My Final Thoughts (I Hope) About Hillbilly Elegy

 This is my third post about J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, after which I hope never to discuss it again. Unless he does something that forces my hand, which I admit is not unlikely.

The first two posts discussed how the book’s good points are diminished by Vance’s subsequent actions and how his conflation of terms casts misleading impressions of demographic groups. Both impugn Vance’s honesty, but what could we have expected? Even the title is cynically misleading.

Merriam-Webster defines elegy as “a song or poem expressing sorrow or lamentation especially for one who is dead.” (Leave aside the “song or poem” part. It’s not germane.) The book’s subtitle is A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Yet by the end of the book Vance is talking about how hillbillies leaving the hollers for better opportunities are spreading the hillbilly outlook of distrust for outsiders, holding grudges, and citing the Bible more than observing it across the country. (If you take issue with that description of hillbillies, read the book. Vance makes it clear.)

I understand leaving decaying areas in search of opportunity. I left Western Pennsylvania in 1980 to join the Army and have lived in or near Atlanta, Boston, Washington DC, Chicago, then back to the DC metro area. I’ve done all right for myself. I own my home and was able to retire at 65. I also picked up knowledge and customs from each place I lived and incorporated them into my own life. I’m a better person for it.

That does not seem to be the case with the Great Hillbilly Migration, as Vance himself implies. Based on changing voting patterns as regional demographics evolve, it appears folks from the hills bring their virtues and vices with them as an inseparable package and it’s up to everyone else to either adjust or ignore them. No effort is made to assimilate.

Well, hell, people. Isn’t that something MAGites can be heard bitching about every day? Pissing and moaning about Spanish signs in stores and how immigrants don’t observe our customs?

The Orange Menace rants endlessly about how immigrants are taking over this country and dragging it down to their level when the sad truth is we can’t have nice things because too many native-born voters are mired in an attitude distrustful of outsiders, hold grudges, actively resist change, and spend more time reading the Bible than they do observing it.

I wonder where that came from?

Hillbilly culture isn’t dying. It’s spreading. And we’d better get a handle on its worst elements before it takes us all down with it.

More on Hillbilly Elegy

 Yesterday’s post talked about J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. That post dealt with what the book got right and how subsequent displays of Vance’s character – or lack thereof – make everything in it dubious. Today I’ll talk about things in the book that indicated to me he was talking though his hat even then.

Early in the book Vance notes that people use the terms hillbilly, redneck, and white trash interchangeably. I grew up at the northern tip of the Appalachian coal country Vance is from and can reasonably say he’s full of shit.

Hillbilly is self-descriptive, and Vance did a serviceable, if less than flattering, job of describing them as people from the hollers who hold firm to family, are distrustful of outsiders, hold grudges, actively resist change, and spend more time reading the Bible than observing its lessons.

A redneck is someone who typically is a manual laborer, as is indicated by the term redneck; their necks are sunburned from working outdoors, often in construction, landscaping, or some other physical task. Rednecks have their own undesirable qualities – quick to anger, too often ready to fight, drink too much beer, and a casual racism they do not themselves see – but they work, and are willing to find different work if the situation requires it. I grew up among rednecks and have a few of the qualities myself. I’m not saying that’s good or bad. That’s just how it is.

White trash are well described in Vance’s book. These are people who don’t work and expect someone else to take care of them. Calling someone “white trash” is the ultimate insult among rednecks.

Conflating the three archetypes does no one any favors. While there are similarities among hillbillies and redneck, the differences are profound. White trash are something completely different from both.

Vance wasn’t finished. Later in the book, after he’s talked about his formative years and gets into examining the problem hillbillies face, he starts to use the term interchangeable with working class whites.

I grew up working class white in a working class white neighborhood. I moved away 45 years ago, but I still proudly identify as such. Someone tries to conflate working class white with redneck, I’ll shake my head a little and give a tight smile, but I have no good argument against it. Given how Vance has described the hillbilly life in the first two hundred pages of the book, I take his making synonyms of hillbilly and working class white to be an insult.

Words matter, especially when used to communicate broad ideas. Vance has taken the warnings of Orwell and Huxley as instruction manuals to say whatever he wants in whatever manner he chooses to and decide for himself what those words mean. It’s a dangerous tactic, and we place ourselves in peril for letting him get away with it.

Hillbilly Elegy

 

A family member I respect a great deal asked me to read J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, before the election. My family member said he thought Vance made some good points and asked me to take a critical look.

Vance does make several good points. The most salient is that hillbillies have good reason to harbor resentment toward much of the rest of the country. Aside from the jokes, they always seem to get left out when economic advances are made. Doesn’t matter what happens elsewhere, things never seem to get better in Harlan County, for instance.

I grew up in Western Pennsylvania during the 70s, so I get this. Even though Pittsburgh rebounded years ago, the towns up and down the rivers have yet to make similar recoveries. Advances are at the margins and much local business consists of, in the words of my late father, people helping each other go under slower.

So I’m with Vance on that. What I’m not down with is how he has used those conditions in a remarkably cynical manner for political gain. Nowhere in his campaigning have I noticed him coming up with anything to help these folks. It’s all been demagoguery to play on the emotions generated by whipping them up to ever higher levels of resentment.

It was Vance who came up with the story that Haitians were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. This was the baldest of lies, and Vance copped to it only after the damage had been done. His reasoning excuse? “Sometimes you have to make up a story to make a point.”

Well, yeah. It’s called fiction. I’m well aware of it. It’s an old saying that fiction writers use lies to tell the truth. Dennis Lehane covered much of the same ground – working class people feeling put upon for too long and reacting badly – in his brilliant novel Small Mercies. The difference is Lehane made no bones that the book was fiction, even though it was set in the context of actual events that took place during the Boston busing riots. Vance passed off the Haitian story as a fact to be considered when deciding how to vote and only pulled it back after the damage had been done. That’s reprehensible.

Vance also whined about being fact checked during the vice presidential debate. The only kind of person who complains about getting fact checked is someone who intends to lie.

These examples of Vance’s character flaws cast doubt on everything in the book. A couple of other things led me to think even less of him. I’ll talk more about that next time.