C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 , 2019
ident’s support dropping to
71 percent among white evangeli-
cals, down from the 81 percent
who supported him against Hil-
lary Clinton in 2016.
“This is the most active Mrs.
Trump has been during her time
as first lady,” says Burns.
McBride says she can see a
change in Melania Trump’s com-
fort at such appearances. While
she made almost no appearances
on behalf of her husband in the
2016 cycle, this could be a sign
that she’s up for doing much
more this time around.
“A reelection is very different,”
says McBride. “They all feel com-
pelled because it’s the last time
you’ll be campaigning for your-
self. And they want to continue
the work they started.”
Whatever the strategy or mes-
saging, it was clear by the end of
the day that these two women,
who have become the most un-
likely of partners, are in this
together. On the tarmac, back in
Washington six hours after they’d
begun, they sealed it with a hug.
[email protected]the most popular member of the
Trump family (according to polls)
is a signal to Republicans that the
administration hasn’t forgotten
about them.
Unlike Democrats who are in
the heat of a crowded primary
race and regularly make stops in
South Carolina, the president
faces no immediate challenger
and doesn’t need to court voters
here.
But he was in the state less
than a week before the first and
second ladies visited, talking
about criminal justice reform at a
historically black college in Co-
lumbia, S.C.
Coming on the heels of that,
his wife’s event with Karen Pence
may be a way to shore up support
among the state’s many white
evangelical voters.
A recent Fox News poll shows
that both the impeachment pro-
ceedings and President Trump’s
withdrawal of troops from Syria
(which puts Kurds, including
Christians, in the region, in dan-
ger) has shaken that previously
unshakable base — with the pres-she said. “She has a big heart for
our country.”
Trump thanked the troops and
their families, and she spoke for
six minutes — one of her longest
recent speeches — taking time to
note the killing of Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi in a “successful Spe-
cial Ops raid that brought final
justice to the leader of the evil
terrorist group known as ISIS.”
Her polite statements of patri-
otism were dissonant from the
messaging from other parts of
her husband’s team. The same
day, his supporters had repeated-
ly questioned the patriotism of
Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, a
top Ukraine expert on the Na-
tional Security Council who’d
told members of the House Intel-
ligence Committee that he found
the president’s actions regarding
Ukraine to have been improper.
Vindman is the recipient of a
Purple Heart.B
urns sees in Melania
Trump’s recent spate of ap-
pearances a ramping-up for- A trip to South Carolina by
“It may make Mrs. Trump
more comfortable in these situa-
tions to have someone with her
who can share the spotlight,” says
Lisa Burns, a professor of media
studies at Quinnipiac University.
“Mrs. Pence also has more experi-
ence campaigning for her hus-
band so this may be the cam-
paign’s way of helping the first
lady prepare to be more active in
the 2020 race.”
The day continued back at the
base, building up to a spectacular
conclusion outside an airplane
hangar. The two women switched
to flats and toured a massive
Boeing C-17 transport aircraft
and took a look at a Coast Guard
helicopter.
Some 500 troops and their
family members gathered inside
the hangar on chairs and bleach-
ers, and Pence spoke first, talking
about her son, Michael, who is
stationed at Marine Corps Air
Station Beaufort in South Caro-
lina. She then introduced Trump.
The idea for the trip, as well as a
previous one to North Carolina’s
Fort Bragg, had been Trump’s,a team reinforces the idea that
the president and vice president
remain a team themselves.”T
he trip to North Charleston
was a showy spectacle of
nonpartisan issues that fall
squarely into traditional, uncon-
troversial first- and second-lady
concerns. Kids. Emergency pre-
paredness. Supporting the
troops.
They began with a visit to a
fifth-grade classroom at Lambs
Elementary, where children were
coloring pillowcases they’d fill
with emergency supplies as part
of a Red Cross’s Pillowcase Proj-
ect, an initiative that started after
Hurricane Katrina.
Trump handed out Be Best
keychain flashlights to kids indi-
vidually, before Pence ushered
her over and they both laughed;
the plan had been to stand at the
front of the room and have the
kids come to them. It was one of
several times when the two
seemed to share a laugh about
the unnatural scripted rhythms
of being on constant display.Pence seemed to understand.
(Trump has learned this the hard
way: When she posted pictures of
herself with the kids in North
Charleston, as often happens
when she’s pictured with kids,
Twitter critics were quick to ref-
erence the “I REALLY DON’T
CARE, DO U?” jacket the first
lady wore while on a trip to visit
migrant children her husband’s
administration had detained at
the Texas border.)
A joint appearance of first and
second lady, especially when the
administration is under siege,
creates, says Jellison, “an image
of unity at a time when people
may be wondering if — or for how
long — the vice president is
willing to stick with President
Trump. Presenting their wives as
LADIES FROM C1
childhood. Maybe they don’t read
“Winnie the Pooh” anymore, but
they smile whenever they see it
sitting there and remember Pooh’s
efforts to outsmart the bees.
It’s been a long time since my
younger daughter and I enjoyed Dr.
Seuss together, but we’re still con-
nected by a relationship spun from
the paper of real books. Last week, I
sent her a copy of Bernardine Eva-
risto’s “Girl, Woman, Other.” Sunday
night, she had to catch a flight out of
Denver, and she was nervous about
taking off before a snowstorm hit.
Turning pages was exactly the balm
she needed. Just before phones had
to be placed in airplane mode, she
texted me, “I LOVE THIS BOOK.”
That’s all I want for Father’s Day
and Christmas and my birthday
for the rest of my life.
[email protected]one thing right. My wife and I filled
our kids’ rooms with books — real
books — and we read with them
every day and every night. “Frog and
Toad,” “Ella Enchanted,” “Love That
Dog” and hundreds more became
our common friends. We laughed,
we gasped, we cried. I don’t mean to
sound like one of those insufferable
parents who says things like, “We
only let our children play with gen-
der-free corn cob dolls made from
organic maize,” but long after my
younger daughter could read on her
own, we still clung to the joy of
reading aloud together. We re-
mained dialogic readers without
even knowing it.
As my kids grew up, their earli-
est books didn’t vanish into the
cloud; they transmuted into trea-
sured objects, weathered sign-
posts back through the mist ofstaring at their phones, you know
what the alternative is.
E-reader advocates counter that
these devices offer a handy slew of
educational tools and metrics. In-
deed, Amazon notes that with the
Kindle Kids Edition, you can “set
educational goals and manage con-
tent with easy-to-use parental con-
trols... and track reading accom-
plishments for each day.”
Weeeeee!
A recent report from Scholastic
notes that around age 9, “chil-
dren’s frequency of reading books
for fun begins to drop” — and
rarely rebounds. More education
goals enforced by parents elec-
tronically monitoring a child’s in-
teraction with stories is unlikely to
reignite the fun.
As a dad, I’m sure I made all kinds
of unforgivable mistakes, but I gotreaders also create a different dy-
namic. “I am concerned,” she says,
“because when using a device, the
interface is less effective in sup-
porting parent-child interactions
that occur during reading a book.”
She explains a process called
“dialogic reading,” which is a fancy
name for what happens when par-
ents read with their child: “Par-
ents expand on the text based on
what the child is interested in and
place it into the contents of their
lives.” We already have some an-
cient technology perfect for that
task. “There’s something pretty
special about turning the page and
reading a book together and talk-
ing about it,” Tomopoulos says.
That relationship extends deep
into a child’s life. Or it can. If
you’ve seen a family of zombies
sitting around a restaurant tabletitles on a Kindle might as well be
under an invisibility cloak. The very
physical thing-ness of a printed
book offers an enhancement that
e-ink can’t touch.
I don’t need science to tell me
how valuable printed books are to
children, but the research exists. A
study published earlier this year in
the journal Pediatrics found that
parents had better interactions
with their toddlers when they read
print books together than when
they read e-books together.
Suzy Tomopoulos is an associ-
ate professor of pediatrics at New
York University who has pub-
lished extensively on how digital
media exposure affects young chil-
dren. She acknowledges the po-
tential benefits of new technology
that could increase reading for
children, but she notes that e-importantly, they use them to build
castles in their own minds. Reduce
the full spectrum of those objects to
the soulless glow of a screen, and
you’ve stolen something precious
from a child. All the convenience of
being able to access a thousand ti-
tles on an e-reader could never justi-
fy its efficient obliteration of a
young person’s shelf of cherished
books. Seven “Harry Potter” vol-
umes stacked next to the bed are a
monument to a kid’s determination
and devotion; seven “Harry Potter”
BOOK WORLD FROM C1
has recently married the fugitive’s
ex-lover (Hera Hilmar as Maghra),
who is about to give birth to the
mystery man’s twin son and
daughter. They’re born with sight,
and Baba Voss protects and raises
them as his own, with guidance
from the tribe’s spiritual leader,
Paris (Alfre Woodard).
The pilot episode is fast and
often exciting (though violent, for
sure) and I found myself admir-
ing the world Knight somewhat
effortlessly creates as he goes. I
figured it’s probably adapted
from some series of fantasy nov-
els I’ve never heard of, but nope, it
turns out to be that rarest of
things in genre television nowa-
days: an original idea.
Less impressively, the next two
episodes lapse into formula as
“See” starts to behave like any old
cable drama. As the show leans
heavily on gore and predictable
plot points, it proves that, at the
very least, Apple has figured out
the dirty truth of making TV:
Even the strongest story pitches
can blindly wander into a puddle
of mediocrity.
[email protected]Dickinson, For All Mankind and
See premiered Friday with three
episodes each on Apple TV+, a new
subscription streaming service.
Additional episodes will premiere
weekly.‘See’
Of all the ways to admire Apple
TV+’s deep cash reserves, perhaps
none is more visually striking
than “See,” a dystopian thriller
from creator Steven Knight
(“Peaky Blinders”), set in a future
North America long after a dis-
ease wiped out all but about 2
million humans worldwide and
left everyone genetically blind
from birth. A tribal society has
emerged, dependent on the four
remaining senses, but still re-
markably color-coordinated in
their raggedy, post-apocalyptic
garb and decor. Sight has become
a heretical concept; even a TV
critic could get his throat slit just
for joking about it.
Jason Momoa, who brings a
certain cerebral quality to his
brawniest roles (whether as Khal
Drogo in “Game of Thrones” or as
a charmingly contrarian Aqua-
man in DC’s superhero flicks),
delivers an energetic yet tender
performance as Baba Voss, the
chief of the peaceful Alkenny
tribe. Their forested mountain
village is attacked by a mercenary
army sent by Queen Kane (Sylvia
Hoeks), a tyrant obsessed with
tracking down a vigilante who
can see. (Get a load of this queen
— she prays to her god by bring-
ing herself to orgasm. It’s only
right to warn you.)
It so happens that Baba Vossepisodes, the mood and intent of
its story arcs begin to cohere. It’s
about an America that has to
work twice as hard to find glory.
Joel Kinnaman (“The Killing”)
and Michael Dorman (“Patriot”)
star as fictional astronauts Ed
Baldwin and Gordo Stevens, who
served on Apollo 10, which orbit-
ed the moon before the Soviets
got there. In popular opinion, Ed
is the commander who could
have landed first, even though
NASA had not planned the mis-
sion that way.
Nixon authorizes another doz-
en or more Apollo missions, in-
cluding plans to build a quasi-
military science lab on the moon’s
surface. Then the U.S.S.R. serves
up another surprise: They send a
woman to the moon. (A woman!)
Here, Moore and company en-
vision a rather thrilling hastening
of America’s regard for gender
equality, as NASA is ordered to
find and train a crew of female
astronauts, one of whom happens
to be Gordo’s wife, Tracy (Sarah
Jones). Less about discriminatory
hurdles, “For All Mankind” wisely
shifts its emphasis to incremental
and mutual triumphs — not only
for what the women capably ac-
complish, but the way the men
learn to support and work with
them. That sense of teamwork not
only saves the space program, but
it may well salvage the show.dropper comes out and the minu-
ets transition to hip-hop, you know
you’re in for a good time.‘For All Mankind’
After this summer’s pride of
looking back at the 50th anniver-
sary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing,
creator Ronald D. Moore (“Out-
lander,” “Battlestar Galactica”)
starts his space-race drama “For
All Mankind” off with a risky and
even depressing premise: In the
summer of 1969, a month before
Neil Armstrong and crew are set to
blast off, the Soviets land on the
moon and plant their hammer-
and-sickle flag. America watches
the live broadcast in humiliation
as a cosmonaut dedicates his first
step to “my people [and] the Marx-
ist-Leninist way of life.”
President Nixon throws a fit,
NASA officials scramble to save
their jobs and even the Apollo 11
mission, launched with a second-
place sense of grimness, is given a
catastrophic twist. Ugh — I know
there are people who totally dig
alternate histories (Amazon
Prime’s “The Man in the High
Castle” milked four seasons out of
the premise that the Allies lost
World War II), but who needs this
kind of downer right now?
By the end of its first episode,
“For All Mankind” feels too
weighty to achieve orbit, but if
you stick through the first threeand pop hits, and a rollicking tone
that borrows a little from “Drunk
History” and“Gentleman Jack,”
possessing just the right smidgen
of anachronistic playfulness that
filmmaker Sofia Coppola tried
years ago in “Marie Antoinette.”
Hailee Steinfeld (all grown up
since “True Grit”) contributes a
bang-up performance as young-
adult Emily, the original goth girl
in petticoats, a millennial misan-
thrope centuries before her time.
She’s adored by her father (Toby
Huss), who nevertheless throws a
fit whenever she tries to publish
her writing, and deplored by her
mother (Jane Krakowski) and sis-
ter, Lavinia (Anna Baryshnikov),
for not doing her share of the
womanly work.
To Emily’s astonishment and
heartbreak, her older brother, Aus-
tin (Adrian Blake Enscoe), has an-
nounced his intention to marry
Emily’s best friend and secret lover,
Sue (Ella Hunt), whose entire fam-
ily has died. (Has there been a TV
show with better typhus jokes?) Far
from the shy flower we thought we
knew, this Emily Dickinson forges
boldy ahead — never more so than
when she and her siblings decide to
throw a party while their parents
are out of town. Once the opiumand the Snoopy empire.
All the money in the world still
can’t buy the elusive combination
of luck and chemistry that makes
truly terrific TV. Apple TV+ is
lush, but often plain. Here are a
few reviews of shows that caught
my attention.
‘Dickinson’
Apple’s most satisfying and
confident treat, without question,
is creator Alena Smith’s sly com-
edy “Dickinson” — a surprisingly
splendid liberation riff on every-
one’s favorite 19th-century poet,
Emily Dickinson.
History portrays her as a quiet
recluse who never left her father’s
house; Smith has reimagined Dick-
inson as a rebellious and frustrated
genius — a young woman resisting
domestic drudgery and testing the
social and gender boundaries that
surround her, while scraps of her
writing float past in her vivid imag-
ination. Even Death himself (Wiz
Khalifa) drops by for an occasional
conversation. (“Because I could not
stop for Death — / He kindly
stopped for me.”)
It’s a pretty period piece
mashed up with modern language
TV REVIEWS FROM C1
Kindle Kids
vs. books
Apple TV+ standouts
Traveling
in pairs
MUSIC - CHORAL
For more
information, visit
citychoir.org or call
(571) 206-8525$15-59
Group and
student
discounts
availableNational Presbyterian Church
4101 Nebraska Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20016
Free parking available.Arguably Haydn’s greatest composition—“Mass for
Troubled Times”—stunningly captures the historical chaos
of his time. The evening also includes the opening to
Britten’s jubilant“Rejoice in the Lamb,”and Arvo Pärt’s
otherworldly“Salve Regina.”A soaring choral event not to be missed!Sunday, November 10,
2019 at 5:00 PMHaydn “Lord
Nelson Mass”
Robert Shafer,
Artistic DirectorMUSIC - JAZZ
$43 Adults 202-965-2000
$40 Senior
$10 StudentDumbarton Concerts
Dumbarton United Methodist
Church
3133 Dumbarton St. NW
Washington, DC 20007Dumbartonconcerts.orgLocal award-winning jazz musician and his band, The
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connect the old with the new, sprinkling in originals and
arrangements alongside timeless hits from Dizzy Gillespie,
to Stevie Wonder, to Steely Dan.Saturday, November 9,
8pmDumbarton Concerts
Presents
Mark G. Meadows
& The Movement
Featuring Rochelle RiceOPERA
Tickets
available
at the
Box OfficeKennedy Center
Opera House
kennedy-center.org
or call (202) 467-4600As a raging storm breaks on Cyprus, the governor
Otello returns victorious from battle. But there is another
storm brewing. Iago, Otello’s ensign, launches a malicious
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those he loves, the great hero will confront his most fatal
enemy: his own jealousy.In Italian with Projected English
TitlesTomorrow at 2 pm
November 8 at 7:30 pm
November11&16at7pmWashington
National Opera:
“Otello”
Music by Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto by Arrigo Boito,
based on Shakespeare’s
Othello
COMEDY
Discounts available
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Call 202-312-1427Ronald Reagan Building $36
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ticketmaster.comA musical, political satire.
We put the MOCK in Democracy!
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http://www.capsteps.comFridays & Saturdays
at 7:30pmMake America
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