- Vance’s “hillbilly” is not a person so much as a cultural emblem used to sell things, from products to political and social ideologies. Understanding this distinction calls for a dissection of the emblem and its origins. Large corporate interests seized control of the Appalachian region’s natural resources just after the Civil War, generating huge profits from coal and timber while workers toiled in dangerous conditions for shoddy wages. These corporate forces fought unionization at every turn, with brutality and out-and-out murder. The area’s real history is defined by locals fighting these forces in organized, principled fashion, from the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 to late-20th century worker efforts to unionize against large interests like the Duke Power Company, detailed in the 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA. One of my fondest memories of growing up in east Kentucky is going to a punk show at an American Legion and hearing a band from New Jersey play songs about union life that made the audience, filled with rural kids, homemade mohawks, and unnervingly large ear gauges, go wild: never cross a fuckin’ picket line!
I read the book and enjoyed the "look how fucked up these people are" elements, while at the same time being confused by the authors perspective of praising said fucked up actions of his poor upbringing, from the heady heights of the Yale law academy. There was was an awful lot of hand-wringing about how much inner turmoil he had to deal with being split between two impossible states of being; a hillbilly, and an Urban elite. Yet that's what he is, he is both those things, is it really THAT hard to grasp that someone can be both... why all the drama? So yea the book was ok, but I'm guessing it speaks more to people in either of his two camps than it does to people in neither. I forgot I read it until I saw the Netflix show advertised. So over the weekend I sat down to watch it, and it was bad. Its not just that its a bad adaptation (which it probably is), its just that some of BS that you fly past in the book (say between Granny the gasoline gunslinger and whatever meth fuelled mess someone else was committing) were scenes like a goddamned Yale law student having an existential crisis over a salad fork and how it would impact his whole future. I gave up on the show around the point where they show his younger self doing a full-on header into a postcard stand in a gas station, where his mother furiously defends him to an overly obnoxious gas pumper... "My boy will show you he is worth three of you"... I switched to the Diana documentary instead, another story of an upwardly mobile young person who dared dream above their station. Although in Dianas case it seems she was a naivete who wandered semi-blindly into her own nightmare, at least she had a sense of.. i dunno... responsibility, doing your duty.... Its foolish but at least you can admire it a little. Vance seems to play both sides of the fence, defending his upbringing for their values, yet benefitting from the opposite values of the elite which raised him to where he is now. Which one is he representing here, which one is he selling out?
JD Vance is a liar; his own family says so. To his credit, he admits this in his book in a roundabout way (saying something oblique like Meemaw and his sister "remember things differently" and that the gasoline thing "never happened") but to his detriment, pretty much every engagement in his book is an obvious I-watched-too-many-ABC-Afterschool-Specials fabrication. Fundamentally his tale was one of a lower-middle-class white guy from rural Ohio who was given every leg up by the liberal elite, who were excruciatingly polite and took great pains to include him. Just a guess, but I'll bet as soon as he took a job with Peter Thiel the narrative about terrible liberals and the spiteful, pugnacious pride of "hillbillies" became a selling point. So the tale was rewritten as "success despite" rather than "success because" and then Trump won and every surface-level liberal fishing around for a simple answer lit upon "oh - it's because Appalachia is stupid and mean" so they could move on. I've had that discussion at least three times. Hillbilly Elegy is a terrible fucking book. It's A Million Little Pieces for the investment class. White Trash, on the other hand, is the book Hillbilly Elegy should have been.I read the book and enjoyed the "look how fucked up these people are" elements, while at the same time being confused by the authors perspective of praising said fucked up actions of his poor upbringing, from the heady heights of the Yale law academy.
It should be told, or at least interpreted, as a straightforward ascension story, rags to riches, where progressive values support people achieving their dreams. I don't remember him suggesting that there was significant pushback from the liberal elite beyond a few awkward situations like the networking dinner (and when would that not be awkward). He was welcomed, assisted financially, promoted, adopted as a full blood member, his upbringing was not a concern for anyone else. I'm trying to recall if he encountered any significant bigotry along the way but nothing springs to mind. Not to draw parallels where none exist, but surely everyone experiences SOME distinction between their childhood experiences and their adult life. Not everyone (including the author it seems) had the Human Torch for a grandmother, but to some degree these two phases of our lives are very different. Again the message SHOULD be that (if taken at face value) he grew up in a violent area, with no objectively good role models, with no obvious route to success; yet he emerged from it to a much better place and isn't that positive and inspiring. I did it and so can you (hill)Billy. But that's not the story the author tells, and because he doesn't tell it "straight", it all smells like a grift. To what end I don't know, it obviously made a ton of money. The article hints at a political run also.Hillbilly Elegy is a terrible fucking book. It's A Million Little Pieces for the investment class. White Trash, on the other hand, is the book Hillbilly Elegy should have been.
The book is basically Atlas Shrugged Running with Scissors. Everyone around The Maker is a Taker whose frayed social safety net does not properly instill a sense of personal responsibility and all the disinterested liberal drones around The Maker are more focused on his adherence to their byzantine social mores than his intrinsic value as an individual. The Maker exists between two worlds because as a bootstrapped thought leader neither the entitleist welfare morlocks nor the misdirected benificence of the liberal eloi offer the goldilocks zone of free thought and free enterprise I'd like to thank Peter Thiel for believing in me. "Hillbilly made good" is Sergeant York or The Quiet Man. "Capitalist Rags to Riches" is 8 Mile or Straight Outta Compton. The grift is archetypal Cato Institute bullshit where success is available to anyone white who happens to befriend billionaires born of privilege.
Ok, so you think he is a member of a third group and uses his supposed membership of the first and second to play both against each other for profit. I'll buy that. Minor quibble but The Quiet Man is less rags to riches, more of a descendent-done-well returns to the old-country."Hillbilly made good" is Sergeant York or The Quiet Man.
I think that his entire story illustrates the plasticity of "group" as well as the context sensitivity of identity but that since libertarian thought leaders won't get a hard-on about that, and since neoliberals can't clutch their pearls about the genetic underclass about that, he bent over backwards to make his intended audience happy at the cost of his actual experience. I'll take your quibble on Quiet Man. It remains a comedy of manners in which the arc towards acceptance requires accepting and adapting to the coarse behavior of one's chosen group. "Rags to riches" was not my argument; after all, Alvin York doesn't get rich, he displays heroism.