Beating the Rhetoric
Elegy in modern literature is often interpreted as a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead. Here the dead could perhaps be replaced by a dying culture, a dying way of life, rotting from within. And it is this dying culture that JD Vance hopes to capture in his offering “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis”. Vance beautifully captures growing up in the Ohio Kentucky region in a steel town that had been haemorrhaging jobs and hope as long as he can remember. Along the way he seeks to answer the question that experts had been trying to answer for some time now, as to why the Middeltown Southern regions went from staunchly Democratic to Republican in less than a generation.
At 32, Vance a Yale graduate with a previous stint in the United States Marine and a well settled job in San Francisco area, is an epitome of the American dream. As he himself said, he believed that he was in the greatest country on Earth and the country made it possible from him. Yet as he takes us on a whirlwind tour of his childhood and adolescence years, one gets the feeling that this journey was anything but easy.
A childhood in the Rust Bowl had very peculiar challenges and Vance articulates the same. These regions had big corporations which employed a large number of people primarily from the Southern regions; whole towns were built around the companies and the jobs they provided. Communities sprang from within these companies and they stayed as long as the companies stayed. As the companies began to leave, towns began to wither and decay and it was in the middle of this decay that Vance found himself in. The economic decay gave way to social decay that is the root of the social depravation the American blue collared working classes face today. Not only is it a community without jobs, it suffers from drug problem , students don’t pass out of high school , broken families the social motivation is low as well. In fact as the author himself quotes, the social condition of the white blue collared working class is often as bad the ghettoised Blacks or the Latinos. Yet little attention was ever paid to this dying system. And this is where the problem lay.
His grandparents originally from the Appalachian Mountains had come to Middletown in search of better lives. While there may have been many reasons why they left the mountains, the author chooses to leave that part and proceeds to talk about the life his Papaw and Mamaw built for him. As jobs began to dry up, the great white working American population – the worker class – found itself in destitute and poverty. Between changing homes and changing husbands, his mother could provide Vance and his sister Lindsay little support. His biological father Bob was a good man as Vance would later admit, but Bob had walked out of them fairly early in life. Since then Vance had seen a number of father figures in his life come and go, watched his mother battle her drug addiction, saw his grandmother nurse neighbourhood poor kids, his sister becoming an elder quite early and most of all the Appalachian code of honour. There is humour in how the author chooses to captivate his life but in that humour lies the sadness of a decaying community.
At the core Vance chooses to establish the fact that the American white working class, once a backbone of the community is decaying and there are many ways that it is happening. As Vance chooses to unravel the hillbillies, he narrates his own demons along the way. He demystifies how policies made for the poor people often end up being used the wrong way, precisely because those making the policies have little view of poverty themselves. He expresses discontentment at how the poor had gamed the American welfare system.
Democrats with their suave niceties and their global outlook couldn’t reach out to this average American voter. The average American white working class voter was losing jobs as the Rust Bowl began to lose prominence. As great industrial towns decayed, people fell into poverty. In the author’s own hometown of Middletown, no great shopping complexes or business exist anymore, not because people moved out but because the malls had moved out. And malls and shopping complexes had moved out because people could not afford to buy anymore. The rot in the American working class was real and it had set in. And the solutions offered were inadequate.
Yet he does not limit his dissatisfaction to the government policies alone, he blames the community as well. Anyone who makes it big from the community is earmarked as a “smart” man rather than appreciating the hard work that the person might have put. The American working class woke upto Pillsbury Cinnamon rolls and had McDonalds for dinner even though cooking at home was much cheaper. They bought things they didn’t need and couldn’t provide for their children’s education when the time came. They would game the system by bringing beer via food stamps and feed cold drinks to their children as small as 9 months. Decaying teeth in the opinion of the author is a very American white working class-hillbilly- feature thanks to years of carbonated drinks. The difference between the rich and the poor, he opined was not only what the rich did but how they did it. The rich have a certain lifestyle in stark opposite to hillbilly way of life. And this hillbilly way of life, the author felt, was also central to the decay that had set in.
The working class had lost the zeal to work hard. The author provides us a funny anecdote on the same; a friend of his left his job because he could not work for long hours. His Facebook post however talked about how “jobs were moving overseas”. The author says that while jobs going overseas are a reality, it was not the reason why his own friend had lost the job! The author also observes how, once the decay sets in, people start believing in ideas that undermine the very root of democracy, hearsay precisely. Vance quotes a large number of Americans believing Barack Obama was a Muslim, when even Fox News channel does not propound the same. In short, the author points to the deep impact myths can play in decaying society.
The book is a caricature of the Trump voter in the Rust Belt. The modern working class man is at odds with the liberal politician and liberal politics because they feel liberalism does not understand the lives of the working class anymore. This book offers an extremely nuanced view of something fundamentally wrong that needs correction. The global contours of such societies could not be sharper. As new jobs in automation and other sectors emerge, old factory towns would lose their prominence. Such towns stare at a future of desolation and decay unless policies are put in the right places. Such policies also need to have their heart in the right place. This book not only provides a look into the past but also provides an insight to the future. JD Vance has truly come a long way from the Rust Bowl.
(Views expressed by the author are personal)