Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Hardcover, 288 pages Pub August 16th 2016 by New Press ISBN13: 9781620972250

The concept of this book is exactly what I had been thinking about for the past two years. I am so grateful for Hochschild for structuring a study to investigate the political divide in the United States as evinced by Louisiana, a deeply conservative red state facing environmental degradation and widespread poverty. Hochschild focused on a single issue upon which voting age people might be expected to converge in attitude, environmental pollution, and ended up asking a question which illuminated other attitudes: why do those living in polluted states want less federal oversight from environmental agencies rather than more?

The statistics and studies Hochschild shares at the end of this book are very useful for placing beside the statements, beliefs and attitudes of those she interviewed in Louisiana to judge discrepancies. Hochschild found that many attitudes are not based in economic self-interest so much as emotional self-interest, something with which every person struggles in our lifetimes. Sometimes our emotional response to a problem or issue colors our perceptions, and puts our economic self-interest at odds with what we decide to believe. (There are lots of examples of this in everyday life anywhere: a mother allows an adult child to move back home rent-free while looking for a job, a sister lends money to a drug-addicted sibling promising repayment, etc.)

Hochschild postulates that the individuals she interviewed belonging to the Tea Party in Louisiana were reacting to preserve emotional self-interest rather than economic self-interest with regard to environmental pollution controls (or the lack of them). She concludes these folks experienced a psychological high of belonging to a powerful, like-minded political majority, and as a part of this group felt released from politically-correct rules that usually govern polite society. [It might be worth noting a similar phenomenon is exhibiting in liberal groups with the campus demonstrations refusing permission to conservative speakers, or by destruction and violence during protest marches.]

Looking over the work Hochschild did in Louisiana, we realize that doing sociological research in the field is messy and hard to categorize. In order to determine if there was a shared narrative that connected the attitudes and emotions of the people she interviewed, Hochschild generated something called a “deep story,” which removes the particular facts and judgments that define individuals and just tells us how things feel to those individuals.

The Tea Party supporters she interviewed agreed that the deep story Hochschild generated did resonate with them and could be said to define them: That life is hard, and they must endure; that they felt like they were waiting in line, patiently, for their rewards for working hard but they see federal government-subsidized line-cutters getting benefits before the hard workers, i.e., Negroes, women, immigrants, refugees; the government appears to be helping the line-cutters using taxpayer money and is therefore antithetical to the hard-workers; God teaches how to endure; gay people were not godly; America, especially the America of their youth when fish and fowl were plentiful and air and water were clean, was something to preserve; everything was changing so much they’d begun to feel like strangers in their own land, not getting the benefits citizenship in America promised.

The connection between pollution and jobs gets tangled in the subjects’ emotional self-interest and they can’t seem to extricate themselves from a loop created by what they hear from their former corporate employers, from their state representatives (Bobby Jindal was in office), and from Fox News. It almost seems as though when corporate representatives said they would not clean up the river/lake pollution, that the pollution is not that bad, or they could not afford to clean up, residents felt powerless. In order not to feel powerless, they blamed someone else, like the federal government, or the line-cutters.

The people Hochschild interviewed for this study* were subject to the most egregious environmental pollution I have ever heard of. In some cases their houses were destroyed or blown up by gas leaks, the rivers surrounding their houses were so polluted plants and animals died when in contact with it. The interviewees were retired or near retirement. Their neighbors and spouses were dying of various cancers.

At the end of the study, when she was drawing her conclusions, Hochschild was remarkably restrained. She’d become friends with these folks, and though she might occasionally, gently, point out areas of disagreement with them to see what they might respond, for the most part it did not appear that she interfered with their belief system. Her conclusions were that these people, who struggled their entire lives to make a living, who were often lied to by those with power over them, felt a kind of collective excitement to be part of Donald Trump’s supporters where they felt secure and respected, and were released from the bonds of political correctness, e.g., caring about those further back in the line, the needy around the country, around the world.

Personally, I think it might be the release from political correctness that made everyone so giddy to be part of Trump’s team, because let's face it, the man was not respectful. Though he was rich, he was low class; he made it look as though his level of success was attainable to ordinary folk. There is a certain amount of willful delusion and economic self-interest in these beliefs, it seems to me. I understand compassion fatigue, particularly when one’s own world is so needy, so I am not going to criticize that. There is, however, something we [should] all learn as we grow older that these smart, mature, experienced folks don’t seem to have grasped, and perhaps this is our fundamental disagreement: Happiness and satisfaction in life is not a zero-sum game.

Although we might be able to feel sympathy, empathy, compassion—something other than steaming anger—for individuals in the world Hochschild studied, I don’t think it is so easy to do the same for a group. I found myself steeled against their resistance to coherent argument on commonsense pollution controls. They can react with their emotional self-interest if they wish, but I don’t think it is healthy if I do as well, because then we’re at loggerheads. If I react with my economic self-interest, we are likewise at loggerheads. These people want what I want, e.g., family, community, a measure of security. They must want a clean environment as well. We disagree on how to get there. I don’t see that changing unless perhaps we agree to set standards of accountability and hold each other to those standards.

This was really a spectacular study, enormously important, and deeply skilled in execution. I am in awe of how the author was able to approach the problems she could see in our society, measure them, and explain what she found to us. This book was published in 2016, the result of at least five years of labor and study. It was a 2016 Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

*[We never get an explanation why younger people, with presumably more at stake, less history in the area, and more energy for resistance to corporate interests, were not interviewed for the study, except maybe it was necessary to limit the scope of the interviewees so they could all operate from the same deep story.]



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Don't Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff

Paperback, First Edition, 144 pages Pub September 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing ISBN13: 9781931498715

This slim handbook subtitled “Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives” was originally published in 2004. It is slightly more than one hundred pages that recaps the large ideas Lakoff had written about in his role as cognitive scientist, in a book called Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, first published in 1996 by the University of Chicago Press. Moral Politics is on it's third edition (ISBN-13: 978-0226411293), published in time for the 2016 election. Last year Lakoff also published an essay on his website called "Understanding Trump" subtitled "How Trump Uses Your Brain Against You." Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972.

I am astonished Lakoff’s brilliant insights are not better utilized by the Democratic Party. Bernie took the lessons to heart and started pounding out a new single-note message so that we couldn’t miss it, but why was he out there alone? Why didn’t the entire liberal left start with reframing—we had a handbook after all—and completely change the way business was done?

One could argue that Hillary did use Lakoff’s cognitive science approach by allowing the ‘Stronger Together’ message to express her values. I vaguely recall hearing also “This is not who we are,” when Trump said or did something particularly egregious. I was paying attention, but it seems to me Hillary’s team could have been A LOT more explicit about the ideas in Lakoff’s book, reframing arguments and changing the discussion. She just couldn't manage to relinquish control and involve us.

Bernie just had one message and he said it loudly and often, and even if we didn’t know what he would do in different situations that arose in foreign affairs, we knew his basic playbook:

Man is basically good. Citizens working together unleash the creative potential in the population. Who wants to be rich when people are starving next door? We have some big problems but we’ll get there together.

This book is a series of conclusions and so reading it is a little like mainlining information if you’ve never seen it before. It may take reading it a couple times before the information sticks in your head, and before you are able to apply the techniques he shares with us. Many of these ideas probably seem familiar if you have been thinking about what happened in the last election. I hadn't been able to articulate my own thoughts but the instant I saw what Lakoff wrote about conservatives and the ‘strict father’ way of looking at the world, it sounded so right (see Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land).

One thing Lakoff points out is that when conservatives start using Orwellian language—language that is the opposite of what they mean—they are weak. Just as they are vulnerable on their position on environment and global warming, they are weak on the ‘healthcare’ bill. We should take these issues and run with them, turning every argument into a referendum on what they are not doing to solve these problems. We own the moral arguments here. They have nothing. Be smart. Be smarter. The far right has appropriated the word “freedom” if you can imagine.

The far right uses “freedom” to mean “freedom from coercion from others,” which at first blush sounds pretty good. Who wouldn’t want that? But then they go on to express the need to "save capitalism from democracy", so that laws won’t constrain their money-making and power consolidation. They object to paying taxes in excess of the amounts one would voluntarily contribute. Why should one pay taxes for schools if one does not have children oneself, is one common argument. They are being coerced to pay for social welfare.

Conservatives are also very big on ‘tort reform,’ or putting limits on awards in lawsuits (like for exploding products, leaking barges, or environmental catastrophe). “If parties who are harmed cannot sue immoral or negligent corporations or professionals for significant sums, the companies are free to harm the public in unlimited ways in the course of making money.”

Liberals look at freedom in a different way: freedom to express one’s creativity, to pursue one’s interests; or freedom from anxiety, from hunger, exploitation, environmental degradation. To achieve these freedoms, we need groups of people working together, doing what they do best.

A recent interview with the president of Princeton University, Christopher L. Eisgruber, confirmed something I'd noticed but wasn’t sure was a blip or a real, observable phenomenon. Eisgruber said that the students at Princeton gave him enormous hope for the future. They are engaged, and their values are right side up. I only hope they continue to exhibit those values at the ballot box in the years to come, and perhaps even help other people understand the ‘strict father’ (I can’t help but think of a spanking father and all that connotes) model is an unsatisfactory way for adults to engage with their world.

Read this book. It’s important. It’s short.

Tavis Smiley interviews George Lakoff (about 23 min):




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We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America by Jennifer M. Silva

Hardcover, 224 pages Pub Aug 1st 2019, Oxford University Press, ISBN13: 9780190888046

I don’t quite know what to make of this book. I read it because I now live in a state a large portion of whose population is deluged with far right TV and talk radio. A large number of people do not have broadband and therefore often do not know there are newspapers and TV stations which make an effort to substantiate news.

There is a disparity in information: the rural areas have been kept the equivalent of “barefoot and pregnant” by a state legislature that couldn't figure out how to fund failing schools and provide broadband.

This book is a study of Jennifer Silva’s time interviewing residents of a former coal town in Pennsylvania, finding out what their lives are like, how they see their personal and professional trajectories, and who they vote for and why.

Not being a social scientist, I found the stories Dr. Silva shares with us confounding. Maybe someone can come up with solutions for these folks, but the reason they don’t vote is that they basically don’t trust anyone after the life they’ve led. In one of the first couples described to us, Silva writes,

“They are not single-issue voters who prioritize social issues such as abortion or fund control over economic interests, not do they place themselves into clear-cut categories of Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. Most of the time, as they attempt to come to terms with their past traumas and future anxieties, they do not think about politics at all.”

Right. Silva’s mentor/thesis advisor might have anticipated this and suggested a less-stressed environment. If Silva was just wondering what was going on in towns like Coal Brook, I would understand that, too, but she admits she’d been hoping to find out what white rural conservatives were thinking about politics when she began.

Soon enough she found out her interviewees were unschooled and inarticulate on the subject of “politics.” She did hear, though, these white residents’ dissatisfaction with Black and Latin “newcomers” to the coal region, former city dwellers and immigrants. So she changed her focus a little to include the newcomers. That was smart, and refocused this work into something approaching Arlie Russell Hochschild’s award-winning Strangers in Their Own Land.

Maybe someone, after reading outcomes for poor white folks who grew up in an abandoned coal town or poor city dwellers who moved in to live inexpensively and get away from inner-city violence, will figure out a way to point these folks in a different direction, in the direction of a life that is more fulfilling and less crushing. But this is way outside my wheelhouse.

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Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole

This book of essays by Teju Cole aren’t always essays: they might be scraps of thought, well-digested and to an immediate point. They are fiercely intelligent, opinionated, meaningful in a way that allow us to get to the heart of how another thinks. And does he think! Let’s be frank: many of us don’t do enough thinking, and Cole shows us the way it can be done in a way that educates, informs, and excites us.

The work in this volume are nonfiction pieces published in a wide variety of outlets and that he chose from an eight-year period of travel and almost constant writing. The emphasis in these pieces, he tells us in the Preface, is on “epiphany.” We can enjoy kernels of ideas that may have had a long gestation, but have finally burst onto the scene with a few sentences but little heavy-handedness or any of the weight of “pronouncements.” This reads like a bared heart in the midst of negotiating life, as James Baldwin says in The Fire Next Time, “as nobly as possible, for the sake of those coming after us.”

Cole references Baldwin in all these pieces in his unapologetic gaze, but he does so explicitly in several pieces, notably “Black Body” in which he tells of visiting the small town in Switzerland, Leukerbad (or Loèche-les-Bains), where Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain found its final form. Cole expands on his time in Switzerland in “Far Away From Here,” which might be my favorite of these essays. Cole tells how he was given six months to work and write in Zurich and though he did precious little writing, he was totally absorbed every day, gazing at the landscape, walking the mountains, photographing the crags, trails, and lakes, thinking, unfettered. This is someone who carries all he needs in his head, and I loved that freedom as much as he.

But how can I choose a favorite from among these pieces when each spoke of ways to approach a subject with which we have struggled—or haven’t yet…About race and class: “how little sense of shame [Americans] seemed to have,” he writes, looking at America from his upbringing in Lagos. Cole echoes Baldwin again in “Bad Laws” about Israel and its laws concerning the rights of Palestinians:

”The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor…Israel uses an extremely complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus to dispossess Palestinians of their land, hoping perhaps to forestall accusations of a brutal land grab.”

Earlier Baldwin reminded us that “…few liberals have any notion of how long, how costly, and how heartbreaking a task it is to gather the evidence that one can carry into court [to prove malfeasance, official or not], or how long such court battles take.” Americans looking at Israel and Palestine should be able to discern some outline of our own justifications and methods, and vice versa.

Photography is one of Cole’s special interests and he is eloquent in Section Two "Seeing Things" in discussing what makes great photography as opposed to the “dispiriting stream of empty images [that the] Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia.” And then he discusses “Death in the Browser Tab,” wherein he tells us what he sees and what he knows after retracing the steps caught by the phone footage recording Walter Scott being shot in the back by eight bullets from a .45-caliber Glock 21.

Politics is what humans do, though “the sheer quantity of impacted bullshit in politics” is clearly not something Cole relishes. In "The Reprint" Cole admits he did not vote until sixteen years after he was eligible, and when he did vote finally, for Obama, “like a mutation that happens quietly on a genetic level and later completely alters the body’s function, I could feel my relationship to other Americans changing. I had a sense—dubious to me for so long, and therefore avoided—of common cause.” He notes that Obama was “not an angry black man, the son of slaves” but a biracial outsider who invisibly worked his way to the center of the political establishment piggybacking the experience of American blacks by hiding in plain sight. The night Obama won, Cole was in Harlem.

“There was as exuberant and unscripted an outpouring of joy as I ever expect to see anywhere… Black presidents are no novelty for to me. About half my life, the half I lived in Nigeria, had been spent under their rule, and, in my mind, the color of the president was neither here nor there. But this is America. Race mattered.”

Cole will speak out in "A Reader's War" against Obama’s “clandestine brand of justice” and his “ominous, discomfiting, illegal, and immoral use of weaponized drones against defenseless strangers…done for our sakes.” He admits that Obama believes he is trying “to keep us safe,” and writes “I am not naive…and I know our enemies are not all imaginary…I am grateful to those whose bravery keeps us safe.” It is one of the most difficult questions about political and military power that we face today and Cole wrestles the issue heroically. Not any of us have yet answered this question well, and until we do, the disconnect between justice and drone strikes will continue to plague us. We have unleashed a terrible swift sword on far away lands while we continue to suffer the brutality of a thousand cuts from our own citizens. Cosmic justice?

When Cole talks about literature I experience a frisson. There is nothing quite like someone very clever and well-spoken addressing something about which one cares deeply. His insights add to my pleasure, and detract nothing. His description of the poetry of Derek Walcott remind me of the first time I encountered Walcott’s work: “This is poetry with a painterly hand, stroke by patient stroke.” I have forever thought of Walcott in this way, in color and in motion: turquoise and pale yellow, cool beige and hibiscus pink, the palest gray and an ethereal green I am not sure is water, air, or sea grass. The ocean creates tides through his work, and it seems so fresh.

When Cole writes of his visit to V.S. Naipaul in “Natives on the Boat," we sense how Cole’s initial reserve is eventually won over by Naipaul’s deeply curious and wide-ranging questions. In the very next essay, “Housing Mr. Biswas,” Cole writes an ecstatic celebration of Naipaul’s accomplishment in creating the “smart and funny, but also often petulant, mean, and unsympathetic” Mr. Biswas in Trinidad,

“an important island in the Caribbean but not a particularly influential one on the world stage…the times and places—the farms, the roads, the villages, the thrumming energy of the city, the mornings, afternoon, dusks, and nights—are described with profound and vigilant affection…it brings to startling fruition in twentieth century Trinidad the promise of the nineteenth century European novel.”

He’s right of course. Naipaul is a beloved writer of a type of novel no longer written, and perhaps now not often read.

Reading all these essays in one big gulp was a lot to digest so I am going to recommend a slower savoring. This is a book one must own and keep handy for those small moments when one wants a short, sharp shock of something wonderful. By all means read it all at once so you know where to go back to when you can dig up copies of some of the photos he talks about or want to recall how Cole manages in so few words to convey so much meaning. His is a voice thoughtful in expressing what he sees and yet so vulnerable and human I want to say—read this—this man is what’s been missing from your lives.


These collected essays will be published August 9, 2016. I read the e-galley provided to me by Netgalley and Random House. I note that some of the essays about art or photography that were initially published in newspapers sometimes were accompanied by examples of the work he discusses. In a perfect world, these would be included in the final book, but truthfully, his writing is clear and compelling enough to not make that nicety strictly necessary. Apologies to the publisher for quoting from a galley: my excuse is that the work is previously published and therefore no surprise.


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