Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  To Derwin—who, having brought lunch to his parents, is packing up to go—the solution to Bayou d'Inde lies far beyond power, politics, or science. A devoted believer in the rapture, as are his parents, Derwin describes the approach of the "End Times." Quoting from the book of Revelation, he says, "The earth will burn with fervent heat." Fire purifies, so the planet will be purified 1,000 years from now, and until then, the devil is on the rampage, Derwin says. In the Garden of Eden, "there wasn't anything hurting your environment. We'll probably never see the bayou like God made it in the beginning until He fixes it himself. And that will happen pretty shortly, so it don't matter how much man destroys."

  Harold and Annette look forward to the rapture too, but they want man to repair the earth before it comes. They've already waited long enough and nearly despair of politics. A commission to study the pollution, "partnering" with industry, had been meeting occasionally for decades. Newcomers to Lake Charles were not privy to this history of pollution, and the Tourist Bureau had no interest in reviving the memory of it. Buried with the memory of the damage, too, was a general appreciation of the extraordinary fortitude that had been called upon in Harold and Annette Areno over so many years. At least the Lord remembered what they'd endured and remembered the courage it took to endure it.

  As I take leave of the Arenos, I ask them about the lawsuit they have filed against the polluters of Bayou d'Inde. Fifty-three plaintiffs, residents on the bayou and workers in nearby companies, had sued twenty-two companies. "We're still waiting," Harold answers. Nothing could fully make up for the loss of trees, birds, and fish from their beloved bayou, but the Arenos are hoping mightily that the lawsuit will at least provide money to move, for despite their attachment to the place, their distrust of the water, the banks, the air makes them feel like refugees in their own home. If they win the suit, it will be a moral victory, a remembered fact. A lawyer who worked in the firm that filed their suit (the lead lawyer had passed away) tells me with a sigh that it is common corporate strategy, with the cooperation of the state agencies, to string these lawsuits out for so long that plaintiffs die before money is due. Still, much time has passed.

  Among the plaintiffs in this suit, I am astonished to learn, is a man I have already met—Lee Sherman. Lee and the Arenos had played different roles in the pollution of Bayou d'Inde, but each recognized the other as a victim. They'd become good friends. In 2012, all three were watching speeches by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He wouldn't help the country clean up dirty rivers, they thought, but as an opponent to the right to abortion, he was for "saving all those babies"—and that seemed to them the more important moral issue on which they would be ultimately judged.

  Harold walks me to my car. I get in, open my window, and fasten my seat belt. "We're on this earth for a limited amount of time," he says, leaning on the edge of the window. "But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We'll never have to worry about the environment from then on. That's the most important thing. I'm thinking long-term."

  4

  The Candidates

  Under a big tent in the restored Acadian Village outside Lafayette, Louisiana, the accordion is leading the fiddle, guitar, and washboard in a catchy, fast-paced Zydeco-Cajun swamp-pop tune. Middle-aged women in jerseys, Bermuda shorts, and sneakers draw partners up from their picnic tables to the dance floor. Men in cowboy hats with curled brims two-step, and a few teenage girls with swinging ponytails move in well-practiced jitterbugs with mothers or grandmothers. Two cooks in tall white hats briefly join in. Picnickers in the mainly white crowd chuckle as a toddler is led to the bandstand with a tiny washboard hung on his neck and distractedly runs a stick over it. Elsewhere, children scamper between festive face-painting, balloon vendors, and snow-cone stands. Dishes of pork, beans, rice, and gumbo are lined up on a long table to the side of the tent, and an enormous basket of cracklins passes from table to table.

  It is a balmy Saturday an hour's drive east from Bayou d'Inde. I've come to the Boustany Boucherie, a public pig roast and campaign whistle stop for the Republican U.S. congressman Charles Boustany. In this 2012 election, he is running in a tight race against fellow U.S. congressman and Tea Party caucus member Jeff Landry. Until recently Landry had represented District 3, while Boustany represented District 7. After the 2010 census reflected a loss of population—each seat has to represent roughly the same number of people—Louisiana lost one seat, and like musical chairs, the two men criss-cross the same territory, event after event, competing for the one remaining seat.

  The pig roast is held in a park commemorating the mid-nineteenth-century life of Acadian settlers—later called Cajuns—in southwest Louisiana. Within the village green are simple restored wood houses with mud walls and tin roofs. Clustered around a pond and majestic Evangeline oaks are a blacksmith shop, a spinning and weaving house, and a small Catholic church whose wooden sign reads "La Chapelle du Nouvel Espoir 1850" (Chapel of New Hope). An old, rusted harrowing machine and plow stand motionless in the nearby grass, and a wooden shed shelters a twenty-seven-foot dugout canoe such as Harold Areno's father built for fishermen on Bayou d'Inde.

  How, I wonder as I sit down at a picnic table, do politicians such as Boustany and Landry deal with Bayou d'Inde or other places like it on Mike Tritico's napkin map? Do they remember what happened? Would they help such people as Lee Sherman or Harold and Annette Areno? If they call for smaller federal government, how do they propose to fix the problems that form part of the Great Paradox that has brought me to Louisiana? I ask myself, again, how people in a poor state with the worst health in the nation can look askance at a federal government that provides 44 percent of its state budget, and how such a polluted state can take a dim view of government regulation of polluters. A political campaign has a central place in the cultural life of a people. It tells citizens what issues powerful people think are worth hearing about.

  I was backing into the picture I wanted to see by noticing what wasn't in it. It was like trying to understand a photograph by studying the negative. I found myself focusing not on what people remembered, focused on, and said, but on what they forgot, disregarded, and did not say. I was backing into the deep story, as I am calling it, and noticing what, in human consciousness, it crowded out.

  My developing focus on silence was not a reward for some brave climb over the empathy wall. I was still way over on my side of it, saying to myself, if the Louisiana environment is in such a mess, I hope these politicians talk about cleaning it up. If not, why not? Something commonsensical was beginning to seem mysterious. Many of the Tea Party people I met seemed to me warm, intelligent, generous—not like people out of the frightening pages of Ayn Rand. They have community, and church, and goodwill toward those they know. Many, like Lee Sherman and Harold and Annette Areno, care deeply about the environment. But for each of them, there was something else, I was coming to realize, that was even more important. Taxes, church? That seemed part of it. But were these the whole story? Congressman Boustany was a mainstream Republican popular with his constituency, with a reputation for honesty, a trained surgeon but a regular guy, pro-oil. He was a man who could get money from Washington but also make jabs at the "Washington elite." He could both complain about Washington being too out of touch and put you in touch with it. The Boucherie door prize was a symbol of the federal government—a congressional club cookbook with a homemade Christmas ornament made by Mrs. Boustany, wrapped in a small American flag (which by some fluke I won). People blamed their woes on Washington, but prized attachment to it too. Jeff Landry was a Tea Party Republican, which, according to one 2011 poll, had won the sympathy of nearly half of Louisiana voters. So I was curious what differences between the two men would emerge.

  After a while the band stops. Dancers sit down. Congressman Boustany, bespectacled and balding, rises to the podium and begins: "We've been through hurricanes together. We've been through a moratorium on oil drilling that hurt jobs. We've been throug
h a financial and economic crisis." Louisiana needs "conservative leadership you can trust." In a later radio interview, he boasts that he defeated a bill to tax oil and gas companies that would have raised $60 billion, opposed a moratorium on drilling after the BP disaster, and voted for the Keystone pipeline.

  At a rice-and-beans supper at a union hall in Rayne a few days later, his rival, Congressman Landry, a former sugarcane field worker and policeman with a heavy Cajun drawl, makes a remarkably similar speech, only adding periodically, "If it ain't good for y'all, I ain't voting for it."

  "You can take a high school graduate—and I know some people that didn't even finish high school," Landry says, "work that tail off in the oil and gas industry—and make better money than most people make anywhere else in this country." He continues: "I'm tired of the government being in my business.... When I was struggling and we needed help, I never went straight to the government. You know where I went? I went into my church. I went into my community. I mean, who built the hospitals in this country? You go back and look. Our Lady of Lourdes—that ain't the government, O.K.? All those Baptist hospitals up in the Midwest? And the Catholic hospitals on the East Coast? That wasn't the government; that was people helping people. The answers to [our] problems are right here in places just like Rayne."

  But questions from the floor in this mainly older crowd focus on how to get more and better federal government services. "Why haven't the over-sixty-five received a cost-of-living raise on their Social Security check?" one man asks. (Landry's answer is to retire later.) Another asks about Medicare. Another elderly woman complains that she has to pay $28 to hire a cab to get to the doctor. "Why isn't there free van transport for seniors?" To these questions, Landry has no answers.

  A few days after a union hall meet-and-greet in Crowley, Congressman Landry speaks at a boat parade in New Iberia. Some in the crowd are munching on devil hot dogs—chili sauce, mustard, and sugar—along with fried chicken and double chocolate whiskey caramel brownies. "We have to take our country back from a government that has ignored our Constitution, dismissed our conservative values, and spent our tax dollars like drunken sailors. Of course, that's unfair to the sailors," Landry declares to a nodding crowd.

  About a third of the gathering are black, and there seem to be quite a few multiracial picnic groupings of families and friends, some there more for the food and music, I am told by two white attendants, than the politics. One black woman confides: "Oh, I'm voting for Obama. We have really poor people here. My twenty-one-year-old grandson says he's going to vote Republican, but I don't know if he means it or he's just trying to raise my blood pressure."

  In all the speeches, between the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning and invitations to gumbo cook-offs at the end, I am again struck by what both candidates avoid saying—that the state ranks 49th out of 50 on an index of human development, that Louisiana is the second poorest state, that 44 percent of its budget comes from the federal government—the Great Paradox.

  At the same time, the rivals both express and promote a culture that has produced the Great Paradox. They disdain "insider Washington" while trying to pry as much money from it for Louisiana as they can. The two men verge on—but refrain from—competing for how many government agencies they would strip away, as other prominent Southern Republicans have done. In the 2012 presidential race, Texas Governor Rick Perry called for abolishing three federal departments, though during a nationally televised debate, he famously forgot the third one. (They were Commerce, Education, and Energy.) Republican Ron Paul called for eliminating the Internal Revenue Service, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), and the Department of Health and Human Services. As mentioned, Congressman David Vitter called for axing the EPA.

  On my keyhole issue, the story was this: the seat of District 3, the parish of Lafayette, which the two were competing to represent, is one of the most polluted counties in the nation—the district includes companies on Mike Tritico's napkin map, as well as the half-remembered, half-forgotten tragedy of Bayou d'Inde. (In 2015, of the nine main waterways in the parish, the EPA listed eight as "impaired" and the ninth as "unassessed.") In 2015, Lafayette Parish also had a hundred facilities with current violations of the law and eighty-nine with "formal enforcement actions in the last five years," according to the EPA.

  Most of those I interviewed voted for Boustany, who won. But all along the campaign trail, I heard not a word about Boustany's vote to roll back regulation of Wall Street, a measure that would strengthen monopolies and hurt small business people, many of whom were Tea Party members. I heard nothing about federal and state subsidies to oil companies, lowered corporate taxes, the role of oil in the erosion of the Louisiana coast, or unclean waters. Their voting records told where they stood. Boustany voted to cut funds for the Environmental Protection Agency, to block fuel-efficiency standards for cars, to ban federal fracking safeguards, to halt Clean Air Act protections for smog, soot, and mercury pollution, and to gut the core of the Clean Water Act—the federal "floor" of water quality standards that states must meet. He voted to redefine "healthy air," basing the definition of it on the feasibility and cost to polluting industries, and not on human health. Representative Landry did the same. On the League of Conservation Voters' scorecard of members of Congress, both Boustany and Landry had earned a lifetime score of 6 out of a total possible 100. Louisiana produced 31 pounds of toxic release per person to air, water, and land in 2012. By comparison, the United States as a whole produced 11 pounds per capita. Neither candidate said a word about all this.

  Silence on the environment extended to the minor candidates in this race as well. At a "Meet You at the Polls" gathering of several hundred citizens in Crowley, a libertarian vowed to "get the government out of the way" so Louisiana can "plant hemp in rice fields." A Democrat began, "I don't agree with everything the Democratic Party or the president say," before declaring himself pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-gun, and pro-oil. Only one candidate came out for "protecting our coast," in part because it would "protect our energy industry."

  At a Landry union hall campaign stop, three dozen retired plant workers sit around wooden picnic tables eating a rice-and-bean dinner from paper plates. When it comes up, they speak of the Democratic Party as a tattered memory from a distant past. One man says that he'd been waiting until his father died before he voted Republican, a comment greeted with knowing laughter around the table. Another man adds, "The only Democrat left in my family is my wife, and she's voting for Landry." More laughter. A former so-called blue dog democratic state, since 1970 Louisiana has voted Republican in seven out of ten presidential elections. And in such older white crowds, this shift rightward seems bound to continue. As one man explains, "A lot of us have done okay, but we don't want to lose what we've got, see it given away." When 1 ask him what he saw as being "given away," it was not public waters given to dumpers, or clean air given to smoke stacks. It was not health or years of life. It was not lost public sector jobs. What he felt was being given away was tax money to non-working, non-deserving people— and not just tax money, but honor too. If that tax money could come back to citizens—as a sort of "raise" in the midst of a three-decade-long national economic lull, why not?

  As with Mike Schaff, Lee Sherman, and the Arenos, conversations moved toward this rift between deserving taxpayers and undeserving tax money takers, those in a class below them. Repeatedly, I was to find, this rift was an emotional flashpoint, especially for men who worked in oil and other predominantly male jobs in the private sector. But it was a guy thing to hunt and fish, too, and these days if the ducks they shot ate fish from Bayou d'Inde, it took some of the fun out of hunting. Still, if it is between animals and people, the man at the Landry union hall table concludes, people matter more: "These days, American men are an endangered species too."

  The General, the Psychological Program,

  and "Just Enough Talk of Jobs"

  Meanwhile, a potential candidate for governor of Louisiana has bro
ken the silence on the environment held all along this campaign trail. He's dressed in army fatigues and stands six feet five inches tall when he gets up from a Baton Rouge hotel breakfast table to greet me. We adjourn to a conference room where he sits, takes off a military cap bearing three large stars, and lays it on the table. A much decorated lieutenant general in the U.S. Army, in September of 2005 General Russel Honoré led the Joint Task Force and a thousand National Guardsmen to rescue stranded residents of New Orleans overwhelmed by the floodwaters and chaos of Hurricane Katrina. Taking up that job after it was famously bungled by FEMA chief Michael Brown, a Bush contributor and Oklahoma lawyer with an interest in horses, Honoré became known as a "Category 5 General" (a term used to describe storms). He reminded guardsmen to point their guns down, because "we're on a rescue mission, damn it." Beloved to thousands of rescued Katrina flood victims, the General became a statewide legend.

  Born the youngest of twelve children in Point Coupe Parish, south of New Orleans, the General is by origin black Creole, though people affectionately call him the "Ragin' Cajun" for his wide strides, forceful manner, and authoritative bass voice. The mayor of New Orleans called him "a John Wayne kind of dude." But this is a serious underestimation. For the expressions that cross Honoré's long face, with its aquiline nose and thin salt-and-pepper mustache, alternate between compassion, humor, thoughtfulness, and indignation. He's an empathy wall leaper.