Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Two top articles, excerpts -- JD Vance and I share Appalachian roots. He’s just the latest to exploit the region for personal profit.
In reading ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ I saw a writer dealing in stereotypes for political ends
By Meredith McCarroll Globe Correspondent,Updated July 17, 2024, 1:08 p.m.
[...]
When I realized he was citing eugenicist Charles Murray, I was worried. By the time that I had finished the book, I was shaking mad. Vance was manipulating readers into thinking that his point of view was somehow representative. He was convincing people that Appalachians are all the same — poor, lazy, and deserving of their poverty.

Vance was simply the latest to peddle the same old stereotypes of a people in order to justify taking from them. With Amy Chua in one ear and Peter Thiel in the other, this young Yale lawyer leaned into a particular boot-straps narrative not to help anyone understand Appalachia and not to offer a sociology of mountaineers or a history of the region. Vance wrote his memoir to launch his political career. He used his Mamaw’s generosity, his mother’s struggles, and his teacher’s encouragement as plot points in a story about getting out. He climbed the ladder and pulled it up behind him, blaming those left behind.

What I found in those pages was familiar, not because Vance’s experience mirrored mine, but because Vance was using the same stereotypes I had studied as I learned how the region had been exploited.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/07/17/arts/how-accurate-is-jd-vances-hillbilly-elegy/

I Grew Up in Appalachia Too. J.D. Vance Is a Hillbilly Phony
COAL CITY CONFIDENTIAL
A 26-year-old Ivy League graduate from Coal City, West Virginia, explains what Trump’s running mate got wrong in his bestselling book.
Caleb Miller
Updated Jul. 19, 2024 11:41AM EDT / Published Jul. 18, 2024 5:32PM EDT
[...]
It wasn’t until we were at Walmart that she told me she was selling all of her jewelry—a lifetime’s worth of treasure for a coal miner’s wife—to be able to afford it. I tried to talk her out of the purchase, but she wouldn’t listen. She taught me that life is about doing what you can to help others, and she was practicing what she preached.

My public high school had many wonderful teachers and I gravitated toward one who noticed that I had an affinity for math. One day, Mr. Perkins asked us to write about what our lives would look like 10 years in the future. I wrote something like “In an ideal world, future Caleb will have graduated from Harvard and gone on to medical school, but OBVIOUSLY that’s never going to happen.”

When he handed back my paper, he circled the last sentence and wrote simply “Why not?”
[...]
But the problem with Vance’s conception of the American Dream is that it is just a dream. A fiction. A convincing lie that successful people tell themselves in order to claim all the credit for their accomplishments. I believed this lie for a while. It helped me to deal with survivor’s guilt, or whatever one should call the feelings that come with moving away from Coal City. But it’s important to recognize that taking all the credit discounts the influence that our communities, the government, and sheer dumb luck have on our outcomes.

I never would have applied to Harvard without the constant encouragement and support of Mr. Perkins.

I never would have gotten into Harvard if my alumni interviewer hadn’t pleaded with the admissions committee to seriously consider me. I never would have visited Harvard if not for a generous mentor offering to pay for flights for me and my grandmother. I never would’ve survived Harvard if not for the love and support from my friends and found family. It’s not that these “elites” taught me how to use a fork (like Vance claimed he learned only after entering the military), it’s that these nice people laughed at my jokes and made me feel like I belonged.

It’s at my post-college job in finance that my story and Vance’s started to diverge. I worked at a high-frequency trading firm where mere nanoseconds separated winners from losers. I got along well with my coworkers, but our collective goal was to take a giant pile of money, push it around, and hope that the pile of money grew by the end of the day. So while some of the minutiae was interesting, the mission was not.

My grandmother raised me better than that. She’s a devoutly religious woman...
[...]
Now I’m worried about the rest of my family. If Republicans gain power, they want to eliminate Medicare, which would hurt my grandma, and eliminate Medicaid, which would destroy my dad. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the Department of Education and Vance himself has called for a national ban on abortion even in the case of rape and incest.

On a larger, global scale, I don’t get Vance’s love for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and support for the slaughter of innocent Ukrainians. I didn’t serve in the Marines like Vance–although I did play a lot of “Call of Duty” and I know enough that you might play a Russian shooting up an airport terminal in a video game, but in real life, they’re the bad guys.

Vance embracing these policies is especially cruel for Ukrainians and people of Appalachia. Kentucky is the third most federally dependent state. West Virginia is fourth. Trump was born into a family with hundreds of millions but Vance should have empathy for his “fellow” hillbillies, for the culture he simultaneously claims and disavows. But this hillbilly origin story is just another tool for Vance to wave around when it’s convenient, and hide in the shed when it isn’t. JD Vance isn’t a hillbilly. To me, he’s a parasite, feasting off a culture that he really doesn’t understand.

When Vance accepted the nomination at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, he declared “Some people tell me I’ve lived the American Dream, and they are right.”

This is the core of why Vance fills me with rage. He wants you to believe that he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and he wants you to look away as he pulls up the ladder behind him.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-grew-up-in-appalachia-too-jd-vance-is-a-hillbilly-phony-caleb-miller-writes

Thank you.