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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Like nearly everyone I spoke with, Donny was not one to think of himself as a victim. That was the language of the "poor me's" asking for government handouts. The very word "victim" didn't sit right. In fact, they were critical of liberal-sounding talk of victimhood. But I began to wonder whether the white, older conservatives in southwest Louisiana—Team Player, Worshipper, Cowboy—were not themselves victims. They were braving the worst of an industrial system, the fruits of which liberals enjoyed from a distance in their highly regulated and cleaner blue states.

  Further disagreements were later brought to the Sunday dinner table of Brother Cappy and Sister Fay. Accepting twenty thousand Syrian refugees, as President Obama proposed? No! comes the chorus around the table. Yes, says Mike Tritico. Who for president? Donald Trump! Donny says. No, says Mike. Issue by issue, so it goes.

  Meanwhile, as we scrape the last delicious morsels from our dessert plates—no one had said no to the strawberries and Brother Cappy had never reached for the Vidalia onion—Tritico makes a last try to bait his adversarial friend.

  "So Donny, how do you feel about crossing the I-10 bridge?"

  "If my kids weren't with me," Donny answers, smiling. "I'd drive fast."

  13

  The Rebel: A Team Loyalist

  with a New Cause

  Handmade signs bob and lurch above the heads of the sparse crowd: "Clean Water for Baton Rouge," "Friends of Lake Peigneur," "Clean Water for Clean Seafood," "Oil Companies: Fix What You Broke." A rotund musician dressed in loose purple pants, a striped shirt, and a white fedora sits with his washboard, waiting to start his three-person Cajun band. A protestor walks about dressed as a large brown pelican. Organizers had tried to rouse interest, but in a city of 230,000, on this sunny Saturday, only about 150 have shown up.

  It was at this rally on the front steps of the state house in Baton Rouge that I'd first met Mike Schaff. He was dressed in a bright yellow T-shirt with "Bayou Corne Sinkhole" printed on the front. With a protective arm, he had brought forward a victim to the microphone to speak before the gathering, but it was he who spoke with tears in his voice. "Five hundred and eighty-two days this woman has been out of her home," he told the crowd, and there were over "three hundred victims just like her." Since the disaster, Mike had been transformed into an activist. He didn't want others to go through the same ordeal. How, I wondered, did his new activism alter his feelings about the market-loving, government-hating Tea Party he so strongly embraced?

  Mike had described himself as a "water baby. When I was about three, back when we lived on the Armelise Plantation, my daddy used to take me with him crawfishing. He's set the traps in a nearby swamp. Then he'd put me in a plastic tub and pull it along in the water as he waded through the water, emptying the traps. I loved it." Now as a sixty-four-year-old man, Mike had a modest home facing a canal issuing onto this glorious bayou that was the paradise he had yearned to retire to—a home on the water. Sitting alone at the kitchen table of his empty house a year and a half after the disaster, and some time after the rally, with cardboard boxes packed, the crack in his living room floor a reminder of recent earthquakes, a gas monitor in his garage, and a wary eye on feral cats, Mike had begun to write letters concerning key bills to members of the Louisiana legislature:

  April 24, 2014

  Friends, Supporters, and Distinguished Senators,

  My name is Mike Schaff.... My desire was to live the rest of my days here and in my last will and testament to be able to turn over this precious jewel to my survivors.... Instead... the only legacy that I will be able to pass on are the countless tears that have been shed, the disrespect that we have been shown by both Texas Brine and our state officials themselves, and the cruel reality that despite hopes of a short-lived incident, the fact is that this tragedy can never truly be remedied...

  Mike Schaff, Resident of Paradise

  Stolen, Bayou Corne, Louisiana

  He was speaking for Senate Bill 209, which would require companies to give victims the replacement value of lost homes within 180 days of an accident. The language of the bill was dry. Seated in the Louisiana legislature were many oil men—owners, past company employees, investors, and recipients of campaign donations—and the bill was tabled.

  On another issue, Texas Brine had asked for permission from the state to flush toxic wastewater into the sinkhole it had caused, and Mike Schaff wrote the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to object: "To Ms. Hatch,... Discarding polluted water back into the Sinkhole is... akin to allowing BP to skim the oil from the Gulf of Mexico and dump it back into the Gulf."

  And so it went, bill after bill, and speech after speech. For now he had become—still resisting the term—an environmental activist. By August of 2015 he had written fifty letters to state and federal officials. He had appeared in twenty local television interviews, fifteen print interviews, and five national and international television interviews. "This is the closest I've come to being a tree-hugger," he tells me with a rueful smile. After the sinkhole disaster, Mike had helped gather neighbors in a desperate circle of self-help. During that meeting, someone suggested inviting General Russel Honoré. Mike recalled imagining the General wouldn't come out for such a small group. But when the General responded immediately, something new emerged: the Green Army. As the General was to tell me in a separate interview, "As soon as I drove home from that first meeting, and thought about Mike, it occurred to me he would be great to work with, and we needed to start something big. The Green Army then became an umbrella organization for many small groups such as Baton Rouge Aquifer Protection, Restore Louisiana Now, and the Lower Mississippi Riverkeepers—one that could speak with the serious authority they would need to stand up to oil and the politicians who wanted to gut the EPA."

  "A lot of people think the environment is a soft, feminine issue," the General mused. "We need Mikes." Don't be a Cowboy in enduring pollution, he seemed to say. Be a Cowboy fighting it.

  But each time Mike rose before an audience to speak about Bayou Corne, he placed his hand over his mouth, delivered a few sentences in a cracked voice. "I've had a rough time because all the emotions rushed back over me as they have tended to do lately," he told me about a talk he gave to a Tea Party group. "The wound is still so fresh." Mike was brought up to admire Cowboys. "Southern men don't cry," he tells me, "and I haven't been much of a weeper. Still, he is disconcerted to discover himself choking up while speaking to the public about the disaster. "I pray one day I'll be able to speak with no tears, just anger," he tells me.

  Before the sinkhole, Mike had worked all his life for oil, an ardent, conservative Republican and, since 2009, an unconflicted Tea Party loyalist. He was a "free-market man," he told me. But how free were people when companies were free to make methane gas bubble in your front yard? What was the Tea Party answer to that? This was the question before him.

  Mike felt he had patiently "stood in line" too long for the American Dream. He had worked hard for a boss and company he liked, but like the 90 percent of Americans who saw no rise in income, Mike was caught in the long, dreary wait. He took offense at certain remarks rumored to have been made by a pro—Texas Brine wife of a retired Exxon engineer who lived in Bayou Corne: "She's one of thirty or forty owners of fancy-dancy homes on the other side of the highway," Mike remarked. And she "let slip that our housing was substandard. The home owners association on our side of the road allows trailers on house lots; on their side, they don't." He felt he'd done okay, but was vulnerable to nasty jibes like that. And more wealth felt within reach. Mike twice remarked on "millionaires" in the local area. One was the heavily bearded star of the reality television show Duck Dynasty, who combined conservative views with Cajun frontier skills. The other was a short, bearded man in T-shirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes standing in the back row at a meeting of Sinkhole victims with Texas Brine, which I was attending with Mike. He introduced himself as "a poor" man, but the crowd tittered knowingly. No; he dressed poor, but he was rich. And ther
e were others around like him, Mike said, with more money than him. From a shotgun home on the Armelise sugarcane plantation to a college education, a professional career, and a home on Bayou Corne, Mike had done well, but he didn't seem sure it was well enough.

  Mike loves to fish, boat, and watch the outstretched wings of the egrets, white ibis, and roseate spoonbills. His e-mail handle is "Swampman." But through the years, he found little daylight time for any of this. "Hey, I haven't seen a month's vacation since I was twenty-two," he says ruefully. As an "estimator," he had calculated the size, strength, heat- and pressure-withstanding properties, and cost of materials needed to build enormous oil storage tanks and drilling platforms. He had been given only one week off a year for the first five years—sick time and vacation combined. For the next five, he was given two weeks off, and after ten years, three. For his entire working life, Mike had yearned for daylight leisure to spend in nature. So on the verge of retirement, he could hardly wait. Time with his new wife, time fishing and hunting, time with his grandchildren.

  Then came the sinkhole.

  After the last church service in Bayou Corne, in which the community sang "Amazing Grace" in French, his neighbors and friends scattered to camper-trucks, motels, and relatives' guestrooms, leaving Bayou Corne a ghost town encroached on by thirty-two acres of toxic sludge. All the fun times they'd had—at crawfish boils and fish-fries, at Miss Eddy's Birdhouse, the local Mardi Gras parade of Bayou Corne Hookers—all gone. Mike had tried to get the loss behind him. But three years later, he is still saying, "Bayou Corne will always be home."

  In his new activism, Mike's long background in oil became a great asset. He knew the geology. He knew the economics. He knew the local lay of the land. He'd gained firsthand knowledge of dangerous chemicals. As a child he had crouched in the sugarcane field to watch the Piper Cub crop dusters fly low, their wheels nearly leafing through the tops of the cane stalks. After the pilot had sprayed DDT clouds and started to rise at the end of the row, Mike would pop up from the cane into the pesticide cloud to watch the plane turn for another pass. He knew about unawareness. But what was new for Mike was a close-up view of the politics—especially the attitude toward the environment expressed by Republican governor Bobby Jindal.

  Closer to home, Mike found himself wedged uneasily between two groups. On matters of government and tax, he was 100 percent with the Louisiana Tea Party. Corrupt state officials had seemed to "cut in ahead" of him, as in the deep story. They were nothing like the self-abnegating nuns he thought public servants should resemble. He had low respect for most of the Louisiana regulatory officials and, in theory, little for their federal counterparts. But in one instance, when he doubted state officials who claimed to detect no oil in the Bayou Corne ground, Mike called for the more reliable "Feds" to double-check.

  But now Mike's new environmental comrades were 99 percent liberals— with their own different deep story, as I'll suggest later. "I'd be okay with 70-30," he says. He agreed with them that Louisiana "gave out drilling permits like candy." He agreed with them on fracking, and on getting industry to repair the coast their actions had destroyed. He agreed on alternative energy. Louisiana was 42nd out of 50 states on that one. He didn't agree with liberals on funding Head Start, Pell college grants, Obamacare, or Social Security. And that was fine. But in the back of his mind, Mike wanted to add the environment to the agenda of the Tea Party. How tough a sell would that be? He wanted to find out.

  The Disaster Before the Sinkhole

  Disasters could occur, get forgotten, and occur again. Like Harold and Annette Areno, Mike was now a rememberer. And the challenge he faced was how to make Bayou Corne the last accident of its kind, one everyone would remember.

  In 1980, an even more disastrous drilling accident occurred in Lake Peigneur, over a hundred miles west of Bayou Corne Sinkhole. Texaco had drilled a hole in the bottom of the lake and punctured an underlying salt dome. The resulting whirlpool had sucked down two drilling platforms, eleven barges, four flatbed trucks, a tugboat, acres of soil, trees, trucks, a parking lot, and an entire sixty-five-acre botanical garden. Miraculously, no one died. Days later, nine barges popped back up; two were never found. One man fishing in the lake that fateful day had tied his motorboat to a tree. But the tree itself began to move toward the vortex. Noticing it, the man quickly untied his boat from the moving tree and roared away at top speed.

  But years later, a memory-softening documentary appeared about the Lake Peigneur disaster. Narrated in a laconic tone that placed these events in the distant past and focused on amusing ironies, the film—produced by the local Chamber of Commerce—seemed to relax the viewer. The narrator expressed gratitude that no humans died, of course. But he avoided blame of Texaco and focused instead on the small drill bit that seemed to have punctured the dome by itself. The film ends with an image of birds flying over the placid lake and a tourist bureau website inviting tourists to visit the site "where the accident happened." In fact, a video on the disaster has become an attraction in the Rip Van Winkle Gardens brochure: "Watch a salt mine swallow a lake at Rip Van Winkle Gardens on Jefferson Island, then tour Rip's Rookery, where roseate spoonbills nest every spring."

  That was not the end. Only eight months after the Bayou Corne Sinkhole, the state issued a permit to a drill once again—in a massive new project in Lake Peigneur. It gave permission to the nation's largest distributor of natural gas, AGL Resources, to dredge the lake and drill three "waste wells" within which to deposit toxic waste. It granted permission to dig three additional wells to store natural gas, and another to drill for brine, all inside the salt dome underlying Lake Peigneur. "Thank God they decided the salt dome wasn't okay to store nuclear waste!" Mike declares.

  Memory was short. The drilling company at Bayou Corne Sinkhole (2012) had forgotten the disaster of Lake Peigneur (1980). Now Lake Peigneur AGL Resources was forgetting—or overriding—both disasters. The Cowboys were running the regulatory agency. Save Lake Peigneur and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) jointly sued the state. A state judge put a stay on drilling, and at this writing, the matter rests there.

  Alone at the dining table in his ruined home, Mike fired off a letter imploring a state senator to vote to ban, for a year, new permits to store hazardous waste and brine in underground cavities in salt domes, until stricter guidelines were developed. It was aimed at stopping drilling in Lake Peigneur. The bill did not pass.

  Mike took on yet another big cause—the Louisiana Tea Party itself. Why couldn't they join a good fight? The coastal land of Louisiana had long been slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. The state's coast provides 40 percent of the nation's wetlands, and its commercial fisheries provide a quarter to a third of the nation's seafood. Experts agree that a major cause of the land's subsidence is the extraction of oil and saltwater intrusion. Over the years, oil companies have dredged hundreds of canals and laid down pipeline through which oil drilled in the Gulf has been piped inland. Saltwater seeps in along the canals, killing grasses that once provided protection against Louisiana's frequent tropical storms. Since 1930, the state had already lost an area equal to the size of Delaware—an average football field every hour.

  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) faced an astonishing new task: de-listing coastal postal addresses. Gone is Yellow Cotton Bay, once a prime fishing settlement in Plaquemines Parish. Gone are Little Pass de Wharf and Skipback Bay. The church in Grand Bayou stands on stilts; a small cemetery is accessible only by boat. Thirty-one communities are now listed only in the historical record. Residents of Isle de Jean Charles are the first "climate refugees" to receive federal help moving to dry land.

  In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the state legislature set up the Southeast Flood Control Commission to come up with a plan for protecting Louisiana from floods. They concluded that the best course of action was to fill in the canals and repair the shore. Since this was a task the oil companies had in their contracts agreed to do,
and had not done, in 2014 the commission did what had never been done: it sued the ninety-seven responsible oil companies. Governor Jindal quickly squashed the upstart commission. He removed members from it. He challenged its right to sue. In another unprecedented move, the legislature voted to nullify—retroactively—the lawsuit by withdrawing the authority to file it from those who had done so. A measure (SB 553) called for costs of repairs to be paid, not by the oil companies, but by the state's taxpayers.

  Mike saw his chance. Still writing from his dining room table in Bayou Corne, he addressed fellow members of the New Orleans—based Louisiana Tea Party. Lower taxes Surely, they would get behind this one, he thought, so he arranged to meet the group at the TJ Ribs steakhouse in Baton Rouge.

  But, presented with the idea, the Tea Party faces went blank. The environment? That was a liberal cause. One man confused the Green Army with the Green Party. To Mike's astonishment, another member suggested moving the burden from the Louisiana taxpayer to the nation's taxpayers. "It was a total bust," he told me later. "I'd invited the General and I had to apologize to him for wasting his precious time."

  Undaunted, Mike tried again with a different Tea Party gathering, this time in Ruston in north central Louisiana. Again, he asked General Honoré, and again the General spoke, this time wearing his American flag and eagle necktie. The issue was saltwater intrusion into their drinking water, and this time party members listened. "Why leave the issue of the environment to the left?" Mike argued. "It should be our issue too."

  But how, I wondered, did that work—putting care for the environment together with the Tea Party call to defund—if not abolish—the EPA, along with other agencies of government? Mike's answer was the free market. "Follow the money," he said. "Make it in the financial interest of everyone to do the right thing. Texas Brine took risks, but it bought insurance. And that insurance company took out back-up insurance. It's in the financial interest of those insurance companies to make sure accidents don't happen. Let them be the regulators." Then he added, "The insurance companies need to be bonded [third-party guarantees promising to pay compensation if problems occur]. That will do it. All we need from the federal government are jails, courts, laws, and bonding. You regulate companies without federal regulators."