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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  "I have nothing against oil and gas making money in Louisiana," the General begins matter-of-factly. "But the oil companies need to clean up after themselves, and they haven't. They need to fix what they break, and they haven't. And pretty much theirs is the only voice we hear."

  "Why," I ask Honoré, "don't citizens ask politicians to clean up their environment?" The General pauses: "All the people in Louisiana hear is jobs, jobs, jobs. And there's just enough to it, that people slip into believing it's the whole story. Really they're captives of a psychological program."

  Honoré has called for cleanup of polluted rivers and abandoned oil wells, and for monitoring devices inside industrial plants, similar to those in airplane cockpits, to tell what has caused a disaster. In recent years, the General has also led what he calls "The Green Army"—a consortium of small environmental groups. "I wasn't aware of the extent of our problem until I looked out the window of the helicopter that took me to New Orleans after Katrina," the General says. "The landscape was littered for miles with debris. I remember commenting to the pilot, 'The storm must have caused that mess,' and hearing back, 'No, those are abandoned oil derricks from years back.'"

  After an hour, Honoré offers to drive me in his truck along River Road, which parallels the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a span now popularly known as Cancer Alley. "You see the river?" The General points his arm out the window at the Mississippi. I am reminded of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, and looking at the map I had been charmed by the names of the towns along it: Convent, Saint Gabriel, Saint Rose, Saint James. I knew that here over half of the nation's grain and a fifth of its other exports floated to the Gulf and out to the world.

  "You know what you're looking at?" Honoré asked. I thought I did. "That's not the Mississippi's water. That's Monsanto water. Exxon water. Shell Oil water. It's a public waterway, but that's private water. Industry owns the Mississippi now. There's hardly a public dock along it."

  The great river has long been polluted, it turns out. "Back in the 1950s," one man told me, "a steam boat left New Orleans propelled by freshly painted red paddles. By the time it had arrived upriver in Natchez, the red paint had vanished."

  Riding in the General's truck, as in Mike Schaff's truck, through the sugar plantation, I become aware of what I can't see. With Schaff, it was history. With the General, it was pollution. Indeed, most of the pollution in Louisiana is invisible to the naked eye. We drive through Gonzales, a small town situated along Cancer Alley that is promoted by the Louisiana Visitor's Bureau as the Jambalaya Capital of the World. Gonzales is the site of springtime festivals in which cooks stir enormous pots filled with 700 pounds of rice. Nearby is "a fisherman's haven," heralded by LouisianaTravel.com, near places "great for hiking and wildlife watching." The site offers a "Cajun Pride Swamp Tour" too. Gonzales seems to be a one-town ongoing party—above ground.

  But the Jambalaya Capital is sadly located on one the most polluted industrial strips in the world. A hundred and fifty facilities line the two sides of the Mississippi, an eighty-five-mile strip, each plant surrounded by chain-link fences, some with entrances whose signs proudly announce the small number of work days missed due to accidents. Many plants were built on former cotton and sugarcane plantations. Other towns along River Road—Plaquemine, St. Gabriel, Geismar, Donaldsonville—lie in parishes that in 2013 ranked in the top 3 percent of U.S. counties in reported toxic releases, according to the EPA. Louisiana is the nation's sixth leading state in generating hazardous waste, and it is third in the nation for the amount of hazardous waste it imports from other states. "We import hazardous waste from Arkansas," the General continues, eyes wide as if in disbelief, "because they've got stricter regulations than we do." Throughout the state, there are many injection wells drilled deep underground and surrounded by casing into which hazardous waste is pumped, and worrisome studies had occasionally appeared in the press about them.

  "Louisiana has a lot of oil," the General continues. "And a lot of people think that's a blessing. And if done well, it could be. But it's not done well." Companies, he points out, have drilled over 220,000 wells, found 600 producing oil fields, and built 8,000 miles of pipelines and canals in this state. Over 25,000 miles of underwater pipelines connect offshore drilling platforms to onshore refineries in Louisiana and Texas. But the companies put the state government in their pockets, the General points out, and people pay the price.

  He pulls his truck alongside an embankment bordering the Mississippi on the campus of Southern University, a formerly all-black college, his alma mater. We get out and walk across the grass to gaze at the river. He points to an island far across the way. "You see the tip of that island? They call that Free Nigger Point, because if a man could swim across the river to it, he could reach the Underground Railroad and he was free. Many couldn't swim and drowned. But today, if he gulped the water, he'd get sick and die gradually of pollution."

  "The Spill Makes Us Sad, the Moratorium Makes Us Mad"

  Combining what I could not hear in the speeches of Congressmen Boustany and Landry with what I could not see out the window of the General's truck, I began to understand how easy it would be to forget or ignore the problems with Louisiana's environment. But what if a disaster were so spectacular, so visible for miles, so long lasting, so publicized, and so far into the arena of "never before" that you couldn't ignore it? What would my Tea Party friends say?

  Of course, just such a spectacular event did occur in 2010—the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana. President Obama called it "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced." The blowout killed eleven workers and injured seventeen. It ruptured an oil pipe 10,000 feet below the surface of the water, from which oil gushed into the Gulf continuously for three months. The spill released the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez-sized oil spill every three to four days—for 87 days.

  Highly trained engineers were helpless. Anxious experts testified on television. Louisiana's 397-mile Gulf coast was critical, they said, to the life cycle of over 90 percent of all fish and 98 percent of all commercial species in the entire Gulf of Mexico. Eyeless shrimp and infant dolphins washed ashore, and oil balls appeared along an estimated 650 miles of coastline. Pelicans died. Crab traps were soiled and shrimp harvests were decimated. Oil leaked onto oyster plots. After the blowout, carcasses of 6,000 birds, 600 sea turtles, over a hundred bottlenose dolphins, and other marine mammals, including whales, washed ashore. Later studies discovered that embryos of fish, especially tuna, that had been exposed to BP oil showed distorted body shapes, hearts, and eyes.

  More bad news followed. Some 90,000 fishermen had lost their livelihood and were offered jobs to clean up the spilled oil, using their own boats, in the Vessels of Opportunity program. However, their protective gear was inadequate against the oil and the dispersant Corexit, and some developed skin lesions, blurred vision, breathing difficulties, and headaches.

  In response, President Obama ordered a six-month moratorium on deep-sea drilling until safeguards could be put in place, reasoning that it was better to have one disaster than two or more. No one knew for sure why the accident had occurred. At that time, the blowout preventer BP had used had never before been used at a depth of 10,000 feet. Even the robots used to explore the site of the blowout had never before been used, so no one knew if they would work. Thirty-two other rigs were still drilling in the Gulf using similar technology at such depths. BP itself did not object to the moratorium. Altogether, it seemed to many a wise step.

  But months later, a team of Louisiana State University researchers asked some 2,000 residents of the devastated coast, "Do you favor or oppose a moratorium that would halt offshore drilling until new safety requirements are met?" Half opposed it, and only a third favored it. When asked, "Have your views about other environmental issues such as global warming or protecting wildlife changed as a result of the oil spill?" seven out of ten answered "no." The rest—int
erestingly, the less educated and female—said "yes." The inland Louisianans I spoke with, like Congressmen Boustany and Landry, were also adamantly opposed to Obama's moratorium.

  Why? Loss of drilling revenue was one thing. But federal government "over-regulation" was another. "It's not in the company's own interest to have a spill or an accident. They try hard," one woman told me. "So if there's a spill, it's probably the best the company could do." Another recalled all the everyday things we use that are made from oil. One man even declared that "what caused the spill was overregulation. If the government hadn't been looking over BP's shoulder, it would have regulated itself, and the spill wouldn't have happened."

  One woman summed it up: "The spill makes us sad, but the moratorium makes us mad." The governor and senators of the state called for an end to the moratorium. In partial response, President Obama ended it a month early, but that earned him no points with those I spoke with. "What did Obama know up there in Washington?" they asked. In the speeches of the two congressmen a few years later, not a word was said about the spill.

  Maybe, I thought, the coastal Louisianans who opposed the ban were expressing loyalty to the oil industry and private sector, and falling into a historic refrain against the federal government. But given their vulnerability to loss and contamination, maybe they were managing strong feelings of anxiety, fear, and anger about what they already knew. Maybe they were saying to themselves, "We can't afford to worry about this. We need to set thoughts of it aside, manage our anxiety and not acknowledge that we're doing so."

  With this in mind, I returned to the Great Paradox. From my initial perspective, Louisiana, like other red states, was coping with a great number of challenges. Perhaps for better-off people of the far right, problems such as poverty, poor schools, and medical care didn't come up because such problems didn't hit them directly. Pollution hit better-off people too. But they seemed braced to tough it out. As for blame, it seemed as if Dad had left a dreadful mess, and you blamed Mom because Mom's used to absorbing blame for what goes wrong and trying to fix it, and she's still there. At least it seemed like that at first.

  Freedom to, Freedom from, Freedom for Whom ?

  So how did Louisianans look at government regulation of any sort? I thought an answer to that might help me understand the coastal Louisianans who were sad at the spill but mad at the government. Maybe it was government regulations in general they resented. At first glance, Louisiana's own policies seemed flamboyantly opposed to the very idea of regulation. With regard to alcohol, Louisiana is one of the most permissive states in the nation. You can pull into a drive-through frozen daiquiri stand and buy daiquiris in "go-cups"—the only legal proviso being that the plastic lid is pressed on and the straw is not yet inserted. At a Caribbean Hut in Lake Charles, a satisfied customer reported ordering a 32-ounce Long Island Iced Tea with a few extra shots, a piece of Scotch tape placed over the straw hole—so it was "sealed"—and drove on. And only in 2004 did it become illegal to drive with unsealed containers. There is even a late July "Defend the Daiquiri Festival" held in New Orleans—supported, naturally, by an alcohol lobbying group.

  An unlicensed vendor can sell handguns, shotguns, rifles, or assault weapons, and large-capacity magazines. A person can buy any number of guns and, except for handguns, need not register them, or report a theft of one, or hesitate to take them into parking lots and state parks. Louisiana also has a "Stand Your Ground" law, permitting a frightened homeowner to shoot first. A person can walk into a bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans with a loaded gun.

  Indeed, a gun vendor in Louisiana can keep no records, perform no background checks, and sell guns to an array of customers forbidden in other states: those with violent and firearms-related misdemeanors, people on terror watch lists or "no fly" lists, abusers of drugs or alcohol, juvenile offenders, and criminals with a history of serious mental illness or domestic violence. In 2010, the governor passed a law that permitted concealed handguns in churches, synagogues, and mosques. Louisiana has the highest rate of death by gunfire in the country, nearly double the national average.

  Still, many I talked to were ardent believers in the right to bear arms. Mike Schaff had four guns. "A 22 rifle, a 22 pistol that I got when Daddy died, a 40 Smith & Weston Automatic, and a 12 gauge shotgun. These killed varmint or deer," he explained, while "the Smith & Weston's for self-defense." He went on to describe his first wife's rifle and another long Kentucky rifle, a "show gun" he had assembled from a kit. But he now had four, which he described as "nothing for the South. Most have seven or eight guns." He didn't have a conceal and carry permit, he added, but said he would get it eventually if "things got worse."

  Looked at more closely, an overall pattern in state regulation emerges, and the Great Paradox becomes more complicated than it first seemed. Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that)— mainly white masculine pursuits—are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater. Within given parameters, federal law gives women the right to decide whether or not to abort a fetus. But the state of Louisiana has imposed restrictions on clinics offering the procedure, which, if upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court, would prevent all but one clinic, in New Orleans, from offering women access to it. Any adult in the state can also be jailed for transporting a teenager out of state for the purposes of an abortion if the teen has not informed her parents.

  Young black males are regulated too. Jefferson Davis Parish passed a bill banning the wearing of pants in public that revealed "skin beneath their waists or their underwear," and newspaper accounts featured images, taken from the back, of two black teenage boys exposing large portions of their undershorts. The parish imposed a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for a second. A town ordinance in Ville Platte (in which 54 percent of the population is black) requires residents to wear "something reflective" and visible from all directions on an outer garment when walking after dark.

  Next to the death sentence, prisons are the ultimate instrument of regulation. The United States incarcerates a higher proportion of its population than does any nation in the world outside the Seychelles Islands— more than Russia or Cuba. Louisiana incarcerates the highest proportion of its population of all the states in the union, and those inmates are disproportionately black. It also houses Angola, the nation's largest maximum security prison, in which rules are notoriously harsh. The prison is the site of the longest-standing case of solitary confinement in the nation—a black man, Albert Woodfox, who had been locked up for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours a day for forty-three years before finally being released on February 19, 2016. So while the state boasts a reputation of an almost cowboy-style "don't-fence-me-in" freedom, that is probably not how a female rape victim who wants an abortion, or a young black boy in Jefferson Davis Parish, or Albert Woodfox see the matter.

  Yet when people spoke indignantly of regulation, it was not abortion clinics and prisons that came to mind, but rather what the government was telling them to buy in stores. At a meeting of the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana, across-the-table talk of regulation focused on the promotion of fluorescent or LED light bulbs: "The government has no right to regulate the light bulbs we buy," one woman declared. "I made my husband change all my light bulbs back to the old ones." Others complained of all the "forced" salads on the menus in fast food restaurants now. "I don't need the government telling me what to eat," one woman complained. "You remember that apron that says 'If the cook ain't fat, I ain't eatin' it?'" one woman asked to a round of happy laughter. Others were irritated by a local ban on driving on sidewalks, or on having more than one RV in your yard, and still others by child-protection devices. One woman recalled an age without child-proof lids on medicine bottles or car seat belts. "We let them throw lawn darts, smoked alongside them," she said. "And they survived. Now it's like your kid needs a helmet, knee pads, and elbow pads to go down the kiddy slide." Laughter rippled around the table.

  Self-Serv
ice Regulation

  One Cub Scout den mother named Louise, a warm-hearted bookkeeper and mother of three, lives near a petrochemical plant. She believes the plants should be regulated—"We regulate everything else, why not them'?"—but had observed events that made her wonder how carefully they actually were. So she kept an informal vigil over nearby plants. "You can go months without a scare," she explains. "Then sometimes you'll hear noises or the windows rattle. You half hold your breath. We'll call: 'Dad, you all right?' [her father-in-law worked in a plant], and he'll say, 'Yeah, everything's fine.' If something happens at Firestone, I'm going to burn up my son-in-law's phone [use the phone a lot] calling everyone who knows somebody at the plant." Other times, she says, "You come over the bridge at night, and see haze hanging in the air. We have humid, heavy air in Lake Charles. It's like someone throwing covers over you, and then a smell, and you wonder, what's getting trapped?" She continues, "My house is less than three miles from Citgo, as the crow flies. We had a release today, but they said it didn't leave the confines of their property." With a laugh she adds, "So me and my neighbor, we go, 'Oh, thank goodness, just to the fence.' "

  Another woman watched the color of industrial flares rising from nearby plant smoke stacks. "If it's a strange color, I'll call up a relative or friend: 'Why is it blue today?' Or Why is it red?' Or if you hear something or smell something, you turn on the radio or TV, and see if there's anything crawling across the screen telling you what's just happened. Around the plants, pollution is personal."

  "Is the state doing all it can to assure safety?" I asked one man I sat next to at the Boat Parade in New Iberia. "I don't know. Sometimes they don't tell us the truth about what's going on because they don't want to alarm us," he replied. "And, of course, we don't want to be alarmed."

  In 2013 an explosion took place at the Axiall plant—the old PPG with a new name and management—the second in thirteen months. It sent massive, dark clouds churning upward over Lake Charles, Westlake, and eastern Sulphur, carrying hydrochloric acid, ethylene dichloride, and vinyl chloride.