Cassandra, Political Crack

Hillbilly Reckoning

I don’t live in Ohio, but I have loathed J.D. Vance since the first time I saw him. He’s a sad liar who only has a political career because he was willing to subjugate himself to a creepy tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, who then bought him a Senate seat. Thiel’s other 2022 purchase was Blake Masters who turned out to be too fucking creepy to be taken seriously.

Vance shouldn’t have been taken seriously, either. He came to fame because he wrote a book about growing up in Appalachia. I didn’t read it, and I didn’t see the movie adaption either, although I did see a funny tweet describing the movie as something that would have been a bit on 30 Rock with Jenna trying to win an Oscar by playing both female leads (and I would definitely watch that movie).

The first big problem with the book that established Vance as a serious social commentator is that it is actually fiction–Vance never lived in Appalachia.

I live inside the borders of each of those boxes, and I do not consider myself qualified to speak on Appalachia. But Vance is a liar, so that wasn’t a deterrent to him.

The second big problem with the book is that it is a screed against poor people, blaming them for things beyond their control, implicitly berating them for not succeeding like he did. Except, and I think this is a salient point, Vance didn’t actually grow up in in Appalachia. And his resentment over things like poor people having cell phones when he couldn’t afford one is just Reagan’s “welfare queen” moved to a rural setting.

At its core there was nothing in it that wasn’t prejudice, personal anecdotes, stories from social media, and rehashed GOP talking points you’ve heard a million times from your right wing aunt. And if you are interested in a good book about someone growing up in Appalachia and leaving and succeeding, I recommend “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls.

The book had a lot of push back from people who actually lived in Appalachia, most notably culminating in an anthology written by a variety of Appalachians, far beyond the small circle of people Vance knew, called “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy”. One of the editors described her decision to collect this anthology:

The perception that mountain folk like to be poor serves someone — but it’s not the poor mountain folk. The representation of Appalachia as all white is not only inaccurate, but it preserves a false and destructive ideal of imaginary “pure white stock.” Images of decay and absence allow those in power to turn away from a place that has been forgotten, but has not disappeared. The narrow ideas that circulate about this broad place do active harm. To more fully understand a place — its real poverty alongside its potential for renovation, its history of fierce activism alongside the stories of extraction and abuse — requires a sort of patchwork panorama, made up of many angles and many points of view. 

Here’s an excerpt from one of the essays:

But, I would never, ever — in my wildest dreams or imaginings — disrespect her in any format because of her fierceness by calling her a lunatic, as J.D. Vance so often refers to his Mamaw in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

The way he describes this woman, whom he claims to revere and credits as the reason he made it out of his low-income life in suburban Ohio and into Yale Law School, is shameful. It displays a willingness to sell out his family members by tapping into a long history of distorted, false, and intentionally made stereotypical images of central Appalachia that have been imposed on the region by outside media makers for nearly three hundred years, ever since the first white land prospectors were sent into the region by George Washington himself.

Vance’s willingness to tap into that long history of misleading images of the place and the people who live there proves his end game: monetary gain and national notoriety to bolster a potential political run for office — supported, of course, by his carefully created and curated self-image as the so-called “expert” on the white working class of Appalachia, a place where he has never lived. His only connection to its realities were visits with grandparents who traveled home for short periods for a few summers when Vance was a child.

However, what’s more insidious about his rise to fame on a book largely made up of descriptions of Appalachian stereotypes he attempts to pass off as universal truths is the fact that people will read his book, and assume all Appalachian people, if they are smart, are trying to actively run away from their culture; they will understand it to be less-than and the people they came from to be crazy lunatics.

Vance is a cipher, a bottomless empty vessel always looking for the next grift. He’s pretty despicable. I hope Americans can see him for who he is.

This song came to mind as I was writing this: