Line Cutters
The imagery of standing in line and watching helplessly as people cut in front of you, thereby unfairly jumping head of you, is one of the recurring bits of imagery which serve to create a motif explaining conservative rage. The line cutting image is especially effective the instant familiarity and recognition of its inherent unfairness cuts across the entire swath of American society except for the super-rich:
“Look! You see people cutting in line ahead of you! You’re following the rules. They aren’t. As they cut in, it feels like you are being moved back. How can they just do that? Who are they? Some are black…women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers—where will it end… These are opportunities you’d have loved to have had in your day—and either you should have had them when you were young or the young shouldn’t be getting them now. It’s not fair.”
Empathy Walls
The author defines an empathy wall as any obstacle which stands in the path of attaining a more profound and complex understanding of another person. The essential element of this imagery is not so much the wall as one might naturally suspect, but the empathy part. The “deep stories” which the author tells which make these figurative walls more concrete do not just obstruct understanding but induce indifference and stifle compassion.
Right Interpretation, Wrong Conclusion
Throughout the book, the author points to how conservatives who consistently elect Republican politicians do so in opposition to their own best interests and, in many cases, their own actual views on individual issues. Harold Areno, for instance, sounds for all the world like a liberal Democrat complaining about Big Business and deregulation when, in fact, he is a diehard evangelical Republican. The disconnect between the ideas expressed and the political ideology in this example recur over and over again:
“The state always seems to come down on the little guy. Take this bayou. If your motorboat leaks a little gas into the water, the warden’ll write you up. But if companies leak thousands of gallons of it and kill all the life here? The state lets them go. If you shoot an endangered brown pelican, they’ll put you in jail. But if a company kills the brown pelican by poisoning the fish he eats? They let it go. I think they overregulate the bottom because it’s harder to regulate the top.”
The Bayou Corne Sinkhole
A very specific example of descriptive imagery is dedicated to conveying the horrific phenomenon of a sinkhole opening up like the voraciously hungry maw of a prehistoric beast coming to life and swallowing everything within its radius. The Bayou Corne Sinkhole is brought vividly to life through the power of imagery:
“As if a plug was pulled in a bathtub, a hollow `mouth’ of a crack in the bottom of the bayou began sucking down brush and pine from the surface of the earth. Majestic, century-old cypress trees crashed down in slow motion and were dragged sideways into the bubbling water, drawn down into the gaping mouth of a sinkhole. Down went bush, grassland, and even a boat. An oily sheen had appeared on the surface of the water, and to prevent its spread, two cleanup workers...tied their boat to a tree, standing in it to do their work. But the tree began to tilt and drift. The workers were rescued in time but their boat disappeared into the sinkhole.”
