­degree angle — to illustrate.

He assured me it would.

“Maybe I should have gotten some braces for the corners?” I fretted.

“No, no. The screws will be enough,” he reassured me, holding up a power drill. “It’ll hold.”

While this scene might seem unremarkable at first glance — oh, a nice Jewish couple trying to make their first sukkah together; that’s cute — it’s not at all what it seems.

I’m Jewish but my husband is not. He’s Muslim. And not only is he Muslim but we met and fell in love in a conflict zone that pits our two people — Israeli and Palestinian — against each other and, by extension, our cultural and religious backgrounds.

Our interfaith home wasn’t always this picture of happy cooperation and cultural exchange. I recall our first Eid al-Fitr, the celebratory day marking the end of Ramadan, as a young family: My husband got up, washed his face, got dressed and informed me he was going to the mosque with his

12 DESERET MAGAZINE

brother for the holiday. Without me or our young daughter. The room was dark, the crib was next to me, and I was devastated that I — we — were being excluded from this important day in the Muslim calendar. I felt like we weren’t a real family.

And then there was the period where I was so scared of upsetting him by honoring Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, with candles

THERE ARE SOME BASIC STEPS TO MAKE SURE EVERYONE FEELS THAT THEIR BACKGROUND IS BEING RESPECTED IN THE HOME.

and prayers that I did it in secret, rushing the kids to the table for hurried Hebrew and sips of kosher juice before my husband came home from work. By the time he walked in, the kids were in front of the TV, and I’d washed the ritual goblet. The candles flickering on the kitchen counter were the only clue of my betrayal.

That we are building a sukkah together this year is nothing short of revolutionary.

•

•

Many Americans will make journeys like ours, wending their way through the wilds of interfaith marriages in the decades to come.

Of couples who have married since 2010, almost 40 percent married someone outside of their faith, according to Pew Research Center. Compare that to the percentage of Americans who married before 1960: Only 19 percent entered interfaith unions. In other words, interfaith marriages are becoming a new normal.

Jewish Americans, like myself, are big intermarriers — just over 40 percent of us have non-Jewish spouses, Pew found. Of the Jewish people who married before 1980, only 18 percent married non-Jews; of Jews who have married since 2010, 61 percent said “I do” to a non-Jewish partner, according to Pew. Jewish Americans with two Jewish parents are less likely to marry out; those who are the product of an interfaith marriage themselves are more likely to marry a non-Jew. When cohabitating is taken into account, Pew reports that Jews are the most likely to be involved in an interfaith relationship, behind mainline Protestants and religiously unaffiliated people. In America, the groups that are least likely to marry (or cohabitate) with someone of a different faith are Hindus ILLUSTR ATION BY MI CHEL L E D’URB A N O

NOVEMBER 2021 13

MODERN FAMILY

(91 percent report marrying or living with someone of the same religion, Pew reported in 2015), Muslims (79 percent), and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (82 percent).

In previous decades, the folk wisdom surrounding mixed unions was to privilege one faith over the other so the children had a firm sense of their identity. (That’s what my husband’s father told him when he initially rejected our plans to marry — that marrying a non-Muslim would leave our hypothetical children “confused” about who they are.) That sort of thinking — that you have to choose one or the other — is baked into the Abrahamic religions, explains Susan Katz Miller, author of “Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family” and “The Interfaith Family Journal.” But the prevailing idea nowadays among interfaith family advocates like Miller is that children — and adults — can be both.

And while there’s no one right way to do it — every family has to work all this out on their own, according to Miller — there are some basic steps to make sure everyone feels that their background is being respected in the home.

“It’s really important that you don’t see it as a competition between the religions,” says Miller. “It’s really important to listen deeply to your partner to understand why they feel the way they do, to listen to their ideas about how the children should be raised and to cultivate empathy for them. And it is equally important for you to feel heard, to feel that your partner really understands what it is that you want to pass on, what are the experiences you want your children to have and why.”

Couples need to make sure that the decisions they make about how to raise their children are made together, Miller says. And they also must “realize that those decisions may change over time based on life events, on new interests, on the evolving agency of children who may start verbalizing what they want at a 14 DESERET MAGAZINE

younger age than you expected — all of that has to be factored in.”

•

•

Though when we were dating I committed

to raising Muslim children, my husband has to be willing to understand and accept that my thinking about these issues changed when we moved to America and had actual real live children. And I have to show my husband the

“MAKE SURE YOU AND YOUR PARTNER STAND TOGETHER — ESPECIALLY IF YOUR DECISIONS ARE BEING CHALLENGED

BY SOCIETY OR EXTENDED FAMILY.”

same grace. Ditto for our kids. My husband and I both have to accept that, as adults, they will make their own decisions. Even if we were both Muslim or both Jewish, they might not end up identifying as either.

“The third step, I would say, is to make sure you and your partner stand together — especially if your decisions are being challenged by society or extended family, whatever those decisions are,” says Miller.

Repeating the advice of one of her mentors, the Rev. Julia Jarvis, Miller says that families should draw a “sacred circle” around their interfaith family and stand together inside of that circle when they face challenges from the outside.

Miller also recommends that parents help

children of interfaith marriages become as fluent as possible in both religions and cultures.

“No matter what choice you make — one religion, the other, both, none — I think it is really helpful to the children … to give them those sensory experiences: the tastes, the songs and the art of both cultures and religions, and to cultivate in them bonds of affection for all of the religions in their heritage and all of their extended family members,” she says. These sensory experiences are the foundation upon which they can learn more about holidays and rituals as they grow older.

This literacy, adds Miller, is vital so interfaith children “can be confident in their inevitable role as interfaith ambassadors, translators and bridge builders.”

Miller adds that, to some extent, even couples from the same background are “interfaith.”

“All relationships are interfaith relationships because no two people have identical beliefs and practices and formative experiences. So I’m often approached by people who say, ‘I’m a Reform Jew, and my husband is Orthodox, and everything you’re saying speaks to me. Our problems are much worse than a Reform Jew dating a Presbyterian,’ ” Miller says. “Even if you’re two Presbyterians, you can find yourself in conflict over what hymns and when to get a Christmas tree and what type of Christmas tree.”

Geography, Miller points out, also plays a role in how couples negotiate the family’s relationship with their religions and cultures. My husband and I offer a perfect example: We met in the West Bank and our courtship took place in Israel and the Palestinian territories — places too contested, perhaps, for both religions to thrive in the same house. But, here, in the U.S., there’s space for everyone. There’s room for imagination. There’s room on our tiny concrete patio in South Florida to take some lumber and an electric drill and put up something new. Something that, hopefully, will hold.

MODERN FAMILY

FAMILY MATTERS U.S. ADULTS RANK THEIR CONCERNS ON FINANCES, FAITH AND MORE IN A NEW POLL

BY LOI S M. COLLI N S

D

a member of their family or extended family died from COVID, comuring the pandemic, rich Americans were more likely to get richer, poor Americans were more likely to get poorer — pared to nearly 1 in 10 white Americans. and nearly everyone got a taste of government largesse.

The survey of 3,000 American adults explores multiple aspects of Personal finances for most Americans, regardless of their income, family life, including relationships, economics, politics, health and culmarital status or whether they had kids, remained about the same for ture. Besides looking at challenges from school closures and remote a majority. But if income changed, lower- and middle-income folks on work, the survey asked how couples share housework, what worries average got poorer while the rich stayed financially healthy or gained working parents and the impact of federal aid during COVID-19. more wealth, this year’s American Family Survey reveals.

Key questions include how race should be broached at home and Some couples drew closer as they went home to work or teach their taught in school. Respondents weighed in, too, on public policy prochildren when schools and businesses closed. A posals including a child allowance and whether small share experienced too much togetherness Congress should approve two free years each of and relationships fell apart. But federal stimulus preschool and community college. It was fielded aid reached the vast majority of Americans — between June 25 and July 8, taking place just bethose who needed it desperately and some who fore the delta COVID-19 variant began circulating didn’t need it at all. widely and the start of a new school year.

Overall, the story of the American family in Amid the differences, an area of unique acTHE PANDEMIC’S the last year has been one of resilience, according cord is the belief that it’s very expensive to raise EFFECTS WERE NOT EVENLY FELT to the seventh annual American Family Survey, children. Even among those making more than ACROSS AMERICAN released this month in Washington, D.C. The ­ $80,000 a year, just one-fourth say the cost is afFAMILIES. nationally representative poll is conducted by fordable for most people. Overall, 54 percent say ­YouGov for the Deseret News and Brigham Young it’s not affordable.

University’s Center for the Study of Elections and But despite those costs and the pandemic, the Democracy. The margin of error is plus or minus 2 last year bucked dire predictions about largepercentage points. scale financial fallout. Karpowitz said while a sig“The larger story is that the pandemic’s effects nificant share of Americans lost income because were not evenly felt across American families. And of reduced hours or job loss — especially partoften, the increasing vulnerability to the pandemic was associated with time workers “who bore the brunt” — both 2020 and 2021 surveys categories of disadvantage that existed prior to the pandemic,” said found a dramatic drop in the percentage of Americans who said they Christopher F. Karpowitz, who with Jeremy C. Pope co-directs the experienced a significant economic crisis in the preceding 12 months, center at Brigham Young University and co-wrote the study report. compared to pre­pandemic polling. “Significant” crisis included mark“So racial and ethnic minorities, lower-income folks, single mothers ers like not being able to afford food or see a doctor or being unable — these are all categories where we see increasing vulnerability. It’s to pay an entire bill. pretty striking to me, for example, that 1 in 5 Hispanic respondents said “The recent reduction in the experience of economic crisis was

16 DESERET MAGAZINE

ILLUSTR AT I ON BY EDDI E G UY

NOVEMBER 2021 17

MODERN FAMILY

e­ specially steep among parents with children in the home, declining about 20 points from a high of more than half in 2019 to under a third in 2021,” the study found.

“I think a lot of that can be traced to federal pandemic aid,” Karpowitz said. “That made a big difference in the lives of large percentages of Americans.”

Both the Trump and Biden administrations offered help, and experts say between 80 percent and 90 percent of Americans received some aid in the pandemic, from multiple stimulus payments to enhanced unemployment, boosted nutrition assistance and more. For those in precarious housing situations, an eviction moratorium provided at least temporary stability.

“I think this will long be seen as a moment where government aid was incredibly well justified and pretty darned successful, though I think it raises questions about the future,” Pope agreed. “Now that we’re coming out of the pandemic, a massive increase in government spending may make people nervous, justifiably. But I think the counterbalancing point you have to keep in mind is, without that government spending, the pandemic would have been quite a bit worse.”

•

•

To see how differently the pandemic impacted even people who look like they have a lot in common, consider the families of two men enrolled in Brigham Young University’s MBA program.

Brett and Hannah Park, of Murray, Utah, married five years ago and have three little boys: Graham, 4, Cooper, 2, and Russell, 7 months old.

“We probably fit more in the cruise-along category,” Hannah Park, 27, said. When the pandemic hit, Brett Park, 28, worked from home on salary and could arrange his hours as he liked, as long as he got his work done. She was primarily a stay-at-home mom who did some professional photography.

He stopped commuting, saving money and time. So he enjoyed more time with his family, working in the yard and on cars and taking play breaks with the boys, which gave her some freedom, too. They took road trips and camping trips after things shut down.

They got — and appreciated — the stimulus, she said, because it helped them avoid student loans. But they had what she calls a “pretty nice setup,” where they didn’t seriously need the money.

His classmate, Ethan Felix, 36, now of Provo, Utah, lived a different pandemic year.

He’d always worked hard, starting a couple of companies after high 18 DESERET MAGAZINE

school, before going to work for others and helping wife Ashley, 33, raise their kids: Wyatt, 12, Beau, 8, Andi, 6, and Briggs, 4.

“We totally took a hit,” he said, as the pandemic slammed them from multiple directions.

His wife had mostly stayed home with the kids, and worked part time at a gymnastics gym. The gym closed down.

He worked for an excursion company where companies could hold work retreats and customers could ride horses or fish. The company kept him as long as possible, then furloughed him. For several “scary” months, Ethan Felix didn’t work. “We didn’t know how we were going to make it, but it ended up being a blessing. It led us to where we are now,” Ashley Felix said, referring to the MBA program.

They got random help from friends, strangers and members of their Latter-day Saint congregation. The federal aid, though, was critical. “I bawled my eyes out with the stimulus. We needed that so badly,” she said.

Families that lost a job or had hours cut back fared much differently than the majority whose financial situations were largely unchanged. And single-parent households were 10 times more likely to experience an economic crisis than any other group in the survey.

The aid was overwhelmingly popular and many low-income people were pulled out of poverty or back from poverty by the stimulus bill, Pope said. Among those who received the aid, nearly three-fourths of those with annual incomes below $40,000 said they needed the money to get by, compared to 46 percent of middle income ($40,000 to $80,000). Even among those with annual incomes above $80,000, more than 1 in 4 said they needed the money to get by.

Sociologist Brad Wilcox said he believes people learned an especially important lesson in the pandemic: “How much family matters for people’s welfare.” A growing share of Americans say their families are stronger now. In many ways, COVID-19 increased the “sense of mutual dependence and mutual support,” he said.

“The ties that bind have grown tighter for those navigating COVID together,” said Wilcox, a survey adviser whose professional titles include director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. “On the downside, all the uncertainty, trials and tribulations made people not currently in a family a bit more cautious.”

There are parallels between those who struggled financially and those who struggled in their relationships, according to Pope. In both cases, the pandemic poured stress on those struggling beforehand.

“One of the overarching lessons from doing the survey over and over again is most people are made better off by their marriage, their family, their relationships,” Pope said.

Meditate with God. Take five minutes to experience divine love in a whole new way.

NOVEMBER 2021 19

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE LOST WAR GEN. H.R. MCMASTER ON AMERICA’S DEPARTURE FROM AFGHANISTAN

BY HA L B OYD

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he word “surrender” is rarely used to describe American foreign policy. Yet that is how H.R. McMaster characterizes the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. Testifying to Congress after a chaotic end to America’s 20-year occupation of that country, the retired Army general and former national security adviser lambasted both the Trump and Biden administrations for their roles in unwinding what he calls “a lost war.” It was not the first time he made important people uncomfortable. You might say he’s made a career of it.

McMaster was a young but accomplished officer and a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina when he wrote “Dereliction of Duty,” critically examining the failure of senior military leaders to oppose policies that ultimately led to America’s downfall in Vietnam. He later advised Gen. David Petraeus as he developed counterinsurgency strategies during the Iraq War, and served in the Training and Doctrine Command, crafting the Army’s long-term philosophies. But he was also passed over for promotions that some believe he deserved, even as young soldiers studied battles he won in Iraq.

Ironically, that maverick reputation may have appealed to former President Donald Trump, who made McMaster his national security adviser from 2017 to 2018. In that role, McMaster recently told Deseret Magazine, he presented options for sustaining a manageable level of engagement in Afghanistan, intended to preserve stability in the region and prevent terrorist attacks, and that’s what the president chose to do. M ­ cMaster is clearly dismayed that Trump later changed tack, a year after McMaster agreed to resign.

When you talk to McMaster, two realities quickly become clear.

First, he says what he thinks, unconstrained by partisan loyalties or social niceties. Second, he believes in the military as both an institution and a collection of individuals who he venerates for their talents and their spirit of service. Here, then, is the rest of our conversation.

Was leaving Afghanistan not the right decision?

We left because of a mantra of ending endless wars, and I believe we talked ourselves into it. Our level of effort in Afghanistan had become quite small, especially relative to the peak of that war. By 2018, we had about 10,000 troops there, and the Afghans were bearing the brunt of the fight. It was sustainable as an insurance policy to prevent what’s happening now. That was the path that President Trump initially chose in 2017, but in 2019 he departed from that and initiated what I would describe as capitulation negotiations with the Taliban. In 2021, President Biden doubled down on that.

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What went wrong in our departure?

What you see in Afghanistan are the consequences of a lost war. The cost of the evacuation in terms of Afghan and American lives has already far exceeded the cost of the war in recent years. And it’s striking that we prioritized withdrawal over our own interest. Across both the Trump and Biden administrations, we made concession after concession to the Taliban. We strengthened the Taliban and weakened the Afghan government and security forces on our way out.

Nearly half of American adults (46 percent) say we ought to pay less attention overseas and concentrate more on the problems at home. Why should Americans care about foreign policy?

When challenges to our security, our prosperity and our future develop abroad, they can only be dealt with at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores. This is the fundamental lesson of 9/11. Remember, al-Qaida declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s, but nobody paid attention, even when they first bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. When they attacked our embassies in Africa in 1998, we fired a few cruise missiles and called it a day. Of course, we all know what happened on September 11, 2001. It was devastating.

You can say the same about the COVID-19 pandemic, which ­China failed to contain. We need a sustainable approach to foreign affairs and national security that recognizes that the world is interconnected.

Technology has ensured that the two great moats of the Atlantic and the Pacific no longer provide us with the security that they once did.

In foreign policy, are you a realist or an idealist?

Those labels aren’t that useful. That polarization is rooted in what I call strategic narcissism, defining the world only in relation to us, and assuming that what we do or choose not to do is decisive in determining the outcome. On what might be called the self-loathing far left, many believe that America is the problem and therefore disengagement is good. And on the far right you have neo-isolationism, driven by a mild form of bigotry. But what they both fail to recognize is that others also have agency and authorship over the future, including our adversaries, rivals and enemies. As G.K. Chesterton observed, the best way to settle differences is to ensure they’re not settled for you.

But should the United States be trying to export democracy and engage in nation building?

I don’t believe we were trying to turn Afghanistan into Denmark. It just PHOTOGR A PHY BY RAY K ACHATORI A N

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needed to be Afghanistan. That country needed a government consistent with their traditions, with their culture, with their decentralized nature. At the same time, we needed to establish a political order that was hostile to jihadist terrorists. And that’s what we had developed, and that’s what we gave up. Their society had been transformed since 2001, but not into a Jeffersonian democracy. We wasted a lot of effort based on unrealistic assumptions about Afghanistan.

What did the Trump administration do well with regard to foreign policy, and what should the administration have done differently?

The shift from cooperation and engagement with China to transparent competition was long overdue. We were clinging to unrealistic assumptions that China, welcomed into the international order, would play by the rules and liberalize its economy and its form of governance. On the other hand, the biggest failures were prioritizing withdrawal from Afghanistan and the tendency to view the greater Middle East as a mess to be avoided under the assumption that problems that develop there stay there and just can’t get any worse. It can get worse.

A majority of Americans support withdrawal. Why would sticking around be worth all the treasure, toil and lives that it would require?

When terrorists have a haven and a support base they become more What was it like to work in the White House? Are you dangerous by orders of magnitude. That’s what satisfied with the job you did? occurred with al-­Qaida prior to 9/11 and it’s what It was a privilege to serve as national security adoccurred in Iraq after our withdrawal in 2011. viser. I was in my 34th year of military service, and That December, when Biden was still vice presiPresident Trump was the fifth commander in chief dent, he called President Obama and said, ‘Thank WE’RE ONLY I’d served. What I endeavored to do was to give him you for allowing me to end this war.’ The conceit BEGINNING TO SEE the best analysis and advice from across the departbehind that statement is that wars end when THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE DISASTROUS ments and agencies of our government, informed by one party disengages. Instead, al-Qaida in Iraq SURRENDER IN the perspectives of others in academia or the private ­morphed into ISIS, the most destructive terrorAFGHANISTAN, sector and like-minded partners internationally. And ist organization in history, conducting well over AND BOTH THE to give him multiple options in each situation, recog190 attacks internationally including the Brussels HUMANITARIAN AND nizing that he’s the one who got elected. A national airport and ­Paris attacks, and inspired the San POLITICAL COSTS WILL MOUNT. security adviser is the only person in the national ­Bernardino attack in the United States. The resecurity establishment who has the president as his ality is that when we disengage we’re not safer. or her only client. And I think I served the president There are already more than 20 U.S.-designated well. But it is a competitive environment, and I’m terrorist organizations along the border between sure this is true across Washington, D.C., in terms of Afghanistan and Pakistan. individuals trying to advance narrow agendas.

A year into President Biden’s administration, how do you grade his foreign You had a rich career of service. What’s your biggest takeaway? policy? Is America better or worse off?

It’s easy to see the challenges and difficulties associated with military serWorse off, for sure. We’re only beginning to see the consequences of vice — separation from family, being in dangerous and arduous situations, the disastrous surrender in Afghanistan, and both the humanitarian and most difficult of all, seeing people who you love or care for get killed and political costs will mount. Remember when everybody was upset or wounded in battle. But what many Americans don’t see is how it feels about Donald Trump’s mean tweets to allies? Well, we just abandoned to be part of something bigger than yourself and part of a team where the the citizens of allied countries in Afghanistan. It’s going to affect man or woman next to you is wanting to give everything including their American influence, and we’re going to pay a security cost as well. own lives for you. What you see in Afghanistan is a cause for heartbreak China immediately sent a message to Taiwan that said, ‘Hey, do you and disappointment, but it also ought to be a source of pride, because now think America has your back?’ Look at what just happened over there. you can see what our effort there was preventing from happening for two Pakistan, who supported the Taliban against us, is essentially a client decades. For those who have lost confidence in what America stands for, state of China. And the Russians are emboldened in the region as well. and serving in uniform, I think the opposite ought to be the case. We need And you’re seeing a whole range of hedging behavior on the part of the best of our young men and women to serve now more than ever. allies and partners who don’t believe that the United States is reliable.

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MAILING IT IN VOTE BY MAIL IS POPULAR IN UTAH. SO WHY ARE OTHER CONSERVATIVE STATES TRYING TO CURB IT?

BY SOFI A J ER EMI AS

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n the run-up to the 2020 election, Utah was having a moment, lished political processes and denser populations made relying on the Postal Service to vote a rarity. the kind of spotlight leaders of the state of 3.2 million relish.

Utah had instituted universal vote by mail, and its Republican leadIn the 1980s, California became one of the first states to allow ers were proud of the elections held in one of the most conservative “no-excuse” absentee voting, which essentially ensured that anyone could vote by mail, although unlike universal mail-in voting, ballots states in the country. Then-Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox told The Atlantic were not automatically sent to the voter’s home. Instead voters had that “vote by mail has been incredibly successful here. It has helped into opt in. In 1998, Oregon instituted universal vote by mail, followed crease voter turnout. It also leads, I believe, to a more informed elecby Washington state in 2011 and Colorado in 2013. Nevada made unitorate.” Sen. Mitt Romney added: “In my state, I’ll bet 90 percent of us versal vote by mail permanent in June, and California is in the process vote by mail. It works very, very well and it’s a very Republican state.” of transitioning.

And yet, Republicans in other red states are instituting stricter Utah began offering the option of vote by mail voter ID requirements, specifically targeting county by county in 2012. Prior to adoption, mail-in voting. In Texas, Republicans passed a ­Damon Cann, a political science professor at Utah bill requiring absentee voters to provide their State University, conducted research looking at driver’s license number to receive a ballot and best practices and interviewing county clerks. made it illegal for election officials to send ballots “For some people in Utah there was a feeling that to voters who don’t request them. Similarly, the VOTING BY maybe we could save some money,” Cann said. At Wisconsin Legislature passed a law requiring abMAIL STANDS the time, voting machines needed to be updated sentee voters to submit a copy of their ID. Even TO BENEFIT and Utah had to decide whether to make a huge in Montana, where 73 percent of the votes cast GROUPS THAT TRADITIONALLY investment in polling places or forge a new path. were by mail in the state’s 2018 general election, LEAN MORE Part of the reason vote by mail was so successful new laws went into effect that restrict who can REPUBLICAN. in the state was that it took an incremental rathpick up mail-in ballots. er than statewide approach. “It was a big hit early The conservative turn against mail-in voting is a on in some of the rural counties,” Cann said. Plus, new phenomenon. “If absentee balloting had been because it was not quickly imposed on the state associated with either party, it had been associatall at once, people had the opportunity to slowly ed with the Republican Party,” Charles Stewart, become acquainted with the system — they may an elections expert at Massachusetts Institute of have had friends or family in early adopter counties who voted by mail Technology, said.

That’s because voting by mail stands to benefit three groups that traand could vouch for it.

When Utah passed its universal vote-by-mail legislation, it wasn’t ditionally lean more Republican: rural voters, older voters and those contentious: “Both parties said it was their No. 1 priority that session,” who travel frequently, Stewart said.

If vote by mail works well for Republicans, why are they clamoring to state Rep. Steve Eliason, the Republican who sponsored Utah’s voteby-mail bill, said in April 2020. The prospect of higher voter turnout restrict access to it across the country? was appealing to Republicans and Democrats, and universal vote by And why is Utah going in a different direction? mail, in which a ballot is automatically sent to the home of every registered voter, promised to do just that.

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The popularity of mail-in voting, which began in the United States

during the Civil War, used to be dictated by geography. Western states with wide-open spaces, where driving to a polling place could take hours, tended to favor its adoption, whereas in the East more estab-

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The narrative around mail-in voting took on a more partisan edge in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, when then-President

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reason states may not be eager to adopt universal vote by mail is simple Donald Trump said instituting universal vote by mail would lead to inertia and comfort with how they’ve done things in the past. Swing massive fraud, and even declaring at one point that “you’d never have a states like Nevada managed to pass legislation instituting universal vote Republican elected in this country again.” His campaign attempted to by mail strictly along party lines, with Republicans voting against it and block mail-in voting in Montana, while other Republicans were trying Democrats for (“I was disappointed but not surprised,” said the bill’s to encourage people to vote by mail. “We are hurting ourselves and putco-sponsor, Assemblyman Jason Frierson). ting ourselves at a disadvantage,” one GOP county chairman in Wis“I think largely the rollbacks that we’ve seen this year have been drivconsin told NPR at the time. en by the disinformation and the partisan conspiracies that have been Trump’s claims about election fraud proved false, but his rhetoric drummed up over the 2020 election,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO may have had an impact on the partisan nature of voting by mail. From of the National Vote at Home Institute and a former elections official 2008 to 2016, Democrats had a slight edge in their propensity to vote for Colorado who helped write the state’s vote-by-mail laws. by mail, although Stewart says that’s largely because mostly blue states While vote by mail does pose new potential for fraud, in Utah, syshad implemented vote by mail. That radically shifted in 2020. Last year, tems have been put in place to limit that. Signature verification and balnearly 60 percent of Democrats cast their ballots by mail, while only 30 lot tracking both work to prevent widespread voter fraud, Cann said. percent of Republicans did. And now, Republicans like Georgia’s goverBut the concern among conservatives and in states where vote by mail nor and secretary of state, who initially spoke out against Trump’s elecisn’t the norm persists. tion integrity claims, threw their support behind And for all the partisan rancor vote by mail has laws requiring IDs for absentee voting. generated — from Democrats in California eager“Utah should not be a model,” said Hans von ly embracing it to Republicans in Montana curbing ­Spakovsky, head of the Election Law Reform Iniit — research on its impacts on voter turnout or tiative at the Heritage Foundation, a leading conpartisanship tend to be lackluster. Most studies on servative think tank. He believes that voting by RESEARCHERS vote by mail, such as one published by researchers mail is more susceptible to fraud, that ballots are AT BYU ANALYZING DATA F ROM TH E at Stanford in 2020, have found that neither party more likely to get rejected, and that if voters send 2020 ELECTION really benefits, or only marginally so in some cases. in their ballots early, they don’t have access to the FOUND A MODEST Researchers at BYU analyzing data from the 2020 most up-to-date information. “Absentee ballots INCREASE IN election, where many states made vote by mail are the only kind of ballots that are voted outside TURNOUT THAT mandatory in response to the pandemic, found the supervision of election officials. And outside BENEFITED NEITHER PARTY. that the result was a modest increase in turnout of the observation of poll watchers. That’s what that benefited neither party. There may be a slight makes them easily targeted.” bump in turnout following its implementation, but He said only a limited number of people, like even that doesn’t really continue long term, acthose serving in the military or people with disabilcording to Cann. ities, should be allowed to vote by mail, and laws “The bulk of the scholarly literature on this like those in Texas requiring identification when reshows that what voting by mail really does is make it more convenient questing an absentee ballot are important to preventing fraud. “I’m not for people who are already going to vote.” The greatest impact it might going to tell you that we have massive voter fraud, or that it’s widespread. have, Cann said, is on local elections that voters might otherwise forget But we have it occur often enough that we should be concerned about it.” about. “I’m not personally an advocate for or against voting by mail.

I’m an advocate for well-administered elections.” You can have a solid, high-integrity traditional Election Day polling place. And you can do the same for voting by mail, he said.

For now, vote by mail doesn’t seem likely to catch on in states that The pandemic resulted in significant expansion of voting by mail — ­aren’t already used to it. Grayson in Kentucky said that while he voted nearly 70 percent of voters either cast their ballots before Election Day by mail and found the process to be easy, lawmakers in his state are not on or by mail, according to the Census Bureau. But that hasn’t resulted in board with expanding it beyond the pandemic. “Vote by mail now has this an eagerness to maintain those systems. For example, while all voters partisan taint that’s gonna hurt people’s comfort.” At the end of the day, could request an absentee ballot in Kentucky last year, the General AsGrayson says, establishing comfort is crucial to making the system work. sembly moved to return to previous restrictions and only allow those Western states once seemed like early adopters of a system that would with special circumstances to use the system. only grow in popularity across the nation, particularly as states were “I always joke, if you’re a policymaker, and you won your last elecforced to expand mail-in voting in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. But tion, then obviously the election was well run — it was fair, it was a good that has not been the case. Utah is now somewhat of an anomaly: a consystem, you want to keep that,” said Trey Grayson, former secretary servative state that’s still all in on voting by mail. of state of Kentucky. Aside from concerns of fraud, a big part of the

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UNITE AND CONQUER? WHAT THE PLAN TO TURN IDAHO INTO A CONSERVATIVE MEGASTATE SAYS OF AMERICA’S URBAN-RURAL DIVIDE

BY D. HU N TER SCHWA R Z

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he urban-rural political divide defines our politics today, and in the ­Pacific Northwest, some think the state boundaries should be redrawn to better reflect it.

“Instead of starting a new state, we’re just asking to realign the border, because borders are arbitrary, they’re not cast in stone, they can be changed,” says Mike McCarter, president of Citizens for Greater Idaho. He is pushing for some rural counties in Oregon, southeastern Washington and northern California to join Idaho.

McCarter’s proposal would transfer all or part of 22 rural Oregon counties to Idaho to form a conservative megastate in the West, plus a a more ambitious plan that includes additional counties in California. The expanded Idaho would be larger in size than every state but Alaska and ­Texas, a bright red counterbalance to progressive, coastal Oregon, Washington and California.

“People are saying we want to have a chance to vote on it,” McCarter says. “We want to see some changes in rural Oregon.”

Residents in seven counties in rural eastern Oregon have voted to show support for joining Idaho since November 2o2o. The votes don’t actually do anything, because modifying state boundaries requires approval of the states and the U.S. Congress, but they reflect popular support among voters for the idea.

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Like some of the California governor recall backlash, the border movement has been exacerbated by the pandemic. McCarter is critical of Oregon Democratic Gov. Kate Brown’s mask mandates and public health measures, and one Idaho state lawmaker cited public unrest in Portland last year as a reason rural Oregonians would want to join her state.

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“In our constitutional republic, you cannot just set up a CHOP zone,” says Republican Rep. Barbara Ehardt, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, referencing the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone set up in Seattle last summer.

“If you cannot seek redress of your government that is in your state because they’re adhering to a lawless form of government, then I believe you have every right to seek redress with the next closest government,” she says.

“In this case, it would be the state of Idaho.”

The proposal would free conservative rural Oregonians from the influence of the Willamette Valley, Oregon’s liberal coastal population center, and bolster Idaho’s already dominant conservative politics at a time when some worry the fast-growing state is attracting out-of-state liberals. “The way I look at it is we certainly would gain many more like-minded people,” Ehardt says.

Today’s urban-rural divide is decades in the making, the result of New Deal infrastructure projects, interstate highways and government programs that attracted jobs to metro areas in the Mountain West and South, according to Guian McKee, associate professor in presidential studies at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.

There’s been a sorting by economics and college education into metropolitan areas, he says, which has been followed by economic opportunities and a perceived dominance of the culture that breeds resentment. In o ­ ther words, cities have made a comeback, and that’s had political and cultural implications.

“If you go back 20 years and look at some of the underlying voting patterns, you tended to see big swaths of the country voting the same way,” McKee says, but today, some states, like ­Georgia, are seeing more competitive elections. “That’s really because the metropolitan areas are now competitive in a way that they just really weren’t 20 years ago.”

The political friction between city and countryside plays out nationwide, in states like Texas, Nevada and Virginia. In Illinois in 2019, some Republican lawmakers sponsored a resolution to make Chicago the 51st state as a statement of frustration at the Democratic city’s political influence.

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Ehardt, the Idaho lawmaker, envisions a redrawn Idaho setting off a flurry of new state boundary proposals. Though the bar for actually changing state boundaries is high, she thinks it can happen. “I absolutely believe that this will not only happen in Oregon, but I believe you’re going to see it happening throughout the rest of the United States, actually very soon,” she says. “I heard from other states, a lot of eyes are on this movement.”

Such a movement could ostensibly carve America into vast rural superstates that vote Republican, densely populated city-states that vote Democratic and several C ­ alifornia states, which has been proposed in the past.

But drawing our borders based on partisanship won’t solve our problems, says McKee. “I think it goes even more than it won’t solve our problems,” he says. “I think it’s actually a rejection of some core democratic principles.”

McKee worries the impulse to redraw state borders based on politics suggests that “we’ve lost some of the ability to disagree.”

“That’s really dangerous, I think, for democratic life,” he says.

He hopes it inspires people to ask why their fellow citizens are upset and how we can build connections to reduce polarization.

“These kinds of movements, I don’t think they’re a serious threat to succeed anytime soon,” he says. Still, “they should be concerning to really all Americans.”

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TO SAVE ONE ANOTHER WHAT DO CONVICTS AND MUSTANGS HAVE IN COMMON? A WYOMING FARM AND A SHOT AT REDEMPTION

BY LAU R EN STEELE

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remember the best day of my childhood. On a late spring afternoon after school, I stepped off the bus and onto the county road I grew up on in northeast Missouri (the bus driver didn’t take us to our individual houses like all the kids who lived “in town”). From The Wyoming Honor Farm is a minimum-security prison. It sits just there, I saw the black tail of my horse, Joey, swishing flies as he meanone mile north of the small town of Riverton, Wyoming — which is home dered through the field that stood between my grandparents’ house to a little over 10,000 people at the confluence of four rivers and a jurisand ours. But after a second look, I saw the black tails of two horses dictional history embroiled in land disputes between the Eastern Shoswishing around. I nearly cried out of excitement. For a fifth grade girl shone and Northern Arapaho tribes and the state government. ­After the growing up on a farm, the only thing better than land was ceded from the Wind River ­Reservation one horse was two. in 1905, it was transformed into a quintessential Over the next year, I pored over books that Wyoming town: full (but not too full) of livestock, could teach me everything I needed to know long fences and the cowboys who work with both. about bonding with my new horse — from the In 1931, the State Penitentiary Farm (later to be “Horseman’s Veterinary Encyclopedia” to “Searenamed the Wyoming Honor Farm) opened, and biscuit.” But the book that I kept coming back even state prisoners became cowboys.

RIVERTON WAS to was “Shy Boy,” by Monty Roberts. Roberts is The farm started as an experiment. What if TRANSFORMED INTO A QUINTESSENTIAL an American horse trainer who went out into the 30 inmates with marked good behavior were alWYOMING TOWN. high desert of the West for a three-day ride and lowed to leave high-security facilities to maintain a EVEN THE PRISONERS came back with a mustang that became his most working farm — complete with beef cattle, swine, BECAME COWBOYS. beloved horse. I was enamored with the idea of poultry, crops, dairy and butchering operations? gaining a wild horse’s trust, and with being able to According to Andrew Brenston, one of the first onunderstand an animal that American and Native site supervisors, the farm allowed former prisoners American lore has celebrated as noble, powerful, to be “successful in finding and maintaining their sensitive, intelligent and — as Roberts wrote it — place in society and become useful citizens once “above all, free.” again.” The idea of putting a ­minimum-security I probably read “Shy Boy” four times between prison on a farm — where inmates slept, worked, then and my teenage years. But I never ran my hands across the withlearned and served out their sentences away from the typical peniteners of a mustang. I never slipped a halter over the muzzle of a wild tiary setting — worked in the state of Wyoming’s opinion, and the farm horse. Heck, I never even saw a wild horse. To me, the story of gaining received additional funding. the trust of the most romantic animal in American culture was just Over the years, the farm grew. In 1985, a new dormitory was built that: a story. to accommodate 40 inmates. That expanded to three more dorms and But for the prisoners at the Wyoming Honor Farm, it’s their life. more than 200 inmates some years. A vocational education shop was 30 DESERET MAGAZINE

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Bi l ly Terhune at th e 2 019 w ild h or s e auc tion to bu y Pa r d, t h e mu sta n g h e ’d t r a i n e d w h i l e i n c a r c e r at e d at the Honor Fa rm

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built, land was leased from the state to graze cattle and an education center was established. The Wyoming Department of Corrections wanted the farm to be a place where inmates could change the course of their lives.

And it just might be working. According to the corrections department, the Wyoming Honor Farm has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the nation. And despite the growth over the years, the work program has largely stayed the same. Annual operations include 700 cattle and over 500 acres of alfalfa, corn, oats and other crops, as well as construction and forestry teams. The inmates still harvest hay by hand, bucking bales in the summer heat. But one big change came in 1988, in the form of a deal with the Bureau of Land Management to help manage the wild horses in the area.

The timing was almost too perfect, in the ironic sense. In the fall of 1987, Wyoming Honor Farm staffers Joe Crofts and Vance ­Everett were searching for a horse program to add to the farm’s operations, over 15 years after the federal Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 was passed. The bill allows the agency to round up excess wild horses and burros — “excess” being determined by a certain number of horses being allowed for certain acreage and water resources — and have them destroyed or removed from public lands across the Intermountain West. Most often, the removed mustangs and burros are sent directly to auction or kept at long-term facilities. But the Wyoming Honor Farm staffers had a different idea in mind that would benefit both the captured mustangs and the incarcerated men at the farm. Crofts and Everett met with Don Glenn from the BLM and spoke with him about establishing a wild horse training and adoption program — one where inmates on the farm would train mustangs and burros to become domesticated animals that would be adopted to ranches and individuals. Something clicked.

In February 1988, a shipment of wild horses arrived off the range.

Like many of the men who ended up at the Wyoming Honor Farm, their introduction to the Wyoming Department of Corrections would be their first behind bars.

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to grow, increasing approximately 9 percent between 2019 and 2024.

While the Wyoming Department of Corrections claims to have one of the lowest recidivism rates in the country due to the honor farm, there’s an intake protocol inmates must meet to be accepted into the facility, and the facility has a limited capacity of about 280 men. Similarly, there’s a capacity for wild horse adoption programs. Only a limited number of mustangs will be placed in these programs and then put up for private adoption after being trained, while the rest will be placed into large long-term holding facilities. Programs like the honor farm’s, which allow inmates to train ­mustangs, have proven to be beneficial to both horses and inmates. Currently, similar programs are also in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas and Nevada.

Incarceration, recidivism and criminal rehabilitation form a complex knot caught in the threads of American politics, culture and economy.

Talk of legislative reform is common — but change is slow. Proposals to lower prison populations, fund prison education programs and invest in community-based treatments are met with stalwarts like budget needs and infrastructural red tape. But the reality is that right now there are people within the system, living in a world away from one they’ve ever known before, preparing for the time to come when they are expected to step onto the other side of the bars and be changed.

Most men who are detained at the Wyoming Honor Farm are 11 to 24 months away from fulfilling their sentence. The facility was established to allow inmates to work on an operational farm and learn new trades that could make them employable before their release, in hopes of easing their reintegration. But as the years have passed it’s become more than just a place to learn how to weld steel or fight wildfires or rake hay. The goal of the Wyoming Honor Farm, as stated by the Wyoming Department of Corrections, is to provide vocational, agricultural and educational programs and treatment. All inmates are required to leave the Wyoming Department of Corrections with at least a GED certificate. Some inmates find a sort of compass for navigating their future in a traditional classroom (the prison has offered classes in collaboration with the University of Wyoming on Stoicism, where Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” is read). Others find that compass in a dusty round pen where a wild horse turns the direction you want it to, but only if it trusts you.

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Data shows that there are 810 prison or jail inmates for every 100,000 adult U.S. residents ages 18 and older. Wyoming’s state statistics are even higher.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan nonprofit, Wyoming has an incarceration rate of 850 per 100,000 people (a number that includes prisons, jails, immigration detention and juvenile justice facilities). The state of Wyoming has a higher percentage of people incarcerated than any democracy on earth, despite having the lowest population in the country — and despite crime rates declining.

To add even more pressure, the state’s prison population is expected

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A horse won’t lie to you and won’t lie for you,” Curt Simmons, the wild horse supervisor at Wyoming Honor Farm, says to me, in between the staticky messages of his radio chattering about the morning’s chores and the team of inmates going out to buck bales of just-­harvested hay.

Simmons has worked at the Wyoming Honor Farm since 1994, taking on the role of wild horse supervisor in 2014. He’s tall, broad and surprisingly soft-spoken. It’s an unexpected trait in a man who’s responsible for tough horses and tough men. But despite the long list “

Si nc e th e p r ogr am b egan in 198 8 , m ore t h a n 3 ,5 0 0 w i l d h o r s e s a n d bu r r o s h av e be e n “g e n t l e d” a nd a d opted

Ab out 95 0 me n i n t h e p r o g r a m h av e t r a i n e d t h e a n i ma ls

NOVEMBER 2021 33

Most wi l d horse s th e b ur eau of land m anagem e n t br i n g s to t h e h o n o r fa r m a r e g e l d i n g s o f t wo to t h ree yea rs i n ag e

gentli ng met h ods h elp tr ain m ustangs an d r e q u i r e h o u r s at a t i me i n a c o r r a l w i t h t h e h o r s e to g ai n i ts tru st

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and clean their hooves, to allow the men to lead them and to accept a of crimes committed by the men that are in his wild horse program, bit and saddle. In most cases, each mustang is in the program for about Simmons can also see the prospect of redemption. In his years at the three months before it is taken to a BLM adoption event to be publicly farm, he says he’s seen plenty of men come in with “no self-esteem auctioned. From those auctions Honor Farm horses have found new life and poor social skills” and leave with self-worth and an ability to in surprising homes. Some have been adopted by the U.S. Forest Serwork with others with patience and respect. “The horses are making vice to aid in rebuilding trail systems. Some have been adopted by the better men,” he says. “We’re not miracle workers, but we see good U.S. Marines Color Guard to become a part of the force. Some by the things happen here.”

Girl Scouts. Twelve horses were adopted by the Kentucky Horse Park This fall, the wild horse program is operating with 159 horses and to work with underprivileged and delinquent children. The program just under 20 men — a lean crew considering that there are normally was so successful that the park adopted 12 more.

30 men working in the training program. To work with the horses, inIn October, 40 gentled wild horses and 10 burros were auctioned mates must indicate their desire to be a part of the program. They are from the Wyoming Honor Farm, with bids starting at $125. More aucthen interviewed and evaluated by staff to determine whether they are tions will take place through December before picking back up again a good fit. Simmons emphasizes that men don’t need to have any ranch in spring 2022. At an on-site auction years ago, one former inmate or farm experience to be accepted into the program, and that many of — John Shuck, who was released in 2013 — had them don’t. In fact, some have never even touched a horse he trained in the program sell for $5,075, a horse when they are accepted into the program. a price well above what is paid for most domesAll inmates in the program start by cleaning out tic horses and a number he was very proud of pens and completing other basic chores. “We need when interviewed by the local newspaper. But to see that they can get along with others and stay oftentimes for the inmates, the auctions are biton task,” Simmons explains. “We need to see how THE WYOMING tersweet — they see the horses they’ve bonded they work together and how they are around the DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS with and watched change from wild mustangs horses. Then they work their way up” — up to the WANTED THE FARM into gentle friends go to new homes on the “outround pen, where the horses are trained.

TO BE A PLACE side,” where they’ll start new lives and where their The horses are taken into government custoWHERE INMATES numbers will become names. dy and — just like the men — given a number.

COULD CHANGE It’s a transformation that is too rich in metaphor In training, the first goal is to establish to both THE COURSE OF THEIR LIVES. to ignore. “The horses are incarcerated and so are the horses and men that the other is not a danger. the men,” Simmons says. “Going to prison is not a That’s hard to do when literal tons of four-legged positive situation, but we want to take a negative mustang power hostilely thrash at anyone who and make it a positive. So I tell the men; ‘At this comes near them. But somehow, these inmates go farm, you took a pit stop along the way to being from that to having a horse willingly be harnessed, who you can become.’” saddled and even ridden.

The first exercise of the training program begins when a horse is let out into the round pen, with the men forming a circle standing against the walls. The mustang circles the pen, looking for a way out — and identifying the man who the horse believes to be the safest option. The horse will then stop and lower its head in front of If you looked down the tree-lined paved driveway of the honor farm that person. This process is repeated with each horse, allowing the today, you’d see quaint white outbuildings neatly placed at the end staff, the men and the horses to get a sense of one another. Then, — the largest with a traditional barn cupola sitting atop the red gahorses are placed in a chute where inmates can touch them — with ble roof. Men at work walk around in collared T-shirts and ball caps. the hopes of desensitizing the horses to feeling pressure and human There are steel corrals and a wooden hitching post. It has all the traphands. Sometimes, moving beyond these beginner exercises to get pings of a farm that that little girl from Missouri could recognize. But the horses used to human presence and touch can take weeks. “If you look a little closer and you’ll find bulbous security cameras suspended are overaggressive the horse won’t respect you,” Simmons says. “The from those white outbuildings and signs that not only have the Wyohorses are a good litmus test for how the men are actually doing in ming Honor Farm emblem on them, but also warnings of K-9 search their rehabilitation. For the first time they’re learning that there’s units on the premises. The horses in the corrals have brands on their something more in life than ‘you.’ ” necks, coarse manes and fetlocks with long, feathery hair. They’re From there, it takes months, and a lot of patience, for the horses to beautiful. More so than a story that I read once. They’re as beautiful be “gentled” — to learn to accept a halter, allow the men to wash them as a second chance gets.

•

•

NOVEMBER 2021 35

THE WEST

THE RETURN OF THE WORKFORCE A FAMILY BUSINESS IN BOISE MAY HAVE THE KEY TO KEEPING EMPLOYEES DURING A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS

BY B EN OÎ T MOR EN N E

S

eated in a leather booth at ­Jalapeño’s Bar and Grill in Boise, Irma Valdivia scrolls through text messages from one of her servers. Forty-five and short in stature, she wears a Chanel pearl necklace nestled against a silky brown shirt — the uniform of a successful businesswoman. “I will now only be working as follows: Five-thirty to close Wednesday, Thursday and Friday,” she reads in a deep voice. “Old Irma would have told her, ‘­Monique, that’s not gonna work out, thank you and best of luck.’ New Irma says, ‘I gotta figure how to keep her on at least one or two days.’ ” Amid an uneven economic recovery and the lingering pandemic, many workers have proven reluctant to go back to their jobs, making them a prized resource and something like an endangered species. Depending on who you identify with, either they’re behaving like greedy squirrels hoarding unemployment insurance nuts or like prey that, for once, get to turn the gun on the hunter. Business owners and managers ponder how best to lure a server out of their living room: With bonuses?

Increased wages? Time off?

Economists, meanwhile, rattle off the factors holding workers back. Fear of being exposed to a new strain of the coronavirus ranks high on the list, even with vaccines widely available.

Low pay, lack of benefits, rigid work schedules and the difficulties of child care follow. What’s

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clear is how this scarcity manifests itself — a labor crunch that has hit businesses like a gut punch, especially in the hospitality sector. As of August, the unemployment rate for bar and restaurant workers was 8.7 percent, about three percentage points higher than the overall rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Jalapeño’s is an exception. The company could use some extra hands for busy shifts, as “hiring” signs indicate. But most of about 100 employees have come back to work for the three-restaurant chain in southwestern Idaho.

The Valdivias credit years of building trust with workers, giving them a voice and, more recently, generous financial incentives. “They actually treat this restaurant like it was their own,” says Leticia Valdivia McLaughlin, Irma’s sister and business partner.

Employers that supported workers prior to the pandemic are less likely to be affected by the shortage, labor experts say. Their financial recovery has also been quicker, putting them in a better position to cushion future economic blows. “All of these things will probably help them be a step ahead compared to other employers who may not be doing the same thing,” says Yannet Lathrop, a senior researcher and policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, a research and advocacy group. Jalapeño’s may provide a blueprint for other small businesses that hope to

keep attracting employees, even in the midst of a public health crisis.

•

•

Watching Irma climb into her sleek black Range Rover, you could be forgiven for guessing that she comes from money, though she built her business from scratch. The SUV’s rear plate reads, in black letters, “­PATRONA,” a Spanish term for a female boss. But she wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in her mouth. She grew up in a family of 10 children, raised by Mexican immigrants who toiled away in the fields around Boise in the 1970s.

Later, she and her brothers worked for an uncle who owns a restaurant and the family was inspired to start their own.

Irma partnered with her sister, and they settled on a Mexican cantina. After opening the first location in Nampa in 2006, they expanded with another in Boise three years later. In 2019, they opened a third store four blocks from Boise State University. Each sibling manages a location, but they often make important decisions as a team. This doesn’t mean that they agree on everything. In March 2020, their partnership was put to its biggest test yet.

Near the end of that month, Idaho’s governor issued a stay-at-home order to limit

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THE WEST

the spread of the coronavirus. The V ­ aldivias faced a tough choice: Would they remain open and provide curbside orders or shut down indefinitely? How many employees would they keep? Sitting in a freezing-cold office, they went back and forth. “It was like beating a dead horse,” says Leticia, 51. Mike, a baby-faced 37-year-old, favored shutting down, worried about getting himself or his staff exposed to the virus. His sisters, however, preferred to stay open as long as they could — as long as their employees were on board.

Businesses across the country had to make similar choices. When researchers surveyed 5,800 small businesses about their response to the pandemic, they found that those in the food service industry cut payroll by more than half, according to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More than one in three restaurant workers filed for unemployment in the spring of 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In the end, the Valdivias agreed to disagree.

The sisters stayed open and Mike ended up closing his location. On the last day, his roughly 20 employees filed out of the restaurant, carrying bags filled with perishable food.

The workers who most needed the money — those with mortgages and families — were sent to another location to help fill pickup orders. Those who were still in high school volunteered to go on unemployment, as did some of the younger workers at the sisters’ restaurants.

A few days later, Katy Marrow, 29, and a handful of employees gathered around Leticia in the kitchen of her restaurant. They’d have to go on unemployment for now, until the Valdivias worked out how to bring employees back safely. But all agreed to come back to work as soon as they could, coronavirus or not.

Marrow had been in the service industry for over 10 years but had never been furloughed.

Suddenly, she had to worry about successfully 38 DESERET MAGAZINE

applying for benefits. “It was a scary thought — being without money or a job,” she says. She soon learned that the additional $600 provided each week under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act amounted to just half of what she made in tips.

But the money wasn’t all that she missed.

At Jalapeño’s, she found working conditions a world apart from the corporate restaurants where she’d worked. “We’re all a lot closer,” says Marrow. After only two weeks, she put

THE VALDIVIAS FACED A TOUGH CHOICE: WOULD THEY REMAIN OPEN AND PROVIDE CURBSIDE ORDERS OR SHUT DOWN INDEFINITELY?

on her black uniform T-shirt and headed back to work, right as the restaurant settled into a new rhythm. Masked cooks prepared meals for her to pack into as many as four boxes. Phone lines were added to keep up with the growing volume of calls. Online ordering became an option. The patio in front of the restaurant was reconfigured to serve as a drive-thru. Loyal customers streamed by, picking up $30 foil containers filled with tacos and leaving generous tips behind.

• There’s

•

a central thread running through the tapestry of complaints voiced by business owners since the economy surged back to life,

alongside supply chain backlogs and vaccine mandates: Workers don’t want to work anymore. The alleged culprit? Unemployment benefits. In the eyes of many, would-be employees would rather stay at home and game the system. A few months ago, 26 states — 25 controlled by the GOP, including Idaho, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona — picked the stick over the carrot and discontinued some or all supplemental programs enacted by Congress, including a measure that provided supplemental unemployment benefits until it was discontinued in September.

Yet, these states saw no noticeable increase in job growth compared with those that maintained the aid, The Wall Street Journal found.

Workers in the 22 states that ended all additional benefits in June were only slightly more likely to find a job, according to a team of economists. It’s possible that some “workers earning more with enhanced unemployment insurance benefits than they did working may have decided that low-paid jobs weren’t worth the risk in the middle of a pandemic,” says the National Employment Law Project’s Lathrop.

But the takeaway shouldn’t be that low-paid employees are slackers. If anything, she says, “it does say something about how depressed wages have been for a long, long time.”

Employers in Utah and Wyoming pay tipped employees a paltry minimum of $2.13 an hour, with tips making the difference to reach the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

The minimum cash wage is slightly higher in Idaho, but residents there have struggled with soaring housing costs due to an influx of transplants, says Jan Roeser, an economist at the Idaho Department of Labor. Idahoans earning minimum wage must work 96 hours a week in order to rent a two-bedroom home, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a policy group.

For many hospitality workers, compensation is only part of the puzzle, as the pandemic

brought about a moment of clarity after years of putting up with unfair treatment. Customers can be stingy on tips, or at best, uneven.

Bosses are often poorly trained to supervise teams and default to using pressure as a management tool. Sexual harassment has long plagued the sector, as has wage theft.

Heather Lynn Smith, 37, worked for about a decade at the front desk of an economy hotel in the Houston area, part of a national chain. She kept pleading for an hourly raise of $1.50, but it was denied over and over again.

After the hotel reopened in May last year, the owner provided gloves and masks only once and refused to say whether she would keep employees who fell sick with COVID-19.

“It was just a very toxic environment,” says Smith. All the while, she worked a second full-time job as a truancy officer at a local ­junior high school, until she and her husband, who also had a job, were able to pay off some debts. Quitting became an option. Finally, in September, she left.

A recent survey of 30,000 job seekers by Joblist, an online job-search platform, found that 38 percent of former hospitality workers were seeking to transition out of the industry.

More than half said no incentives would lure them back.

This is a teachable moment for employers, says Rosemary Batt, a professor in human resource studies at Cornell University. “The pandemic has taught all of us that health and family come first, and many have chosen that over making more money,” she says. “So employers need to focus on the quality of jobs and daily working conditions: health and safety above all, paid sick leave, predictable schedules — which very few front-line service workers have.” It may not require an extreme makeover. She reports that employers who provided a predictable schedule prior to the pandemic were shielded from high turnover once it hit, according to research by her stu-

dents that has yet to be published. That history also helped such employers bounce back financially more quickly.

•

•

One difference between Jalapeño’s and other businesses is that it provides more than a paycheck. It provides a “support system,” Irma says. The Valdivias throw birthday parties for

“THE PANDEMIC HAS TAUGHT ALL OF US THAT HEALTH AND FAMILY COME FIRST, AND MANY HAVE CHOSEN THAT OVER MAKING MORE MONEY.”

employees’ kids — when they’re not babysitting them. The owners pitch in to clean toilets and help the cooks cut chips. They’ve stopped counting the number of times they’ve given a stranded server a ride. Irma says she acts as a mother, a mentor, a car dealer and sometimes as an immigration attorney for her employees, most of whom are Hispanic. “Once you set that foundation — how you’re going to treat your employees and how you’re going to be good to them, they’re willing to trust you and stick with you a little bit,” says Mike.

But the Valdivias have recently turned to more traditional means to hold on to employees. They used hundreds of thousands in loans provided by the federal Paycheck Protection

Program to pay bonuses. They moved to permanently increase wages by up to 30 percent, passing some of the cost on to consumers. Chefs and dishwashers earn around $20 an hour, and servers are paid about $6 an hour before tips.

Workers also have more flexible schedules now.

They’ve been able to take vacation time this summer even as Jalapeño’s readied itself for a busy comeback season. One employee took at least two days off to take care of a sick cat.

But there’s a flip side to the new economic reality, which is that employees get to call the shots. “They have the upper hand now — 100 percent,” says Irma. Because of that, some feel like they can push the limits. One worker who injured his hand in off hours told her he’d take the rest of the week off. Servers sometimes text at the last minute to request time off on busy Saturday nights. These days, Irma has no choice but to go along with it.

Yet she sees most of these changes as overwhelmingly positive. She’s the first to acknowledge that, historically, Mexican ­ restaurants were built on the back of cheap, immigrant labor, and likes to think her family is at the vanguard of more humane management in the industry. She’s also come to realize there’s more to life than her own job — she’s gone so far as closing her location on Sundays, like her siblings. A single mom, she’s started going on dates again.

At the same time, she’s achieved prosperity in part through the devotion of her employees who, by their own accounts, have known nothing but hard work all of their lives. Now, she wonders, what happens when the old guard, the workers fiercely devoted to their jobs, retire? Take Jose Toro, Leticia’s chef of nine years. At 53, he stands in the kitchen eight to 10 hours a day, working the grill in Death Valley-­like temperatures, without complaining. “Where are you going to find that quality of employee,” Irma says, “and still not pay them $30 an hour?”

NOVEMBER 2021 39

LETTER FROM THE FIELD

FIFTY WAYS TO ENDURE SURVIVING A MIDLIFE CRISIS IN 50-MILE INCREMENTS

BY MATT CR OSSMA N

T

he wisconsin river cuts a brown snake through a dense Midwestern forest, maybe 300 yards across. We paddle along the south shore, chasing the bubbles that indicate a faster current. Five days and 125 miles in, I’m exhausted. We all are. Fifty miles on foot. Fifty miles on a bike. Now 25 miles to go in our green canoe. A September breeze softens the harsh sun. Paddles dig through the water. I settle into a perfect calm — until someone cries out behind me.

There are 10 men in our group, in five canoes spread across the water. We turn to find the doctor and the pastor are stuck on a submerged tree. As we all shout instructions, they try to paddle forward, then backward, but their canoe won’t budge. Another team tries to tow them out, to no avail. My mind races with nightmare scenarios. What if they capsize? What if they fall underwater and get stuck in the branches?

I had envisioned this trip as a celebration, a test, a respite from anxiety. I called it 5050-50 in honor of my looming 50th birthday.

But honestly, the past year had been horrific.

I’d survived COVID-19, as had my children, only to see my mother succumb to cancer.

Forced to confront mortality, I’d hardly slept since the funeral. I needed relief and hoped an adventure with my friends would bring it.

I wanted to do something hard, but this isn’t what I had in mind.

•

•

On day one, we gather before dawn in the

parking lot of my church in suburban St. ­Louis and convoy six and a half hours north, two pickups and my old hatchback. By afternoon we’re on the Ice Age Trail, not far from Madison, 10 men at various stages of middle age. We hike a meandering dirt path over rolling hills and through thick forest. Yellow rec­

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tangles called blazes painted on trees mark the way, which crosses a couple of rural roads. I bounce between the front and the back, eager to lead, just as eager to hang back and talk.

We all belong to an outdoor fitness group, and I often organize physical challenges like 250-mile bike rides, paddling trips on the Missouri River, or doing 100 burpees every day for a month. Today’s 15-mile hike is the first leg in an itinerary cobbled together across southern Wisconsin. But it’s easy to get lost in the moment out here. Like when the trees part, revealing a small lake rippling in the wind. The day is three steps short of perfect. Back at the trailhead, the mechanic rolls his ankle and tumbles down the stairs to the parking lot. Before long it swells to the size of his calf.

Back at our Airbnb, I take a private room, hoping it will help me sleep. Instead, I toss and turn for four hours, worried about his ankle.

It’s worse the next morning, with 20 miles to cover. The doctor, a gastroenterologist, wraps the ankle, joking, “I finally get to use my first-aid kit.” On the trail, I study the mechanic’s stride from behind. He’s limping and his right shoe pops loose with every step. He keeps up the pace, but I can’t help worrying.

What if his ankle snaps six miles from the car?

After a dark foreboding section of trail thick with bushes and weeds, we descend into another stretch cleared of undergrowth. Pine trees stripped of low branches look like scattered telephone poles that form an optical illusion, as if I can see into infinity. I see aging metaphors everywhere — even in the leaves’ apparent resistance to change colors.

There is no resisting: Death comes for us all, and it’s coming for me sooner than I’d like.

It’s easy to look back at my first 50 years and wonder what I’ve done with my life. I try not to do that, but it’s one of the uncomfortable realities of middle age: Sometimes it’s easier to look back rather than forward.

•

•

The mechanic’s bike comes off the truck with

a broken tire stem, but changing a tube is quick work. Soon we’re cruising west on the Glacial Drumlin State Trail, a converted train line that runs 52 miles from Milwaukee to Madison, with no cars or big hills. We roll past cornfields and small towns, old railroad depots and waterways. When the group stops at a gas station for snacks, the pastor and I rest in the shade of a small tunnel. The respite is short-lived. “I’m finished,” the mechanic texts to the group.

His ankle is holding up, but his derailleur has snapped and his nerves aren’t far behind.

We brainstorm a fix, removing the offending part and trimming the chain to fit, converting his 18-speed bike into a hipster single-speed.

It gets us moving, albeit more slowly, interrupted whenever the mechanic howls that the chain has slipped again. Each time, we gather around, shine our lights and encourage him as he puts it back on, cursing.

The sky glows purple and orange as the sun drops behind a marsh. Bugs ping against my face. My headlight catches a rabbit darting into the trees. As we climb the last knoll, the chain slips again and the mechanic surrenders, coasting downhill to the pastor’s pickup.

That night, I lie in bed, eyes wide open.

Hours tick by. I take cough syrup, the kind that makes you drowsy. But every time I’m about to drift off, I jerk myself awake. My mind feels like I’m watching a fireworks display, only in place of the dark sky there’s a strobe light and instead of oohs and aahs I want to scream.

I’ve struggled with insomnia, but never so bad as the months since I gave my mother’s eulogy. The cancer in her jaw came back last year, right around the shutdown. She made it nine months, enduring shingles, a gallbladder

Continued on page 45 PHOTOGR A PHY BY SPEN SER HEA PS

B ik ing th e 5 2-m ile Glac ia l D ru ml i n Stat e T r a i l , a c o n v e rt e d r a i l l i n e i n W i s c o ns i n

Gr as s es glow in th e eve n i n g s u n a lo n g t h e I c e Ag e T r a i l i n s o u t h e r n w i s c o ns i n

NOVEMBER 2021 41

SECTION

Ligh t p lays o n t h e s u r fac e o f t h e W i s c o ns i n R i v e r

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NOVEMBER 2021 43

Lak e La G r a n g e a s s e e n fr om t h e I c e Ag e T r a i l

Th e pastor ( w ear ing a s ky-b lue T - s h i rt ) r e g a l e s h i s fe l low t r av e l e r s w i t h a c a mp f i r e sto ry

44 DESERET MAGAZINE

Aer ial view of th e W i s c o ns i n R i v e r , d ot t e d w i t h i s l a n ds a n d s a n d b a r s

Continued from page 40 problem and a couple of falls. We tried to visit my parents for the holidays, but my daughters and I tested positive for COVID-19, so we had to settle for a video chat on Christmas Day. She looked like she was on the verge of death.

I knew I’d never see her again.

My mom was all smiles and friendly energy. If you went with her to the grocery store, it could take two hours, and you’d surely get to know the cashier, the manager, even the stocking clerk. She didn’t want a funeral. She wanted a party, so we threw her one when the pandemic allowed, with drinks and a taco bar.

I found myself pondering my own life and what people might say about me when it’s my turn to go. I wanted to give them plenty of material to work with. More than anything, I wanted my eulogy to be like my mom’s.

That’s how I ended up here, waiting for a morsel of sleep.

•

•

Heading to the river, I can barely function.

Two hours of sleep last night, 16 over four days.

I can’t drive my own car. I try to say something

about floor mats, but the term won’t come. I call them “the thing in the car you put your feet on.” At the put-in spot, a bald eagle sits on a thumb of sand and I watch in a stupor. My brain is a moth without a light.

I pair up with the pilot because he has arms like a lumberjack and he used to fly a fighter jet, so I trust his nerve. He steers the canoe while I paddle weakly in front, snarfing candy and electrolytes until I start to feel like myself.

As the afternoon heat burns off, we find an island to spend the night. I set up my tent and inflate my mattress and pillow, ready to pass out. Instead I rally to enjoy tacos and stories by the fire with my friends. The soft sand makes my best bed all week, and it’s a good thing.

By midmorning on day five, the canoe is stuck and so are my friends, trapped by their own weight. Somebody’s got to get out. It’s risky. They’re wearing life jackets, but they could still get sucked under the tree or swept downstream. The doctor goes first, standing on a slick branch to steady himself before slipping off. Another team pulls him to shore.

Now it’s the pastor’s turn. He is my pastor. His wife teaches my daughter piano. His kids go to youth group with mine. He lowers himself out of the boat and disappears into the water.

Pop back up, man.

POP BACK UP. Finally, his salt-and-pepper hair resurfaces.

The canoe gives, and he holds it against the current until we can tow it to shore.

Later, we stop at a roadside diner where Amish families roll by in horse-drawn carriages. We stink of sweat and muck, and I feel for the server. There’s no vegan menu, so the doctor orders his first burger in years. I soak fried catfish in tartar sauce while the pilot mulls a second meal. Already we’re reliving our grand, exhausting, scary adventure.

I’m 50, and no, I won’t live forever. In fact, I’m closer to the end than the beginning. This is unsettling, to say the least.

But I want to keep my focus on what still lies ahead. I want to get the most from my talents—including the ability to form and strengthen deep and meaningful relationships. It’s one way I remember my mom and honor what she taught me.

I know there will be ups and downs, accidents and injuries and mechanical failures. But there will also be awesome, sweet, small moments I never want to forget, like the taste of tartar sauce on fried catfish at a roadside diner with my best friends. I want more of that.

NOVEMBER 2021 45

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D O O M PATROL A WORLD-RENOWNED HISTORIAN

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NOVEMBER 2021 49

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most of the previous 20 years. In January, I flew from London to Dallas, from Dallas to San Francisco, and from there to Hong Kong (January 8), Taipei (January 10), Singapore (January 13), Zurich (January 19), back to San Francisco (January 24), and then to Fort Lauderdale (January 27). I wore a mask once or twice but found it intolerable after an hour and took it off. In the course of February, I flew almost as frequently, though not so far: to New York, Sun Valley, Bozeman, Washington, and Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. You may wonder what kind of life that was. I used to joke that the lecture circuit had turned me into an “international man of history.” I realized only later that I might have been one of the “superspreaders” whose hyperactive travel schedules were spreading the virus from Asia to the rest of the world.

My weekly newspaper column in the first half of 2020 became a kind of plague diary, though I never mentioned the fact that I was ill for most of February, with a painful cough I could not shake off. (To get through lectures, I relied heavily on the alternative medicine that some call Scotch.) “Worry about grandparents,” I wrote on February 29; “the

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ever in our lifetimes, it seems, has there been greater uncertainty about the future — and greater ignorance of the past. At the beginning of 2020, very few people grasped the significance of the news coming out of Wuhan about a new coronavirus. When I first spoke and wrote publicly about the rising probability of a global pandemic, in the week ending January 26, 2020, I was regarded as eccentric (certainly by the majority of the delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, who seemed oblivious to the danger). The conventional wisdom at that time, from Fox News to The Washington Post, was that the coronavirus posed a lesser threat to Americans than the usual winter wave of influenza.

On February 2, I wrote, “We are now dealing with an epidemic in the world’s most populous country, which has a significant chance of becoming a global pandemic. ... The challenge is ... to resist that strange fatalism that leads most of us not to cancel our travel plans and not to wear uncomfortable masks, even when a dangerous virus is spreading exponentially.”

Looking back, I read those sentences as a veiled confession.

I was traveling manically in January and February, as I had done for

A POLICEMAN AND A MEMBER OF THE SPANISH ARMY’S MILITARY EMERGENCY UNIT STAND OUTSIDE A MADRID ICE RINK. THE RINK WAS TURNED INTO A TEMPORARY MORGUE TO DEAL WITH A SURGE IN COVID-19 DEATHS IN MARCH 2020.

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A CATASTROPHE LAYS BARE THE SOCIETIES AND STATES THAT IT STRIKES. IT IS A MOMENT OF TRUTH, OF REVELATION, EXPOSING SOME AS FRAGILE, OTHERS AS RESILIENT. mortality rate for people in their 80s is above 14 percent, whereas it’s close to zero for those under 40.” I omitted the less comforting data on asthmatic men in their mid-50s. I also left out the fact that I went to see a doctor twice only to be told that — as more or less everywhere in the United States at that time — there were no tests available for COVID-19. All I knew was that it was serious, and not only for me and my family, as I wrote on March 1: “Those who blithely say, ‘This is no worse than the flu’ ... are missing the point. ... Uncertainty surrounds it because it is so difficult to detect in its early stages, when many carriers are both infectious and asymptomatic. We don’t know for sure how many people have it, so we don’t exactly know its reproduction number and its mortality rate. There’s no vaccine and there’s no cure.”

In another article, published in The Wall Street Journal on March 8, I wrote, “If the U.S. turns out to have proportionately as many cases as South Korea, it will soon have some 46,000 cases and more than 300 deaths — or 1,200 deaths if the U.S. mortality rate is as high as Italy’s.” At that point, total confirmed cases in the United States stood at just 541; deaths at 22. We passed 46,000 cases on March 24 and 1,200 deaths on March 25, just over two weeks later. On March 15, I noted, “John F. Kennedy airport was thronged yesterday with people doing what, since time immemorial, they have done in times of plague: fleeing the big city (and spreading the virus). ... We are entering the panic phase of the pandemic.”

That was the same day I myself flew, with my wife and my two youngest children, from California to Montana. We stayed there for a year.

I wrote and thought about little else in the first half of 2020. Why this intense preoccupation? The answer is that, although my core competency is financial history, I have been keenly interested in the role of disease in history ever since studying the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892 as a graduate student more than 30 years ago. Richard Evans’ meticulously detailed study of that episode introduced me to the idea that the mortality caused by a deadly pathogen is partly a reflection of the social and political order it attacks.

It was the class structure as much as the bacterium Vibrio cholerae that killed people in Hamburg, Germany, Evans argued, because the entrenched power of the city’s property owners had been an insuperable obstacle to improving the city’s antiquated water and sewage systems. The mortality rate for the poor was 13 times higher than for the rich. Researching “The Pity of War” a few years later, I was struck by statistics that suggested the German army had collapsed in 1918 partly because of a surge of illness, possibly resulting from the Spanish influenza pandemic. “The War of the World” (Penguin, 2006) delved more deeply into the history of the 1918-19 pandemic, showing how the First World War ended with twin pandemics — not only influenza but also the ideological contagion of Bolshevism.

The work I did on empires in the 2000s also involved excursions into the history of contagious disease. No account of European settlement in the New World could have omitted the role that disease played in “thin-

ning the Indians, to make room for the English,” as John Archdale, the governor of Carolina in the 1690s, callously remarked. (The title of the second chapter of my book “Empire” was “White Plague.”) I was also very struck by the terrible toll of tropical disease on British soldiers stationed far from home: A man’s chances of surviving a tour of duty in Sierra Leone were pitifully low — 1 in 2. “The Great Degeneration” (Penguin, 2014) explicitly warned of our growing vulnerability to “the ... random mutation of viruses like influenza,” while “The Square and the Tower” (Penguin, 2017) was essentially a history of the world based on the insight that “network structures are as important as viruses in determining the speed and extent of a contagion.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. The death toll worldwide

approaches five million, which is certainly an underestimate, as the statistics from a number of large countries (notably Iran and Russia) cannot be trusted. And the cumulative body count continues to rise globally — to say nothing of the number of people whose health has been permanently damaged, which no one has yet estimated. It seems increasingly likely that Lord Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal, has won his bet with the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker that “bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six month period starting no later than Dec 31 2020.”

Some epidemiologists have argued that, without drastic social distancing and economic lockdowns, the ultimate death toll could have been between 30 million and 40 million. Because of government restrictions and changes in public behavior, it will surely not be as high.

Yet precisely these “nonpharmaceutical interventions” have inflicted a shock on the world economy far greater than that caused by the 200809 financial crisis — potentially as great as the shock of the Great Depression, but compressed into months, not years. Governments had to take drastic fiscal measures to stave off a collapse of the markets.

You see, disasters and their impact are rarely entirely exogenous events, with the exception of a massive meteor strike, which hasn’t happened in 66 million years, or an alien invasion, which hasn’t happened at all. Even a catastrophic earthquake is only as catastrophic as the extent of urbanization along the fault line — or the shoreline, if it triggers a tsunami. A pandemic is made up of a new pathogen and the social networks that it attacks. We cannot understand the scale of the contagion by studying only the virus itself, because the virus will infect only as many people as social networks allow it to. At the same time, a catastrophe lays bare the societies and states that it strikes. It is a moment of truth, of revelation, exposing some as fragile, others as resilient, and others as “antifragile” — able not just to withstand disaster but to be strengthened by it. We still find ourselves in the middle of this pandemic, about which it’s hard to gain the perspective that hindsight affords.

But looking at past pandemics and disasters not only helps ­provide NOVEMBER 2021 51

perspective on the current one, but also allows us to understand and prepare for the inevitability of the next one.

So cometh now

My Lady Influenza, like a star Inebriously wan, and in her train Fever, the haggard soul’s white nenuphur, And lily-fingered Death, and grisly Pain And Constipation who makes all things vain, Pneumonyer, Cancer, and Nasal Catarrh.

Rupert Brooke’s “To My Lady Influenza” (1906) was a facetious undergraduate work. Yet “Lady Influenza” was never to be trifled with. The first well-described influenza outbreaks were in 16th-century Europe, but the earliest was probably in 1173. There had been significant influenza pandemics in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the 20th century was hit much harder. A more populous world was also a more urban world and a more mobile world — a world in which low air quality in industrial towns may have made people more susceptible to respiratory

illnesses. A year after Brooke wrote “To My Lady Influenza,” his eldest brother, Dick, died of pneumonia, at the age of 26. Brooke himself would live only a year longer, dying of an infected mosquito bite that led to sepsis, off the Greek island of Skyros.

A predictable “gray rhino,” in the sense that danger of a general European war was well known, but also a surprising “black swan,” in the sense that contemporaries seemed bewildered by its outbreak, the First World War was a true dragon-king event in terms of its vast historical consequences.

As disastrous as the war was, its proximate impact in terms of lives lost was exceeded by that of the influenza pandemic that broke out in its final year. Where exactly the new strain of H1N1 first appeared is uncertain, but it is usually said to have been Fort Riley, Kansas, the site of Camp Funston, one of the network of Army camps where hundreds of thousands of young American men were being trained to fight in Europe as the American Expeditionary Forces. There is, however, evidence that the pandemic originated in the British Army in 1917, though the condition was initially identified as “purulent bronchitis with bronchopneumonia.” Here was the key to influenza’s 20th-century success.

INDIA HAS REGISTERED MORE THAN 450,000 DEATHS FROM THE CORONAVIRUS, BUT ACCORDING TO ONE STUDY THE ACTUAL DEATH TOLL MAY BE 10 TIMES THE OFFICIAL COUNT.

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monwealth Pier on August 27, 1918, when three cases of influenza appeared on the sick list. Eight cases emerged the next day, and 58 the next, 15 of whom were so ill they were transferred to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Chelsea. On September 8, influenza arrived at the Army’s Camp Devens. Within 10 days, thousands of feverish patients overwhelmed the camp’s hospitals; within weeks, the morgue was full of blue-tinged, asphyxiated corpses. Combatant countries sought to suppress the news of the pandemic as potentially harmful to wartime morale; this hardly helped to keep the public informed. The disease came to be known as the Spanish flu because only the largely uncensored press of neutral Spain reported on it with any accuracy.

Between 40 million and 50 million people died as a result of the pandemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. The absolute numbers were highest in India (18.5 million deaths) and China (between 4 million and 9.5 million), but death rates varied widely from place to place. Close to half (44.5 percent) of the population of Cameroon was wiped out; in Western Samoa, nearly a quarter (23.6 percent). The worst mortality rates in Europe were in Hungary and Spain (each around 1.2 percent), with Italy not far behind.

By contrast, North America got off lightly: between 0.53 percent and 0.65 percent for the United States, 0.61 percent for Canada. As these figures

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Never had armies been mobilized on such a scale before — more than 70 million men in uniform. Never had so many young men been taken from their homes and workplaces, crowded into primitive accommodations, and sent over long distances in ships and trains. The idea that the virus originated in pigs has been refuted (an avian origin seems more likely); if anything, the direction of infection was from men to pigs.

The first American cases were recorded at Camp Funston on March 4. A week later, a member of Fort Riley’s catering staff entered the infirmary, followed in the coming days by a stream of infected soldiers. By the end of the month, more than a thousand cases had been recorded and 48 men had died of influenza. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, the virus spread rapidly across the United States and then crossed to Europe on the jam-packed American troopships. It is possible that the pandemic explains the near doubling of the proportion of German soldiers reporting sick in the summer of 1918, which was a crucial factor in the imperial army’s subsequent collapse. Certainly, we have reports of German prisoners of war with the flu from July. By that time it had reached India, Australia and New Zealand. A few months later, a second and deadlier wave struck all but simultaneously in Brest, France; Freetown, Sierra Leone; and Boston.

The virus made a new landfall in the United States at Boston’s Com-

A BURIAL TAKES PLACE WHERE NEW GRAVES HAVE BEEN DUG AT A CEMETERY IN MANAUS, IN THE AMAZON FOREST IN BRAZIL, ON APRIL 22, 2020.

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good illustration of the impact of the pandemic on young adults, as well as a vivid description of the hallucinogenic miseries of the illness itself, can be found in Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1937), about a wartime romance cut cruelly short by the virus.

In September 2021, COVID-19’s American death toll overtook that of

the 1918 flu. And yet, in August 2020, it appeared that, with a regime of mass testing, contact tracing, social distancing and targeted quarantining, a country could contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2, as the virus relied heavily on superspreaders for its transmission and disproportionately sickened or killed people past retirement age. A vaccine is now vanquishing the virus. Unlike World War I, this pandemic might even be over, if not by Christmas 2021, then by Easter 2022. Sure, in the second week of October 2021, COVID-19 case numbers were rising in 122 countries. But only in the spring of 2021 did it join the elite of pandemics — the 20 or so in recorded history that killed upward of 0.05 percent of humanity. Only a handful of those nations that fought World War II had lost more people per day to COVID-19 than they had lost to the

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imply, the Spanish flu was indifferent as to a country’s combatant status.

While its initial spread may have been related to wartime accommodation and transportation, that soon ceased to be true.

In the United States, the deaths of as many as 675,000 people were attributed to the Spanish flu, of which 550,000 were excess deaths (above what would have been expected in that period under normal circumstances). Equivalent mortality in 2020 would have been between 1.8 million and 2.2 million Americans. The Spanish flu killed an order of magnitude more Americans than died in combat in the war (53,402).

Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults.

Out of 272,500 male influenza deaths in the United States, nearly 49 percent were aged 20 to 39, whereas only 18 percent were under five and 13 percent were over 50. The very young and very old were also (as usual) vulnerable, so that all countries for which age-specific death rates are available recorded a roughly W-shaped age distribution of mortality. Death was not caused by the influenza virus itself so much as by the body’s immunological reaction to the virus.

Perversely, this meant that individuals with the strongest immune systems were more likely to die than those with weaker immune systems. A

A COVID-19 DISASTER MORGUE OF REFRIGERATED TRAILERS STANDS AT THE SOUTH BROOKLYN MARINE TERMINAL IN BROOKLYN, DECEMBER 14, 2020.

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THE COVID-19 PLAGUE BEGAN AS A GRAY RHINO, PREDICTED BY MANY. IT STRUCK AS A BLACK SWAN, SOMEHOW COMPLETELY UNFORESEEN.

Axis powers. The United States was one of those countries. This illustrated something profound — that all disasters are at some level manmade political disasters, even if they originate with new pathogens.

Politics explained why World War II killed 25 times as many Germans as Americans. Politics also helps to explain why COVID-19 has thus far killed more than eight times as many Americans as Germans.

This plague began as a gray rhino, predicted by many. It struck as a black swan, somehow completely unforeseen. Could it become a world-changing “dragon king”? As we have seen, disasters of any kind become truly epoch-making events only if their economic, social and political ramifications amount to more than the excess mortality they cause. Could this medium-size disaster nevertheless alter our lives permanently and profoundly? Let me now hazard three guesses.

First, COVID-19 will be to social life what AIDS was to sexual life: It will change our behavior, though by no means enough to avert a significant number of premature deaths. I myself welcome a new age of social distancing, but then I am a natural misanthrope who hates crowds and will not greatly miss hugs and handshakes. Most people, however, will be unable to resist the temptations of post-lockdown gregariousness.

There will be unsafe socializing just as there still is unsafe sex, even after more than three decades and 30 million deaths from HIV. Second, and for that reason, most big cities are not “over.” Do we all now head from Gotham or the Great Wen to the villages, there to cultivate our vegetable gardens in splendid, rustic isolation? Do nearly half of us continue to work from home, as we did during the pandemic — more than three times more than before? Probably not. It takes a lot to kill a city. True, just over a century after Thomas Mann wrote “Death in Venice” (1912), Venice is pretty much dead. But it was not cholera that killed it — it was the shifting pattern of international trade. Likewise, COVID-19 will not kill London or New York; it will just make them cheaper, grungier and younger. Some billionaires will not return. Some firms and many families will move to the suburbs or even farther afield. Tax revenues will drop. Crime rates will jump. As Gerald Ford supposedly did in 1975, when the city asked for a federal bailout, another president may tell New York to “drop dead.” San Francisco will lose talent to Austin. But inertia is a powerful thing. Americans these days relocate less than they used to. Only a third of jobs can really be done at home; everyone else will still need to work in offices, shops and factories. Workplaces will just be different — more spacious and campuslike, as they already are in Silicon Valley. Commuting will no longer involve being packed like sardines on a subway. No more unwelcome intimacies on elevators. Masks over most faces. No more tut-tutting at the hijab and the niqab. Perforce, we are all modest now.

What of the pandemic’s impact on the generational imbalances that had grown so intolerable in many societies by 2020? Was COVID-19 sent by Freya, the goddess of youth, to emancipate millennials and

Generation Z from bearing the fiscal burden of an excessive number of elderly people? It is tempting to marvel at this ageist virus. No previous pandemic was so discriminating against the elderly and in favor of the young. But in truth, the impact of COVID-19 in terms of excess mortality will probably not be great enough to balance the intergenerational accounts. In the short run, the majority of old people will remain retired; relatively few will die prematurely — hardly any in the most elderly of countries, Japan. The young, meanwhile, were the ones struggling to find jobs (other than with Amazon) and struggling almost as much to have fun. An economy without crowds was not a “new normal.”

It was more like the new anomie, to borrow Émile Durkheim’s term for the sense of disconnectedness he associated with modernity. For most young people, the word “fun” is almost synonymous with “crowd.” The era of distancing has been a time of depression in the psychological as well as the economic sense. The gloom has been especially deep for Generation Z, whose university social lives — half the point of college, if not more — were wrecked. They spent yet more time on electronic devices — perhaps an hour a day more than before the pandemic. It did not make them happier.

History tells us to expect the great punctuation marks of disaster in no predictable order. The four horsemen of the Book of Revelation — Conquest, War, Famine and the pale rider Death — gallop out at seemingly random intervals to remind us that no amount of technological innovation can make mankind invulnerable. Indeed, some innovations — like those fleets of jet airplanes that transported so many infected people from Wuhan to the rest of the world in January 2020 — give the horsemen the opportunity to ride in their slipstream. Yet somehow the riders’ arrival always takes us by surprise. For a moment, we contemplate the scenario of total extinction. We shelter in place, watching “Contagion” or reading Atwood. Perhaps the black swan becomes a dragon king and turns life upside down. But very rarely. Mostly, for the lucky many, life after the disaster goes on, changed in a few ways but on the whole remarkably, reassuringly, boringly the same. With astonishing speed, we put our brush with mortality behind us and blithely carry on, forgetful of those who were not so lucky, regardless of the next disaster that lies in wait. Think, if you doubt the truth of this, of Daniel Defoe’s concluding doggerel from his “Journal of the Plague Year”: A dreadful Plague in London was, In the Year Sixty Five, Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls Away; yet I alive!

Adapted from “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe,” copyright 2021 by Niall Ferguson. Used by permission of Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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SECTION

AN UZBEK MILITIAMAN SALVAGES COATS FROM TALIBAN SOLDIERS KILLED IN THE BATTLE OF QALA-I-JANGI IN DECEMBER 2001

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ESCAPE

F R OM A F G H A N I S TA N

T W E N T Y Y E A R S A G O, A N A F G H A N B O Y S T U M B L E D I N T O A

JOURNEY TO HIS OWN AMERICAN DREAM.

HE NEVER IMAGINED HE’D END UP HELPING HIS

FA M I LY F L E E T H E TA L I B A N

BY S C O T T C A R R I E R

NOVEMBER 2021 57

Part One: Over There

November 27, 2001 I step on a tugboat with four other journalists and we start across the river that separates Uzbekistan from northern Afghanistan. The current is fast and deep. For the first time in weeks, I breathe deeply. I feel the line being crossed, and, yes, I want to go. Roughly two months have passed since the twin towers fell and America changed forever.

On the shore of Afghanistan a man in a worn-out sport coat and scarf stamps my passport, and I cram into a Toyota microbus heading 60 miles south to the city of ­Mazar-e-Sharif.

Mazar sits on the flatlands before the Hindu Kush mountains. The streets are mud, and the buildings are brick and concrete cubes sprouting clusters of rebar. There are men pulling carts with wood wheels. There are women wearing burqas. There are shops with skinned goats hanging upside down, shops where chairs and tables are made, a shop where a man is pounding out food cans and riveting them together in the shape of a satellite dish.

The one hotel that’s open is across the street from a blue-tiled mosque. My room is tiny and cold, one window, and a thin cotton mattress on top of wire springs that sag and creak almost to the floor. The electricity is off.

The bathroom is down the hall, but I’m told there’s no water now.

I stare at a bare lightbulb as the call to prayer breaks through a loudspeaker at the mosque.

I decide to go for a walk and stop to look at the blue-tiled dome. Very quickly there are five young men around me. Then there are 10, then 30, then 50 — all men and boys, close together, all yelling at me.

Then I hear a soft voice say, “Excuse me, sir, can I help you?”

I turn and see a young boy with a freshly shaved head, beautiful green eyes and long eyelashes.

“Yes,” I say. “You can make these people go away.”

So he stands up on a bench and starts yelling. He’s wearing a Planet Hollywood T-shirt under an old ski parka with bell bottom pants that are two or three sizes too big, cinched by a belt, and he’s castigating the crowd, throwing his finger at them, shaming them all in Pashto. And, amazingly, they all turn and walk away with their heads down.

“That was impressive,” I say.

“Do you need an interpreter?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “What’s your name?”

“Najibullah.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” he says.

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I look away and wonder, maybe he’s too young.

“I will help you in any way I can,” he says.

“And I will not leave your side. As long as you are here, I will be with you.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt in the process,” I say.

“Come,” he says. “Let’s go to the hotel.”

December 2, 2001 Najib and I are in a taxi headed to Qala-i-­ Jangi, a medieval-style fortress where the first battle of the war has taken place.

Najib is driving. The old chauffeur is relaxing in the passenger’s seat while the teenager speeds 90 miles an hour, pounding the steering wheel to the beat of Afghan disco music. He drives too fast, and he slows down and speeds up too quickly as the car crashes through a series of large potholes. This happens again and again, even though I keep telling him to slow down.

In the distance, there are small caravans of camels and herds of goats, and along the road runs a natural gas pipeline, rusted, resting on the ground or on small dirt mounds.

“Is that a real pipeline?” I ask Najibullah.

“Yes, it’s real. It’s the only one in Afghanistan. The gas goes to Mazar-e-Sharif.”

“And it works?” I ask.

“Yes, for electricity,” he says. “My father helped design the pipeline as a geology engineer.”

Up ahead, there’s a young soldier with a Kalashnikov on the side of the road. Najibullah pulls over. The soldier comes up to the car pointing his gun at Najib. He has his finger on the trigger.

“What are you doing?” Najib shouts at him. “You shouldn’t be out here on the road stopping cars. This man is an American and you should be careful not to upset him or the bombs will find you in your house.”

The soldier falls back like he’s been punched in the gut, and he lets us go.

“He really believed that,” I say.

“Yes, they all believe it,” Najibullah says, “and it’s true.”

“But I can’t make it happen.”

“He doesn’t know this,” Najibullah says.

The old chauffeur looks at me and smiles.

December 4, 2001 I’m sitting beside Najib’s father in the back seat of a taxicab. Najib is driving again. We’re headed to Sheberghan, 90 miles west. Najib’s father, Sadiq, is going to translate as I interview two Taliban prisoners in the Sheberghan prison. Both speak Russian. Najib’s father will translate into Pashto for Najib and Najib will translate into English for me.

Sadiq is wearing a corduroy jacket and looks like a college professor, which in fact he is. He teaches geology at Balkh University.

He’s calm and quiet. Running along the highway is the pipeline that he helped design.

“The electricity seems to go out a lot,” I say.

“Is there a problem with the pipeline?”

“No,” he says, smiling. “The pipeline is fine. And we have plenty of gas. It’s the power plant. It was built by the Soviets and is always breaking down. We need to build a new one.”

“Maybe the U.S. will help,” I say.

“Inshallah,” he says, God willing.

My question could have offended him, but it didn’t. He knows I’m new here.

Sadiq doesn’t talk much. He’s different from Najib in this way. Najib’s strength is his voice and he’s always a step ahead of you.

Sadiq sits back and takes everything in.

December 5, 2001 I asked Najib to buy three burqas for me at the market, souvenirs to take home. He brings them to my hotel room and spreads them out on the bed — two sky blue, one white. They look ghostly.

“So have you ever gone on a date?” I ask him.

“What’s a date?”

“Like when you go somewhere with a girl and maybe hold her hand or kiss her.”

“No,” he says. “I’ve never even spoken with a girl other than my sisters. If I speak with a girl in this way, then our fathers would beat us with a stick.”

“OK,” I say, “let me ask you a hypothetical question. Do you understand what I mean by hypothetical?”

“Yes,” he says.

“What if your sister slept with someone and they’re not married? What would happen?”

“My father would tie her to a tree and shoot her with a Kalashnikov.”

“I doubt that very much,” I say. “I’ve met your father. He’d never do it.”

“It’s true,” he says. “Believe me.”

“What if he wouldn’t do it?”

“Then my oldest brother would do it,” he says, clearly upset.

“What if he didn’t?”

“Then my next oldest brother would do it.”

“And what if he didn’t?”

“Then I would do it,” he says.

“Najib,” I say, “just think about it. You’d never tie your sister to a tree and shoot her.”

He looks at the floor and then he looks at me like he wants to fight. Then he turns away and walks out the door. I insulted him by saying he wouldn’t shoot his sister. I’ve read that nothing is more important to an Afghan than his honor, but man, I just didn’t see it coming.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY S COTT C A RRIE R

C ap tive Talib an s old ier s awa i t a me a l i n t h e S h e be r g h a n P r i s o n ya r d, D e c e mbe r 2 0 0 1

The next day he is back. He tells me he went home thinking he couldn’t work for me anymore. But his father talked him down, explaining that I don’t understand the Pashtunwali, the Pashtun code of honor, and I didn’t intend to insult him.

“But only because I gave you my promise,” he tells me.

Part Two: Najibullah In America

April 2006 Najib has been calling me in the middle of the night. “How is your family?” — always the first thing he says. He’s calling from the United Nations office in Mazar. He’s the assistant to the radio operator, and after lunch his boss falls asleep. So Najib whispers, saying that he needs to get out of Afghanistan. Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum’s men are after him.

“I have a plan,” I say. “I have a friend who’s a high-ranking professor at a university where I’ve accepted a job, also as a professor.”

“Congratulations,” he says.

“Maybe,” I say. “I’m afraid it’s not a good fit for me. But anyway, my friend might be able to get you accepted as a student. You could get a student visa and come here.”

“What do I need to do?”

“You need to write an essay, a letter, to

show you’re up to college standards.”

“What do I say in the letter?” he asks.

“Write about your life,” I say.

Three weeks later, I get the first draft by email. It’s barely readable, full of misspellings, grammatical errors, problems with punctuation. I realize Najib doesn’t know how to write because he learned English from watching movies like “Rush Hour” and “Rambo.”

But writing is mainly about the movement of the mind, and Najib’s mind moves like a Ferrari, so once I figure out what he’s trying to say, I see he’s written an amazing story.

He begins with the Russians pulling out of Afghanistan in 1989, when he was five years old.

There was peace for a few years, but there were no jobs or money, just a lot of weapons left over from the war. When people got hungry all they could do was go kill somebody and take whatever they had. This is how the civil war started.

Various ethnic groups — Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras — fought against each other.

Najib was a bad student. He often fell asleep in class. His family had no money. So, when he was 12 years old, he asked his father if he could quit school and go to work. Reluctantly, his father agreed. He’d keep Najib’s two older brothers in school because this would be better for the family in the long run, but in or-

der to get by in the present, he was willing to sacrifice Najib’s future.

Najibullah’s first job was collecting fares on buses. Then, for a while, he bought gasoline downtown, filling one-liter bottles and carrying them 10 kilometers out of the city where he sold them for a few cents profit. Then he built a box he could carry with a rope slung over his neck and filled it with gum and cigarettes. He made as much as a dollar a day hawking his wares on the street.

At that time, 1996, the Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan, but Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and the Uzbeks were in charge of Mazar. Najib was afraid of Dostum’s men, as they sometimes abducted young boys. He believed the Taliban had higher morals, so he wanted them to come and take over.

In 1997, the Taliban attacked. Najib was selling gum and cigarettes as the first tank came barreling into the city at full speed, flying a dirty white flag, carrying men with long beards.

Everybody started screaming, “It’s the Taliban!” and ran away. The battle went on for four days and in the end Dostum’s militia killed every single Talib — thousands of them — and left their bodies in the streets. Najib saw the bodies being eaten by wild dogs. The smell of death was everywhere.

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A year later, the Taliban took the city and imposed Sharia law. Najib would walk around, passing bodies of men hanging from lampposts, their mouths stuffed with money.

He saw public executions of women who’d shamed their families. At night, in his friend’s basement, he watched smuggled videos from America and dreamed of someday being able to go there.

It’s a wild essay, written in a form where even the words seem to have been blown apart. I send it to my friend without changing a thing. He writes back in less than an hour, saying, “We want him. Tell him he’s accepted.”

November 2009 Najib is at my house in Salt Lake City for Thanksgiving dinner. He’s been going to school at Utah Valley University, where I work as a journalism professor. The job is not going so well for me. I don’t like most of my students, and they, in return, do not like me.

Najib, however, gets along with them quite well. He makes friends easily, especially girl friends. In Afghanistan, the only women he knew were his mother and his sisters, but in America, he’s a rock star, changing his look from day to day, sometimes a goatee, sometimes a ponytail.

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The only problem is when they invite him to their church. He tells them conversion is not possible for a Pashtun. A Pashtun who becomes a Christian is no longer a Pashtun.

He’s banished or killed. So his best friends are young people who’ve fallen away. They like to party. He doesn’t drink, and this makes him the designated driver. Unlike some of his friends, he studies hard and earns good grades.

He’s thinking about running for student body president.

At dinner, Najib makes an announcement.

“I’ve realized I will no longer tie my sister to a tree and shoot her with a Kalashnikov if she sleeps with someone to whom she is not married.”

My whole family knows the story. We’re silent for a moment, and then we applaud. I have to choke back some tears.

April 2010 Najib is studying business, but I talked him into taking a course on Dada, an art movement from the early 20th century. I promised to help him write his final paper.

My plan is to teach him how to write like he talks. We drive up Provo Canyon, following the river up to the Heber Valley, a place they call Little Switzerland. “Take out a pen and pa-

per,” I say, “and tell me who were the Dadaists.”

Najib sucks on his pen and says, “The Dadaists were artists in Europe who thought art had too many rules and was boring. So they moved to Zurich, where there were no rules about art.”

“Excellent,” I say. “Write that down, just what you said.”

This takes him about five minutes, and when he reads it back he’s completely messed it up by trying to make it sound proper, and it makes no sense at all.

“Look down at that river,” I say. “Do you see any places where you could jump from rock to rock and make it across to the other side?”

“No,” he says. “There’s too much water.”

“Well, imagine there is a place like that. I want you to think about writing as jumping from rock to rock. Can you swim?”

“Not very well.”

“Good,” I say. “In order to jump to a rock, you must first answer my question honestly, in your own voice. If you try to answer in someone else’s voice, you’ll fall into the river and drown. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he says.

“OK. You jumped from the first rock by telling me who the Dadaists were. In order to jump again, tell me, what did the Dadaists do?”

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“They sat in coffee shops and talked about new ways to make art,” he says. “Whatever was pleasing to them, they called it art.”

“OK, good,” I say, “jump to the next rock.

Now tell me, what kinds of things did the Dadaists find to be pleasing?”

“The one called Duchamp took a toilet and turned it upside down to make people see it for its shape, not for what it does.”

“And what do you think about that?”

“But what I think doesn’t matter,” he says.

“So now you’re in the middle of the stream and you’re just going to stay there?”

I ask. “Will I have to call your father and tell him you were last seen in the middle of a river contemplating Dada? In order to keep going, you have to say what you think. Now! Jump!”

“Back home, if we wrote what we thought, we’d get beaten up by the teacher.”

“Do you think your professor is going to beat you up?” I ask.

“No.” “Then go for it. What did you think about the upside-down toilet?”

“I didn’t see it as a toilet. I saw it as a beautiful shape. Duchamp was trying to show there’s more than one way to see the same thing, and that blew my mind.”

“Very good,” I say. “Write that down, everything you just said.”

It takes a while, but he’s doing it, writing it like he said it.

“This next jump is the hardest one of all.

You’ve told me who the Dadaists were, what they did, and what you think about it. Now

tell me if learning this stuff made any difference in your life, or changed the way you see yourself and the world around you.”

He thinks about it.

“The Dadaists liked to hang out and go crazy,” he says. “This is what some of my friends do here, even though it’s against the rules of their society. They used to believe in those rules, but now they don’t. They want there to be no rules.”

“And how does that make you feel?” I ask.

“How does that make me feel?”

“Yes. Do you have any feelings? Do you know what they are?” I ask this as a joke, but then I see Najib walking through a street filled with dead bodies and wonder if I’m being too harsh.

“It’s fun and scary at the same time,” he says.

“Yes, good,” I say. “And what’s the word

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for that kind of feeling, fun and scary at the same time?”

He thinks about it for a while, and then he says, “I don’t know.”

So I tell him. “Freedom,” I say. “Fun and scary at the same time is called freedom, and that’s what America is all about.”

I give him the ending, just as so many others have done for me in the past.

May 2011 Up on the stage, our president is handing out diplomas as the name of each student is called.

The graduation song is playing over and over again. Babies are crying. People are yelling and whistling. Najib is finally at the front of the line. He has a friend with a telephoto lens shooting pictures for his family back home. I try to whistle.

He’s made it. In two months, he’s getting married to an Afghan American girl in California, and he has a lot of job offers. He wants to run for president of Afghanistan some day, and he just might pull it off.

A master stood with his student on the edge of a cliff.

“Jump,” the master said.

“But I’ll fall,” said the student.

“Jump,” the master said.

So the student jumped, and he flew.

Part Three: The Longest War

April 30, 2021 Najib calls to tell me he’s bought a second condominium.

“I feel like I’m living the American dream,” he says.

He bought his first condo last fall, in the suburbs. This one is downtown in an old art deco apartment building a block from Temple Square. He’s 37 years old — a licensed accountant auditing Fortune 500 companies for one of the big four accounting firms, taking flying lessons, working on his CPA certification.

“Why do you want a second condo?” I ask.

“For an investment,’ he says. “I want to have 10 rental properties by the time I retire.

And I need to buy some land out in the country, like in the mountains, somewhere with a runway where I can land my plane.”

“When are you going to learn how to play golf?” I ask him.

“Afghans play golf on horseback, but instead of a ball we use a goat.”

“But you’re an American now,” I say.

“Then I will join the polo club,” he says.

“You should come down and take a look at my new place. And I need some help hanging my curtains.”

A lot has happened in Najib’s life since he graduated. First, he got married. The wed62 DESERET MAGAZINE

ding was huge and went on for three days. His wife was beautiful with a sharp wit, very much into fashion.

Then, a year later, he took a job working for the Department of Defense and went back to Afghanistan, first with the 82nd Airborne and then with the U.S. Marine Corps. He’s never told me his job title or much about what he did, just that they were shot at, a lot. He calls the sound bullets make as they go by a “swizzle.”

Najib came back, and within a year his marriage was over. He left their apartment with only his car, which he lived in for the next three years while going to school for a master’s degree. Those were bad years. He didn’t come to visit. We spoke only rarely on the phone.

“Do you really sleep in your car?” I once asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “in the college parking lot by the library where I study. But I have two cars.

The Land Cruiser I sleep in and keep all my stuff. The sedan I use for driving Uber.”

He finished his master’s and took this job.

He had a desk in a tall building with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. He rented an apartment. Then COVID-19 hit and he spent a year alone, working remotely on his computer screens until he was sure he was going out of his mind. He decided to move back to Utah to be among his old friends in a place that felt like home.

His new building has a chandelier and mosaic tile in the foyer. The condo is small, 650 square feet, one bedroom, up on the second floor with an interesting view looking down on people going in and coming out of ­Harmons grocery store.

“Sometimes I’m blown away thinking how my life would be different if I hadn’t gone to the mosque that day we met in Mazar,” he says. “If I never met you, if America didn’t go to war in Afghanistan, I’d be driving a truck in Kabul right now.”

This is when I tell Najib we should go back to Afghanistan together. I want to produce a radio story about how things have changed.

“We could be there as the last plane flies away,” I say. “I want to ask people if they’re afraid the Taliban will take over.”

“They’ll tell you it’s not a possibility,” he says. “They won’t tolerate that kind of thing. They’ve had 20 years of exposure to technology and news. A whole generation has grown up that never knew the Taliban.

They’re educated now and know how to make better decisions.”

“But the Taliban seem to be winning the war,” I say. “They already control most of the country outside the cities. When our troops leave the Afghan National Army will be even weaker.”

“The Afghan Army can fight the Taliban and win,” he interrupts. “I’ve seen them in action, at least the special forces. Their capabilities and talent in war is as close to the American Special Forces as you can get.”

“How will we travel around?” I ask. “Don’t the Taliban control all the highways?”

“My brother is a captain in the Afghan Air Force,” he says, “and he has his own plane, a Cessna 208, used for reconnaissance. He’ll take us wherever we want to go — Mazar, Herat, Kandahar. We can talk to whomever you want — people on the street, military officers, government officials.”

“And where will we stay?” I ask.

“With my father in Kabul.”

“I’d like to see him again,” I say.

“We used to not get along so well, but lately we’ve been talking on WhatsApp,” Najib says.

I try to remember what Najib told me about his father. I ask, “He took a second wife and then your mom moved to Istanbul to live with your sister?”

“Yes, and now he has three young daughters I’ve never met. I’d like to see them and my dad. As I get older I realize I have a lot of respect for him.”

July 6, 2021 The trip to Afghanistan is looking iffy, with no word on my visa. Also, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is not what Najib predicted. The Taliban have been taking control of district after district, often without a fight.

I read today that over 1,000 Afghan soldiers fled across the border into Tajikistan. And yesterday, in the middle of the night, the U.S. military abandoned ­Bagram Airfield — apparently a surprise for the Afghan government.

We still have 600 troops protecting the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, but President Joe Biden now says everyone will be out by August 31. I call Najib to ask what’s happening and why.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “All of the planes and helicopters used by the Afghan Air Force were maintained by American contractors at Bagram. Now those planes and helicopters will be grounded, which means there will be no air support for our troops, no way to get them food or ammunition.” Still, he believes the Afghan army can protect the capital.

“What if they don’t?” I ask. “What if they fail? What will happen to your family?”

“My dad will be OK,” he says. “He’s in charge of maintaining the country’s infrastructure for natural gas. He’s a well-known and respected public servant, so he can work for either side. But my brother will be in trouble as the Taliban have placed pilots at the top of their kill list. They’ll just shoot him first chance they get.”

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August 14, 2021 The Taliban have taken some major cities — Kunduz, Herat, Spin Boldak — and now they have overrun Sheberghan, Gen. Dostum’s stronghold. Najib comes by my house.

He walks in without saying hello, stands in the kitchen for a bit looking at his cellphone and then says his father may have been killed.

“He was in Sheberghan when the Taliban came into the town,” he says, “with his wife and three daughters. It’s said the Taliban were killing public servants, shooting them, cutting off their heads. My dad tried to get away by driving to Mazar, along the same highway we were on 20 years ago, but he didn’t make it.

No one has heard from him in over 24 hours.”

In all the time I’ve known Najib, I’ve never seen him scared. I’ve never seen him weak or vulnerable. But he’s all these things now.

He’s sitting at my table, hunched over his phone. He starts to cry, just a bit. I’ve never seen him cry.

“I just hope they didn’t torture him,” he says, defeated. “Last time the Taliban came, they beat him nearly to death, but his body was younger then and he could recover. Now I just pray they shot him or hanged him quickly.

This would be a relief.”

I don’t know what to say. I know Najib’s

father. People I know are not beaten and hanged, their heads are not cut off. This is barbarism, something in books and movies, not real life, not my life.

“I can’t grieve for him now,” Najib says. “He was old and lived his life, and he knew what he was doing. But his three daughters … without him to protect them … I’m afraid Taliban soldiers will take them for wives and their lives will be over.”

“Maybe he’s hiding out somewhere,” I say.

“He knows lots of people in the area who would help him,” Najib says. “He may have thrown away his cellphone and is staying out of sight until he grows a beard.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” I say.

August 16, 2021 Kabul has fallen. The Taliban drove into the city in seized U.S. military vehicles and not a shot was fired in resistance. Now the victorious commanders — freshly coifed and wearing fine clothes — are posing for social media in the presidential palace. The markets stay open but the streets are quiet. The city is full of people hiding in their homes, afraid they will be killed if they don’t get out of the country. Najib and I won’t be going back to Afghanistan, not anytime soon.

Biden has 5,000 U.S. Marines at the Hamid Karzai International Airport to begin evacuating U.S. citizens, as well as Afghans with visas, Afghans who assisted U.S. troops and Afghans who worked for media organizations.

By 10 a.m. Najib is at my house asking me to help his brother obtain an exit visa. He’s talking loudly on the phone, in Pashto, pacing through my living room and kitchen. I can hear his brother’s voice clearly, with no time delay. Sometimes they’re laughing, making jokes, saying short phrases in English. Najib is no longer frightened. He has a plan and he’s running with it. I need to keep up.

“The Taliban have a list of pilots’ names,” he says. “They’re searching the city and have already murdered three aircraft mechanics.

My brother is on the run, moving from house to house.”

“Oh, man,” I say, “what can I do to help?”

“The State Department is accepting letters from journalists who have been assisted

by Afghan translators in the field,” Najib says.

“Say hello to your new translator in the field, my brother Zabi.”

I talk to Zabi while Najib pulls up an online form. I have a copy of Zabi’s passport that he sent by email. He’s 39, two years older than Najib, and looks like a banker.

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F E LT M Y H E A R T B R E A K , ” N A J I B S AY S.

Zabi says it’s nighttime in Kabul and he’s doing OK in his present location, that his family is safe. He thanks me for helping out. Then Najib takes the phone and motions me to start typing.

I write a short letter saying Zabi, my translator, is in grave danger of being killed by the Taliban and that he poses no threat to the United States of America. Then I send it off by clicking a button. It seems like a weightless, fruitless endeavor, but at least we’re doing something.

Najib hangs up and starts ranting about how badly Biden messed up the exit strategy. “­Every decision he makes is only about the next elections,” he says. “He doesn’t care about the Afghan people. And I will not forgive him for this.”

August 27, 2021 Over the past week there have been thousands of people — men, women and children — pressing up against the gates of the Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul, desperate to get on a plane out of Afghanistan. They fight to get to the front of the crowd to show their documents. Those with U.S. passports and special visas are let through, with as many as 19,000 evacuated in a single day. Yesterday a suicide bomber worked his way through the crowd, and when he got to the gates, he pushed his button or flipped his switch and killed over 150 people — men, women and children — 13 of whom were American soldiers.

I haven’t seen or heard from Najib in a couple of days and I’m worried about him, so I go down to his condo. He looks terrible, puffy face, swollen eyes. The floor is littered with photocopied documents that look like he’s been sleeping on them. He has six video monitors showing different news channels, email, messages. He says he’s been on the phone, night and day, trying to get Zabi to the airport with his wife and three kids. They are in a car and Najib uses WhatsApp to see their location on a map of the city. Zabi tells him what he sees on the road and Najib looks for alternate routes when the street is blocked by Taliban soldiers.

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calm. Then, through the phone, he heard the Taliban start the truck. He could hear the revving of the engine, the shifting of the gears, and Zabi’s children holding their breath as the truck drove away. “And then my nephew said, ‘It’s OK uncle, don’t worry, we’re safe now,’ and I felt my heart break,” Najib says, choking up.

“I grew up tough,” he says. “I’ve seen wars.

I’ve seen death from a very young age, six, seven years old. I’ve been in a run my whole life, my whole life, but nothing has scared me or petrified me like being on the phone with my niece and nephews as they were hiding.

They’ve always thought of me as a hero, but I could do nothing to help them.”

When I met Najib he was just a boy, but I’ve always thought of him as an adult because he always acted like an adult. Now I realize this is because he never had a childhood. Or his childhood stopped the day the Taliban came to town. He buried the trauma inside his body and came to America to start a new life where every move was to ensure the trauma would stay buried. But then the Taliban came back, and the trauma rose up from the grave like a zombie. He’s been through living hell.

And still there is no word from his father.

August 31, 2021 The last U.S. troops flew out of Kabul at one minute before midnight. In two weeks, coalition forces evacuated more than 123,000 people, but Zabi and his family were not among them.

They almost made it. They kept trying to get to the airport, day after day, but it was always too dangerous and they had to turn back. Then Najib got in touch with a network of former intelligence and military people who have friends in Afghanistan who can somehow get things done. Najib can’t talk about who the people are or how he got in touch with them. These things need to be a secret because there are still lives on the line.

With their help, Najib was able to get Zabi and his family to the airport. It took 22 hours for them to travel a distance of only five miles, Najib on the phone with them the whole time.

But just as they got to the airport perimeter, the last plane departed.

I meet Najib at Harmons for lunch. He hasn’t been sleeping and isn’t hungry, but he seems to be in a good mood.

“When the last plane took off, I was speechless,” he says. “I felt like a doctor whose patient is going to die and you don’t know what to tell him.”

“You needed a whole new plan,” I say.

“Yes,” he says, “we had to hide them in Afghanistan.”

With the help of his nameless accomplices, he hired two cars and two drivers — one for Zabi and one for his wife and kids. They traveled north along back roads through the Hindu Kush. Many of the mountains are over 15,000 feet tall, and some are covered by glaciers. It took them two days to get over a remote pass and down to the countryside in their tribal homeland.

“There they can ask for protection under the Pashtunwali,” Najib says. “If you come in peace you can ask for protection from another Pashtun and he must protect you.”

“So they are safe?”

“For now, yes,” he says.

“How do you feel about America now?” I ask him.

“You know, I voted for Biden and it crushed me that I had such a misunderstanding of how incompetent he can be,” he says.

“And I’m critical of the government. The government screwed up and has been screwing up for 20 years. But this is my country now. I adopted it and it adopted me. It’s not perfect, but it’s still much better than the rest of the world.”

“So these people who helped you, they were Americans?” I ask.

“I can’t really talk about that,” he says, “but the way we were able to get my brother to the airport and then to safety in the countryside, this all came from American technology and American creativity. No government could help us, so we figured it out step by step, on our own. This is the American way of living, the spirit of thinking free.”

Something has changed. Najib has confidence. And he’s calm, more quiet. He reminds me of his father, Sadiq, who is still missing.

ing my brother. I pretended to be a Taliban commander from Kandahar. Suddenly I was speaking with a Kandahari accent, dropping the names of Taliban commanders I knew from when I was there. I told him to let my brother go and he did. It was so close, so many times, and every time the right words came out of my mouth. I don’t know how I did it.”

The longest war in American history is over. For two decades we fought an enemy in one of the poorest countries in the world, and we lost, a lot. And there are nearly four times as many jihadis in the world today as there

were in 2011, with up to 64,000 in Afghanistan alone as of 2018. They all must consider our departure to be a great victory.

As for Sadiq, Najib still has hope he’s coming back. I’m afraid the chances this will happen are small. He may never return, and the details of how and where and why he died will never be known. I once sat next to him in a car as we drove down the highway, along the pipeline he helped design, the same highway where he disappeared. He was a good man, a public servant who wanted to help bring Afghanistan into the 21st century. And that may never happen now.

PORTRAIT BY SPENSER H EAPS

September 21, 2021 Najib just sent me a photo of Zabi and kids, big smiles, inside a commercial passenger jet.

The message: “I got them out!”

I call him up but he can’t tell me how he did it. For now, the point is, he saved his brother’s life and got the family to safety.

“I can’t believe what I’ve been through,” he says. “For three weeks straight I’ve been on the phone with people in so many countries, just guessing what to say, how to get their attention — people in the military, intelligence, government officials, even a Taliban soldier at a checkpoint who was question-

Now 37, Najib ullah m our ns f o r A f g h a n i sta n bu t h o p e s h i s fat h e r w i l l o n e d ay r et u r n

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he seeds of today’s split in the Republican Party were sown before Donald Trump declared his lofty and once-laughed-at ambition to become president. Fights between so-called “rational” and “radical” Republicans broke out with the rise of the tea party movement in 2009 and continued throughout the Obama presidency, as establishment GOP elites were pitted against a raucous right wing. But these were mostly ideological spats — disputes over policy within a political party struggling to evolve — and seem quaint when compared to the current state of affairs.

As the former Trump administration official known as “Anonymous,” thanks to the op-ed I wrote for The New York Times announcing a resistance within Trump’s own administration, I can tell you things have gotten worse. In the last year the GOP civil war has gone from figurative to physical. What began as a philosophical cleavage has now turned into a militant fight over personalities, from a barrage of violent threats against establishment Republicans who brought down their own president … to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol … to ongoing efforts aimed at silencing those who break with Trump, the party’s lingering figurehead.

In interviews with more than a dozen prominent Republicans — including former members of Congress, my fellow ex-administration officials, recent party leaders and political strategists — I heard a common theme: In today’s GOP, intimidation has supplanted open discourse. “For a party that’s all sensitive about the left canceling them,” lamented Michael Steele, the former head of the Republican National Committee, “they do a pretty good job canceling their own.” Perhaps most striking, though, was the revelation that center-right dissenters have been forced to worry about something more precious than their political careers: their lives.

I was present when the battle lines were drawn, working as a national security aide for the Republican majority in the U.S. House during the Obama years. These were the days when we tussled with the White House over concerns that it lacked focus on the terrorism threat, was unwilling to stand up to Russian aggression and was more interested in courting autocrats overseas than our own allies. (The irony isn’t lost on me, given who would eventually replace President Barack Obama.)

Yet Republicans were hardly unified. A new wave of right-leaning tea party representatives pressured GOP leaders to turn America’s focus inward, from “ending endless wars” to imposing tight immigration restrictions. I remember lamenting the intraparty squabbles on the House floor with Evan McMullin, the Republican policy chief and a former CIA officer, who had the unenviable task of reconciling these competing factions.

“It’s been a bumpy road,” he confided to me then in his usual, understated manner, as House leaders worked to keep the newcomers at bay.

Then Donald Trump entered the scene. His 2016 presidential bid transformed a simmering rift within the GOP into a full-blown existential crisis. The Party of Lincoln went to war with itself, divided ­between the values of its 19th-century founder and the viral vitriol of social media hordes, stoked by a mercurial tycoon-turned-candidate who relished in fanning the flames of the party’s populist movement — and whose confrontational style delighted Americans tired of politicians and triple-filtered talking points.

Establishment Republicans panicked. Texas Gov. Rick Perry branded Trump “a cancer on conservatism”; Sen. Lindsey Graham equated him to “an evil force”; and Rep. Mick Mulvaney said he was one of the “most flawed human beings ever to run for president in the history of the coun68 DESERET MAGAZINE

try.” What’s more, House Speaker Paul Ryan tasked aides, including myself, with drafting a “Trump inoculation plan,” a GOP platform that was designed to be the antithesis of the candidate’s nativist worldview.

As Trump continued his march toward the nomination unabated, the party’s right flank coalesced around him, while many Republicans resisted. The Atlantic called it “The Great Republican Revolt,” while Politico ran the headline “Welcome to the GOP civil war,” as GOP heavyweights considered ways to block Trump’s convention coronation.

GOP elites resigned themselves to a sobering reality: that a deeply flawed Donald Trump was their nominee and that he would undoubtedly lose, tarnishing the party’s image in the process and leaving the White House in Democratic hands. The mainstream media agreed, predicting a post-election GOP reckoning. “You may think the Republican Party is in the midst of a civil war,” one analyst mused days before the vote, “(but) you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Then the unthinkable happened. Trump won.

Most anti-Trump Republicans either left the party or were side-

lined. Others, including myself, urged fellow conservatives to consider entering the administration to contain the chaos, fearing that the president-elect and his island of misfit advisers were unprepared to lead the country. Meanwhile, Trump used strong-arm tactics to drive remaining Republican dissidents underground or into submission, turning previously fiery critics — like Perry, Graham and Mulvaney — into supplicants, eager to curry favor with the new president.

Suddenly, the cacophony of a once-divided Republican Party sounded more like silence. To be clear, this was a public silence. Because ­behind closed doors, Republicans — from members of Congress to the president’s own Cabinet secretaries — confessed that they didn’t think he was a real conservative, was unstable and even posed a threat to the country. Nevertheless, many kept their mouths shut, having witnessed Trump’s vindictiveness up close.

Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman from Virginia elected in 2018, described the environment like a hostage situation. “As soon as I won, I realized what I’d gotten myself into,” he told me. “I found that votes had nothing to do with policy but with complete loyalty to the president. I just found it amazing that (other Congress members) were so subservient. Half of them agreed with me … but there was no way they were going to go against the polls and fundraising.”

During Riggleman’s first month in office, the federal government shut down, and Trump refused to reopen it until he got more money for his border wall. The upstart congressman believed hobbling the government was a dangerous exercise, so he stood against the president. “At that point, I was told I would have a primary opponent,” he said, “because I voted ‘yes’ (to reopen the government).” Rep. Mark Meadows, who later became Trump’s chief of staff, approached Riggleman on the House floor. “You’re done,” he spat, implying an end to the Virginian’s career.

A Trump-ified Republican Party made examples out of members like Riggleman (he was challenged in the primaries and lost to Bob Good, who campaigned on a Trump-aligned platform, which included calling the COVID-19 pandemic “phony”). The intimidation worked. With rare exceptions, the GOP largely unified behind the commander in chief. And a détente remained in place for the majority of Trump’s term.

While Republican infighting abated, overall political discourse got more heated, jumping the tracks from vitriol to violence. There was the driver who rammed his vehicle into a crowd of protesters opposing a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; the Florida man

PER HAP S M OST STR IKIN G , TH O UG H , WAS T HE R E VEL ATIO N TH AT CENTE RRIGHT DISSENTERS HAVE BEEN FORCED TO WO R RY AB O U T S O M ETH IN G MORE PR ECI O U S T HA N TH E IR P O L IT ICA L CA R E E R S : T HE IR L IV ES . who mailed pipe bombs to Trump critics across the country; and the El Paso shooter who gunned down 22 people in a Texas Walmart, echoing Trump’s grievances about an “invasion” at the southern border.

Senior national security officials, including people Trump appointed, worried that the president’s charged words were fueling an uptick in domestic terrorism. “Some of this started to surface with the rhetoric of the tea party,” explained Olivia Troye, who served as Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland security adviser. “But it shifted from ‘angry sentiments’ to ‘taking action’ under Donald Trump.”

Other conservatives shared those worries. “Language shapes behavior,” former Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman told me. “And the language we heard from President Trump over four years was the kind of language that encouraged people to act out if they don’t get their way. He was encouraging the other bullies to strike.”

As the 2020 race heated up, there was quiet chatter about potential Trump challengers from the right, especially during his impeachment.

Several Republicans dipped their toes in the race, including former Reps. Joe Walsh and Mark Sanford, and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld. Their outsider candidacies failed to take off; instead, it was a group of insiders who posed a bigger danger to the president and who reignited intra-GOP hostilities.

I was among them, publishing that Times editorial under a pseudonym and a subsequent book detailing presidential misconduct that should disqualify Trump for a second term. His former national security adviser, John Bolton, eventually followed suit, releasing an extensive indictment of the president and declaring: “I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job.”

It didn’t stop there. As summer approached, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis penned a scathing essay, calling Trump “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try.” Then the dam began to break, and an unprecedented parade of ex-Trump aides started speaking out against him. CNN even aired a prime-time special (“The Insiders: A Warning From Former Trump Officials”) featuring nearly a dozen administration aides who believed their old boss was unfit for office.

“The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me,” the president’s second chief of staff, John Kelly, told associates. “The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship. … He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.” Anti-Trump organizations amplified these messages in television spots, digital advertisements, social media posts and billboards across America, infuriating the sitting president

and giving center-right voters unease. If Trump’s own team didn’t think he was qualified, did he really deserve reelection?

Nevertheless, many officials who shared our views were reluctant to join the fight. It wasn’t that they disagreed with what we were saying (in fact, most privately told us they’d vote for Joe Biden before voting for Trump, or write in the name of a family member). Rather, they were worried about the president using his expansive bully pulpit to attack them. “I watched how they went out of the way to destroy people and their entire lives,” Troye reflected on her time in the Trump White House; it gave her pause about coming forward.

In only a few years, the nature of political dissent had changed.

Speaking out meant facing the wrath of Trump-incited digital mobs, ready to terrorize you with a few keystrokes. “When the leader of your party — the president of the country — says, ‘Go ahead and knock the hell out of them, and if you have legal fees I’ll pay for it,’” Steele remarked, “where do you go from there?”

Still, courage was contagious in some quarters. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified in Trump’s first impeachment trial, detailing the incriminating phone call he heard between Trump and the president of Ukraine. In retaliation, Trump not only fired Vindman from his post at the National Security Council, he had Vindman’s twin brother removed from the NSC as well. “The objective of intimidation is to silence,” Vindman told me. “People who stand on principle won’t let that happen. They won’t be silenced.”

In the case of Troye, Pence’s national security aide, the threats were immediate. After she released a video message in September 2020 detailing the president’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the president and his aides struck back and rallied supporters to do the same.

“It wasn’t just political anger,” she recalled. “It was more like, ‘You will be shot in the street.’ It skipped a beat and went straight to violence.” She was deluged with messages and phone calls from strangers, including, “We know who you are,” “You will never be able to walk the streets again,” and “We will find you and your family.” Others shared similar anecdotes with me, including relocating their families or having a police presence outside their house for days and even weeks on end.

Around the same time, I was traveling through swing states to warn voters not to give Trump a second term. I’d been at it for months, but I felt the time had come to disclose that I was also Trump’s “Anonymous” critic. Sure, I’d originally written under a pen name so that Trump would be forced to contend with my message rather than distract attention by making it about the messenger, but on the eve of a momentous NOVEMBER 2021 69

I WAS ACCOST ED IN P UB L IC, F O RCE D TO LE AVE M Y H O M E A N D M Y J O B, ASSIG N E D AN A R M E D B O DYG UA RD, AND B E S I EG E D BY STA L KER S W H O THR E AT E N E D M Y EX T E N D ED FA MI LY AND F R I E N DS . election, I wanted to urge others to come out of the shadows. Now was a moment to stand up and be counted, not to hide.

My unmasking led an angry Trump to bellow at a campaign rally that “bad things” were about to happen to me — a not-so-subtle signal to supporters that they should go after his adversary. They took the bait.

In a North Carolina hotel room rented under a fake name, my phone exploded with emails, texts and Twitter posts from MAGA world. Each was a digital grim reaper. “Your blood will be in the streets, you (expletive) traitor,” one read. I settled in for a sleepless night, pillow covering the loaded pistol I brought on the campaign trail for self-defense. In the months that followed, I was accosted in public, forced to leave my home and my job, assigned an armed bodyguard, and besieged by stalkers who threatened my extended family and friends.

Then on Nov. 3, something extraordinary happened. Although it wasn’t immediately clear who won the election, data started to emerge that millions of Republican voters who supported Trump in 2016 ditched him in 2020, voting instead for Democrat Joe Biden. In fact, the margins were enough to push Biden over the edge in key swing states. Disaffected Republican voters had joined the rebellion.

When Biden was certified the winner, mainstream conservatives breathed a sigh of relief, hoping it would be the end of a tumultuous period for the party and country.

It wasn’t.

Key members of Trump’s team rebutted his charges of a “stolen” and “fraudulent” election, including his own top election security official, Chris Krebs, who announced that the election “was the most secure in American history.” The president promptly fired him by tweet. Soon after, one of Trump’s attorneys remarked in an interview that Krebs “should be drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn, and shot.” Krebs reported receiving a “barrage of threats and harassment,” and his attorneys noted in later court filings that he “face(d) a genuine risk of imminent harm from persons who may seek to act upon … (the) call for violence.”

The comment came on the heels of another public exhortation by a Trump ally, former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who declared that FBI Director Chris Wray should be decapitated and have his head placed on a pike outside of the White House, suggesting capital punishment for disloyalty to the president.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, also a Republican, was similarly harassed for rebutting Trump’s claims. “You and your family will be killed very slowly,” he was warned in chilling text messages to his wife: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.” The family

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went into hiding, as the trend continued around the country, with election officials fearing for their lives for contradicting the president.

The discord culminated with the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Members of the mob — Trump supporters who’d been egged on by the president to “stop the steal” — broke into the Capitol and appeared to be hunting for senators and congressmen, with some even calling for the death of Vice President Mike Pence, who was whisked away from the Senate floor where he had been overseeing the certification of the election results.

As Congress weighed whether to impeach Trump in the wake of the attack, GOP representatives reported that their colleagues were scared to vote their conscience. “If you look at the vote to impeach,” Rep. Liz Cheney later revealed, “there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives.” Cheney herself was forced to take on a protective detail following threats related to her impeachment vote and was later ejected from House GOP leadership.

“That’s why the hammer came down so hard on Liz Cheney,” Steele explained. “To send a message of fear. No one wants to be targeted the way she’s been targeted, which makes this period we are in perhaps the most dangerous.”

Conservatives I spoke with were pessimistic about whether the rebel wing of the GOP would prevail. “In the House, we used to marginalize the crazies and elevate the rational ones,” an ex-GOP congressman confided on background. “Now the opposite is happening. They are elevating the fringe members — the ones who talk about Jewish space lasers and vaccines not working — and are sidelining the Liz Cheneys and Adam Kinzingers, the rational ones.”

Conservative lawyer George Conway believes that the moderate side has already lost the GOP civil war, at least inside the Washington beltway. “We’re down to just two Republicans in the House who are taking a strong stand,” he told me. “The real civil war is happening underground, in a sense, as Republicans lose moderate, sensible voters in the suburbs.

That’s where the cleavage is. It’s a wasting away of the party.”

Data this year lends support to Conway’s claim. Following the insurrection, moderate voters began ditching the GOP in droves, with tens of thousands in key swing states renouncing their membership. At the same time, a record proportion of voters claimed to be “independents,” while a Gallup poll showed the largest increase in Democratic Party affiliation in a decade.

As rational Republicans flee, more radical ones are doubling down on extremist political positions. A YouGov poll this summer found that

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F OLLOW I N G T H E IN S UR R ECTIO N, MODE RAT E VOT E R S B EG A N D ITC H I NG THE G O P I N D R OV E S , WIT H T E N S OF THOU SAN DS I N KEY SW IN G STAT E S R ENO U N C I N G T H E IR M E M B ER S H I P.

the majority of Southern Republicans (66 percent) supported the idea of secession — in other words, having their states formally leave the United States to form a new government.

At the same time, shifting attitudes toward physical attacks are setting an ominous tone around the “underground” GOP civil war Conway described. “There is a growing sentiment that political violence is justified,” says Elizabeth Neumann, who previously served as a top Trump counterterrorism official. “The rhetoric we are tracking online is shifting. Trump supporters are talking more about ‘civil war’ and ‘taking back the country’ through violent means.”

A University of Chicago survey found that nine percent of American adults (more than 20 million people) agree with the statement: “Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.”

More alarming still, one million of them are members of — or personally know members — of militia or extremist groups, while six million voiced support for such groups.

“Previous estimates for domestic extremists in the United States were closer to 100,000 or less,” Neumann told me. “So we’re talking about a roughly tenfold increase in just a few years.” She fears that politicians are normalizing violent rhetoric which will, in turn, fuel more violent behavior. Neumann pointed to comments in August from North Carolina GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn who warned of potential “bloodshed” if elections “continue to be rigged.”

“You could have another January 6 or worse if this charged political rhetoric continues,” she elaborated. “I think they see it as politics as usual, but they are not understanding that we are on the precipice of future terrorist attacks.”

Case in point: The week she and I spoke, police arrested a Trump protester in Washington, D.C., who threatened to bomb the U.S. Capitol if Joe Biden didn’t step down. Rather than condemn the would-be bomber, Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks appeared to offer support, releasing a statement that read in part, “… I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom, and the very fabric of American society.”

“The GOP has a decision to make,” GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger struck back. “Are we going to be the party that keeps stoking sympathy for domestic terrorists and pushes out truth, or finally take a stand for truth?” In the 2022 and 2024 elections, we may get an answer.

Most observers I spoke with worried that the specter of Trump’s reentry into the fray would haunt the GOP, driving more dissidents underground and pushing the party further to the populist right. “There’s not even a GOP platform,” Whitman lamented. “The party didn’t release one in 2020. It’s just whatever Donald Trump says it is.” Others are less pessimistic. “The best thing that happened to Republicans is 72 DESERET MAGAZINE

that Trump lost his social media platforms,” an ex-congressman offered.

“Now they don’t have to answer him on a daily basis.” What’s more, he predicted that the presidential ambitions of figures such as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz would counteract the former president’s Darth Vader-like chokehold on the party.

Meanwhile, the violent intimidation has continued. A vocal Trump critic and lifelong Republican shared that in recent weeks she’d been notified that MAGA users on the darknet were sharing her personal information and location data, along with not-so-veiled talk of hits on her life. “It’s time to take her out,” one user wrote. She referred the threat to law enforcement.

Half of the moderate Republicans I interviewed had already applied for — or received — permits to carry concealed firearms because of safety worries. One is considering a near-term run for public office and is putting in place additional precautions. There are “people in a lot of these communities who are now unafraid to commit violence. They’ve been given license by Trump — and the people who’ve made excuses for him — so we’ve got to protect ourselves,” he said, pausing for a moment.

“It’s a tightening of the noose around freedom and democracy.”

It’s much too soon to write a eulogy for the Party of Lincoln. A nucleus of conservative leaders are still working to steer the Republican Party away from vitriol and violence and back to its roots — to a common foundation built around reverence for free minds, free markets and free people. And new conservative candidates are­entering races around the country with a similar message.

Meanwhile, the GOP base is slowly showing signs of openness to a less combative, post-Trump future. One recent poll found that a majority of Republican voters want to see “new leaders and fresh faces” in a clear rebuke of Donald Trump, whose support in the same poll among GOP primary voters plummeted — only 26 percent of them want to see him as the 2024 nominee, a 20-point drop from this summer.

Finally, in the run-up to the 2022 elections, there are hopeful signs that moderates on both sides of the aisle are aligning to support moderates in races where radical candidates might otherwise have the lead.

And that, perhaps, is where the GOP civil war will one day end—with pragmatic Americans deciding that they would rather be unified closer to the center than divided at the political poles.

Miles Taylor is the co-founder of the Renew America Movement, the former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and author of The New York Times bestselling memoir, “A Warning.”

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CULTURE

WRITING ON THE WALL TV SERIES ‘SCHMIGADOON!’ OFFERS TIMELESS LESSONS FOR EVERYONE — INCLUDING ITS CREATORS

BY ETHA N B AU ER

C

But the show’s greatest power isn’t in its charming homage to musical inco paul hatched the idea for “Schmigadoon!” some 25 theater tropes. It’s found instead in what it has to say — about love, years ago. Inspired by the show’s namesake, the 1947 musical about honesty and about openness to growth and change.

“Brigadoon,” and “An American Werewolf in London,” the basic idea “Schmigadoon!” reaches its climax when its residents gather in was to have two guys go for a hike and end up in a town that is itself the town square for a mayoral election. Dressed in colorful early a musical. He discussed it over the decades with his longtime writing 20th-­century garb, they’ve come to vote for the smarmy, stubborn partner Ken Daurio, and after 20 years of waiting, the duo refined the town p ­ uppet master played by Kristin Chenoweth. Her platform is idea and finally got their shot to make it happen. Finally, they could a straightforward rebuke of Melissa, Josh and their “sinful” city-folk pursue this new adventure — together. ways. “Strife and tribulation, people!” Chenoweth’s character rePart parody, part love letter to golden-age musicals like “Oklahominds the town. “Strife and tribulation!” But in a touching twist, the ma!” and “The Sound of Music,” the show follows two lovestruck but town turns on her. “No! Why are you cheering for struggling New York physicians, Melissa (played these sinful city folk! Have you forgotten what by “Saturday Night Live” veteran Cecily Strong) they’ve done to this town?” Chenoweth’s characand Josh (Keegan-Michael Key of sketch show ter asks. “I haven’t forgotten, and I hope I never “Key & Peele”), as they try to save their relawill. I hope none of us ever will. Because they’ve tionship by going on a backpacking trip. Instead made Schmigadoon better,” answers the town they end up in the town of Schmigadoon, “where schoolmarm before alluding to the show’s gay the sun shines bright from July to June.” They’re THE MESSAGE OF mayor and his decision to live openly. “Maybe it’s trapped there until they find “true love.” It’s ‘SCHMIGADOON!’ IS CLEAR: GROWTH time we all start following the mayor’s example dazzling and plastic and happy — but also very REQUIRES HONESTY, and were more honest about who we really are.” grown-up, which marks a departure from Paul A WILLINGNESS TO The message — for the town, and for Josh and and Daurio’s past successes.

CHANGE AND THE Melissa’s relationship — is clear: Growth requires Perhaps most famous for the 2010 smash hit COURAGE TO ACT ON honesty, a willingness to change and the courage “Despicable Me,” Paul and Daurio, who both live THOSE FEELINGS. to act on those feelings; it requires making diffinear LA, also co-wrote “The Secret Life of Pets,” cult choices. It’s reminiscent of the climax of “Detwo Dr. Seuss adaptations and “The Santa Clause spicable Me,” when Gru faces a choice between 2.” They’ve worked together since the late 1990s, his longtime career of villainy and the prospect of after they met on the set of a musical penned by fatherhood and family — it’s a Paul and Daurio Paul and starred in by Daurio to commemorate signature. And indeed, their names are all over the 150th anniversary of the ­Latter-day Saint pithe “Schmigadoon!” credits: created by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio; oneers’ arrival in Utah in 1847. Both devout members of the Church written by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio; original songs by Cinco Paul; of Jesus Christ, they’ve turned to their faith and its values for inspiconsulting producer Ken Daurio. Like “Despicable Me” before it, the ration time and time again. “It’s all there,” Daurio says. “You have to show appeared to be a coming out party for the longtime duo. look sometimes, but it’s all there.” In “Schmigadoon!” — that fact was Except that Daurio left the show long before it aired in July 2021. hidden in plain sight.

With a potential second season on the horizon, the duo is a duo no Wrapped in a veil of double-entendres and inside jokes for t­ heater more. Now they both live in the shadow of their collective past achievelovers, the show has earned praise from NPR’s “Fresh Air,” New York ments, without the other to lean on after over two decades together.

Magazine and RogerEbert.com, among others. It holds an 88 percent Difficult choices, indeed. on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic scored it at 73.

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Keegan-Mi c hael K ey ( c enter ) th inks m us ic a ls o ffe r h o p e , w h i l e h i s “S c h mi g a d o o n ! ” c h a r ac t e r i s l e e ry of the g enre

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door mall. Outside their hobby, Paul had begun a career in scriptwriting, while Daurio was making a living directing music videos including Blink-182’s early work. He was also a writer in his spare time, however, In 1997, the Church of Jesus Christ’s leaders in Newbury Park, Caland his wife persuaded him to share a script he’d been working on with ifornia, asked Paul to oversee their play to commemorate the 150th Paul. Paul thought it was fun — and more importantly, he thought it anniversary of the Saints’ arrival in the Great Salt Lake Valley. He would be fun to work on something with Daurio. said no. He was already making a living as a screenwriter, but he hadn’t The duo’s first script, called “Special,” follows a man who pretends done anything big yet. He had, however, written a few road shows and to have a disability to secure an autographed football for his girlfriend’s youth presentations for church conferences, which is perhaps why son. He ends up having to pretend much longer than anticipated, and leaders wouldn’t take no for an answer. When they asked him to at the story explores how one small lie ballooned into something much least write it, he agreed. Daurio, meanwhile, auditioned at the behest bigger. They sold it to MGM in 1999, and it created “a lot of buzz of his wife. They’d both performed and done choir in high school, and around town,” and based on that success they pitched a story called she thought it sounded like a fun time. She ended up backing out, “Bubble Boy” that became a Disney movie in 2001. “Not a great movwhile Daurio, who was 26 at the time, got a part — much to his annoyie,” Paul says. “It totally bombed. But you cannot deny the fact that it ance. “I was bitter,” he says. “I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ And I was a movie.” was cranky all through rehearsals.” But then he met Paul, and his tune Their process involved writing in separate rooms and meeting to started to change. discuss their ideas. They’d break for some Halo at lunch, and they’d They talked, and they stayed behind after rehearsal to sing Beatles chat, but at the end of the day, they’d read aloud what they’d written, songs. “My heart started to change,” Daurio says. The actual plot of and they’d help each other fill in jokes or plot holes or fix whatever else the musical followed a pioneer girl and her modern great-great-greatneeded fixing. “And ultimately, it was about who won the day,” Paul granddaughter switching places. “It was very high-concept comedy, jokes. “And who won most of the days?” which you don’t see a lot of in the church,” Paul says. “So I think it “I think it’s clear who won most of the days,” caught people by surprise.” They both had plenty Daurio answers, laughing (both thought they won of history to draw on for inspiration. Both of them the day most of the time). grew up in mixed-faith homes. Paul’s father was Their big break came while writing another Catholic, and his mother was a Latter-day Saint. script for Disney in 2003. It happened to find its He went to church with her growing up, but he way in front of Chris Meledandri, then the presiwasn’t baptized until right before he left his homedent of 20th Century Fox Animation and executive town of Phoenix for college at Yale and four years producer of the “Ice Age” franchise. He loved the before his eventual mission to Tokyo in 1986. StarMANY ROMANTIC script and —with plans to make an adaptation of ing down the uncertainty of adulthood, he started COMEDIES ARE ABOUT A HAPPY Dr. Seuss’ “Horton Hears a Who!” — he offered to seriously think about what he believed and who ENDING BECAUSE the job of writing it to Paul and Daurio. “Horton he wanted to be, and he decided it was time. The THEY FOUND EACH Hears a Who!” happened to be Daurio’s favorite baptism took place in a swimming pool. “I don’t OTHER. “THIS IS book, so he was elated. It was their first foray into a think that would be allowed today,” he admits. “I SAYING THERE’S NO very public, yet still subtle display of their values in don’t think it was allowed that much back then!

HAPPY ENDING. IT’S ALWAYS WORK.” Hollywood films. After all, “Horton Hears a Who!” But the bishop was just so freaking happy that I is about believing in something unseen that no one was getting baptized.” else believes is real. Similar themes appeared in Daurio’s father was also Catholic, and his moththeir later 2012 Dr. Seuss adaptation, “The ­Lorax,” er was Baptist. He didn’t grow up going to church where respect for the planet and faith in the goodmuch with either of them, but he did always have ness of others predominate. Or in “Despicable some kind of belief and he always felt different. “I Me,” where a villain is changed by his love for three was sort of a white sheep in a family of black sheep,” orphan girls. “Those are all the kinds of things that he explains. He was very trouble averse; the kid I want to put out in the world, to help people feel and see,” Daurio says. who followed all the rules. “And high school was really where I found Speaking of “Despicable Me,” both of them still revere it as their my group of friends who ended up being all the good kids who didn’t greatest achievement. It was one of those rare times where they felt ungo party,” he says, “and they were the Mormon kids.” After graduation, inhibited by the politics of corporate bureaucracy or pressure from laymost of those friends left town — except for Daurio and one young er after layer of stakeholders, allowing them to have true fun at work. woman, whom he started dating. She soon became her local congreMeledandri, they explain, left Fox to start his own animation studio, gation’s Relief Society president and told Daurio that, if he wanted to Illumination. He had enjoyed working with them, so he invited them hang out with her on Sundays, he’d have to hang out at church. He had to write all of Illumination’s movies around the time “Horton Hears a no problem with that, but “I was always waiting for the weird thing,” he Who!” was released in 2008. Paul and Daurio spent the next 12 years says. “They’re clearly weirdos, and there’s some culty thing happening at Illumination, starting with “Despicable Me.” Because the company here, and they’re going to reveal it, and I’m going to run out of here. But was new, nobody was really paying attention. “We didn’t have to answer the weird thing never came.” He chose to be baptized, and he and his to anybody, and it just was so free and fun,” Daurio says. “We got to do then-girlfriend were married in the temple. anything we wanted. Expectations were low.” Those expectations got Paul and Daurio’s first venture together wasn’t writing, but music. ratcheted up when “Despicable Me” became an instant hit, spawning From their sessions singing “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be,” they formed two sequels and a spinoff film. a band — The Otter Pops — that released two albums sold almost They then entered the uncharted territory of the grown-up world. ­exclusively to their 40 or so fans and played many a wedding and out76 DESERET MAGAZINE

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Paul wanted to go back. He wanted to return to the familiar, in more ways than one. Foremost, he wanted to reembrace the sorts of stories he and Daurio had written before striking it big in kids entertainment. For him, “Schmigadoon!” was a return to the realm of risque stories like “Special.”

“That sort of live-action comedy,” Paul explains, “which I had missed.”

He got his chance in September 2017 after a meeting with production house Broadway Video, an outfit founded by “Saturday Night Live” co-creator Lorne Michaels. Its executives mentioned an interest in musicals. Paul had held onto his musical idea for over 20 years, but he didn’t mention it right away. Instead, he drove home to Agoura Hills, soaked in his jacuzzi and thought — really thought — about what it might look like. Originally, he and Daurio loved the idea of two guys stuck in a lavish musical. But soaking in that hot tub, Paul had three revelations: First, it’s a couple. Second, they’re stuck in the musical until they find true love. And third, the show would be called “Schmigadoon!” He quickly emailed his list to Daurio. The first of those three revelations was particularly impactful. Rather than a mere idea, that gave the story a narrative arc — one that both Paul and Daurio felt was underrepresented in popular culture. “There are too few romantic comedies about a couple that’s already together and the difficulties of making that work,” Paul says. “So many of them are about, at the end of the movie, a couple finding each other, and now it’s a happy ending because they found each other. This is saying there’s no happy ending. It’s always work.”

“The show is about the fact that true love isn’t something you find,” adds Daurio. “It’s something that you believe in and work on, every single day.” Needless to say, he was sold on Paul’s email.

The timing felt right for such a project, too. The TV landscape, Paul explains, had changed significantly from when he first had his kernel of an idea. By his own admission, the concept of “Schmigadoon!” is “out there,” and network executives would have been unlikely to greenlight such a risky project. But with the advent of streaming and increasingly niche TV, Apple was willing. And the product Paul and Daurio delivered was certainly niche.

It’s loaded with inside jokes for musical theater lovers, like Josh’s meta commentary on his relationship with the underaged, tokenized farmer’s daughter character. It also explores many other issues absent from children’s programming (the bread and butter of Paul and Daurio up to that point), like one-night stands with the tokenized town rapscallion, having children out of wedlock and, in a particularly memorable song called “He’s a Queer One, That Man o’ Mine,” the tokenized woman who doesn’t seem to realize her perfect husband — and the town mayor — is a closeted gay man. The mayor, named Aloysius Menlove, eventually finds romance with the town’s minister, who also turns out to be gay. “I love to tell people who’ve seen ‘Schmigadoon!’ ‘A sweet Mormon man wrote this. Can you believe it?’ ” Strong told New York Magazine about the tone of the show. “It’s not corny, but it’s also not mean.”

The show presented Paul’s first opportunity to be a showrunner. The pressure of knowing the show’s success or failure rested largely upon him was a new challenge — especially while filming in relative isolation during the pandemic. “This was like a $40 million company that I was running with no experience,” he says. “That kept me awake at night.” He’s quick to credit his helpful and creative team for making his life easy; they’d often come to him with proposals asking for his yes or no, and their experience and expertise meant Paul didn’t have to think much about his answers.

He did have to make some tough decisions, like squeezing in time to refilm a song that turned out to be too slow. All of it without Daurio.

Because while Paul was chasing a return to his roots, Daurio desired a return of his own.

•

•

Daurio needed to talk. For days, for months, for years, a feeling had built up inside him; he’d squashed it down, figuring he’d be able to accept his new reality eventually. But the further he ventured into the world of grown-up entertainment, the more he longed for the comfort of his past; for the PG. “We had been in family world for so long, and we left family world to do some more grown-up things,” he explains. “I quickly realized I’m a family guy.”

His feeling burned more intensely the more the show crystallized. He agonized over the fact that his name was all over it. “Gosh,” he told himself, “there’s some things in there that I’m super uncomfortable with.”

For example, pretty much any sexual humor. “Anything that pushed beyond the PG,” he says. He’d always been the one to rein in Paul’s edgier ideas, but this show demanded edginess in a new way that couldn’t stop at PG. Finally, after a long, sleepless night, he knew it was time to talk.

Not that he wanted to.

At work, he recalls, everything felt fine. Despite Daurio’s misgivings, his relationship with Paul had remained largely unaffected. But he feared this conversation had the potential to change that. Again, his name was all over the project, and disentangling himself could jeopardize the whole thing. On paper, he knew he’d messed up. The proper time to back out had long passed. “I could only see scenarios where it was all bad,” he says. And though he knew it had to happen, he hated the idea of losing his writing partner. “Only a marriage is more a marriage than we were,” Daurio says. “We were together for 20-plus years, every single day. So not only was I losing my writing partner; I also wasn’t going to be hanging out with my buddy every day.” Beneath that anxiety, another question simmered: “Once this is done, what am I going to do?”

He pressed on anyway. He told Paul he’d decided to leave.

Paul was stunned. He knew some of the content might push his longtime friend’s buttons, but he had no idea Daurio wanted out completely. He’s sure his facial expression revealed his surprise. At the same time, he knew he had to stay composed. He didn’t want Daurio to think he was heartbroken — though, he now admits, he was. “I just didn’t want him to feel like I was,” Paul says. He did a good job. Daurio recalls nothing but Paul’s concern, which put to rest all the bad scenarios he’d conjured up. “He was worried about me,” Daurio says. “That’s why the transition could work.”

Daurio had already spent the summer of 2019 in the show’s writer’s room, but he was gone by the time it went into production. He left Paul with instructions that he recalls, with a chuckle, as “Go make your filthy show, you heathen.” A tad harsh, he now admits, but he remains steadfast in his discomfort with some of the show’s content. Still, his moral clarity never made leaving easier. “It was really tough for me, because there’s so much of the show that I love,” he says. “I just had to find that line where I asked myself, ‘Am I moving forward, or am I not?’ ” Paul moved forward, jetting to Vancouver, where the show was shot, to keep the dream alive. Daurio, meanwhile, began searching for a way back to the world he once knew. But while their writing relationship couldn’t be salvaged, they remained hopeful for their friendship.

•

•

On a Tuesday afternoon in September, Cinco Paul joins a conference call from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Tall and lanky, with a face and smile reminiscent of a blue-eyed Bill Nye the Science Guy, he makes small talk until Ken Daurio enters the Zoom meeting a few minutes late, calling from Los Angeles. “Hey guys, how’s it going?” he laughs. Shorter, stouter NOVEMBER 2021 77

CULTURE

Th e s h ow is Part par ody, part lo v e l et t e r to g o l d e n -ag e mu s i c a ls l i ke “O kl a h oma ! ”

and with a cap covering his bald head, he looks just as jovial as his longtime writing partner. Above his left shoulder, the logo from their band’s bass drum decorates the wall. Before he can say much, a phone rings. “This is crazy,” Paul says. “I’m getting FaceTimed by K ­ ristin Chenoweth.” “Really nice setup, Cinco,” Daurio chides. They talk like old friends. Because they are old friends.

After their professional split, Daurio returned to Illumination, where he’s currently working under an exclusive contract on projects he’s unable to talk about yet. Paul continued working on “Schmigadoon!” though he’s unable to confirm or deny whether it’ll see a second season.

He’s admitted that his original concept involved more than one season, but in a Twitter thread from mid-August, he noted “that’s all I can say for now. …” When I asked if he knows the answer — whether yes or no — he hit me with a “big freakin’ ‘No comment,’ ” though he thought the question was funny, which seems to bode well for a second season.

They both seemed at peace with where they are and where they’re going, though both felt burdened by past success. “Everyone in the cast was so thrilled with how it turned out,” Paul says of “Schmigadoon!”

“So following up something like that is always scary.” Especially without Daurio, though neither of them would change what happened. In that regard, the show’s ending proves instructive.

During the final song, titled “This Is How We Change,” Melissa tells Josh, “But you don’t have to stay that way. That’s what’s so great about change. There’s always the hope we can be something better than we are.”

“Schmigadoon!” and its creators view love as a verb rather than a noun; an action rather than a feeling. It’s something you choose to do because you believe in something bigger than yourself. It’s tempting to say they’ve forsaken that message by splitting up. But just because love is a choice doesn’t mean that sticking it out at all costs is the right one. Paul and Daurio instead realized that it was in their best interest to split up — an 78 DESERET MAGAZINE

even harder decision than staying together. Indeed, they didn’t have to stay content. Like Josh and Melissa, they had to recognize their feelings, be open to growth and have the courage to act.

Making that choice didn’t save their writing relationship, but it did save their friendship. And Paul believes that’s worth celebrating amid an atmosphere of societywide division — especially within his own community. “Very faithful members of the church can disagree on certain things,” Paul says. He and Daurio surely do. But he doesn’t view D ­ aurio as a crazy fundamentalist because he won’t do “Schmigadoon!” Nor does he believe Daurio views him as lesser because he continues to do it. ­Daurio nods in agreement. “People have different levels, and people draw the lines in different places, and that’s totally fine,” Paul continues.

“We can all — we should all — still be able to get together in harmony with an understanding that the most important things that bring us together will never change. These little things are just little things.”

In reflecting on his exit, Daurio once more admits that his timing was terrible. He feared what his decision would cost the show, and his friend.

“But Cinco valued our friendship and me as a person more than that stuff,” he says toward the end of our conference call. “So thanks, Cinco.”

They’re both still open to working together again. Daurio wanted to work on one of Paul’s recent projects, but he’s exclusive with Illumination for now. Still, listening to them talk about the possibility, their enthusiasm makes such a reality seem less theoretical and more inevitabile.

Because when they talk about it, what they miss most isn’t the success or the stress or the help from each other; it’s the moments in between.

Like lunchtime Halo. “I really do miss that,” Daurio says. “That was the hardest thing, saying goodbye to our lunchtime Halo.” Once more, the show’s final number proves instructive: “What the future holds, well, we just don’t know. But there’s hope for all.”

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IDEAS

THE LOOMING PEASANT STATE THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS IS THE EROSION OF AN AMERICAN IDEAL

BY VI CTOR DAVI S HA N SON

T

the ideal of an independent middle class, originally agrarian, rather than a subservient peasantry became the American ideal, at least until recently. All politicians still praise the middle class, but few have sought or found ways to preserve it in a radically changing globalized world.

The result is the emergence of a new American peasantry, of millions of Americans who own little or no property. The new majority has scant, if any, savings. Fifty-eight percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank. A missed paycheck renders them destitute, completely unable to service sizable debt. Most of what they buy, from cars to electronic appurtenances, they charge on credit cards. The credit card indebtedness is over $8,000 per household and over $2,000 per individual — paid through monthly installments at average annual interest rates of between 15 percent and 19 percent, at a time when most home mortgages are usually below 4 percent.

Such short-term debt is often roughly commensurate with the payments and sharecropping arrangements that premodern peasants once entered into with lords and made it impossible for the serf to exercise political independence or hope for upward mobility.

The chief contemporary difference, of course, is that the modern American peasant is the beneficiary of a sophisticated technological society that allows him instant communications, advanced health care, televised and computer-driven entertainment, inexpensive food and a social welfare state. These material blessings often mask an otherwise shrinking middle class without confidence that it is in control of its own destiny.

A fifth of America receives direct government public assistance. Well over half the country depends on some sort of state subsidy or government transfer money, explaining

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why about 60 percent of Americans collect more payments from the government than they pay out in federal income taxes, in health care entitlements, tax credits and exemptions, federally backed student and commercial loans, housing supplements, food subsidies, disability and unemployment assistance, and legal help.

Such social insulation, along with science fueled by free market capitalism, has succeeded in ending starvation, dying in one’s 30s and 40s, and, for the most part, chronic malnourishment, as well as ensured access to a wealth of material appurtenances. But otherwise, 21st century American “peasants” — currently perhaps about 46 percent of the population — usually die with a net worth of less than $10,000, both receiving and bequeathing little, if any, inheritance.

Drive on El Camino Real on the perimeter of Stanford University’s elite campus and witness hundreds living in curbside trailers in the manner of the poor of Cairo, or visit the side streets near the Google headquarters in nearby Mountain View where thousands live in their cars, or walk among the homeless on tony University Avenue in Palo Alto. Then juxtapose their lifestyles with estates in nearby Woodside, Atherton or Portola Valley, and the Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs of those in their early 20s parked in the student lots at Stanford University.

The natural historical referent for this dichotomy is certainly not the booming middle classes emerging following World War II. Instead, the image is one of the manors and keeps of medieval Europe amid peasant huts outside the walls.

For all practical purposes, it is almost impossible for young families to buy a home anywhere in California’s 500-mile progressive coastal corridor from San Diego to Berkeley or in the greater Portland and Seattle areas.

The same is largely true in the metropolitan and suburban areas from Boston to Washington, D.C. Whatever this bifurcated new culture is — and it is new and different from that of a half-century ago — it is not so conducive anymore to classical citizenship.

Even those of the middle class who can be thrifty, who save some of their income and develop modest passbook savings accounts, are now targeted by institutionalized cheap interest. The result of massive and chronic trillion-dollar annual budget deficits — the national debt is now near $30 trillion — and the zero interest rates of the often jittery Federal Reserve is the destruction of any interest income on savings accounts.

The modest, middle-class citizen saver thus faces daunting options just to preserve the value of his money. He can engage in risky real estate speculation or invest in a booming stock market, fueled not by business performance, per se, but often by those who have nowhere else to park their money. So middle-­ class families, to be safe, often keep their modest savings in passbook accounts or buy federal bonds, where interest payouts below 1 percent do not cover the erosion in value of their principal due to annual inflation.

Yet American citizenship always differed even from the Western tradition found in the Europe of the last three centuries. The founding of America saw an entire array of newly expanded rights, responsibilities and privileges for the vast majority of the resident population. This late-18th century new birth of citizenship arose in part because of an almost limitless supply of land, in part because colonial America lacked many of the European mainland’s traditions of class distinctions, primogeniture, peasantry and serfdom, in part because of the parliamentary traditions that Britain had implanted in North America, and in part because of the protections of ILLUSTR ATION BY ØI V I N D HOV L A N D

the Constitution of the newly formed United States. America would soon become the f­ reest and most egalitarian society in the history of civilization.

The point is not that late-18th century America was perfect at birth or could even approach what we now enshrine as 21st century moral values. Rather, the new United States was unlike, or rather superior to, most con-

temporary nations. Indeed, almost alone of governments, America had hit upon a mechanism that would allow constant self-criticism, legal amendments to its founding documents and moral improvement. Such change came without the necessity of collective suicide or permanent revolution — and yet within the boundaries of constitutional absolutes that transcended time and space, and all made pos-

sible only by an empowered and autonomous middle class.

Excerpted from Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America,” forthcoming from Basic Books. Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

NOVEMBER 2021 81

IDEAS

A TESTAMENT OF FAITH THE BLACK CHURCH IS A MODEL ON HOW TO DISAGREE WITHOUT CONTEMPT

BY J U STI N GI B ON EY

C

all it one of American history’s ugliest ironies — a country founded, in part, on the pursuit of representation and religious freedom, condoning and in some instances sanctioning the denial of representation and religious freedom to certain people.

This is perhaps the defining battle of the Black religious and political experience in America. A story of survival despite constant attempts to deny human dignity and agency.

The earliest version of the Black church was forced to be an “invisible institution,” as Albert Raboteau coined it in his book “Slave Religion.”

He explains how many enslaved people were forbidden from attending church or even praying. Pursuing meaningful religious experience was to risk corporal punishment. Literacy, and therefore Bible reading, were prohibited, likely because the Bible’s liberation narrative has always been a threat to injustice and moral disorder.

And yet somehow, the church survived as a clandestine body, becoming a life source and refuge where many slave preachers professed a theology of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. A hermeneutic of love and truth that distinguished itself from the slaveholders’ perverted version of the faith — constantly reminding the shackled congregation that they were defined by God, not by the institution of slavery. That their chains were temporal but their freedom inevitable.

Despite church bombings and segregated church pews, the Black church experience is ultimately a testimony that couldn’t be contained.

It’s about a praise and worship chorus that couldn’t be silenced. Conversely, it’s a reminder of man’s inability to subvert God’s providence and plan.

It’s a glorious illustration of the fact that there are some things you can’t beat out of a people. True faith is always beyond the tyrant’s reach, but its free exercise is not.

You see, religion robs the tyrant of ultimate authority. It means there are some matters that transcend the jurisdiction of heads of state and the cultural consensus. So the tyrant always seeks to dismantle, neutralize or co-opt it. But there will always be a song that refuses not to sing, a praise determined to reach the heavens.

This explains why enslaved people in the midst of a system designed to produce nothing but hopelessness and self-hate somehow found a

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way to sing freedom songs and love their own soulful aesthetic.

A people bound to a wicked institution designed to produce beasts of burden, yet they somehow became poets and theologians, inventors, orators and playwrights. The Black church has always had a song that refused not to sing. A praise that rang out through the muzzle of oppression to miraculously reach the heavens.

And here we are now, drawn into a culture war not of our own making but nevertheless with our interests and the survival of our institutions at stake. Not faultless, but also not equitably represented in the exchange.

The Black church is not a monolith, but the large number of us who value social justice while refusing to be lured by the false promises of self-­definition and self-justification find it difficult to fully align with either side of this war.

Though we primarily vote with Democrats, neither the conservative nor secular progressive storylines are all that convincing, to be quite honest. One of these traditions got the entire civil rights movement wrong, the other battles in vain against absolute truth.

This leaves many of us conflicted. But one thing’s for sure, we’re never insulated from the consequences of their altercation. We’ve always paid, not only for our own sins, which are real, but also for the sins of whoever’s winning the culture war at the moment.

James Davison Hunter, the sociologist who coined the term “culture war,” noted that “the cultural conflict in this country took place primarily within the white middle class.” It’s diversified a bit, but the Hidden Tribes report showed that today’s polarized debates are still dominated by affluent white people on both sides of the ideological spectrum.

My organization, and the hundreds of Black and brown pastors who stand with us, has decided that it’s past time to enter the debate whether we received an invitation or not.

To stand up for religious freedom — and LGBT rights. Not by surrendering our convictions or splitting the baby, but rather by demonstrating that it’s not a winner-take-all proposition. We’ve resolved to apply the compassion and conviction of the gospel to those with whom we agree and disagree alike.

PHOTOGR A PHY BY B R A N DEN CA MP, ASSOCI AT ED PRESS

One of the keys to depolarizing religious freedom is to listen to people of color who aren’t vested in the old ideological wars but have an interest in the outcome of the religious freedom dispute. And then to reconstruct the debate based on those insights.

Try following leaders like Asma Uddin, who have a different framework and approach to the issue. The debate would automatically become less partisan and more constructive. A majority of Americans who primarily define themselves through the lens of conservative or progressive ideology have no credibility with the other side.

So rather than waiting for the other side to be bludgeoned out of existence, overcome the impasse with different inputs and frankly by following diverse leaders. Everyone has a role to play, but the frame and

tenor of the discourse can no longer solely be driven and orchestrated by white conservative and progressive sensibilities and historical beefs.

I’m not talking about diversity for the sake of diversity, but rather diversity for the sake of democracy and a healthy discourse that can effectively come to solutions. The traditional Black church’s public witness provides a probative and compelling example of how to disagree and fight for freedom without contempt.

It’s a song that refuses not to sing, with notes and lyrics worth reciting and living out.

Justin Giboney is an attorney and political strategist based in Atlanta. He is also co-founder of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic engagement organization.

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THE LAST WORD

a st r i d t u mi n e z

THE MANY PATHS TO SUCCESS UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY’S PRESIDENT ON THE COLLEGE EXPERIENCE, INCLUSIVE HIGHER ED AND DOING GOOD

BY LOI S M. COLLI N S

A

strid tuminez is extraordinarily well-educated, but never set out to be an educator herself. Still, her role as president of Utah Valley University isn’t a surprise in a resume packed with accomplishments.

There’s a smile in her voice when Tuminez tells me, “I have had many lifetimes.”

Indeed.

The student’s life: Coming up in a city slum in the Philippines where she and her six siblings went to school, she later earned successive degrees related to international studies, with emphasis on the Soviet Union, from Brigham Young University, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The linguist’s life: In addition to English, she is fluent in Filipino, Tagalog, Ilonggo, Russian and French.

The executive’s life: She’s worked for companies like Microsoft and AIG, for nonprofits and in venture capital.

Her seat in the ivory tower is very down to earth — she loves wrestling and attends every meet at UVU. She’s as comfortable waving pompoms as she is in corporate boardrooms. And here’s a twist: Tuminez — a runner, mother of three and wife who loves French poetry and Russian literature — has a permanent seat on the Council on Foreign Relations. At a time when nuclear proliferation kept Americans awake at night, she contributed to the work that led to the removal of nuclear weapons from the former Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus. “We were very concerned that after the Soviet Union broke up,

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you’d have all these new nuclear countries,” said Tuminez, who worked for the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York at the time of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program in the early 1990s. “I kind of had a front-row seat to all of this.”

Deseret Magazine caught up with Tuminez over Zoom.

Your life has taken many turns. At age 18, who did you think you were going to be?

When I was 18 years old, I was thinking of becoming a lawyer or a dentist, because I grew up in the Philippines, and in Asia, a lawyer, a doctor, those are the two best professions. I just had that image in my mind that I’d be a lawyer. I certainly didn’t think that I would become a university president. I certainly wasn’t thinking that I would go to Harvard or MIT. None of that, because I had just landed here in the United States and had started at BYU. I was just learning about the world, coming from a background of very little sophistication, very little information, very little exposure to what the world is all about. Really, I had no clue at 18.

When did the idea of being a university president come to you?

That just landed on my horizon when I learned about the opening at Utah Valley University.

At that point in my career, three years ago, there were opportunities to stay on in the tech world in ever-bigger roles. But when I learned about the university, I got very intrigued by the proposition of running a very different kind of higher education institution, one that was super incluILLUSTR ATION BY RA N DY GL ASS

sive, open admission, which is counterintuitive to how higher education is supposed to function. You’re supposed to exclude people. This one was saying, “Let’s include everybody and see what we can do with them, what we can do with their human potential.”

I was intrigued by the fact this is in Utah County — very different from the ’80s; this is a more diverse place. The area is now 19 percent people of color and Hispanics, and UVU’s enrollment is exactly 19 percent people of color. That growth and the scale was also interesting, the programming, the combination of a community college and teaching university so that people at all types of preparation could begin wherever they’re comfortable beginning — and then keep moving up as they are prepared to move up.

lutely. I use the example of programs, let’s say at Google, where for $39 a month — and the programs can be anywhere from three to six months — you can get a certification. Microsoft has the same; you can get a Microsoft certification and get a job in Germany, because all the Germans understand what a Microsoft credential means.

The costs are lower. The skills are real. But I think the offering is also limited. And then of course, you have the exceptions to the rule, the Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gateses of the world who by dropping out became extremely successful. But again, those are extreme exceptions.

We would be deluding ourselves if we think for a moment that most people will be OK with a high school education. … And once you move up through management ranks, you need more education rather than less education.

People with a very entrepreneurial mindset and restless energy can do it. But if you ask me in a classroom of 100 people taking an entrepreneurship class, a handful will truly succeed as entrepreneurs.

What are the biggest challenges young adults face?

Definitely mental health. This is an epidemic across the nation that keeps me up at night. One response I have is to instill a sense of pride in our students, that they are always worthy, that they are always good, that they’re always worth the effort that they and others put into their lives and their success.

Another way I think of mental health is that it is the job of everyone at UVU. I was talking yesterday to deans and department chairs. And I mentioned that professors are at the front line. While “WE OUGHT TO mental health is not their job, they have to see their BE UNAFRAID OF students for who they are and take the time to obREALLY GIVING serve and notice. There is one number to call if EVERYBODY A there’s a mental health concern.

VOICE AND BEING Another, of course, is financing: Thirty-six perNONPREJUDICIAL IN OUR APPROACH TO cent of our students are Pell Grant eligible, so we OPPORTUNITY.” are working with people from lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, and the more money we can raise for students, the better. Delay is the single most important reason for dropping out. It delays graduation. If they lose a job, they’re gone.

Is college really the best pathway to position oneself to succeed?

I believe the answer is yes. Based on all the data that we know, there’s nothing more useful than getting higher education. If you look at earnings across the board, I believe that college students earn maybe 56 percent more than high school students. And when you ask employers today, the majority — I would say close to 90 percent — still say a higher education degree is something they’re looking for in workers and that it’s important for the world of work. However, there is now a divide between the general population and what employers think. I think the number for the general population in one survey that I looked at, only 67 percent believed higher education is important for employment.

What does the university experience give you?

It gives you exposure to the kind of discourse that we all use in our lives, where people may agree or disagree with you and you’re around people who are coming from very different life experiences. I think in all of that there is value. There’s value to mentoring from professors, faculty members, leaders of the university.

Having said all of that, are there other ways to succeed in life? Abso-

How do you see diversity in Utah?

I lived here in 1982 to ’86, and certainly Utah as a state and Utah County as a region were a lot more homogeneous. Today that has changed. So how do I define diversity? Equity and inclusion are the words we use. I define diversity in a very broad way. It does mean gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity — but at UVU, we also define ethnicity as your socioeconomic background, whether you are rural or urban, your mental health state.

We ought to be unafraid of really giving everybody a voice and being nonprejudicial in our approach to opportunity.

I also believe we ought to be historically well-­ informed, historically educated on where we have failed as a society and as a nation in how we have treated minorities, people of color, our Black population. I’ve given public talks where I use the word “repentance,” that there is a need to repent.

Having said that, we need to now look at what we can do together as one society, and not close the door in each other’s faces. I think there is plenty of room to listen and to include. At UVU I use the term “nonprejudicial education.” I think that’s what we do. When we think about diversity and inclusion, we always need to link it to our core business, which is education.

We are running an enterprise whose mission is to educate every type of person for success in work and life. Everything we do in diversity inclusion needs to link to that. That money that we have, the full-time people that we have, it has to go back to ... are we succeeding in recruiting, retaining and graduating our people so that they leave UVU with greater confidence, greater skills and a greater ability to navigate life as a whole, because life is difficult to navigate.

The world is not a safe place. I say that over and over again. But we have it in us and we need to help one another to go out there and navigate.

Any last words?

If we are lucky, life is long. And never underestimate the amount of good that we can do.

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Enrollment in SelectHealth Advantage depends on contract renewal.

Every year, Medicare evaluates plans based on a 5-Star Rating System.

SelectHealth Advantage plans received 5 out of 5 Stars for contract year 2022. Visit medicare.gov for more information. SelectHealth obeys federal civil rights laws. We do not treat you differently because of your race, color, ethnic background or where you come from, age, disability, sex, religion, creed, language, social class, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, and/or veteran status. This information is available for free in other languages and alternate formats. ATENCIÓN: Si habla español, tiene a su disposición servicios gratuitos de asistencia lingüística. 注意：如果您使用繁體中文，您可以免費獲得語言援助服務。請致電 SelectHealth Advantage: 855-442-9900 (TTY: 711) / SelectHealth: 800-538-5038 All rights reserved. 09/21 H1994_1723959_M

SelectHealth received Medicare’s highest quality rating for 2022.