Appalachia's unheralded victims.
The author's family comes out of the Kentucky hollows where life is harsh—often violently so—and people have learned not to expect much more of it than that. If there is work, it most likely will be in the mines. Women get pregnant when they are still girls and the men who are responsible fail in their responsibilities. The children grow up without guidance or ambition. The void in their lives is filled with idleness and drugs. And this passes from one generation unto the next.
So, one thinks, why stay? Why not escape the Appalachian prison for a better life elsewhere? Well, Vance's people did, along with millions of others. As he writes:
The scale of the migration was staggering. . . . In 1960, of Ohio's ten million residents, one million of them were born in Kentucky, West Virginia, or Tennessee. This doesn't count the large number of migrants from elsewhere in the southern Appalachian Mountains; nor does it include the children or grandchildren of migrants who were hill people to the core.
The grandparents who raised Vance were among those who fled north to Ohio where there was work. In the case of Vance's grandfather, this turned out to be a steel mill in Middletown, Ohio. This is where his mother was born and raised, as was he—although it would be more accurate, in his case, to say "born and neglected."
But even as Vance's grandparents put together the material framework of a middle-class life—house, car, some disposable income, etc.—the pathologies of the hollow went with them: The grandfather drank, and the alcohol liberated the violence; the grandmother, who was a match for him in this department, warned him that if he came home drunk again, she would kill him. He did—and she tried. While he was passed out on a sofa, she doused him with gasoline and put a match to it. He survived with minor burns and eventually did get off the whiskey.
Meanwhile, their daughter, Vance's mother, finished high school but also got pregnant with Vance's sister. Her life then took a slow downhill slide into serial marriages and childbirth. She, too, carried the curse of easy violence and once threatened to kill Vance and herself by crashing the vehicle she was driving at high speed. When she finally pulled over in order to "beat the s—t out of me," he ran to a stranger's house for protection and his mother went to jail.
By this point in his life, Vance himself seemed headed down a bleak road taken by so many who, though they may have left the hollow, it had never left them. He might have failed in school since that was almost ordained for young people like him. But his grandparents rescued him: His grandfather coached him with arithmetic and his grandmother would not allow him to give up, would not let him fail at school, and coached him on the books when his potential could have been withering in front of the television or worse.
She also taught him how to fight: One of her rules was "to punch with your whole body, especially your hips." Few people, she told him, "appreciate how unimportant your fist is when it comes to hitting someone." Vance fought as she'd taught him to fight, and he put down the class bully in the last fistfight of his life. He also listened to her when she told him to "never be like those f—ing losers who think the deck is stacked against them. You can do anything you want to."
He could have been a dropout, like so many of his cohort. But the pushing of his grandmother and the attention of a dedicated teacher put him on another path, and college became, almost miraculously, a possibility. But for someone with his primitive social skills, even the application process seemed daunting. That was a matter of self-confidence more than anything else: Who, in his mind, was he to be applying to colleges when his proper destiny was to be another dropout and criminal or addict? Or both.
So he enlisted in the Marines. This was the last door through which he needed to pass if he were to leave the literal and psychological hollow behind. He returned to civilian life after his time in the Marines (which included a year in Iraq) and was accepted at Ohio State, where he blazed through to a degree in two years. From there, it was on to law school—Yale, if you please, where he became an editor of the law review. He is now a "biotech executive in Silicon Valley" and has given the world this book.
Which would be important for fundamental literary reasons, if nothing else. One cannot read Hillbilly Elegy without being moved, and honestly so: There is no cheap sentimentality in its pages, though there is a lot of uncomplicated love. In many ways, the book reminds me of another memoir of growing up in a broken and poisonous culture but surviving and escaping to tell the tale. That would be Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), Claude Brown's account of life on the streets of Harlem in the 1940s and early '50s, as the nation's attention was being drawn to the stresses and pathologies of urban black life just as it is now focusing on the trials of those fugitives from the hollows Vance chronicles.
++
They are the Trump voters, of course, many of them: the ones who were left behind when the mills closed and the jobs went away. They are the ones who cannot find work, or say they can't, in the digital world.
They are, in a word, victims in fact and, more important, in spirit. Victims, largely, of themselves. Which is one of the most compelling aspects of this book. Vance does not excuse and he provides no alibi for the people he comes from and loves. In his high school years, he took a job as a cashier in a supermarket and witnessed customers who gamed the welfare system.
They'd buy two dozen-packs of soda with food stamps then sell them at a discount for cash. They'd write up their orders separately, so they could buy food with food stamps, then buy beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They'd regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.
Vance is simultaneously unsparing and charitable—which is paradoxical, perhaps, but these are his people. He is a hillbilly, like them.
Vance doesn't propose grand solutions, perhaps because he doesn't believe that any are handy. When Claude Brown wrote Manchild in the Promised Land America was launching a War on Poverty and getting on with creating Model Cities. Meanwhile, back on the streets where Brown had grown up, heroin was taking over. In one of Manchild's memorable passages, Brown wrote how
Heroin had just about taken over. . . . It seemed to be a kind of plague. Every time I went uptown, somebody else was hooked, somebody else was strung out. People talked about them as if they were dead. You'd ask about an old friend, and they'd say, "Oh, well, he's strung out." It wasn't just a comment or an answer to a question. It was a eulogy for someone. He was just dead, through.
The optimism of the Great Society was no match for the pathologies of the urban underclass. Heroin was stronger than hope, and heroin has now found its way into the lives of the people Vance loves, including his mother.
It is a mystery why people whose legend is for being tough and resourceful are (as Vance describes them) helpless and victims, ultimately, of themselves: "I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth," he writes, but "are we tough enough to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it? Are we tough enough to look at ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children?"
It's hard to know, on reading Hillbilly Elegy, what the answer might be. If there is an answer—and the black experience doesn't make one especially hopeful—it certainly isn't as simple as electing Donald Trump to the presidency. Or anyone else, for that matter. Public policy gives—as with those food stamps Vance took from his customers at the supermarket—but it also takes away, as with all those factory jobs, such as the one that Vance's grandfather worked at the steel mill, that are now gone.
The loss that Vance details here is measurable not merely as a function of reduced income but also as a diminished work ethic and a corresponding loss of spirit, a demoralization which manifests itself in an overarching spirit of denial.
It's not like parents and teachers never mention hard work. Nor do they walk around loudly proclaiming that they expect their children to turn out poorly. These attitudes lurk below the surface, less in what people say than in how they act. One of our neighbors was a lifetime welfare recipient, but in between asking my grandmother to borrow her car or offering to trade food stamps for cash at a premium, she'd blather on about the importance of industriousness. "So many people abuse the system, it's impossible for the hardworking people to get the help they need," she'd say. This was the construct she'd built in her head: Most of the beneficiaries of the system were extravagant moochers, but she—despite never having worked in her life—was an obvious exception.
Inspiring as his own story is, Vance leaves us wondering about the people whose lives are so badly broken and about whom he writes with affection, pity, and candor. What, if anything, can be done?
If J. D. Vance's people are to be saved, they will need to do it themselves. As they knew in the hollows, and know in their bones, you cannot depend on outsiders.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/hillbilly-elegys-unsparing-look-at-those-left-behind/article/2004158
The author's family comes out of the Kentucky hollows where life is harsh—often violently so—and people have learned not to expect much more of it than that. If there is work, it most likely will be in the mines. Women get pregnant when they are still girls and the men who are responsible fail in their responsibilities. The children grow up without guidance or ambition. The void in their lives is filled with idleness and drugs. And this passes from one generation unto the next.
So, one thinks, why stay? Why not escape the Appalachian prison for a better life elsewhere? Well, Vance's people did, along with millions of others. As he writes:
The scale of the migration was staggering. . . . In 1960, of Ohio's ten million residents, one million of them were born in Kentucky, West Virginia, or Tennessee. This doesn't count the large number of migrants from elsewhere in the southern Appalachian Mountains; nor does it include the children or grandchildren of migrants who were hill people to the core.
The grandparents who raised Vance were among those who fled north to Ohio where there was work. In the case of Vance's grandfather, this turned out to be a steel mill in Middletown, Ohio. This is where his mother was born and raised, as was he—although it would be more accurate, in his case, to say "born and neglected."
But even as Vance's grandparents put together the material framework of a middle-class life—house, car, some disposable income, etc.—the pathologies of the hollow went with them: The grandfather drank, and the alcohol liberated the violence; the grandmother, who was a match for him in this department, warned him that if he came home drunk again, she would kill him. He did—and she tried. While he was passed out on a sofa, she doused him with gasoline and put a match to it. He survived with minor burns and eventually did get off the whiskey.
Meanwhile, their daughter, Vance's mother, finished high school but also got pregnant with Vance's sister. Her life then took a slow downhill slide into serial marriages and childbirth. She, too, carried the curse of easy violence and once threatened to kill Vance and herself by crashing the vehicle she was driving at high speed. When she finally pulled over in order to "beat the s—t out of me," he ran to a stranger's house for protection and his mother went to jail.
By this point in his life, Vance himself seemed headed down a bleak road taken by so many who, though they may have left the hollow, it had never left them. He might have failed in school since that was almost ordained for young people like him. But his grandparents rescued him: His grandfather coached him with arithmetic and his grandmother would not allow him to give up, would not let him fail at school, and coached him on the books when his potential could have been withering in front of the television or worse.
She also taught him how to fight: One of her rules was "to punch with your whole body, especially your hips." Few people, she told him, "appreciate how unimportant your fist is when it comes to hitting someone." Vance fought as she'd taught him to fight, and he put down the class bully in the last fistfight of his life. He also listened to her when she told him to "never be like those f—ing losers who think the deck is stacked against them. You can do anything you want to."
He could have been a dropout, like so many of his cohort. But the pushing of his grandmother and the attention of a dedicated teacher put him on another path, and college became, almost miraculously, a possibility. But for someone with his primitive social skills, even the application process seemed daunting. That was a matter of self-confidence more than anything else: Who, in his mind, was he to be applying to colleges when his proper destiny was to be another dropout and criminal or addict? Or both.
So he enlisted in the Marines. This was the last door through which he needed to pass if he were to leave the literal and psychological hollow behind. He returned to civilian life after his time in the Marines (which included a year in Iraq) and was accepted at Ohio State, where he blazed through to a degree in two years. From there, it was on to law school—Yale, if you please, where he became an editor of the law review. He is now a "biotech executive in Silicon Valley" and has given the world this book.
Which would be important for fundamental literary reasons, if nothing else. One cannot read Hillbilly Elegy without being moved, and honestly so: There is no cheap sentimentality in its pages, though there is a lot of uncomplicated love. In many ways, the book reminds me of another memoir of growing up in a broken and poisonous culture but surviving and escaping to tell the tale. That would be Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), Claude Brown's account of life on the streets of Harlem in the 1940s and early '50s, as the nation's attention was being drawn to the stresses and pathologies of urban black life just as it is now focusing on the trials of those fugitives from the hollows Vance chronicles.
++
They are the Trump voters, of course, many of them: the ones who were left behind when the mills closed and the jobs went away. They are the ones who cannot find work, or say they can't, in the digital world.
They are, in a word, victims in fact and, more important, in spirit. Victims, largely, of themselves. Which is one of the most compelling aspects of this book. Vance does not excuse and he provides no alibi for the people he comes from and loves. In his high school years, he took a job as a cashier in a supermarket and witnessed customers who gamed the welfare system.
They'd buy two dozen-packs of soda with food stamps then sell them at a discount for cash. They'd write up their orders separately, so they could buy food with food stamps, then buy beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They'd regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.
Vance is simultaneously unsparing and charitable—which is paradoxical, perhaps, but these are his people. He is a hillbilly, like them.
Vance doesn't propose grand solutions, perhaps because he doesn't believe that any are handy. When Claude Brown wrote Manchild in the Promised Land America was launching a War on Poverty and getting on with creating Model Cities. Meanwhile, back on the streets where Brown had grown up, heroin was taking over. In one of Manchild's memorable passages, Brown wrote how
Heroin had just about taken over. . . . It seemed to be a kind of plague. Every time I went uptown, somebody else was hooked, somebody else was strung out. People talked about them as if they were dead. You'd ask about an old friend, and they'd say, "Oh, well, he's strung out." It wasn't just a comment or an answer to a question. It was a eulogy for someone. He was just dead, through.
The optimism of the Great Society was no match for the pathologies of the urban underclass. Heroin was stronger than hope, and heroin has now found its way into the lives of the people Vance loves, including his mother.
It is a mystery why people whose legend is for being tough and resourceful are (as Vance describes them) helpless and victims, ultimately, of themselves: "I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth," he writes, but "are we tough enough to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it? Are we tough enough to look at ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children?"
It's hard to know, on reading Hillbilly Elegy, what the answer might be. If there is an answer—and the black experience doesn't make one especially hopeful—it certainly isn't as simple as electing Donald Trump to the presidency. Or anyone else, for that matter. Public policy gives—as with those food stamps Vance took from his customers at the supermarket—but it also takes away, as with all those factory jobs, such as the one that Vance's grandfather worked at the steel mill, that are now gone.
The loss that Vance details here is measurable not merely as a function of reduced income but also as a diminished work ethic and a corresponding loss of spirit, a demoralization which manifests itself in an overarching spirit of denial.
It's not like parents and teachers never mention hard work. Nor do they walk around loudly proclaiming that they expect their children to turn out poorly. These attitudes lurk below the surface, less in what people say than in how they act. One of our neighbors was a lifetime welfare recipient, but in between asking my grandmother to borrow her car or offering to trade food stamps for cash at a premium, she'd blather on about the importance of industriousness. "So many people abuse the system, it's impossible for the hardworking people to get the help they need," she'd say. This was the construct she'd built in her head: Most of the beneficiaries of the system were extravagant moochers, but she—despite never having worked in her life—was an obvious exception.
Inspiring as his own story is, Vance leaves us wondering about the people whose lives are so badly broken and about whom he writes with affection, pity, and candor. What, if anything, can be done?
If J. D. Vance's people are to be saved, they will need to do it themselves. As they knew in the hollows, and know in their bones, you cannot depend on outsiders.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/hillbilly-elegys-unsparing-look-at-those-left-behind/article/2004158
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