Kill the Hillbilly, Save the Man

A Good Ol' Boy's review of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy

I just finished listening to J.D. Vance’s reading of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. There’s been a lot of skepticism towards the guy, especially from some corners of the dissident right. He’s some kind of white Obama they say—he’s a Thiel groomed MAGA subverter—a curry slurping hillbilly who has no real convictions. I found Hillbilly Elegy at my local goodwill for a buck, but I’m still nurturing my love of reading back to life so it’s been on my shelf for a couple of months, and no telling when I would have ever got around to it.

But lo and behold, I see the hillbilly’s book is on spotify—with the hillbilly narrating himself, no less! Took me a weekend to listen to the almost 7 hours of the book which is about double the time it would have taken me to read the thing if I’d have just sat down and did it since it’s fairly short. Had it been anyone else narrating, I doubt I would have even bothered, but I can appreciate that he did it himself.

Now, lemme be up front with you. Though I am white (enuf), I am NOT a hillbilly. Though I have plenty of Scots-Irish blood in these veins, my people never followed Daniel Boone into Appalachia. No, we remained in the original South, the bonified South, the home of Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit—Dixieland. I would not call J.D. Vance a Southerner, though I would hope he has Southern sentiments, of course.

Unfortunately, however, you don’t get much of a sense one way or t’other from his book. Yes, his grandparents were from Kentucky (and their ancestors from presumably elsewhere in the South prior to that though I don’t recall him mentioning it), but Kentucky’s status as a Southern state has always been marginal. Vance makes little reference to the South except in comparison here and there, especially the few instances he mentions blacks when discussing statistics. Or, like when one of his aunts got bigged up by a brotha and abandoned which brought out a bit of his family’s “racial prejudices.”

I digress. Though I’m not a hillbilly, I am what many would be quick to call white trash. Which is not an immediate synonym for a country boy or a redneck which you’ll understand if you’re from the South, so humor my elaboration if so. See, while I can run a trot line if I ever need to, I never have. I’ve done a bit of fishing but practically no hunting. We didn’t have decent hunting land and were too poor to pursue it as a mere hobby. My grandfather grew up in the depression and while my father remembers always having indoor plumbing, he remembers using bedpans and trips to the outhouse at relatives’ homes outside the small town he grew up in well into his teenage years.

While both my grandpa and dad had red necks, they weren’t rednecks as a matter of breed. They had plenty of redneck friends, naturally, but they were more good ol’ boys than anything. Suffer another quick aside for me as I clear up what a “good ol’ boy” is. Even if you’re from the South these days, many people’s first thought from the term is the “good ol’ boys’ network.” Think Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazard or, for an actually evil example, Bill Clinton. This is some “New South” yankee bullshit. The psychological priming to view all white people with political power as a clique of conspiracy mongers pulling the strings behind the scenes.

Now, there’s always been dynamics akin to this in varying degrees, but that’s politics period. I take issue with the term’s application to these types. I haven’t dug into the digression, but if I had to guess some Gloria Steinem type feminists started applying it to white men in positions in power back in the later half of the 20th century and its taken root. But a real good ol’ boy isn’t the from time immemorial legacy frat bro (though it’s not mutually exclusive as a rule) or Boss Hogg types, but Bo and Luke Duke, Andy Griffith, Hank Williams, etc. The everyman of the South.

The War Between the States left my family destitute. Both my great-great-great grandfather and great-great grandfather fought for the South. Can you imagine? The father fought as an older man and died of pneumonia almost immediately after getting home in 1865. Junior died earlier in the war in 1862, but not before having my great-grandfather in 1860. Yes, I am a mere three generations away from the direct consequences of Mr. Lincoln’s war. Dad has always said great grandpa went out about the best way a man could—living a full life, killing some yankees, and dying at home surrounded by his loved ones.

Since Vance is now a Yale man, and a part of a serious “good ol boy network,” I am sure he wasn’t too keen on drawing out his ancestry that far back. Thought I don’t know if he has any Confederate ancestors, had he claimed to be a son of Confederate veterans—a genuine good ol boy—that wouldn’t have played out too well in his new circles. In such a case, I can understand him leaving it out rather then mention it in self-denigration. He does plenty damned enough of that already.

Boy, is the this book full of self-denigration, albeit not quite as bad as many online seemed to make it out to be. He threads a fine needle of ensuring that he spoke bad enough about poor whites so that he would come off as a reformed hillbilly while also still trying to honor his family and people in a rearview mirror, arms-length kind of way. I’m still stewing on it, but overall I’m left feeling with an unease about his true motivations.

The ending is about as milquetoast establishment as it gets. His ultimate conclusion is basically that poor whites have got to get their shit together, stop victimizing themselves and playing the victim, and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The fact that Vance routinely criticized Trump during the promotion of the book and that it was lauded as a blueprint to why whites were voting for the orange man makes me really wonder about the deleted scenes. Evidently, in 2017 he signed an $8 million dollar deal to write a sequel, so maybe we’ll get some more about his journey from the holler to Yale to dissing Trump to getting endorsed by him for U.S. Senator and now becoming his damn VP nominee.

Should the Trump-Vance ticket win in November, this hillbilly is literally a heartbeat away from the presidency. Don’t get me wrong, on the one hand, I love it.

I love the idea of having a president with enough Scots-Irish blood in him that I could see him decking some journo that gets too close in his face or something. But I still wonder who this guy really is in a lot of ways. I wonder how much Yale really changed him. Clearly enough for him to marry his Indian law school sweetheart who is the diametric opposite of his entire upbringing. I don’t begrudge him that. Though I don’t think interracial marriages are advisable under most circumstances, I understand them—hell, I married a German woman, I’m in one!

But Vance’s marriage obviously speaks to the fact that in some ways he truly does see himself as an ascended hillbilly out from the holler. At the end of the book, he tells a little scene where he stops himself from getting out of his car at a red light to go tell off someone that flipped the bird at him. His wife tells him she’s proud he controlled his instincts, but Vance confesses that he felt torn up about it the rest of the day but knew it was the right thing. Kill the hillbilly, save the man.

I have more to say, but I’ll save it for another piece in the near future. In parting, though, I will say that my main takeaway from Hillbilly Elegy is that, at the time he wrote it, he was still very much a young man finding his way in the world after what was assuredly a difficult upbringing. Vance was trying to reconcile his identity as a hillbilly boy with Kentucky roots with the Yale man he had become. My hope is that within the last 8 years, Vance’s ascension from insecurity of his identity as a poor white trash hillbilly willing to be skeptical of Trump to a Trump endorsed U.S. Senator and now Trump’s VP nominee has been a genuine fulfillment of who he really is, rather than a familiar mask donned to further escape the holler by any means necessary.

In the next part, I’ll be digging deeper into Vance’s life story and relating that to his current policy interests.