J. D. Vance wrote “Hillbilly Elegy” to posture as if he knew U.S. Appalachia.
But the book’s actual message is his bitterness at working class America – it has just too many just too lazy for not going to Harvard as he did.
Harvard? Ivy League? Half their majors are biz ed, where life reduces to nothing more than the abstractions and living dead units for billionaires to package. Appalachia? Long America’s easiest pickings for our predator rich. As commenter Gary Loft here has written, it also adjoins all “the MAGA South that the Heritage Foundation wants to expand across the entire country.”
To make up for how Vance, like MAGA, has dehumanized, let’s just note some of the truest Appalachian humanities for the rest of us:
James Agee, “A Death in the Family”;
Harry Caudill, “Night Comes to the Cumberland”;
Davy Crockett, many tall tales;
Wilma Dykeman, “The French Broad” (Rivers of America series), “Return the Innocent Earth,” and more novels citing mountain/valley working realities;
Davis Grubb, “Night of the Hunter”;
George Washington Harris, the Sut Lovingood tales;
I was working as a library page when that book came out and absolutely every scared-and-guilty white liberal with a B.A. felt compelled to pick it up to get more of an understanding for those people whose neglect had left them no choice but to stray toward facism. Boy was I chastised for not only refusing to take part in the wearing of the hair-suits, but for having the gall to actually point out that people were obviously getting played by a poseur. There was no there there besides opportunism and apologia.
My sister lives in Central PA and when you get up in the hills/mountains to the west of I-81 it is pretty bleak economically. My niece delivered pizzas south of Harrisburg for several years and she saw many things she'll never be able to unsee.
If Trump wins the election, it may be time to split the nation into several smaller nations.
The climate deniers are going to suck up billions of dollars trying to rebuild on the East Coast south of the Mason-Dixon Line. What is the upside to rebuilding time and again?
And the Christian-Nationalists who authored Project 2025 will continue to support the patriarchy as well as the oligarchs.
The map accompanying this article shows how the US and Canada really has 11 separate 'nations' with entirely different cultures.
Gary Loft, I can't see any benefit to that except for oligarchs who would be delighted to own their countries and compete and war with the other countries. It would be their dream and our nightmare. We are more protected from domestic and foreign oligarchs as united states in a large region than as smaller fish, easy prey for predator oligarchs. In fact, I just read an article about Theil's friend, Yarvin, a wealthy tech guy, who proposes splitting our country up into smaller corporate owned nations. What could possibly go wrong? As sick of the division as we both probably are, the only way forward is to unite. It's no accident that their greatest strategy is divide,, divide and conquer, as old as time.
Hah.. 1954, I was in public school, 4th Grade, in Atlantic Highlands (NJ) when we shifted from "one nation "indivisible" to a nation "under god".. ! That, quite simply, was the beginning of 'the end'. Whoa.., is that too extreme for you gentle readers? I understand. Hows-about I use the word 'beginning'? As in, the beginning of the quagmire of religious-paralysis we're stuck in? It would have been better if it read One nation under Ford.., or One nation under General Motors, or maybe it shoulda been left alone.., "indivisible".
I fully admit that splitting up the US would a logistics nightmare and the winners would be the large corporations and oligarchs -- at least initially.
One can hope for Nirvana, but the unintended consequences are way beyond my imagination.
If we divide as a nation, we’ll end up dividing loyalties with other countries. Red Republicans will align with Russia and other authoritarian nations plus some others who need resources from those states.
We won’t have peace. We’ll end up as “meat” for stronger countries to take.
While we’re dreaming, I’ll repeat my dream: Canada++ = West Coast + Mexico + Canada, with Canada’s political and legal systems. World’s third largest economy and a force for good governance and a green new deal.
Rex Page (Left Coast), P.S., it feels like so much innocence has been lost these last eight years, or maybe I was just in a state of ignorance is bliss. I don't know. The world is all upside down.
Rex Page (Left Coast), sadly, the last eight years of our propaganda on steroids from the top down has also awakened a strong vein of yearning for dictatorship by some in Canada. It is, I suspect, not as strong but even a few degrees of separation is still bad.
i think the mindset of corporate owned is already with us (unfortunately). Seems since the 70’s or 80’s the paradigm most folks are operating from is a business one. Everything is for sale and efficiency uber important. Return on investment is being applied to everything including for example healthcare and education. Everything measured and quantified. Yes, a nightmare.
I think we need to reform capitalism to protect life essentials from speculation. Creativity and innovation are being hamstrung by our operating out of a business paradigm for everything. No wonder people feel unhappy. There is only room for the businessman’s perspective. Ridiculous waste of human potential. I think we need to stop counting everything and measuring what’s in this for me. All this counting is not leaving room for anything else. Corporate nations may indeed replace the current nations and governments if we don’t reform and put other values besides money first. Profit first is a divider. I think people first is needed for us to unite.
Mary Ellen Spicuzza, you have explained it well. Robert Reich refers to it as our demise of stakeholder capitalism (everyone mattered, shareholders, ceo's, executives, employees, customers, community, and the common good of the nation) replaced by shareholder capitalism (only shareholders, ceo's and other executives matter, profit only goes to them).
Mary, In the absence of industry and manufacturing, the goal of that side and corporate democrats, is to "peddle" the myths of "self-made" folks, and the glory of some "gig" economy. It's all horsecrap ! Don't get me started....
Perhaps we need to redefine "business". The phrase "it's business", translates into "I can do anything I want regardless of the consequences, as long as I make a profit". That doesn't have to be the only way to understand business. It could mean, an activity that is designed to make it possible for people to have a good life, while also considering environmental factors. Business without ethics is what's destroying us.
60 years ago I was 17 years old and hitch-hiking all over this map. I felt no cultural divisions (okay, I was 17), only excitement at a country with so much diversity, variety, human and natural.
With the exception of a certain war that interrupted things (and changed me), I just continued to absorb the novels, songs, films, and other arts that informed, suffused this great land.
Even today, imaginatively, I cannot accept -- can scarcely even register -- the sheer vulgarity of those who just cannot even begin to love the America I was so blessed then and since profoundly to love.
Even though my parents lived in one house for 53 of their 55 years of marriage, my mother insisted we take a vacation every year -- usually 2 to 3 weeks long.
From Omaha, we could travel to much of the country in a couple of days in our 1962 powder blue 3 on the tree Chevy Bel-Air station wagon. It was packed to the gills with canned meat, cereal, fruit and other ready made drive down the road meals. We would drive until sunset the first day, and my dad would ALWAYS be grumpy. And then my mom would yell at him for being grumpy.
We would set up our tent roll out the sleeping bags and my mom would set up the camp stove to make coffee in the morning.
We met people in campgrounds from all over the US and once in a while from other countries. And my mom always made us tour some business. One year we toured the Swift Meatpacking Plant in Albert Lea, MN. The first stop on the tour was the hog kill line. I was 9 at the time and my sisters were 12 and 5. All 3 of us kids can still recall every detail of that tour. And I'm suspect from hearing the Covid-19 stories of the conditions in the meatpacking plants little has changed in the 60 years since that tour.
Those vacations were an education that I cherish, even though I haven't eaten Spam or Vienna sausage since. And the people we met, were all so real and nice.
I've lived in 10 states and worked in almost 40 states and 5 foreign countries. I have learned so much about people yet I know so little. How lucky are we to live in the US and have the freedom to travel almost anywhere in the world.
like yours, my family traveled 3 weeks every summer, al over the US. (Well, not south, in our un air-conditioned Ford wagon,Mom vetoed that!) Staying in a tent in national parks, and seeing the greatness of our country. We met people from all over, and made friends no matter where they wre based. An unparalleled education.
We can't let the haters Win Phil, we just can't. I happened across the perfect meme for this age we find ourselves in; I'll set to searching for it in my files, then share it with you and our friends here.
I read Colin Woodward's book you mentioned, as well as his book, American Character. Both books raise similar interesting points. I highly recommend them.
Thanks Gary for sharing this. Once again I am discovering a new idea from a fellow Substack reader. Not saying I think it is a good idea mind you but it sure is interesting to see the breakdown on that map.
Insulted! Yes. And since 2016, our worthiness as citizens of this great country has been under duress together with our intelligence being continually insulted by #45 and his surrogates (u-name-them). Vance, fits right in. I can only hope that the Harris campaign grabs those two bozos right by the nuts and shakes them till their teeth fall out.
I use Glasshouse as the example of what Reaganomics/trickle down did to a well functioning union based industry that had its money sucked out of it and good paying jobs sent to China. The decline of that town is the failure of trickle down.
I'd not have seen this, Kathy, but for your kindness in posting.
My favorite lines:
"Vance’s policy approach is not very resonant. He specializes in weak-man politics. His claim is that government is always impotent. This does not work together with Trump’s strong-man fantasy."
My take-away from the book was the author’s unfathomable devotion to a family of deeply deplorable dunces. When the white working class that Vance pretended to champion went all in on continuing the French colonial war in Vietnam, I lost most of my respect for them. When they put a union-busting racist in the White House in 1980, I lost the rest of it. They’ve gotten steadily worse since then. Not all of them, of course. Twenty or thirty percent of them are decent human beings. Whatever problems the white working class might have are their own damn fault for voting for rethugs.
Vance' book became popular as an explanation of Trump's appeal to the White rural poor. A NY Times review suggested that stereotyping those poor as despairing rather than indolent was an improvement. And a Brookings report noted that Vance's "account anecdotally confirmed the report's conclusion that family stability is essential to upward mobility."
However. Vance grew up in suburban Ohio. His grandparent's had left Appalachia (Kentucky) in their 20s.
"Jared Yates Sexton of Salon criticized Vance for his "damaging rhetoric" and for endorsing policies used to "gut the poor". He argues that Vance "totally discounts the role racism played in the white working class's opposition to President Obama." Sarah Jones of The New Republic mocked Vance as "the false prophet of Blue America," dismissing him as "a flawed guide to this world" and the book as little more than "a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class." Historian Bob Hutton wrote in Jacobin that Vance's argument relied on circular logic and eugenics, ignored existing scholarship on Appalachian poverty, and was "primarily a work of self-congratulation." Sarah Smarsh with The Guardian noted that "most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia" and called into question Vance's generalizations about the white working class from his personal upbringing. . . The book provoked a response in the form of an anthology, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. The essays in the volume criticize Vance for making broad generalizations and reproducing myths about poverty." When it was published, many from Appalachia rejected it. Today, the rejection of Vance's appropriation and misrepresentations by both residents and scholars of Appalachia continues.
JD Vance took a route to privilege and wealth through the military. (Where he served in a PR unit.) Which gave him entree to an Ivy league education. Like Trump, Vance's business ventures failed. Instead of his way being smoothed by his father's wealth and influence, Vance's rise was smoothed by Ohio Yale classmate Peter Thiel's wealth and influence.
"From giving Vance a job in Silicon Valley to funding his Ohio Senate campaign — and introducing him to a network of tech billionaires who could give him more money — Thiel helped propel Vance into the MAGA-verse and onto the ballot, simultaneously bringing the agenda of the New Right into mainstream politics. The New Right is a post-Trump movement of young and elite conservatives that essentially believe federal institutions and current democratic systems have failed the United States and must be dismantled."
Peter Thiel is intellectually brilliant, but seems to believe his brilliance should be highly rewarded. He seems to think he should be able to buy anything, his own politician for example. His ideas are very scary.
I don't know where you are unless I know your latitude and longitude. One without the other is useless. Likewise, I don't know who you are unless I know your intelligence and your wisdom. One without the other is useless.
Q: Is exceptional intelligence an asset?
A: It depends. Exceptional intelligence in a wise person is an asset, and exceptional intelligence in an unwise person is a liability. Thank God Citizen Donald is an evil idiot and not an evil genius.
I am uncomfortable with disparagement of "MSM" This is a GOP trope which has tainted public discourse. And is unfair to the many good journalists at outlets such as WaPo and the NY Times. And exactly what does the term "MSM" encompass? NPR? The New Yorker, The Atlantic etc?
These are samples of early criticisms. Recent ones abound.
WaPo 2017:
I was born in poverty in Appalachia. ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ doesn’t speak for me.
lin°, that's a good point. When I say MSM, i think mainly of the three major television networks and their online sites. I separate the press, cable, NPR and PBS in my mind. My criticism of MSM is on a continuum of criticisms/motives. Go to the extreme right and you find generalization of all the MSM with the motive to destroy it and any press, cable, and publicly funded programming who questions them or disagrees with them. My motive is expounding a truth that the MSM fell all over themselves to glorify his book. And around its release, there wasn't a glut of questioning of some of his premises by the MSM.
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." —George Orwell.
My suggestion is we distinguish between real journalism, public relations, and phony journalism. Every journalist must engage in public relations to survive, and the purpose of real journalism is to inform. The problem is phony journalism: public relations that harms by misinforming.
Q: Does a journalist tell people what they want to hear because it's profitable, or tell people what they need to hear because that's journalism?
Q: Do I consume media because it's telling me what I want to hear, or do I consume media because it's telling me what I need to hear?
Same answer to both questions: Do no harm. I think it's safe to assume that every subscriber to this newsletter understands that implicitly.
James R. Carey, yes it really comes down to motive, both overarching and for each individual story. Are you trying to inform the audience, with facts that point to the truth or manipulate the audience, with omission of facts that point away from the truth?
Hunter Thompson is from Louisville, KY. Not Appalachia, but still wish he had a chance to confront Vance! I recall him coming to Daytona in '84. Queried on which Dem he liked among the seven contenders at the time: "I don't give a shit as long as we get these profit taking bastards out of the White House."
Louisville, Kentucky (Hunter Thompson's birthplace), is far west of Appalachia, Rich.
My mother's family is from Beaver Creek, part of the Clinch river watershed where they built the first T.V.A. dam when my mother was first entering school in the nearby city of Knoxville.
When I knew my great-grandfather, he was retired from the Southern Railroad, and living in a large old wooden house on Fort Saunders hill, just west of the L&N rail yards along Knoxville's old downtown
There'd been a great Civil War battle one nasty November morning on that hill, where Longstreet's Johnny Rebs could not dislodge the entrenched bluecoats.
Same hill, described so poignantly by James Agee in "Knoxville: Summer, 1915" (prologue to "A Death in the Family."
Guess we all owe it to Heather for her good work allowing this site of hers to be of some remedial help to us who've otherwise missed, not known of, so much worth knowing.
and WE, the tax payers, paid for that Harvard schooling if he used the GI bill. If that is the case, Harris's campaign needs to highlight that as his exploitive ways. Make him defend his grifting.
I am from Kentucky. The Appalachian Mountains are exquisite and the people are a beleaguered population isolated and abused by coal corporations. Their culture is old and a powerful part of American history.
Here is what our Governor Andy Beshear said about Vance:
" “If somebody calls you on that, what you do is at least listen. And I want America to know what a Kentuckian is, and what they look like, because let me just tell you that J.D. Vance ain’t from here. And the nerve that he has, to call the people of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky, lazy. Listen, these are the hard-working coal miners that powered the industrial revolution, that created the strongest middle class the world has ever seen, powered us through two world wars. We should be thanking them, not calling them lazy. So today was both an opportunity to support the vice president but also to stand up for my people. Nobody calls us names, especially those who have worked hard for the betterment of this country.”
Your governor's response described what I saw making nurse home visits in West Virginia in the late 70's. Proud, family focused, hard working, give you the shirt off your back people. I hated Vance's book. Feel the same way about the author.
I have really enjoyed "Dirt Road Revival" by Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward, https://www.dirtroadrevival.com/ Chloe won office in the reddest county in Maine. "Democrats can win back and empower overlooked communities that have been pushing politics to the right." How they did it is relevant to any state.
Thank You, Phil. In 1979 on my first day at work in a West Virginia clinic, the director handed this Michigander a copy of Caudil's "Night Comes to the Cumberland" and said, "Read this." Best orientation ever.
Apparently Vance does what many Republicans do, which is to blame individuals for system failures. Poverty is the result of political policy decisions. And human beings caught up in poverty have a whole array of responses to their circumstances, depending largely on their family structure and function, genetic predisposition and the social environment they live in. Some people are undone by poverty, while others have the wherewithal to overcome the impact of it and every possible response in between. Vance seems to have mistaken depression and despair for "indolence". But not all succumbed to what is actually a public health crisis of poverty by becoming depressed.
Here's what I said yesterday on another site. Vance as the hitman for the campaign. Think Spiro Agnew. Not just women. Trump wants to play the victim of unrestrained targeted prosecutions and Harris was a lifetime prosecutor.
I heard Black Lung cases for 20 years mostly in Appalachia and grew up with that Wheeling Feeling, exposed to the culture. Fire in the hole! If he checks out who the Reagan Democrats in Macomb County Michigan, were, most of their antecedents took that Hillbilly Highway to get work in Detroit city. Same for every industrial area in the Midwest.
To a hillbilly, Vance ain't no hillbilly. "He is playing into the stereotype of the lazy, violent mountaineer who can't quite be trusted to take care of themselves." https://www.npr.org/2024/07/20/nx-s1-5043772/appalachian-writer-revisits-j-d-vances-hillbilly-elegy J.D. Vance Never Was and Never Will Be the Voice of Appalachiahttps://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/jd-vance-never-was-and-never-will-be-the-voice-of-appalachia. The voice of Appalachia these days is Governor Andrew Graham Beshear, who just last year flipped counties that went 70%-30 for Trump twice. He speaks the language. Her's a lay Decuples of Christ preacher who know the lyrics of all the hymns and Bill Monroe songs and knows what it takes to make burgoo.
Vance is a guy who married an Indian, gave his kids Indian names. His opponent is also partly Indian. I bet they eat the same food and it ain't burgoo. I bet he doesn't put syrup on his samosas and pakoras. On his naam bread. I bet he doesn't eat Martha White biscuits and chew Mail Pouch.
This is also a guy who has been, as I have written previously, the spokesman for the Putin position in Ukraine, despite the fact that 70,000 Ukrainians live in Ohio, not to mention folks interested in preserving democracy in Baltic and other European countries threatened by Russia.
BTW Vance lost the Republican childless cat woman vote. Trump hates dogs. Vance hates cat women, be they Democrat or Republican.
"This is also a guy who has been, as I have written previously, the spokesman for the Putin position in Ukraine, despite the fact that 70,000 Ukrainians live in Ohio, not to mention folks interested in preserving democracy in Baltic and other European countries threatened by Russia." Big part of the Vance moment.
“Audubon: a Vision”. A tour de force of American poetic imagination. Red studied Audubon’s journals. Then as if possessed by his ghost, he imagines the early American wilderness and its inhabitants as Audubon must have surely seen them but declined to elaborate upon. And it is haunting.
RPW was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, went to high school in eastern Tennessee, Clark County. Then went to Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Yale, and Oxford, achieving honors and distinction at every turn. I took to rereading All the Kings Men a few years back. There is this passage from then end of the first chapter, loosely from memory.
“As they were leaving, the Boss said, “Go to work on the Judge. Find something. “But what if I don’t find nothing” Jack replied. I know the Judge. There ain’t nothin on him. He’s clean. To which the Boss replied. “Jack, there is always something. Man is conceited in sin and born in iniquity. And he passes from the stink of the ditty to the stench of the shroud. There is always something”.
Please, don't blame him on Harvard. He went to YALE. Harvard has enough questionable fruits in it's basket ie, bad apples. Don't saddle it with this sour, and rotten lemon. He's Yale and Ohio State.
J. D. Vance wrote “Hillbilly Elegy” to posture as if he knew U.S. Appalachia.
But the book’s actual message is his bitterness at working class America – it has just too many just too lazy for not going to Harvard as he did.
Harvard? Ivy League? Half their majors are biz ed, where life reduces to nothing more than the abstractions and living dead units for billionaires to package. Appalachia? Long America’s easiest pickings for our predator rich. As commenter Gary Loft here has written, it also adjoins all “the MAGA South that the Heritage Foundation wants to expand across the entire country.”
To make up for how Vance, like MAGA, has dehumanized, let’s just note some of the truest Appalachian humanities for the rest of us:
James Agee, “A Death in the Family”;
Harry Caudill, “Night Comes to the Cumberland”;
Davy Crockett, many tall tales;
Wilma Dykeman, “The French Broad” (Rivers of America series), “Return the Innocent Earth,” and more novels citing mountain/valley working realities;
Davis Grubb, “Night of the Hunter”;
George Washington Harris, the Sut Lovingood tales;
Barbara Kingsolver, “Demon Copperhead”;
Cormac McCarthy, “The Orchard Keeper.”
I was working as a library page when that book came out and absolutely every scared-and-guilty white liberal with a B.A. felt compelled to pick it up to get more of an understanding for those people whose neglect had left them no choice but to stray toward facism. Boy was I chastised for not only refusing to take part in the wearing of the hair-suits, but for having the gall to actually point out that people were obviously getting played by a poseur. There was no there there besides opportunism and apologia.
Today, I am smug and I am not sorry.
I wasn’t impressed with the book when it came out, and neither were scholars of Appalachia.
My sister lives in Central PA and when you get up in the hills/mountains to the west of I-81 it is pretty bleak economically. My niece delivered pizzas south of Harrisburg for several years and she saw many things she'll never be able to unsee.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-11-nations-of-the-united-states-2015-7?op=1
If Trump wins the election, it may be time to split the nation into several smaller nations.
The climate deniers are going to suck up billions of dollars trying to rebuild on the East Coast south of the Mason-Dixon Line. What is the upside to rebuilding time and again?
And the Christian-Nationalists who authored Project 2025 will continue to support the patriarchy as well as the oligarchs.
The map accompanying this article shows how the US and Canada really has 11 separate 'nations' with entirely different cultures.
Gary Loft, I can't see any benefit to that except for oligarchs who would be delighted to own their countries and compete and war with the other countries. It would be their dream and our nightmare. We are more protected from domestic and foreign oligarchs as united states in a large region than as smaller fish, easy prey for predator oligarchs. In fact, I just read an article about Theil's friend, Yarvin, a wealthy tech guy, who proposes splitting our country up into smaller corporate owned nations. What could possibly go wrong? As sick of the division as we both probably are, the only way forward is to unite. It's no accident that their greatest strategy is divide,, divide and conquer, as old as time.
Hah.. 1954, I was in public school, 4th Grade, in Atlantic Highlands (NJ) when we shifted from "one nation "indivisible" to a nation "under god".. ! That, quite simply, was the beginning of 'the end'. Whoa.., is that too extreme for you gentle readers? I understand. Hows-about I use the word 'beginning'? As in, the beginning of the quagmire of religious-paralysis we're stuck in? It would have been better if it read One nation under Ford.., or One nation under General Motors, or maybe it shoulda been left alone.., "indivisible".
MadRussian12A, I don't know how it got added, but it clearly violates separation of church and state.
To separate the United States from the atheist commies and socialists in the Soviet Union
That is a notable memory of mine as well!
I fully admit that splitting up the US would a logistics nightmare and the winners would be the large corporations and oligarchs -- at least initially.
One can hope for Nirvana, but the unintended consequences are way beyond my imagination.
If we divide as a nation, we’ll end up dividing loyalties with other countries. Red Republicans will align with Russia and other authoritarian nations plus some others who need resources from those states.
We won’t have peace. We’ll end up as “meat” for stronger countries to take.
While we’re dreaming, I’ll repeat my dream: Canada++ = West Coast + Mexico + Canada, with Canada’s political and legal systems. World’s third largest economy and a force for good governance and a green new deal.
Rex Page (Left Coast), P.S., it feels like so much innocence has been lost these last eight years, or maybe I was just in a state of ignorance is bliss. I don't know. The world is all upside down.
Rex Page (Left Coast), sadly, the last eight years of our propaganda on steroids from the top down has also awakened a strong vein of yearning for dictatorship by some in Canada. It is, I suspect, not as strong but even a few degrees of separation is still bad.
Cascadia! California, Oregon, Washington, and BC!
Yes! We're even willing to drag the eastern sides along so they don't become the responsibility of Idaho.
For our enemies friendly adversaries, and competitors. Power abhors vacuums as well as nature and other 'things.'
i think the mindset of corporate owned is already with us (unfortunately). Seems since the 70’s or 80’s the paradigm most folks are operating from is a business one. Everything is for sale and efficiency uber important. Return on investment is being applied to everything including for example healthcare and education. Everything measured and quantified. Yes, a nightmare.
I think we need to reform capitalism to protect life essentials from speculation. Creativity and innovation are being hamstrung by our operating out of a business paradigm for everything. No wonder people feel unhappy. There is only room for the businessman’s perspective. Ridiculous waste of human potential. I think we need to stop counting everything and measuring what’s in this for me. All this counting is not leaving room for anything else. Corporate nations may indeed replace the current nations and governments if we don’t reform and put other values besides money first. Profit first is a divider. I think people first is needed for us to unite.
Mary Ellen Spicuzza, you have explained it well. Robert Reich refers to it as our demise of stakeholder capitalism (everyone mattered, shareholders, ceo's, executives, employees, customers, community, and the common good of the nation) replaced by shareholder capitalism (only shareholders, ceo's and other executives matter, profit only goes to them).
Bob Reich, in my view has always had his crap together.
Mary, In the absence of industry and manufacturing, the goal of that side and corporate democrats, is to "peddle" the myths of "self-made" folks, and the glory of some "gig" economy. It's all horsecrap ! Don't get me started....
Perhaps we need to redefine "business". The phrase "it's business", translates into "I can do anything I want regardless of the consequences, as long as I make a profit". That doesn't have to be the only way to understand business. It could mean, an activity that is designed to make it possible for people to have a good life, while also considering environmental factors. Business without ethics is what's destroying us.
Thank you for the map, Gary.
60 years ago I was 17 years old and hitch-hiking all over this map. I felt no cultural divisions (okay, I was 17), only excitement at a country with so much diversity, variety, human and natural.
With the exception of a certain war that interrupted things (and changed me), I just continued to absorb the novels, songs, films, and other arts that informed, suffused this great land.
Even today, imaginatively, I cannot accept -- can scarcely even register -- the sheer vulgarity of those who just cannot even begin to love the America I was so blessed then and since profoundly to love.
Thank you for your comment Phil.
Even though my parents lived in one house for 53 of their 55 years of marriage, my mother insisted we take a vacation every year -- usually 2 to 3 weeks long.
From Omaha, we could travel to much of the country in a couple of days in our 1962 powder blue 3 on the tree Chevy Bel-Air station wagon. It was packed to the gills with canned meat, cereal, fruit and other ready made drive down the road meals. We would drive until sunset the first day, and my dad would ALWAYS be grumpy. And then my mom would yell at him for being grumpy.
We would set up our tent roll out the sleeping bags and my mom would set up the camp stove to make coffee in the morning.
We met people in campgrounds from all over the US and once in a while from other countries. And my mom always made us tour some business. One year we toured the Swift Meatpacking Plant in Albert Lea, MN. The first stop on the tour was the hog kill line. I was 9 at the time and my sisters were 12 and 5. All 3 of us kids can still recall every detail of that tour. And I'm suspect from hearing the Covid-19 stories of the conditions in the meatpacking plants little has changed in the 60 years since that tour.
Those vacations were an education that I cherish, even though I haven't eaten Spam or Vienna sausage since. And the people we met, were all so real and nice.
I've lived in 10 states and worked in almost 40 states and 5 foreign countries. I have learned so much about people yet I know so little. How lucky are we to live in the US and have the freedom to travel almost anywhere in the world.
like yours, my family traveled 3 weeks every summer, al over the US. (Well, not south, in our un air-conditioned Ford wagon,Mom vetoed that!) Staying in a tent in national parks, and seeing the greatness of our country. We met people from all over, and made friends no matter where they wre based. An unparalleled education.
Yeah, we didn't head south either. It was hot enough in Nebraska and no air.
We traveled on a shoe string. My mom kept the till. A few times we had major car trouble like the clutch going out. It was touch and go after that.
Your Mom was wise beyond her years Gary..
🙂
We can't let the haters Win Phil, we just can't. I happened across the perfect meme for this age we find ourselves in; I'll set to searching for it in my files, then share it with you and our friends here.
I read Colin Woodward's book you mentioned, as well as his book, American Character. Both books raise similar interesting points. I highly recommend them.
Thanks Gary for sharing this. Once again I am discovering a new idea from a fellow Substack reader. Not saying I think it is a good idea mind you but it sure is interesting to see the breakdown on that map.
I can't imagine a time when things would get so bad that we would split up as a country, but if we did, maybe it wouldn't just be into 2 countries.
G K Chesterton wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill in 1904
about London being turned into separate countries!!!
Sky high insurance costs, for themselves - and us all, as those 'costs trickle down' it would seem.
Totally! I was astounded that anyone found the book worthy of any praise, it was insulting, now even more so!
Insulted! Yes. And since 2016, our worthiness as citizens of this great country has been under duress together with our intelligence being continually insulted by #45 and his surrogates (u-name-them). Vance, fits right in. I can only hope that the Harris campaign grabs those two bozos right by the nuts and shakes them till their teeth fall out.
Before then MR12A, but, I digress. It hit high gear with that cretin; that's how I would put it.
Same here. Found the book poorly written and its characters one dimensional and its story line weak tea.
I bought the book as I also own The Glass Castle. I now realize they could be promoted the same, but they are not.
I use Glasshouse as the example of what Reaganomics/trickle down did to a well functioning union based industry that had its money sucked out of it and good paying jobs sent to China. The decline of that town is the failure of trickle down.
I think both books are more about the devastation poor parenting heeps on children, than about regions.
The state of Vance from a respected substacker, Timothy Snyder : https://snyder.substack.com/p/veep-stakes
I'd not have seen this, Kathy, but for your kindness in posting.
My favorite lines:
"Vance’s policy approach is not very resonant. He specializes in weak-man politics. His claim is that government is always impotent. This does not work together with Trump’s strong-man fantasy."
Thank You, Kathy.
Ditto..
My take-away from the book was the author’s unfathomable devotion to a family of deeply deplorable dunces. When the white working class that Vance pretended to champion went all in on continuing the French colonial war in Vietnam, I lost most of my respect for them. When they put a union-busting racist in the White House in 1980, I lost the rest of it. They’ve gotten steadily worse since then. Not all of them, of course. Twenty or thirty percent of them are decent human beings. Whatever problems the white working class might have are their own damn fault for voting for rethugs.
Too much of it doesn't add up.
Vance' book became popular as an explanation of Trump's appeal to the White rural poor. A NY Times review suggested that stereotyping those poor as despairing rather than indolent was an improvement. And a Brookings report noted that Vance's "account anecdotally confirmed the report's conclusion that family stability is essential to upward mobility."
However. Vance grew up in suburban Ohio. His grandparent's had left Appalachia (Kentucky) in their 20s.
"Jared Yates Sexton of Salon criticized Vance for his "damaging rhetoric" and for endorsing policies used to "gut the poor". He argues that Vance "totally discounts the role racism played in the white working class's opposition to President Obama." Sarah Jones of The New Republic mocked Vance as "the false prophet of Blue America," dismissing him as "a flawed guide to this world" and the book as little more than "a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class." Historian Bob Hutton wrote in Jacobin that Vance's argument relied on circular logic and eugenics, ignored existing scholarship on Appalachian poverty, and was "primarily a work of self-congratulation." Sarah Smarsh with The Guardian noted that "most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia" and called into question Vance's generalizations about the white working class from his personal upbringing. . . The book provoked a response in the form of an anthology, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. The essays in the volume criticize Vance for making broad generalizations and reproducing myths about poverty." When it was published, many from Appalachia rejected it. Today, the rejection of Vance's appropriation and misrepresentations by both residents and scholars of Appalachia continues.
JD Vance took a route to privilege and wealth through the military. (Where he served in a PR unit.) Which gave him entree to an Ivy league education. Like Trump, Vance's business ventures failed. Instead of his way being smoothed by his father's wealth and influence, Vance's rise was smoothed by Ohio Yale classmate Peter Thiel's wealth and influence.
"From giving Vance a job in Silicon Valley to funding his Ohio Senate campaign — and introducing him to a network of tech billionaires who could give him more money — Thiel helped propel Vance into the MAGA-verse and onto the ballot, simultaneously bringing the agenda of the New Right into mainstream politics. The New Right is a post-Trump movement of young and elite conservatives that essentially believe federal institutions and current democratic systems have failed the United States and must be dismantled."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy
https://www.salon.com/2024/07/22/jd-vance-owes-almost-everything-to-peter-thiel-a-pro-billionaire-and-new-right-ideologue/
Peter Thiel is intellectually brilliant, but seems to believe his brilliance should be highly rewarded. He seems to think he should be able to buy anything, his own politician for example. His ideas are very scary.
I don't know where you are unless I know your latitude and longitude. One without the other is useless. Likewise, I don't know who you are unless I know your intelligence and your wisdom. One without the other is useless.
Q: Is exceptional intelligence an asset?
A: It depends. Exceptional intelligence in a wise person is an asset, and exceptional intelligence in an unwise person is a liability. Thank God Citizen Donald is an evil idiot and not an evil genius.
Intelligence and riches have never equated with character.
lin°, thanks for the robust list of criticisms for the book. I never heard those from MSM.
ThankYou.
I am uncomfortable with disparagement of "MSM" This is a GOP trope which has tainted public discourse. And is unfair to the many good journalists at outlets such as WaPo and the NY Times. And exactly what does the term "MSM" encompass? NPR? The New Yorker, The Atlantic etc?
These are samples of early criticisms. Recent ones abound.
WaPo 2017:
I was born in poverty in Appalachia. ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ doesn’t speak for me.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-grew-up-in-poverty-in-appalachia-jd-vances-hillbilly-elegy-doesnt-speak-for-me/2017/08/30/734abb38-891d-11e7-961d-2f373b3977ee_story.html
NYTimes 2019:
‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Had Strong Opinions About Appalachians. Now, Appalachians Return the Favor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/books/review-appalachian-reckoning-region-responds-hillbilly-elegy.html
lin°, that's a good point. When I say MSM, i think mainly of the three major television networks and their online sites. I separate the press, cable, NPR and PBS in my mind. My criticism of MSM is on a continuum of criticisms/motives. Go to the extreme right and you find generalization of all the MSM with the motive to destroy it and any press, cable, and publicly funded programming who questions them or disagrees with them. My motive is expounding a truth that the MSM fell all over themselves to glorify his book. And around its release, there wasn't a glut of questioning of some of his premises by the MSM.
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." —George Orwell.
My suggestion is we distinguish between real journalism, public relations, and phony journalism. Every journalist must engage in public relations to survive, and the purpose of real journalism is to inform. The problem is phony journalism: public relations that harms by misinforming.
Q: Does a journalist tell people what they want to hear because it's profitable, or tell people what they need to hear because that's journalism?
Q: Do I consume media because it's telling me what I want to hear, or do I consume media because it's telling me what I need to hear?
Same answer to both questions: Do no harm. I think it's safe to assume that every subscriber to this newsletter understands that implicitly.
James R. Carey, yes it really comes down to motive, both overarching and for each individual story. Are you trying to inform the audience, with facts that point to the truth or manipulate the audience, with omission of facts that point away from the truth?
"Front page and narrative repetition" lin. That's the cause and effect of MSM generalized failings. I 'get' your reluctance though
Lin, great information here, thank you. Why are we not hearing any of this from MSM?
ThankYou. Please see my reply to M Tree above (on Hillbilly Elegy.) Now I will focus of Vance -Thiel.
I fear so many reflexively dismiss "MSM" that they don't see what's out there. Even when HCR cites the reporting.
Early examples. Current are too numerous to cite
WaPo 2022
Why a secretive tech billionaire is bankrolling J.D. Vance
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/05/peter-thiel-bankrolling-jd-vance-reactionary-nationalism/
Bloomberg 2022
Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Win One for JD Vance in Ohio
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-04/jd-vance-trump-focus-overlooks-peter-thiel-s-role
I wonder if he used AI.
Used any and every tool available Tyler. AI is not as 'new' as one might think.
Check, check, and check lin; happy that you added what I chose not to.
Hunter Thompson is from Louisville, KY. Not Appalachia, but still wish he had a chance to confront Vance! I recall him coming to Daytona in '84. Queried on which Dem he liked among the seven contenders at the time: "I don't give a shit as long as we get these profit taking bastards out of the White House."
Louisville, Kentucky (Hunter Thompson's birthplace), is far west of Appalachia, Rich.
My mother's family is from Beaver Creek, part of the Clinch river watershed where they built the first T.V.A. dam when my mother was first entering school in the nearby city of Knoxville.
When I knew my great-grandfather, he was retired from the Southern Railroad, and living in a large old wooden house on Fort Saunders hill, just west of the L&N rail yards along Knoxville's old downtown
There'd been a great Civil War battle one nasty November morning on that hill, where Longstreet's Johnny Rebs could not dislodge the entrenched bluecoats.
Same hill, described so poignantly by James Agee in "Knoxville: Summer, 1915" (prologue to "A Death in the Family."
Hey Phil, love this post, it has the making of a Steve Earl song 😀cheers!
Hillbilly Highway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BxFfAxJYvw
Like Sonny, I, too, thank you, Daniel.
Guess we all owe it to Heather for her good work allowing this site of hers to be of some remedial help to us who've otherwise missed, not known of, so much worth knowing.
haha I really didnt know he wrote a song like that! Thanks for the link
and WE, the tax payers, paid for that Harvard schooling if he used the GI bill. If that is the case, Harris's campaign needs to highlight that as his exploitive ways. Make him defend his grifting.
Rickey, I wonder what Project 2025 thinks of government-financed education? 🤔 (Don't worry, I know the answer.)
Awesome point Rickey ! You are a genius in the making ! Force some 'truth telling'.
I am from Kentucky. The Appalachian Mountains are exquisite and the people are a beleaguered population isolated and abused by coal corporations. Their culture is old and a powerful part of American history.
Here is what our Governor Andy Beshear said about Vance:
" “If somebody calls you on that, what you do is at least listen. And I want America to know what a Kentuckian is, and what they look like, because let me just tell you that J.D. Vance ain’t from here. And the nerve that he has, to call the people of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky, lazy. Listen, these are the hard-working coal miners that powered the industrial revolution, that created the strongest middle class the world has ever seen, powered us through two world wars. We should be thanking them, not calling them lazy. So today was both an opportunity to support the vice president but also to stand up for my people. Nobody calls us names, especially those who have worked hard for the betterment of this country.”
In other words, “Lemme at him.”
Your governor's response described what I saw making nurse home visits in West Virginia in the late 70's. Proud, family focused, hard working, give you the shirt off your back people. I hated Vance's book. Feel the same way about the author.
That's a perfect response by Bashear, Barbara. I hope it plays as well in KY as it does in my mind.
We really love Beshear here. He was amazing during covid.
Sharing Bashear's MSNBC interview!
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/andy-beshear-kamala-harris-vp-rcna163228
Thank you MaryPat....
Thank You MaryPat. I really enjoyed this.
Andy Bashear for Vice President!
Thank you Barb; Outstanding contribution here !
Thank you. We are Kentucky Proud!
As you very well should be Barb. Likewise, I have no shame about my roots - after all, I've grown into a tree.
Well then you would enjoy the book:
THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES
by Elif Shafak
I have really enjoyed "Dirt Road Revival" by Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward, https://www.dirtroadrevival.com/ Chloe won office in the reddest county in Maine. "Democrats can win back and empower overlooked communities that have been pushing politics to the right." How they did it is relevant to any state.
Thank You, Phil. In 1979 on my first day at work in a West Virginia clinic, the director handed this Michigander a copy of Caudil's "Night Comes to the Cumberland" and said, "Read this." Best orientation ever.
Don't forget "The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek" by Kim Richardson
Have my copy here!
Apparently Vance does what many Republicans do, which is to blame individuals for system failures. Poverty is the result of political policy decisions. And human beings caught up in poverty have a whole array of responses to their circumstances, depending largely on their family structure and function, genetic predisposition and the social environment they live in. Some people are undone by poverty, while others have the wherewithal to overcome the impact of it and every possible response in between. Vance seems to have mistaken depression and despair for "indolence". But not all succumbed to what is actually a public health crisis of poverty by becoming depressed.
Harvard? No! Yale, twice. Harvard,particularly Harvard Law, one of my alma maters, has much to answer for, but not for Vance.
How about two more dishonorables like DeSantis and Cruz to add to your list.
Robert 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🤓
His academic career post high school: Ohio State, Yale. I agree that he's smug, untrustworthy and potentially more dangerous than DJ Trump.
There is also an epic poem of early frontier life by Robert Penn Warren. Forget the title. But it’s gripping. Hard times, come again no more.
Here's what I said yesterday on another site. Vance as the hitman for the campaign. Think Spiro Agnew. Not just women. Trump wants to play the victim of unrestrained targeted prosecutions and Harris was a lifetime prosecutor.
I heard Black Lung cases for 20 years mostly in Appalachia and grew up with that Wheeling Feeling, exposed to the culture. Fire in the hole! If he checks out who the Reagan Democrats in Macomb County Michigan, were, most of their antecedents took that Hillbilly Highway to get work in Detroit city. Same for every industrial area in the Midwest.
To a hillbilly, Vance ain't no hillbilly. "He is playing into the stereotype of the lazy, violent mountaineer who can't quite be trusted to take care of themselves." https://www.npr.org/2024/07/20/nx-s1-5043772/appalachian-writer-revisits-j-d-vances-hillbilly-elegy J.D. Vance Never Was and Never Will Be the Voice of Appalachiahttps://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/jd-vance-never-was-and-never-will-be-the-voice-of-appalachia. The voice of Appalachia these days is Governor Andrew Graham Beshear, who just last year flipped counties that went 70%-30 for Trump twice. He speaks the language. Her's a lay Decuples of Christ preacher who know the lyrics of all the hymns and Bill Monroe songs and knows what it takes to make burgoo.
Vance is a guy who married an Indian, gave his kids Indian names. His opponent is also partly Indian. I bet they eat the same food and it ain't burgoo. I bet he doesn't put syrup on his samosas and pakoras. On his naam bread. I bet he doesn't eat Martha White biscuits and chew Mail Pouch.
This is also a guy who has been, as I have written previously, the spokesman for the Putin position in Ukraine, despite the fact that 70,000 Ukrainians live in Ohio, not to mention folks interested in preserving democracy in Baltic and other European countries threatened by Russia.
BTW Vance lost the Republican childless cat woman vote. Trump hates dogs. Vance hates cat women, be they Democrat or Republican.
_
"This is also a guy who has been, as I have written previously, the spokesman for the Putin position in Ukraine, despite the fact that 70,000 Ukrainians live in Ohio, not to mention folks interested in preserving democracy in Baltic and other European countries threatened by Russia." Big part of the Vance moment.
“Audubon: a Vision”. A tour de force of American poetic imagination. Red studied Audubon’s journals. Then as if possessed by his ghost, he imagines the early American wilderness and its inhabitants as Audubon must have surely seen them but declined to elaborate upon. And it is haunting.
RPW was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, went to high school in eastern Tennessee, Clark County. Then went to Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Yale, and Oxford, achieving honors and distinction at every turn. I took to rereading All the Kings Men a few years back. There is this passage from then end of the first chapter, loosely from memory.
“As they were leaving, the Boss said, “Go to work on the Judge. Find something. “But what if I don’t find nothing” Jack replied. I know the Judge. There ain’t nothin on him. He’s clean. To which the Boss replied. “Jack, there is always something. Man is conceited in sin and born in iniquity. And he passes from the stink of the ditty to the stench of the shroud. There is always something”.
More or less.
Please, don't blame him on Harvard. He went to YALE. Harvard has enough questionable fruits in it's basket ie, bad apples. Don't saddle it with this sour, and rotten lemon. He's Yale and Ohio State.
"Night of the Hunter": both a favorite movie and a cherished book.
I’ll add author Sharyn McCrumb. Wonderful books, mostly mysteries, celebrating the history and folklore of Appalachia.
Thanks for all the book recommendations! Much appreciated.