One of the advantages of this job is that strange collisions can happen in your brain; two conversations that appeared to be different suddenly fuse together, revealing something unexpected.
I’m currently reading Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land, a sincere attempt by an anthropologist to understand the Tea Party and the American right. (I’m reviewing it for a future issue of the magazine.) Hochschild spends time in Lake Charles, Louisiana, trying to scale the “empathy wall” which separates her – and her liberal Californian sensibilities – from the county’s residents. They live in a state blighted by pollution: one of her interviewees himself dumped toxic waste in the bayou, on the orders of the chemical company which employed him. And yet, she notes, the state is red, and its dominant political mode is Tea Partyism. Living amid dead trees and mercury riddled fish, the people of Lake Charles reject the idea of government help.
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