"Hillbilly Elegy"--What It Is, What It Isn't

J.D. Vance wants you to know what the backwoods life is all about--the mindset, the culture, the hopelessness. He has done so in Hillbilly Elegy.

This book was an instant smash best-seller. It came out in the shadow of the 2016 campaign, explaining to a certain extent why the dirt-poor, self-hating but prideful (at the same time) residents of Appalachia turned to 45, regardless of his background.

To the best of my fathoming, they did it because he's as angry as they are at just about everything and they found it easy to play off of. He is dripping in self-pity, like they are. But don't tell him why he has to be angry and that he's way off base about things; he will lash out at you with a vengeance. Just like they do.

I got a taste of that when I lived in Arkansas. A whole bunch of those folks are the same way (though not all of them; some are terrific). They can get after each other and laugh at themselves easily and often, but if someone who isn't one of them tries to point out what they've been saying to each other, even if it's well-intentioned and friendly, you become an intolerable outsider and the folksy warmth turns icy very fast.

Much of Vance's childhood was deprived and even dangerous. His mother was emotionally unstable, and married five times. He spent a great deal of his time with his grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, who of course lived just five houses away. He skipped school a lot. He had three last names. He had to lie to keep his mother out of jail.

Basically, he shows, you need four things to get out of the kind of life to which he could have easily adapted, which he came perilously close to having:

• Stability--It has to come from somewhere. It is the idea that there's something you can always count on that isn't harmful, that will bring you peace. For J.D., it was a sense of being home, which rested with his Mamaw. It arrived just about when he was going to start high school. He finally had a base from which to launch his dreams.
• Education--Still the bulwark of it all. Without it, there's little that can be done to develop the kinds of thinking skills that will allow a person to succeed. If we accept the concept that education is thinking practice, and that paying attention to it drives one's thinking abilities forward, never backward, doors begin to open. J.D. caught on to this when his Homelife began to become more stable, when he was able to concentrate on his schoolwork both inside and outside of school, since there gradually was less to think about outside of it. This was relative, because his family never became completely stable, but the reduction of issues allowed him to focus enough to get enough confidence to keep going, eventually to Ohio State and Yale Law.
• Sense of responsibility--Which usually comes with some kind of home stability. J.D.'s Mamaw wasn't exactly stable herself, but she did instill within him the kind of responsibility one learns to maintain a decent home atmosphere--chores, etc. Her language and manners were crude, but she respected education and what it could do for someone. With that reinforcement, J.D. had someone to report to and to whom he had to be accountable. Eventually, this would take hold. It also happened within the military training he received. Like a few kids I taught, messed up for one reason or another, the training he received served to straighten him out. He would have been drummed out if it hadn't.
• Sense of adventure--In the end, someone in the kind of culture J.D. began in has to risk stepping out of it, risk failure, risk embarrassment. He did so in a dangerous way: Going into the Marines. He was deployed to Afghanistan, the most perilous of places. But the lessons he learned about self-reliance stuck with him and gave him the confidence to seek college and beyond. Without that, he might have stayed within the hillbilly culture he was raised in.

As it was, he has never allowed himself the luxury of dismissing or completely discarding his background, which he now could easily do. He's a principal attorney in a business on the West Coast, married to a lawyer. He's acquired more money than he could ever have imagined, even without this best-selling memoir. But he still thinks of pajamas as elitist (No, they're not. My family had them, and we were never rich.), and selects Christmas presents for needy kids with a clear message in mind.

Cut off on the highway in California, and bringing him back to his old sense of manhood, he contemplated giving the offender a five-fingered piece of his mind at the next stoplight. But his wife held him back; naively, he never considered that the guy might have had a gun.

But the most telling paragraph comes in the book's Conclusion. He has spent most of the work explaining the mentality of the hillbilly, the way they have dealt with, sometimes, the tough breaks they've had and the lifestyle they've adapted. But he doesn't ignore what continues to sit there, the thing that his teachers, and teachers everywhere, try to instill in their pupils, whether they accept it or not, whether they utilize it to make something of themselves or not:

We don't need to live like the elites of California, New York, or Washington, D.C. We don't need to work a hundred hours a week at law firms and investment banks. We don't need to socialize at cocktail parties. We do need to create a space for the J.D.s....of the world to have a chance. I don't know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.

That's what 45 has taken away, though: A sense of personal responsibility. In both speech and action, he has blamed others for his misfortunes, and blamed someone else for the misfortunes of those who so slavishly follow him. He's taken that way, and with that, has stripped them of the need to step up and use what they have to get out of the fixes they're in. 

He has done, in short, what Republicans love to do: Blame government for ruining their lives, when in fact they've caused nearly everything bad that's happened to them, admit it or not. It may be the bottom-line legacy of Reagan, who was fond of trashing government whenever he could, but we are there and we must now deal with those who are hooked to that kind of thinking.

We need to reclaim a balance, Vance seems to be saying. Government, especially in an enormous land as this, is constantly necessary, though some people resent it. Libertarianism only goes so far, even if it takes enormous depravity for those in Appalachia to admit it. We are seeing the lack of safety that the lack of governance has caused, now that the virus is threatening to run wild. If this doesn't bring us up short, I'm not sure anything will.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark