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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  Many government workers waste taxpayer money doing useless work, she feels. Here Fox News offered her a rich supply of "can't top this" examples. First, there was Solyndra, a solar company that wasted a $535 million federal loan. Then an EPA worker was caught watching four hours of pornography films on a government computer, one called Sadism Is Beautiful. Then there was the National Endowment of the Arts-funded painting in which the artist Chris Ofili attached cow dung to the figure of the Virgin Mary. "That stuff disgusts me."

  We had returned to her SUV and were heading back, fishing gear still rattling in the back. "Okay, we're a free country," she says, "but not that free. Maybe you can make a picture of Christ out of cow manure if you want to. You can make one of Mohammed out of cow manure if you want to. Or you can make one of Buddha out of manure if you want to. But don't let my tax dollars pay you the money to do it. You go out there and shovel that manure on your own." To Janice, the "other team" was behind the failed Solyndra, the EPA's Sadism Is Beautiful man, the manure artist. Not her team. No way.

  Faces in Line

  It is not just the moral laxity of the Democrats that galls Janice, but the imposition of such laxity on her. She is badgered for sympathy, she feels, and made to feel bad if she doesn't grant it. Take sexual orientation and gender identity. "If you're gay, go be gay. Just don't impose it on me," she says. When I suggest that gay people aren't imposing a gay lifestyle on her or others, she counters: "Oh yes they are," and cites the example of Chaz Bono, the child of pop singers Sonny and Cher, who was born a girl but later changed sex to become male. Janice had followed the story closely: "He was the cutest little girl on the show when I was growing up. When Cher's son said it would have been easier to grow up, if she/he had not experienced prejudice, I think Chaz was forcing his way of living on me. He wants the whole world to change so it will be easier for him to grow up. So I say, 'Go be a man if you want to. Go be gay if you want to.' I don't mind somebody being gay if they want to be gay. Just be a regular person, go to work, mow the lawn, fish. You don't have to be shouting it from the mountaintops. Don't make me change and don't call me a bigot if I don't. That's how we're portrayed. Cher Bono said on the Jay Leno program that the 'Tea Party are fucking nuts,' and that's the consensus in liberal Hollywood."

  I return to an issue closer to her home: industrial pollution in Bayou d'Inde, where her uncle, Harold Areno, and his wife, Annette, live. "My grandfather homesteaded those forty acres before anybody even knew what a refinery was," she muses. "It's all killed now. It makes me not want to live in Bayou d'Inde and makes me sad." Industry had brought four toxic waste landfills to Sulphur, one only a block from her present home. But "they make what we need—plastic soda bottles, rubber-soled shoes, toothpaste. We need toothpaste."

  Being a Team Player meant braving problems. To do so, Janice did a kind of work she didn't even count as work: the emotional work of accommodating such things as nearby toxic waste landfills, which in her heart of hearts she never would choose to live with. Sometimes Team Players had to suck it up and just cope.

  The Rubberized Horse

  Janice and I stop off at a cousin's house to meet her nephew Dicky. Janice's sister is along too. Janice had earlier told me a shocking story about a relative with a horse, and I wanted to talk with him directly, to hear the story again from him. 1 sat with Dicky, Janice, Janice's sister, and a cousin around a small kitchen table to hear a well-worn story that still evoked sadness and surprise.

  Now a retired school teacher, Dicky had been a young boy in the 1950s. "I was riding my palomino horse, Ted," he recalls. "Normally Ted cleared ditches five feet across just fine. But this time the horse fell back into the water and sank down. He tried to climb up but couldn't. We tried to pull his reins, but couldn't get him up. Finally my uncle hauled him out with a tractor. But when Ted finally scrambled back out, he was coated all over with a strange film. I hosed him off but that only hardened the film on him. It was like a terrible glued-on wet suit. It was like rubber. The vet tried but couldn't save him, and Ted died two days later." The ditch was downstream from a Firestone polymers plant.

  Dicky was heartbroken at the time, and it still shows as he tells the story. But Janice recalls the episode slightly differently. It saddens her too, but she doesn't allow her sadness to interfere with her loyalty to industry. She shakes her head as if to say, we sure did put up with a lot of things back then, but let's not linger on too much bad news, the way environmentalists do. As a child, she recalled hearing a great roar and seeing the daytime sky turn black. It was an accidental explosion at Cities Service (now Citgo). "We all thought the world had come to an end," she says. But that was then, she thought. Today "industry is in compliance with state-issued permits," and she sees no problems.

  We leave Dicky and Janice's sister and drive on. After a while, Janice turns the SUV off the pavement onto a dirt road that winds between two large ponds. We are coming up to the "barn," her dream retirement home, built on forty acres of former lumber company land, six miles from the Sasol expansion. "I've stocked my left pond with catfish, and I'm digging the pond on the right now. We love to fish," she says proudly. She parks before an enormous building, covered by a long, flat, tin roof. The house isn't finished yet, but a rock garden in the front is already surrounding a small water fountain, a tiny peacock figurine, and two elephant statues, black and white, one with trunk upheld. Two deck chairs overlook the scene. "My sisters put that together," she remarks, chuckling.

  Although single and childless, Janice has built a six-bedroom, four-bath estate with a large common family kitchen-living room where the whole clan can gather. The refrigerator is stocked with sodas. This "barn" can house her two sisters—Joyce, who is recovering from hip surgery and is ready to move in, and maybe Judy, who lives in Texas, should she become widowed. Her nephew Kelly, helping to build the place, has his trailer on the premises and has just brought in a basket of fresh eggs along with a report that one chicken has died. One day he, his girlfriend, and his daughter, Mattie—of whom he has half-time custody and whom everyone adores— might move from the trailer to the house. In back of the barn is an RV shed, a potting shed ("Joyce loves plants"), a chicken coop, a yard for two goats, and a paddock for twelve horses. "And we have dogs," Janice adds. All along the back side of the barn is an enormous "rodeo arena" where Mattie, when she's older, can practice ropes and barrels. "I wasn't interested in a fancy place," Janice explains, "just serviceable, where we could all come." Weekends, you can see her atop her riding mower, cutting grass on eight of her forty acres.

  As I walk around Janice's American Dream house, I began to understand how the deep story makes sense to her. She had made it out of the structural squeeze—aiming high on one side, facing a flat wage, uncertainty, competitors, and government aid on the other. Maybe her salary hadn't advanced in leaps and bounds, but she'd gotten to the head of the line. And man, oh man, that had been hard. You couldn't be some wilting violet. Along the way, it hadn't been so easy enduring surprise explosions, noisy machinery, and strange odors. To live with it, Janice managed anxiety nearly hidden to her, anxiety that now felt like second nature; it kept her steady and brave. It kept her focused on the good news of Citgo for her dad, Lacassane for herself, the "buckle in the energy belt," the free market. She felt loyal to capitalism as it worked through the petrochemical plants of Sulphur, Louisiana, the system that produced the miracle of her father's wage and her own. She wanted others to want to feel loyal to it. Wasn't it obvious? What else, besides family and church, was there worth feeling loyal to?

  Such devotion wasn't respected, she felt. Indeed, she had to defend that devotion from a liberal perspective, which she associated with a morally lax, secular, coastal-based culture. It was one thing for certain categories of people to cut in line, but it was another to have false notions of the good and the true gain popularity and edge out her truer ones. Instead of the country agreeing with her community on the natural Tightness of heterosexual marriage as the center
of family life, she was now obliged to defend herself against the idea that these views were sexist, homophobic, old-fashioned, and backward. She also needed to defend her notion of the line itself. She didn't want to appear to critics as hard-hearted regarding the poor, immigrants, Syrian refugees. They simply shouldn't be ahead of her in line.

  Not only her values, but even the kind of self she proudly exhibited—an endurance self—seemed to need defending, because it too seemed to be going out of fashion along with all the blue-collar jobs. "They used to brag on my dad at the plant that he was so reliable and steady." Janice tells me proudly. But what did that count for anymore? Like her father and uncle, Harold Areno, Janice feels proud to have a rooted self, a self based in a busy, dense, stable community of relatives, co-parishioners, and friends. A newer cosmopolitan self, one that seemed uprooted, loosely attached to an immediate community, prepared to know a lot of people just a little bit, a mobile, even migratory self—this seemed to be coming into vogue. Such a self took pride in exposure to a diverse set of moral codes, but did a person with that kind of self end up thinking "anything goes"? It was frightening. It was wrong. And Janice was having none of it.

  She was doing yet more emotional work disregarding the downside of life in the buckle of America's energy belt. She was focused on the upside. Industry was a loyal friend to her, and she to it. As for pollution, "A company has a job to do; it's making things people want and need. Just like people have to go to the bathroom, plants do too. You can't just say, 'don't do it.'" But while she sided with Citgo, with Sasol, with Monsanto and other companies in the state, Janice felt obliged to set aside problems she knew existed but had decided to accept.

  After I'd known her for several years, Janice told me that her sister, Joyce, a warm-hearted woman, was planning to move in with her in her new home. Joyce had worked for Olin Chemical as a shipping supervisor checking train cars that had been filled with phosgene (used in making pesticides and, at room temperature, a poisonous gas) without a facial mask. She began to suffer from a debilitating autoimmune disease, had to cut her hours, and struggled to get better with prednisone and naturopathy. Janice herself also suffered from an ailment that she says "is probably related to growing up near the plants." She was thinking of getting her blood checked. But she wasn't letting herself get "all anxious" about it.

  Janice is already hosting monthly cookouts for the Areno clan. "We had sixty-seven people for a Good Friday cookout," she says proudly. "We have big cookouts at least once a month, twenty-five if you barely mention it, more if you spread the word. If we've got enough food, you eat; if the pots are bare, you didn't get here in time."

  Even as pine forests have given way to vast industrial compounds and voters of the South have shifted right, Janice Areno is carrying forward the best she can from her roots—a loving family, ropes and barrels, catfish fishing, deer hunting, and "yall come" cookouts-—with the fruits of a BA and forbearance. She credits her team—her party and the industry she feels it represents—with all her good fortune in life. She's a Team Loyalist. She originally moved to north Sulphur to escape the plants. But construction soon began on Sasol's new ethane cracker, only six miles away. "If Sasol has a major fire or explosion, we'd be subject to it," she says philosophically. And with the fracking boom, other new plants might be creeping closer in the future too. "But hey, you're subject to earthquakes in Berkeley, California. Things happen." In the meantime, anyone can stretch out in a deck chair in front of Janice's new home, by a small fountain, and see an object of great loyalty—pudgy, white foot midair, tusks and trunk aloft.

  11

  The Worshipper: Invisible Renunciation

  "Sunday's my favorite day," Jackie Tabor tells me, as if offering me a key to her whole life. We have just driven home from Sunday services at Trinity Baptist on my third visit with her. Her husband, Heath, has parked the tan SUV in the carport beside their high-riding Arctic Cat all-terrain vehicle with its large, deeply grooved tires muddied by his recent hunting trip.

  Jackie is a petite, svelte, youthful forty-five, with shoulder-length dark hair, gold stud earrings, a pink cotton top and flats; casual dress and intense dark eyes. She walks me through the hallway of her spacious home, restraining her excitable German shepherd, calming other dogs as we pass a hamster cage in her children's playroom. We enter a high-vaulted living room, where three antlered buck heads stare ahead from above a large stone fireplace. The dry wall behind them? "Heath did all that and shot the bucks," she says, her eyes proudly wandering around, "and designed the whole house." It seems a miracle to her that this could truly be hers.

  Heath has grilled a tuna he's caught in the Gulf of Mexico and seasoned with piquant salsa. Jackie, Heath, their two children, and I sit down, pray, and enjoy the delicious fish. Heath describes the time he was out deep-sea fishing in the Gulf and, from a great distance, watched the fire of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon explosion. He had considered the possible effects of the oil and dispersant on his catch there, but figured it was minimal. Jackie rises from the table to fetch a children's sporting magazine that features their beaming ten-year-old son, Christian, hoisting high a large, dangling yellowfin tuna. The family loves fishing, hunting, and the outdoors, Jackie tells me.

  After lunch, Jackie and I move to the living room, and the topic gravitates to her gratitude to Jesus. The Lord has given her all she treasures, she feels—a loving husband, two beautiful children, frisky dogs, and the chance to stay home with her children in a beautiful, all-paid-off home: the American Dream. Set in the affluent suburban development of Courtland Place on the outskirts of Lake Charles, with a double brick pillar entrance, hers is an earth-toned house bordered by azaleas and daisies with an American flag draped over a large stone on the neighbor's side of their driveway. Weekday afternoons, the neighborhood is empty except for homemakers and an occasional black gardener edging hedges with an electric trimmer.

  A successful contractor, Heath has built and repaired houses in the aftermaths of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ivan, Matthew, and Bertha. If Louisianans measure time in storms, Heath measures it in ripped-off roofs, broken windows, flooded basements, and jobs to do, if only he could find enough good workmen for his crew around town.

  "I Came from Nothing"

  The very first words Jackie said to me when 1 first met her at a Tea Party focus group in Lake Charles were: "I came from nothing!" Growing up, there was so much she had wanted, and so little she could have—including loving attention. Along the way, she had learned a subtle lesson about managing strong wishes, and the counterintuitive effects of doing so. Sometimes it's wise to give up wanting something very badly, she felt. In His mysterious way, the Lord may ultimately grant your wish.

  Like some others I spoke with in Louisiana, Jackie felt she had hold of an American Dream—but maybe just for now. Gesturing around her large living room, she says, "This could all vanish tomorrow!" She had worked hard. She had waited in line. She'd seen others "cut ahead," and this had galled her and estranged her from the government. Like Janice Areno, Jackie had developed a deep story self. She could accommodate the downside of the free market and sadly that included the bad news of industrial pollution, but she had her own way of doing so.

  Jackie has brought me coffee and we are sitting alone in her living room to talk. She loves nature, she tells me. While Janice Areno, brought up close to nature, had focused on the fish she caught, the deer she shot, Jackie had grown up in Chicago, had never fished, hunted, or even much got to the zoo. Ironically, when I brought up the topic of environmental pollution to Janice, she conceded that it existed and quickly moved on. But Jackie herself raised the topic and expressed her distress about it: "I saw a little boy swimming in Lake Charles last week. They should have warning signs up. What if that boy accidentally swallowed some water? He was diving. It's easy to do. It breaks my heart," she says. She feels the same about chemicals in the air and soil, and wishes, all things being equal, that for the health of her family they coul
d move. So how, I wonder, did someone who so deeply appreciated nature, who did not avoid knowledge of injuries done to it, end up celebrating industry and the unrestrained consumption of all it produced? How did she, too, live the deep story?

  Much of the answer began, as for us all, in childhood. On a snowy March day in 1990, Jackie was nineteen, jobless, homeless. She lay in the corner of the un-vacuumed living room floor in her younger sister's apartment, beside her sister's dog. "I had no address. I'd found work behind a hotel front desk in Dallas, then as a land title researcher for a contractor. I did well in a series of jobs, but I felt lost, kicked out, angry. My entire belongings fit in a suitcase. After my stepdad kicked me out, my sister was the only one I could turn to. She took me in. I'd been in her apartment six weeks, and I was treating her horribly," Jackie recalls. "I had two jobs, and when I wasn't working I was in my pajamas, smoking and drinking. While my sister was at work, I'd let the dishes pile in the sink, run up her phone bill, and let the house stay a mess. I lied. Every day I wrote a list, 'I will not lie. I will save my money. I will stop drinking.' I carried the list in my pocket everywhere I went. I meditated on it, then got halfway through the day, then quit. I felt dead. I was shattered, broken. I had come from nothing and I was heading for nothing."

  Jackie had been born the third of five children to an Irish-Catholic home-maker and an abusive, alcoholic father who left when Jackie was eight. My mother "had to get on welfare to support us," she says. (She defends welfare for mothers in such situations, though she feels they are a small proportion of those on it.) "My mother got a job, then two, then three. We never took our problems to her. She had enough on her hands." Eventually, Jackie's mother remarried and followed her new husband to Louisiana. While their mother worked, the girls discovered their stepfather to be a "dirty-talking" sexual predator. But Jackie stood up to him. They quarreled, and her stepfather announced that if Jackie left home, she could never return. At nineteen, high school diploma and suitcase in hand, Jackie stepped out the front door of her home into what felt like an emotionally empty world. Later rescued by her sister, still lost, she underwent an experience that was to transform her life.