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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  10

  The Team Player: Loyalty Above All

  "You can tell I'm a Republican, Janice Areno says as she invites me to sit down in her office. Elephants fill three shelves of a wall opposite her desk. One is blue-and-white porcelain, a second is gold, a third is red, white, and blue and stands near a young child's drawing of a yellow one. One is shaped into a teapot. Another holds an American flag. There are large elephants and small, wooden and glass. There are elephants standing and elephants trotting. Next to her awards for outstanding service to her community and photos of relatives, the elephants had been gathered, over the years, from bake sales, luncheon raffles, and Republican conventions. "I see an elephant, I feel proud of this country."

  I am seated across from Janice (pronounced Jan-EECE) in her spacious office where she has long worked as an accountant for Lacassane, a land management company in Lake Charles. She is the daughter of Harold Areno's oldest brother, and she herself grew up not far from Bayou d'Inde. She is a short woman with a purposeful handshake and a lively face who dresses in a no-nonsense gray pantsuit and practical shoes. She wears neither jewelry nor make-up; in this way, she "dresses Pentecostal," as she puts it. But with her somewhat mannish outfit and close-cropped brown-gray hair, she explains, "In some ways, I don't dress Pentecostal." Her manner is direct, forceful, usually good-humored. Across the desk, during our first of many meetings, she punches out a series of well-articulated opinions on a wide range of issues, and then comments humorously, aside, "You get me talking about all the burrs under my saddle." Then she quips, "Maybe I'll visit you in Berkeley and you can introduce me to naked hippies.

  A blizzard of papers covers her large wooden desk. "Tax season," she explains. "I do returns for the cleaning lady and the computer guy free, and I just finished taxes for the daughter of a co-worker." She's also been calling around to everyone she knows to donate food and furniture to a friend's relative, a soldier who had just returned from a second tour in Iraq to discover that his wife had abandoned their three small children. The oldest was feeding the younger ones remnants of stale cereal. Janice had joined her church's compassionate effort to rally around the man.

  We joke. On a later visit to Lake Charles, I bring her a San Francisco 49ers cap; she is an ardent Dallas Cowboys fan. She tells me she'll wear it deer hunting, but can't promise to root for the 49ers. In truth, her home team is the right wing of the elephant, the Republican Party. Her loyalty to it defines her world.

  Sixty-one and single, she is devoted to a large extended family and notes proudly, "I raised my sister's kids like my own." One nephew, now grown, lives in a trailer on her property and is helping her construct rooms in her large new home to accommodate one sister, maybe two, and anyone else it works out with. At Lacassane, Janice is usually the last to leave the office at night. She oversees the management of 21,000 acres of land, long ago part of a rice and soybean plantation. Throughout the years, the land has also been leased for hunting and oil and gas exploration. Lacassane also runs a large hunting lodge called Jed's Cabin, licenses underground pipeline rights of way, and manages timber.

  I ask Janice if we could visit her former school, church, and home in Sulphur, just west of Lake Charles. We leave her office, walk into the parking lot, and climb into her silver SUV. Fishing rods rattle in the back, along with a three-pound bag of pecans "crushed but not shelled" that she plans to give away to friends. Sulphur is an industrial town of 20,000 built in the 1870s. Out of the car window I see signs of many other lines of work in Louisiana: Richard's Boudin and Seafood Market, Sulphur Pawn and Discount Center, Bebop's Ice House, lumber yards, barber shops, Family Dollar stores, Walgreens, J.C. Penney, PayDay Loans of Sulphur, and EZ Cash.

  As we head for her old school, she begins to describe her childhood. "I was born in the middle of the pack, fourth of six. My dad was the oldest of ten, and my mom was the youngest of seven, and everyone married and had kids. On Daddy's side alone I have forty-six cousins, and on my mom's side it's about the same. One of my mother's sisters had eleven." Like many of those I talked to, Janice describes her childhood as "poor but happy." "My mother was a homemaker, but, boy, she cooked up a storm morning and night and washed for eight in a washhouse."

  "I worked hard all my life. I started at age eight and never stopped," Janice begins. In the course of her work life, she had learned to tough things out, to endure. Endurance wasn't just a moral value; it was a practice. It was work of an emotional sort. Not claiming to be a victim, accommodating the downside of loose regulations out of a loyalty to free enterprise—this was a tacit form of heroism, hidden to incurious liberals. Sometimes you had to endure bad news, Janice felt, for a higher good, such as jobs in oil.

  I was discovering three distinct expressions of this endurance self in different people around Lake Charles—the Team Loyalist, the Worshipper, and the Cowboy, as I came to see them. Each kind of person expresses the value of endurance and expresses a capacity for it. Each attaches an aspect of self to this heroism. The Team Loyalist accomplishes a team goal, supporting the Republican Party. The Worshipper sacrifices a strong wish. The Cowboy affirms a fearless self. Janice was a Team Loyalist.

  Janice has not left her love of rural life behind. "I learned to handle a shotgun when I was six, picking off cottonmouth and copperhead snakes from a boat," she tells me. "Now I hunt deer, duck, and boar in season, and I fish on weekends. My daddy used to say if you shoot 'em, you clean 'em and eat 'em. Until I was forty, all my brothers and sisters did that. Now I take the meat to be ground into sausage."

  We pass Janice's elementary school, named after the German scientist Herman Frasch, who developed a method of mining sulfur. Her high school's official emblem was a miner's hardhat, crossed pick, and shovel; its school colors were red, white, and blue. Janice had been in the Honor Society and 4-H, and she was a leader on the debate team, following that up with a BA from nearby McNeese University and a career in accounting. Her father had not been so lucky, she told me. As the oldest of ten, he was forced to quit school early to help his father raise a garden to feed a family of twelve.

  We stop in front of Janice's church, get out, pop the trunk, and carry in boxes of cups, plates, and hand wipes. These are to be used at a church supper to raise money for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. "People have stopped giving money for our boys, but they're still over there," she said. "We still have to care." We get back in her SUV and drive on.

  Janice's talk of family focuses mainly on her father. "He had a third-grade education and supported a family of eight. He could do a lot of things, like mend a hole in fishing net like no one you ever saw," she says. At nineteen he learned pipefitting, joined the local union, and worked for more than thirty years at Cities Service (now Citgo). "He was never on disability or unemployment," she says proudly. "He could never have supported us all without the opportunity to work at the refinery." After he retired, her parents drove their camper truck to Utah and Colorado, working as fruit pickers, and "had lots of fruit, and I'm glad they got the chance to travel before he died."

  The SUV slows down, and we pass a modest building that hardly stands out from the homes across a hedge on each side. This was where, as a small girl, Janice belonged to a full gospel church (which refers to speaking in tongues, prophecy, and gifts of healing) and attended Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night—"no missing." Her grandfather had been a founding board member of this now relocated church, her dad had been treasurer. Now Janice was chairman of its board.

  Diligence, Industry, Party

  It was in church that Janice first learned the honor of work, she says. "As an eight-year-old girl, I swept out the whole church by myself after Sunday and Wednesday services, and mowed the lawn. I cleaned out the bathrooms, the boys and the girls, in back of the church. My parents would drop me off and pick me up later." She kept that job as she grew older, but added another job at a Tastee Fee stand. After high school, "I put myself through McNeese working forty hours a week as a telep
hone operator. I worked 1:30 to 10:00 P.M. and 3:00 to 11:00 P.M. and 4:00 P.M. to 12:00 A.M. It was hard to work long hours and get up to go to school the next morning, hurrying to get your studying in between. I only had one weekend a month off, no summers. It was rough." After that, she got a job in the company she works for still.

  Janice is stoutly proud that, like her dad, she never "took a dime from the government.... For five years at the telephone company and forty-three years here ... I never one time ever drew an unemployment check or got any government assistance," she says, adding, "I did get a small student loan when I was going to college—back then the government didn't just give it to you—and I paid every nickel of it back."

  Getting little or nothing from the federal government was an oft-expressed source of honor. And taking money from it was—or should be, Janice felt—a source of shame. The sharpest "burr under my saddle," Janice declares, is "people who take government money and don't work."

  "I know guys who work construction who quit so they can draw unemployment to hunt in season." It was the same with disability payments, she said: "A friend's daughter has a husband who works long enough to get hurt and puts in for disability. My own cousins, uncles, and brothers have done it. Sometimes there weren't jobs; then it's great to have welfare," she allows. "But when there are jobs, why couldn't they mow a church yard, or fold clothes at a care center, or clean out the school bathrooms? We pay them to do nothing—first through TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] and now through SSI [Supplementary Security Income, for elderly or disabled]. That's not right. They should do something to help." (On this, see Appendix C.)

  Work had been a passport out of fear, poverty, and humiliation for her father and others a generation back. But Janice doesn't base her own sense of honor or that of others just on money. She doesn't base it on how gifted she is in her work, or whether her job makes for a better world—at least, none of this comes up. If people work as hard as she does, it is a better world.

  Her feeling about work is part of a larger moral code that shapes her feelings about those ahead and behind her in line for the American Dream. "Hard" is the important idea. More than aptitude, reward, or consequence, hard work confers honor. It comes with clean living and being churched. Those getting ahead of her in line don't share these beliefs, she feels. Liberals—those associated with the social movements that brought in the line cutters—share a looser, less defined moral code, she feels. Liberals don't give personal morality itself its full due, probably because they aren't churched. Janice opposes abortion except under certain circumstances, but imagines there are "fifty million abortions a year, probably all Democrats." (She pauses for a moment of dark humor: "Maybe I should rethink that position.") With Supreme Court approval of gay marriage, with federal welfare for the idle, with fewer Americans "churched," with the PC amnesia concerning the heroism of the young boys who died for the South (however misguided the Confederate cause), her piece of America seems like a small, brave holdout against a national tide. The American Dream itself has become strange, un-Bibled, hyper-materialized, and lacking in honor. Even as she stands patiently in line, she is being made to feel a stranger in her own land. The only holdout for the better aspects of the past is the Republican Party.

  If you have a job, you should apply yourself to it, even if you face a little risk, Janice feels. "Two of my brothers are pipe welders, and the guys they work with would stop work for small stuff," she complains. "On one job, the guys were welding aluminum. It helps to counteract the fumes you inhale if you drink milk, so the company brings them ten o'clock milk. It's in the union contract. If the company didn't bring them their milk at ten o'clock, thirty guys would wobble the job [stop working]. Now is that stupid or what? It wouldn't have killed them, one day. They could have brought their own milk." Janice's was a company perspective. For a period, she worked for the Lake Area Industry Alliance, visiting schools to explain the benefits of industry to students who might be getting another story from home or from the liberal media.

  Work has a disciplinary function. "If there aren't jobs around, well, get people working on the highways, using wheelbarrows and shovels instead of all the dump trucks," she says. "When people got home at night, they'd be tired and wouldn't be out drinking or doing drugs."

  Janice had even cooked up an imaginative scheme to bring jobs back to America: "America needs to dig up every rock and every headstone" of American veterans of World War II buried in France—which "hasn't been a good friend to us"—she declares, and "bring them back to American land, and let American workers mow the lawns around them with American lawnmowers."

  If we can't substitute wheelbarrows for dump trucks, or import cemeteries to bring morality to the idle, her thoughts turn to war. "I'm not advocating war so people can work," she adds hastily, "but there's a positive side to the war—manufacturing missiles, Humvees, sewing uniforms—it's work."

  Not everything in Sulphur concerns work, she tells me. We are coming up on an enormous fairgrounds, part of Sulphur's newly built arena and events center, with a 14,000 square foot ballroom for Mardi Gras and a rodeo arena for the Silver Spurs Rodeo "barrel contests" (where riders steer horses around barrels) and steer-roping contests. "On rodeo days, parents don't just drop their kids off and pick 'em up later," Janice says. "These are family events."

  Janice understands the fix the idle are in; welfare gives them more than an available job would. "You can get an $8-an-hour job and maybe clear $250 a week," she says. "With welfare what it is, it's not worth it to get a real job." However, she and others like her speak of seeing with "my own eyes" parents driving up in Lexus cars to drop their children at a government-supported Head Start program. The government is trying to get her to feel sorry for people like that, Janice feels. She's not having it. Get a job.

  Looking away from the wheel for a moment, Janice stares at me with eyes wide, preparing for my shock. "Some people think I'm too hard-nosed," she declares, "but I think if people refuse to work, we should let them starve. Let them be homeless." That 44 percent of the Louisiana budget that came from the federal government, much of it for welfare to the poor, she would just as soon give back. Giving money in return for nothing? That broke her moral rule: reward for work. So for her, there was no paradox in Louisiana coming in 49th in the human development index and 50th in overall health and right-wing resistance to the idea of federal government aid. They could have whatever rank they wanted, if they didn't work.

  We stop at a drive-through Burger King to buy two Whopper Juniors, sit down to eat them with some large sweet teas, then head to Janice's dream house. Having grown up blocks away from Citgo, Janice has bought a plot of land in north Sulphur so as to be far away from the plants—a retirement "barn," as she calls it. She is constructing it, room by room, with the help of her nephew, who is planning to live there too, with his family. As we drive along, a call comes in on Janice's cell phone with a deafening clang; her nephew is checking in about a plumbing fixture.

  With my questions about the Great Paradox, I am myself another burr under Janice's saddle, but I ask her my ultimate question: what about children born poor? Is she so indignant about idle parents that she won't reach out to the child? Does she oppose Head Start or subsidized lunch? "I would hope that the child would say, 'I'm going to work hard and get me an education and good job and get myself out of this environment,' " Janice answers. Beyond that, her solution is to get children "churched" and to limit the fertility of poor women. "Some people say I'm too hard-nosed," she says again, "but after one or two children, I'd have her tubes tied." Wouldn't that be the federal government acting as Big Brother? I prod. No, she answers. "She could decline to have her tubes tied and decline federal money."

  Underlying Janice's reasoning is her idea about inequality itself. Some people may just be destined to remain at the end of the line for the American Dream. That's why she opposes redistribution of tax money from rich to poor. The fix wouldn't last. "Ten percent of the people
have 90 percent of the money, okay?" she says. "But if you even it out, in a year—even in six months—10 percent of the people would still have 90 percent of the money.

  A lot of people who win the Power Ball $247 million jackpots are bankrupt a decade later. They can't ward off beggars and cheats and don't know how to invest. We each have to find our own niche and learn to be happy where we are."

  Not only does the federal government give too much, it does too much and owns too much, she feels. "We only need it to handle military and diplomatic matters and to build roads and dredge waterways," she says. As for government ownership of public lands, "We should hold on to the Grand Canyon, part of Yellowstone, a few others, but sell the rest of the national parks for development and jobs." The government also controls too much— guns, for example. Without imagining her view would surprise me, Janice argues that handing out guns is the best way to create democracy in the Middle East. "If everybody had a gun and ammunition, they could solve their own differences. There are dictators because the dictators have all the guns and people have none. So they can't stand up for themselves. If the government takes our guns away, the same thing will happen here," she predicts darkly. Others echoed her sentiment. When Obama first took office, rumors spread that he would take peoples' guns away, and stores around DeRidder, Lee Sherman told me, sold out of ammunition. Another man told me that a minister even led his congregation to Walmart to stock up.

  The number of federal workers also seems to her "plumb out of whack." She doesn't venture a guess, but many I interviewed estimated that a third to a half of all U.S. workers were employed by the federal government—a common estimate was 40 percent. (Not knowing the figures myself, I looked them up. In 2013, 1.9 percent of American workers were civilian federal employees, and that percentage has declined over the last ten years. For more, see Appendix C.)