Berl Falbaum
In 2016, J.D. Vance, now Donald Trump’s running mate, made headlines with the publication of a book titled: “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.”
I usually have little interest in reading memoirs, even those written by famous public figures because generally they are self-serving and can’t really be fact-checked. The authors work to put their best feet forward, try to rationalize crises in their lives and get even with enemies.
In addition, at the time, Vance was an unknown venture capitalist -- six years away from being elected a U.S. senator. So why should I bother?
But the brouhaha piqued my curiosity; I wanted to know what all the fanfare and fuss was all about. I wish I had not been so curious.
I found the book, in a word, disgusting. It was patronizing, condescending, mean-spirited, and ugly. Those were its good points.
First, a very brief summary of Vance’s life:
Vance was born in Middletown, Ohio. His mother, who had five husbands, struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism. He was raised by his grandparents, who moved to Middletown from Kentucky’s Appalachia. His childhood, which he describes in detail, was marked by poverty and abuse.
After graduating from Middletown High School in 2003, Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps and did a six-month stint in Iraq in 2005.
He then graduated from Ohio State University with a bachelor of arts degree and worked for a Republican state senator. After graduating, Vance attended Yale Law School on a scholarship. He was an editor of The Yale Law Journal, and graduated in 2013.
Now, back to the book. I understood that the book would win approval from some conservatives -- even though some of them, I thought, would find the book appalling -- but I could not fathom the embrace by liberals.
Basically, the major message is that Appalachians are lazy alcoholics who refuse to help themselves. If anyone is responsible for their poverty, they are.
His not very subtle implication is that they need to work themselves out of poverty by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Forget that they might not even have any boots.
A typical example from the book: “People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”
Or consider the following: “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”
He totally ignores outside forces which caused the poverty such as the rape of Appalachia by behemoth mining companies and other economic/political forces.
Then there is discussion of his dysfunctional family. He describes in detail how his mother struggled with addition, alcohol and, besides her several marriages, had numerous sexual encounters in the family home.
What kind of man would write that? Why humiliate his mother so publicly? To what purpose? I would be hesitant to write in a book that my mother wasn’t a good cook.
His point seems to be: See what I had to put up with. This is where I came from but look what I have achieved. I noticed in my research that even book reviewers, while mentioning Vance’s mother’s drug addiction and alcohol problems, omitted her sexual history -- I suspect out of respect and finding it unnecessary.
“‘Elegy’ is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class,” said a New Republic Magazine review at the time. “Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles.”
Neema Avashia, an “Appalachian expat” and writer recently said the following in an essay in The Guardian: “I barely read 30 pages before I saw the book…for what it was: a political platform masquerading as memoir. Before I saw J.D. Vance for what he was: an opportunist. One willing to double down on stereotypes, to paint the people of Appalachia with a culture of poverty brush, rather than be honest about the ways in which both electoral politics and industry have failed the region.”
Avashia continued: “My Appalachian friends and I are tired of being reduced to stereotypes. We are tired of the single-source, corporate-funded narrative that is propagated about us. Appalachia deserves a more complicated narrative, and better representation, that a Trump-Vance presidency offers us.”
Silas House, an Appalachian author and Appalachian Studies chair at Berea College in Kentucky, said in an interview with Politico, that “Hillbilly Elegy” is “not a memoir but a treatise that traffics in ugly stereotypes and tropes, less a way to explain the political rise of Trump than the actual start of the political rise of Vance.”
A.O. Scott, discussing “Hillbilly Elegy”in The New York Times, wrote: “…the idea that members of a marginal or disadvantaged group have caused their own misfortune is music to the ears of those in power.
If those people are just that way — lazy, uncooperative, sexually promiscuous — then any policy designed to help them is useless.”
Nationally, we don’t know much about Vance yet. But as we learn more, we can be confident compassion and empathy are not his strong points.
—————
Berl Falbaum is a long-time political journalist and author of several books.
I usually have little interest in reading memoirs, even those written by famous public figures because generally they are self-serving and can’t really be fact-checked. The authors work to put their best feet forward, try to rationalize crises in their lives and get even with enemies.
In addition, at the time, Vance was an unknown venture capitalist -- six years away from being elected a U.S. senator. So why should I bother?
But the brouhaha piqued my curiosity; I wanted to know what all the fanfare and fuss was all about. I wish I had not been so curious.
I found the book, in a word, disgusting. It was patronizing, condescending, mean-spirited, and ugly. Those were its good points.
First, a very brief summary of Vance’s life:
Vance was born in Middletown, Ohio. His mother, who had five husbands, struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism. He was raised by his grandparents, who moved to Middletown from Kentucky’s Appalachia. His childhood, which he describes in detail, was marked by poverty and abuse.
After graduating from Middletown High School in 2003, Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps and did a six-month stint in Iraq in 2005.
He then graduated from Ohio State University with a bachelor of arts degree and worked for a Republican state senator. After graduating, Vance attended Yale Law School on a scholarship. He was an editor of The Yale Law Journal, and graduated in 2013.
Now, back to the book. I understood that the book would win approval from some conservatives -- even though some of them, I thought, would find the book appalling -- but I could not fathom the embrace by liberals.
Basically, the major message is that Appalachians are lazy alcoholics who refuse to help themselves. If anyone is responsible for their poverty, they are.
His not very subtle implication is that they need to work themselves out of poverty by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Forget that they might not even have any boots.
A typical example from the book: “People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”
Or consider the following: “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”
He totally ignores outside forces which caused the poverty such as the rape of Appalachia by behemoth mining companies and other economic/political forces.
Then there is discussion of his dysfunctional family. He describes in detail how his mother struggled with addition, alcohol and, besides her several marriages, had numerous sexual encounters in the family home.
What kind of man would write that? Why humiliate his mother so publicly? To what purpose? I would be hesitant to write in a book that my mother wasn’t a good cook.
His point seems to be: See what I had to put up with. This is where I came from but look what I have achieved. I noticed in my research that even book reviewers, while mentioning Vance’s mother’s drug addiction and alcohol problems, omitted her sexual history -- I suspect out of respect and finding it unnecessary.
“‘Elegy’ is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class,” said a New Republic Magazine review at the time. “Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles.”
Neema Avashia, an “Appalachian expat” and writer recently said the following in an essay in The Guardian: “I barely read 30 pages before I saw the book…for what it was: a political platform masquerading as memoir. Before I saw J.D. Vance for what he was: an opportunist. One willing to double down on stereotypes, to paint the people of Appalachia with a culture of poverty brush, rather than be honest about the ways in which both electoral politics and industry have failed the region.”
Avashia continued: “My Appalachian friends and I are tired of being reduced to stereotypes. We are tired of the single-source, corporate-funded narrative that is propagated about us. Appalachia deserves a more complicated narrative, and better representation, that a Trump-Vance presidency offers us.”
Silas House, an Appalachian author and Appalachian Studies chair at Berea College in Kentucky, said in an interview with Politico, that “Hillbilly Elegy” is “not a memoir but a treatise that traffics in ugly stereotypes and tropes, less a way to explain the political rise of Trump than the actual start of the political rise of Vance.”
A.O. Scott, discussing “Hillbilly Elegy”in The New York Times, wrote: “…the idea that members of a marginal or disadvantaged group have caused their own misfortune is music to the ears of those in power.
If those people are just that way — lazy, uncooperative, sexually promiscuous — then any policy designed to help them is useless.”
Nationally, we don’t know much about Vance yet. But as we learn more, we can be confident compassion and empathy are not his strong points.
—————
Berl Falbaum is a long-time political journalist and author of several books.
