Three young women—the Brantleys' daughter, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, a freshman at McNeese University-—have stayed back from church to prepare steaming roast beef, gravy, potatoes, okra, green beans, corn bread, and sweetened ice tea. (They would catch the full gospel service later that evening.) They have set two tables—one for the women, smaller, in the kitchen, and one for the men, larger, in the dining room. The two sexes normally ate at separate tables, but Mike has asked the Brantleys if it would be okay for me to sit at the men's table, so I can listen in on the weekly debate between him and Donny McCorquodale.
And that's the man I'm eager to meet: a retired telephone company worker who hates regulators. Donny is a lanky, blond, fit man in his sixties, dressed in slacks and a blue shirt, slightly slouched in his chair, quiet. He is, Tritico tells me, the younger son of a highly religious mother, well known as a Baptist prayer warrior. When Donny was growing up, like some other devotees in Merryville, his mother was said to wear long dresses, have uncut hair, and occasionally switch young girls for immodesty. Perhaps rebelling against such strict rules, Donny grew up as the playground prankster and daredevil. Now on his second marriage, Donny is raising a young family, including two children, one an adopted boy from Honduras. Known for spontaneous acts of kindness, he once saw Tritico at a church yard sale eyeing a $25 wooden organ he could not afford. Donny handed money to the seller, hailed a handyman with a dolly, and paid him to deliver the organ to Tritico's cabin. Missing a key or two, and emitting an occasional hum, the organ sat for decades in Tritico's disheveled cabin, a reminder of Donny's good heart.
A former Democrat, Donny voted for Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush because "if Al Gore believes in climate change, he's too stupid to be president." Since then, he had moved to the right of the Republican Party.
A story about Donny had long circulated around Longville, and heads always shook in disbelief at the retelling. Like Cappy, Donny had long worked for the phone company, and both men drove repair trucks. One day as Cappy was driving his truck sixty miles an hour on the freeway, he heard a honk, glanced out his truck window, and was flabbergasted to see Donny driving his truck alongside him, as legend has it, also sixty miles an hour—in reverse. Donny was also known for secretly sticking pins in coworkers' Styrofoam coffee cups to make them dribble inexplicably. He has logged forests, worked the Alaska pipelines, handled electrical wires atop telephone poles—dangerous jobs. He also exceeds speed limits and hates environmentalists: "They talk pollution to death." If Janice Areno came to endurance through a loyalty to her team, the Republican Party, and Jackie Tabor by expressing a religious attitude of renunciation, Donny came to it through a celebration of daring. He is a Cowboy.
With loaded plates, everyone seats themselves and says prayers. Brother Cappy is seated at the head of the table; Donny and Mike Tritico sit to each side of him, across the table from each other. Both Donny and Mike are white, churchgoing residents of Longville, neighbors and friends on opposite sides of an issue. They both value honor and integrity. But there are key differences between them. Although mentally unstable, Mike's mother graduated from college, and Mike himself got three years into a medical degree and two years into a master's in marine biology before dropping out. Donny's parents are not college educated, but Donny headed into a forestry degree for a while before moving on.
The two men start to talk about the Lake Charles EDC leak discovered in 1994 in the pipe between Condea Vista and the Conoco docks, the largest toxic chemical spill in U.S. history. As I noted earlier, Condea Vista had hired five hundred cleanup workers to remove soil containing EDC from beneath the forty-year-old pipeline; part of the estimated total of between 19 million and 47 million pounds spilled. Workers were not given adequate protective gear, and by the late 1990s many had begun to have trouble breathing and had sued Condea Vista.
But the problem had not ended there. An underground plume of EDC had penetrated the clay and was slowly moving toward the pilings of the enormous 1-10 bridge, which daily carries 50,000 vehicles between Lake Charles and Westlake. Madonna Massey had said the 1-10 bridge was "spooky." Jackie Tabor avoided it. Others, too, spoke of it as "strange"— without mentioning the EDC leak.
Guests have risen, refilled their plates, and reseated themselves expectantly. And a debate between Donny McCorquodale and Mike Tritico over the EDC leak under the 1-10 bridge begins.
The I-10 Bridge
"For the first time, the state highway department is talking about closing down the I-10 without building another bridge," Tritico begins. "They can't dig down to bedrock because of that spongy EDC-soaked clay. That tells you that they [the mayor of Lake Charles and city engineers] understand the danger. It's reasonable to be scared of the bridge and to wish there had been better oversight." Tritico is guided by the precautionary principle, the principle he returns to over and over in debates with Donny. "It's the principle doctors abide by: first do no harm." And to apply it to the I-10 you need good government, he feels.
"Don't jump on the company," Donny fires back. "They didn't know their pipe was leaking. They didn't realize that this was going to happen forty years back when they put the pipeline in."
Mike: "They can't say they didn't know in the 1970s what EDC would be doing to our clay today. Condea Vista and Conoco knew that EDC would ruin clay, because [the] industry conducted two different studies where they put the EDC into the local clay and it ruined it."
Donny: "They weren't convinced. Why would they believe these 'experts'? Just because some expert tells you X is true, doesn't mean X is true. You know, if you're making $1,000,000 a day on something and somebody wants you to stop it, you don't say that's the truth until you're really convinced it's the truth. I wouldn't have believed it."
Mike: "Companies contrive ignorance. They were saying: 'I'm going to believe what I want to believe even if you do give me scientific evidence.' They didn't react to information their own experts gave them."
Donny: "Experts can be wrong. You remember in 1963, when the seat belt law hit? I had a Pontiac that had a lap seat belt and I'd sit and wear it. The Chevys and Fords didn't have them. GMC trucks had a seat belt. So some people believed it was a good thing and others didn't. And later on, the regulators concluded that the lap belt wasn't the answer. So we'd all agreed to a silly regulation."
Mike: "If Condea Vista and Conoco want to hide their heads in the sand and not admit that EDC could break up clay underneath the I-10, then later, when they're found responsible, they should have to pay."
Donny: "You can't always be ready to blame the company, like those lawyers are all set to do."
Mike: "But what if it is their fault and it's your bridge? Suppose you're in the car and the bridge collapses because the clay is spongy. Then suppose you die, okay? Your family will say 'wait a minute.' The company knew they were wrecking the clay."
Donny: "You want everything to be perfect, for companies to make no mistakes, and you—and we—can't live like that. If you aim for perfection, then you're being overly cautious, because we have to be able to take risks. That's how they split the atom—risk. That's how they made vaccines—risk.
They were daring. A lot of good things happen because people dare to take risks. With all these environmental regulations, we're being too cautious. We're avoiding bad instead of maximizing good.
"To live in civilization, you've got to take risks. There will be mistakes. You can't succeed by just always being perfect. People have to learn from their mistakes. We wouldn't have made the discoveries we have, live with the world of plastics we've got—car steering wheels, computers, the telephone wires I deal with—a lot of that's plastic. We wouldn't have built this country if we were all as risk-averse as you are. Do we want to go back to life in shacks reading by kerosene? Accidents happen. They used to spill kerosene. So what? Do you wish they hadn't ever used that?"
Mike: "No one's talking about going back to kerosene or never making mistakes."
Don
ny: "Regulation is like cement: you lay it down, and it hardens and stays there forever."
A ripple of laughter circulates around the circle. The women now seat themselves around the men's table.
Donny (continuing): "Once something is regulated it's hard to un-regulate it. And so, year after year at first—it's just a little at a time—but then after a while it's like it is now, hardened cement. Everything is regulated. We're all stuck in cement."
The conversation turns toward the over-regulation of playground fights. "Children have a natural desire to dominate and try to get what they want," Donny says. "It only stops when one guy is afraid his lip is going to get busted. That's the natural order. Regulation breaks that up. We don't see the harm overregulation can do."
Mike: "I'm not talking about regulating everything or avoiding all mistakes. I just don't want us to make certain kinds of mistakes—the kinds that spill chemicals into water and give people rare brain cancers and endometriosis, or that lead innocent people to drive on collapsing bridges and die, children too. Why let that happen if there's a known way to prevent it?"
Donny: "I think we all have to take our knocks, sadly. We all make our own independent decisions. With its overload of regulations, the government is almost living our lives for us. You're not you anymore; you're it."
Mike: "So if you're driving the car on the I-10, of your own free will, and you get hurt, is it your own fault that you get hurt?"
At this point, Donny's adopted daughter, a beautiful girl of sixteen, sits down in Donny's lap. He wraps his arms around her, continuing his debate. "I would say a lot of it is. I can't say what my kids would say."
A grandson goes around the table, guest by guest, politely asking each whether they want strawberries with their ice cream.
"You can get sick," Mike Tritico tells Donny. "I have been sick. And Mother Nature in Bayou d'Inde is sick. In fact, it has been made sick by people who think like you do. And it's hard to get to a place where people feel safe enough to live creative lives when the decisions of important leaders are based on bravado."
The room is quiet. The two are approaching a real showdown.
Mike continues: "So what if you're a guy like me, who tries to find out the cause and effect of the EDC spill, and the companies won't say, and the state government won't say. So through the Freedom of Information Act, you receive 3,000 pages, redacted, blacked out so that you still don't know the truth about the spill. Why should we have to settle for that? And how could it be my own fault that I got hurt or killed?"
Donny: "If risk is to be reduced at all, it should be done by regular people themselves. I've taken some risks, when I was a logger with Willie Baldwin, and we built log bridges, chained them together, and drove over the bridge with a big load of logs. That was a risk, and one guy did get hurt. You have to live with risk. But it's real people—not the government—that should be telling us what is or isn't too risky."
Mike: "But you need some people who make it their business to know more about very complicated things, so that all available information can be brought to bear on complex issues."
Donny: "But citizens can do the job. Some citizens complained about a smelly asphalt pit and it got closed."
Mike: "But what if the pit owners hadn't agreed to close it?"
Donny: "Then get a lawyer."
And so the debate continues. Everyone now returns with second helpings of strawberries and ice cream, the women handing around coffee. Tritico feels that Donny is an unwitting mouthpiece for the chemical companies. He embraces their right to take risks with our lives. And Donny, while conceding Mike's greater information on the matter, feels Tritico speaks for the regulators, who would turn society into a giant block of cement. Through the years, their dispute has continued on the Internet. Once, after Mike arranged for a professor to give a lecture in Lake Charles on global warming, the talk was reported in an online news article. Mike spotted a discrediting comment accusing the professor of propagating "lies." The comment was anonymous, but Tritico said, "Oh, that's probably Donny."
Sister Fay and the other women, now seated at one end of the men's table, turn the conversation to government welfare, out-of-wedlock births, addiction, and the reluctance to work for your living. Women on welfare have six or seven children, Fay notes. The consensus around the table is that the government could support one out-of-wedlock child but not the remaining "five or six," since the woman in question should have learned her lesson.
The debate between Mike and Donny echoes a larger finding from a 1997 study of four hundred workers in a Louisiana chemical plant that processed materials that were carcinogenic, mutagens, and flammable. Researchers John Baugher and J. Timmons Roberts of Brown University asked workers, "How often are you exposed to dangerous chemicals on the job?" and "Do you worry about exposure to these dangerous chemicals?" Worry about exposure, the researchers reported, was only loosely related to actual exposure. Hourly crafts workers—men such as Donny McCorquodale—worried less than you'd think they would, given their exposure. Managers and clerical workers worried more. For example, 50 percent of hourly crafts workers said they were "always or often" exposed to dangerous chemicals on the job, but only 40 percent said they worried about it; a higher proportion felt exposed than were worried.
Among managers and professionals, a smaller proportion (10 percent) said they were exposed, but a higher proportion (20 percent) said they worried about it. Relative to their actual exposure, workers worried less, and managers worried more. Women in the study were more likely to listen for warnings, take them seriously, and act with precaution than men were, and minorities did so more than whites. When asked about a long list of risks, white males stood out from all other groups as being less likely to see risk. Maybe Donny was more like the white male crafts worker, and Mike Tritico was more like the manager.
The two men also differed in what they thought ought to be done about exposure. They assigned honor differently. Exposed to danger in some of his jobs, Donny tended to stand brave against it and to honor bravery. Less exposed to danger, Tritico wanted to reduce the need for bravery. Donny said, in essence, "I'm strong. You're strong. Mother Nature is strong. We can take it." In this way, he resembled the Cowboy. Tritico valued the precautionary principle and said, in essence, "The real strength we need is to stand up to industry and the almighty dollar."
In the past, Mike had taken risks of a different sort himself. He had heard of a scientist who had testified at a public meeting, pointing out the dangers of a proposed dredging project. Angry workers felt his testimony would lose them work, and after the late-night meeting they ran his car off the road. Mike himself went to the same meeting hall weeks later to warn against the same project in the presence of the same glaring men. In the end, other men offered to escort him home. One could be brave without being a Cowboy.
What was life like in the plants themselves? I wondered. Were they governed by Donny's Cowboy perspective or Mike Tritico's precautionary principle? One safety inspector for Axiall—which had an enormous explosion in 2013 and again in 2014—had the job of trying to reduce the risk of accidents. The young man climbed towers and squeezed under machines to check pipes and valves and attach small red flags to pipes that needed replacing or valves tightening. Operators didn't like him coming around because each red flag meant extra work, he said. Some waved him away, "No, not today." Then he said, "They would gang up. I'd have to call their boss, and they hated that. So when they saw me, they'd say, 'Here comes Big Brother.' It was a stressful job."
On hearing this story, a man hired as a corporate industrial hygienist, tasked with sampling acid mist in the battery-charging area in a Ford battery plant, recounted this: "To set up the air monitors, I had to wear a respirator. Staff asked me to take it off since it might make workers who saw me with it on worry about the ill effect of the air on them. But they needn't have worried. Some of the guys started to taunt me, the corporate sissy who couldn't tough it out like they [did]. But when
they laughed at me, I could see their teeth were visibly eroded by exposure to sulfuric acid mist."
Not all Cowboys are male, of course, and they hold many kinds of jobs. Among those I talked with, one was a state administrator, another an accountant, and several were homemakers. If the state of Louisiana itself had been seated at Brother Cappy and Sister Fay's dinner table, it might have taken Donny's side. For in Louisiana, as mentioned, it is legal to buy a frozen daiquiri with the lid snapped on, straw to the side, tape over the hole, at a drive-by shop. It's legal to gamble and to carry a loaded gun into a bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. In these ways, Louisiana is a Cowboy kind of state.
To Donny, the Cowboy expressed high moral virtue. Equating creativity with daring—the stuff of great explorers, inventors, generals, winners— Donny honored the capacity to take risk and face fear. He could take hard knocks like a man. He could endure. Janice Areno had accommodated environmental pollution through loyalty to job-providing industries and the party she identified with them. Jackie Tabor had accommodated it because it was "the sacrifice we make for capitalism." Donny accommodated out of respect for bravery. Each expressed a deep story self.
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Page 20
