Strangers in Their Own Land

There are ten guests around the table and a Vidalia onion in the middle of it at Brother Cappy and Sister Fay Brantley’s Sunday dinner in Longville, just north of Lake Charles. Mike Tritico has invited Hochschild to the dinner, and the onion is Cappy’s “half joke and half serious” way of keeping arguments civil.

Cappy and Fay, an aging couple active in the local Longville Pentecostal church, live on a compound with much of their extended family. Mike Tritico, a longtime friend of Cappy and Fay’s, even jokes that they “have adopted us!” This is because Cappy and Fay frequently invite their friends over on Sundays for polite arguments about politics, religion, and the environment, held at gender-segregated tables. But Hochschild is permitted to sit at the men’s table, so she can hear Mike argue with Donny, “the man [she is] eager to meet.”

Hochschild first describes Donny as “a retired telephone company worker who hates regulators.” He grew up with a strictly religious mother, but he has been known all his life for his generosity, pranks, and fearlessness. He used to be a Democrat, but he thought Al Gore’s belief in climate change made him “too stupid to be president” and, since then, he has ended up “right of the Republican Party.” One piece of local lore involves Cappy, who also worked at the phone company, driving his repair truck down the highway to notice “Donny driving his truck alongside him, as legend has it, also sixty miles an hour—in reverse.” Donny has worked a series of dangerous jobs and “hates environmentalists.” If Janice is a Team Loyalist and Jackie is a Worshipper, Hochschild explains, then Donny is a Cowboy: he “came to endurance […] through a celebration of daring.”

The guests serve the food and say their prayers. Donny and Mike Tritico sit across from one another; they are both “white, churchgoing residents of Longville” who “value honor and integrity,” even though Mike’s family has more education. They start discussing the Condea Vista leak and the I-10 bridge, which carries 50,000 vehicles a day in Lake Charles and has gotten “strange” ever since the ethylene dichloride from the leak has started to weaken its foundations.

Mike agrees with the government’s calls to close the bridge, adhering to the “precautionary principle” that government should first and foremost “do no harm.” Donny says that Condea Vista could not have predicted the effects of their leak, but Tritico cites company studies demonstrating that they knew the environmental risks of ethylene dichloride. Donny questions whether Condea Vista would choose to believe scientific experts over the money they knew they could make, but Mike sees this as evidence of how “companies contrive innocence.” Donny suggests that “experts can be wrong,” like when regulators decided that lap belts were not safe enough and forced everyone to switch to seatbelts.

Mike says that Condea Vista should “have to pay” if they are found responsible for weakening the bridge; Donny replies that “you can’t always be ready to blame the company” but Mike asks, “what if it is their fault and it’s your bridge?” Donny thinks Mike is overly cautious, focused on “avoiding bad instead of maximizing good.” To Donny, innovation fundamentally requires taking risks (“we wouldn’t have built this country if we were all as risk-averse as you are”), but regulation, for Donny, creates a permanent obstacle to taking the necessary risks. It also creates more regulation, “a little at a time,” until “everything is regulated” and “we’re all stuck in cement.” As on a playground, Donny says, conflict “only stops when one guy is afraid his lip is going to get busted.” But “regulation breaks that up” and gets in the way of competition.

Mike explains that he does not want to regulate everything or avoid any risk at all; rather, he thinks the government should prevent an accident “if there’s a known way to prevent it.” Donny thinks this gets in the way of people’s “independent decisions” and says that, if someone gets hurt driving on the I-10, “a lot of it” is their own fault for choosing to drive there. Mike accuses Donny of having the mindset that has caused the region’s health issues; Hochschild sees that the room is focused on their conversation and “the two are approaching a real showdown.”

Mike wonders, “how could it be my own fault that I got hurt or killed?” Donny explains that “real people—not the government” should be in charge of deciding “what is or isn’t too risky.” Mike asks how citizens without expertise “about very complicated things” could make these decisions, and the pair continues to go back and forth. As the guests switch to dessert, Mike accuses Donny of parroting the chemical companies’ ideology. In Hochschild’s words, Mike thinks that Donny “embraces their right to take risks with our lives.” And, in turn, Donny accuses Mike of siding with regulators. Hochschild notes that their debate continues elsewhere—Mike has even suggested that Donny left anonymous comments on an internet news article about a talk that he helped organize.

The women have joined the men’s table and change the conversation topic to “government welfare, out-of-wedlock births, addiction, and the reluctance to work for your living.” The group agrees that, after the first out-of-wedlock child, the government should cut off support because “the woman in question should have learned her lesson.”

Hochschild notes that Donny and Mike’s debate reflects a broader trend about Louisianans’ fears of pollution. She notes a 1997 study demonstrating that managers and clerical workers in chemical plants worried more about chemical exposure than the laborers who were actually exposed to chemicals. Women and minorities paid more attention to warnings, and overall “white males stood out from all other groups as being less likely to see risk.” She compares Donny to the crafts workers and Mike to the managers.

They also have differing perspectives on honor. Donny sees honor as a function of bravery, but Mike “wanted to reduce the need for bravery.” Hochschild argues that Mike’s environmental activism—which once led to construction workers driving him off the highway—is actually another form of bravery altogether. She recalls stories of regulators who ended up on the receiving end of corporate wrath—one who pointed out leaky pipes started to get bullied off the premises because he was creating more work for plant operators; another was seen as a “corporate sissy” for wearing a gas mask and laughed down by an army of workers whose teeth were visibly damaged by sulfuric acid exposure.

Hochschild suggests that, in terms of regulation, “Louisiana is a Cowboy kind of state” that carries Donny’s attitude toward risk: enduring risk, even when the risk is unnecessary, proves one’s strength and honor. Hochschild suggests that, despite all the Tea Partiers’ disdain for self-proclaimed “victims,” Louisianans are themselves the victims of unregulated industry. Back at Brother Cappy and Sister Fay’s dinner, the guests continue to argue “issue by issue,” but Brother Cappy never has to reach for the onion. As they finish up dessert, Mike asks Donny how he would “feel about crossing the I-10 bridge.” Donny’s reply: “If my kids weren’t with me […] I’d drive fast.”