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y66, on 2017-March-16, 10:22, said:
From Why I'm Moving Home by the author of Hillbilly Elegy J.D. Vance
Is this guy for real? We'll see. I hope so.
Is this guy for real? We'll see. I hope so.
I am now reading Hillbilly Elegy so I doug up this old post. Ialso found a TED talk by Vance https://www.ted.com/...n_working_class
I disagree with much that he says even though there are things that I can relate to.
My strongest reaction: The white working class environment that he describes is not the white working class environment that I grew up in. This is not just a matter of the times they are a'changin. He goes back to the lives of his mother, the various men in her life, his grandparent's lives and so on, some of this from the period when I was growing up. He describes how his family was not accepted easily into the general culture of Middletown Ohio. Of course they weren't, but this was not because they were from the hills of Kentucky, it was because of how they acted. At times he seems to understand this, at other times he seems proud of the way his family acted. He describes a time when his uncle was a young child and was in a drug store by himself and was playing with a toy. The clerk made him leave. The child's father. so J.P.'s grandfather, went into the store, smashed that toy and other toys, threw toys against the wall, grabbed the clerk and threatened him. Vance seems to write this off as just the way the Scotch-Irish are. No. Not the way the white working class I grew up with were, and I have no reason to think it's the way the Scotch-Irish are. It's the way his grandfather was, to the extent the story is true. And that's another thing. My Uncle Floyd, an iron miner, often spoke of his physical combativeness. One learns to be a bit skeptical. In the drugstore scene I wondered: Was there nobody else in the store? Did the clerk not later call the police? If not, how about the owner when he found the store trashed? Did the grandfather ever enter the store again? Or even go to that mall again (I think it was in a mall)? We can all think of stories that get told and re-told, becoming more and more embellished, and it seems nobody ever stops to say "This doesn't sound like something that would really happen". Vance seems to take the story at face value. Naive, I think.
J Dot's mother (he was known as J.P. or J Dot) was a total disaster. That's where the action is, I think. You don't have to be Scotch-Irish and you don't have to be poor ( his grandparents were in fact middle class with a considerably bigger house than the one I grew up in) to have disastrous family circumstances. Some survive this, with scars, some don't. I grew up with stability, my mother slept only with my father, my father slept only with my mother. That helps. It helps a lot. Perfect? No, but who's childhood was?
So I applaud any effort Vance makes in trying to bring hope and stability to troubled families. Much of the rest? To borrow a line from Nat King Cole "Your story's so touching but it sounds just like a lie"
