J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Among Vipers

[Osceola, Iowa on 10/7/14]

Americans would rather, by far, read books by politicians than writers. Not content to be screwed, they happily pay to be shafted further by world-class bullshitters. It’s another perk of being corralled in history’s greatest democracy. Good luck escaping even mentally. Lying in bed, they can wet their pillow while listening to Obama’s Dreams from My Father, The Audacity of Hope and A Promise Land. Those in the opposing camp can be riled up by Trump’s Great Again. Its earlier title, Crippled America, was admittedly a marketing snafu. Swamp junkies can also quaff Nancy Pelosi’s The Art of Power: My Story as America's First Woman Speaker of the House, Kamala Harris’ The Truths We Hold: An American Journey or Mike Pence’s So Help Me God, etc. What a ghastly mother fuckin’ lode.

Into this stinking stew plops J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, an engrossing account filled with insights and honesty. Though such rawness has triggered the unctuous or oblivious, many readers have welcomed Vance’s exposure of a crippled America. It’s as bad, if not worse. Since Vance wrote it before he became a senator (or successful businessman), it’s technically not a politico’s book. Still, it’s how this politician is known, and why he’s risen so quickly. Vance’s outsider cred is more solid than Senator Obama’s even. He’s gold, then, for any billionaire hustler.

In his own words, “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.”

On hillbilly despair, “We’re more socially isolated than ever, and we pass that isolation down to our children.” Suffering a “peculiar crisis of masculinity,” Vance’s kind counts “too many young men immune to hard work.” With factories gone, men feel particularly redundant, but even with half-decent jobs, many manage to sabotage them. Deftly, Vance sketches:

One guy, I’ll call him Bob, joined the tile warehouse just a few months before I did. Bob was nineteen with a pregnant girlfriend. The manager kindly offered the girlfriend a clerical position answering phones. Both of them were terrible workers. The girlfriend missed about every third day of work and never gave advance notice. Though warned to change her habits repeatedly, the girlfriend lasted no more than a few months. Bob missed work about once a week, and he was chronically late. On top of that, he often took three or four daily bathroom breaks, each over half an hour. It became so bad that, by the end of my tenure, another employee and I made a game of it: We’d set a timer when he went to the bathroom and shout the major milestones through the warehouse—“Thirty-five minutes!” “Forty-five minutes!” “One hour!”

Though most committed to family, land and old ways, hillbillies have been forced into places they don’t quite belong. Vance on a Kentucky redneck transplanted to Ohio, where, as a mailman, he still raised chickens in his backyard:

He treated them just as Mamaw [Vance’s maternal grandma] had treated her chickens back in the holler: Every morning he collected all the eggs, and when his chicken population grew too large, he’d take a few of the old ones, wring their necks, and carve them up for meat right in his backyard. You can just imagine a well-bred housewife watching out the window in horror as her Kentucky-born neighbor slaughtered squawking chickens just a few feet away. My sister and I still call the old mail carrier “the chicken man,” and years later even a mention of how the city government ganged up on the chicken man could inspire Mamaw’s trademark vitriol: “Fucking zoning laws. They can kiss my ruby-red asshole.”

Mamaw’s vitriol went way beyond poetic language. At the mall to buy Christmas presents, she left her young son, Jimmy, at a shop, only to find him standing outside in the cold:

Mamaw and Papaw stormed in, demanding an explanation for the clerk’s rudeness. The clerk explained that Jimmy had been playing with an expensive toy. “This toy?” Papaw asked, picking up the toy. When the clerk nodded, Papaw smashed it on the ground. Utter chaos ensued. As Uncle Jimmy explained, “They went nuts. Dad threw another of the toys across the store and moved toward the clerk in a very menacing way; Mom started grabbing random shit off the shelves and throwing it all over the place. She’s screaming, ‘Kick his fucking ass! Kick his fucking ass!’ And then Dad leans in to this clerk and says very clearly, ‘If you say another word to my son, I will break your fucking neck.’ This poor guy was completely terrified, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.” The man apologized, and the Vances continued with their Christmas shopping as if nothing had happened.

Later, Mamaw set Papaw on fire. Tired of fights with a drunken husband, she promised to kill him the next time he came home shitfaced. Vance, “Mamaw, never one to tell a lie, calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest.”

The “never one to tell a lie” shows Vance’s humor and writing chops. He does it often. Vance on being middle class, “Kind of boring, by some standards, but happy in a way you appreciate only when you understand the consequences of not being boring.” On his parents, “I was the abandoned son of a man I hardly knew and a woman I wished I didn’t.” Such restrained bitterness.

Fatherless Vance had to ingratiate himself to a series of pseudo dads:

In Ohio, I had grown especially skillful at navigating various father figures. With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it, I pretended earrings were cool—so much so that he thought it appropriate to pierce my ear, too. With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of “girlieness,” I had thick skin and loved police cars. With Ken, an odd man who proposed to Mom three days into their relationship, I was a kind brother to his two children. But none of these things were really true. I hated earrings, I hated police cars, and I knew that Ken’s children would be out of my life by the next year.

Vance also had father figures among Mamaw’s brothers and brothers-in-law, the “Blanton men.” Vance loved them despite their flaws and violent tendencies:

My people were extreme, but extreme in the service of something—defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes. The Blanton men, like the tomboy Blanton sister whom I called Mamaw, were enforcers of hillbilly justice, and to me, that was the very best kind.

One account, “I’m running for my life, and [Uncle] Teaberry is close behind with a switchblade, assuring me that he’ll feed my right ear to the dogs if he catches me. I leap into Mamaw Blanton’s arms, and the terrifying game is over.”

At 39-years-old, Vance is engaged in a game much more terrifying, as orchestrated by father figures much more monstrous. His sugar daddy, Peter Thiel, spent ten years to destroy Nick Denton. Thiel’s enemy had dared to expose his homosexuality. This was no private vendetta but a principled fight to protect privacy, Thiel claimed. That’s preposterous since Thiel is the founder of Palantir. Launching its stocks, it boasted of being “the ultimate tool of surveillance.” Working with the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Pentagon, Thiel has violated everyone’s privacy. Showing no proof, Palantir has also bragged about locating Bin Laden for his supposed assassination. These monsters lie nonstop.

Reading from a teleprompter at the Republican National Convention, Trump just gave us a dandy:

I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard. On my right ear. I said to myself, “Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.” And moved my right hand to my ear, brought it down. My hand was covered with blood. Just absolutely blood all over the place. I immediately knew it was very serious.

Knowing we’re too dazed to trust our own eyes, they don’t care what their own photos reveal. When they say blood, we see it. When told there’s no genocide, we grunt. Vance, though, is way too smart, but can you blame him for going along? It’s nice to be invited to the bacchanal, if only as a cabana boy. Vance must chuckle rereading what he wrote just eight years ago:

I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn—recently, an acquaintance used the word “confabulate” in a sentence, and I just wanted to scream. But I have to give it to them: Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer. These people are beating us at our own damned game.

Trump doesn’t just promise “four greatest years in the history of our country,” but cures for cancer and Alzheimer! What we’ll get is more war, Jewjab deaths, destitution, surveillance and central control. Vance, though, will be among the winners. Should Trump be shot for real after the selection, Vance will even become America’s most literary president! What a rise for this hillbilly from “Middletucky.”

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