Replies to post #485667 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[newmedman]

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.



Wharncliffe, Mingo County, West Virginia. July 2008.ROGER MAY

As many were reeling from the 2016 presidential election, JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” published earlier that year, emerged as a way to understand Trump’s victory via a working class memoir from Appalachia. And for me, as an Appalachian expatriate living in New England, “Hillbilly Elegy” became inescapable. Liberal and well-meaning colleagues told me that they had read the book; many told me that they understood where I was from having read it. “Hillbilly Elegy” is selling again as Americans seek to understand the vice presidential nominee; his first success was not when the book was released but when Trump was elected and Vance’s book was seen as an answer from Appalachia. Many Appalachians take issue with his claim to the region given that he was raised in Middletown, Ohio — which is not Appalachian — and only visited family in eastern Kentucky.

I was a 24-year-old living in Boston when I realized what it meant to be Appalachian. Five generations of my family had called western North Carolina home, and I had nothing but pride in calling myself a mountain girl. It didn’t take me long to realize that my feelings about Appalachia were not widely shared in the city. I spent a little time trying to explain where I was from and what that meant. But the shadow of stereotype darkened the light I tried to shine when I talked about home, and before long I stopped saying where I was from. All along, though, I held on to my love for Appalachia like a secret — their loss if they don’t know the labor history of the term redneck or if they take hillbilly to be a slur. I knew then that Appalachia was a complex and beautiful place worth loving.

Like any empathetic reader, I found Vance’s personal story touching. The character of his Mamaw resonated with me. I was sad for this boy whose mother battled addiction, creating instability and insecurity for JD. But about halfway through the book, I started cringing as it felt like he was writing something other than a personal memoir. As I read closely to confirm that he was, in fact, claiming that hillbillies are somehow inherently lazy and prone to violence, I was baffled. 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.

RELATED: Hillbilly Elegy: Welcome to hard times

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. From 19th-century local color pieces that ran in Harper’s Magazine to reality shows like “Buckwild,” Appalachia has been portrayed as a place filled with ignorant and backward people who belong to another time. Yesterday’s people. Its land and people have been seen as deserving of exploitation. Take the beauty, strip the value, and prosper individually. First it was timber. Later it was coal. Now it is identity. Vance tapped a vein and extracted an identity that allows him to be of the people while he blames the people for their challenges.

RELATED: Who is JD Vance? Eight things to know about Donald Trump’s pick for vice president.

In 2018, I gathered writers, scholars, and photographers to be a part of “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.” The point of the book wasn’t to attack Vance, but to complicate the monolithic narrative that he was peddling about a 13-state region that spans from Alabama to New York. Let’s create a chorus of voices, my co-editor Anthony Harkins and I said. Let’s pass the mic so that no one can misperceive his as the only perspective. We felt the need to do this because of Vance’s move from “I” to “we” in his “memoir of a family and a culture in crisis.” Rather than telling his own story, he was claiming the right to tell our story … something most people from this broad and diverse region would know better than to try.

As Vance continued his climb to power, some were shocked by his change of heart about certain leaders, or by his erratic positions that don’t seem to align with clear policies. Those of us who have been paying attention to him since he used us for his early launch onto the political scene are not surprised. Those of us who grew up in towns where the factory left, who had a teacher who believed in us, and who had extended family who helped care for us, see Vance taking without looking back. Those of us who have felt the resonance of the opioid crisis, who come from places that Purdue Pharma targeted, who have seen the empty storefronts of Main Street, see Vance pruning his experience into something shaped like a hero’s journey. Vance has had so many opportunities to hear the push-back, to listen to his neighbors, to tell a more accurate story … or at least a more personal and less representative story. Part of a long history of people taking from the region for their own benefit, he continues to look down on the places and people that lifted him up.

Meredith McCarroll is author of “Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film” and co-editor of “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.”
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


OPINIONJD Vance and Caleb Miller against Appalachian background
Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images and Courtesy of Author

I was raised in Coal City, West Virginia and when Monday’s big news about Trump’s vice presidential selection was announced, I felt instant rage. I wrote to my friends:

“J.D. Vance was named Trump’s running mate, which means people are talking about his stupid fucking book again, in which a venture capitalist from suburban Ohio who spent a couple of summers in Kentucky praises himself for pulling himself up by his bootstraps and blames the continued poverty of his ‘fellow’ hillbillies on their poor choices.

“Instead, read literally anything else. Read Appalachian Reckoning which responds to J.D. Vance’s stupid fucking book. Read Demon Copperhead. Read Another Appalachia. Dump a can of alphabet soup onto the floor and read whatever comes out of that. I guarantee it will be better than J.D. Vance's stupid fucking book.”

Vance fills me with rage, in part, because I’m a lot like him.

When viewed from a distance, the arc of my life looks remarkably similar to his. Unlike Vance, my story actually starts in Appalachia. I was born in 1997, one town over from Coal City which doesn’t have luxuries like hospitals. My parents were white but that was basically their only advantage. My father is chronically ill and disabled. After getting a hysterectomy, and on the advice of her doctors, my mother started taking OxyContin. This prescription turned into an addiction that would carry her to an early grave.

Like Vance, I was raised primarily by my hillbilly grandparents, especially my mamaw. Papaw had died years earlier from stomach cancer that was left untreated when he refused to go to the doctor because he couldn’t afford to miss a shift in the mines. Papaw left mamaw with a meager pension and a roof over her head.


Caleb with his mamaw Sharon Miller.
Caleb Miller

We got by, but barely. We’d eat cornbread and grow vegetables in the garden. When I asked my grandma to buy me a computer, she hemmed and hawed before eventually agreeing. 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.”


Vance outlined his life story at the RNC but it filled me with rage, writes Caleb Miller, for its stunningly wrong conclusions.
Jeenah Moon/Reuters

When he handed back my paper, he circled the last sentence and wrote simply “Why not?”

That was the first moment that I believed a miracle like that could be possible. I started bootlegging textbooks off the library’s internet and watching educational videos on YouTube. I connected with a younger student who (somehow) loved math even more than I did, and together we were the founding (and only) members of the Independence High School recreational math club. I became a Presidential Scholar representing West Virginia and in the spring of my senior year, I was accepted to Harvard.

I was the first student from my high school to get into any Ivy League college in over 20 years and the local newspaper called to interview me. The one good thing about being really poor was I qualified for full financial aid. The next year, my math club co-founder was accepted to MIT and another friend from our high school also headed to Harvard. It’s easy to conceive of this as me blazing a path, but the truth is that we all pushed each other to work harder. Moving to Massachusetts—or “Liberal-land” as my family called it—was a shock (understatement of the century). College was incredibly difficult, especially compared to a West Virginia public high school. Over time, I adjusted. I even graduated from the math department with high honors.


Harvard could not have been a greater contrast to life in Coaltown, but Miller eventually thrived among its yards and atmosphere of privilege.
BRIAN SNYDER/Reuters

At Harvard, there is intense pressure on students to pursue the most “prestigious” goals. For math graduates who don’t want to be professors, getting a high-paying finance job is about the most “prestigious” thing that you can do. And the sort of salaries they offer to fresh college grads would be enough to bump my family up by a couple of tax brackets, so that’s what I resolved to do. I got an offer to become a trader at a high-end quantitative finance firm. They said they would pay me $150,000 a year (before bonuses!) to write computer code. In the moment, I couldn’t have been happier. I’d done it. I’d achieved Vance’s notion of the American Dream. I had pulled myself up by my own bootstraps.

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.


It took the dedication and ambition of Chad Perkins, a high school math teacher, to transform life for Miller.
Caleb Miller

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 and I grew up going to church with her. Mamaw was a Pentecostal, which meant that people were speaking in tongues and practicing divine healing. My favorite part was always watching Brother Monroe (everyone always called each other Brother and Sister, and treated each other as such) as he ran laps around the chapel during praise and worship, keeping time by banging his tambourine.

After the singing was done, the preacher would head to the pulpit and start his sermon. These were long and boring to an impatient child, but I did learn a few things. I learned that, apparently, it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. I also learned how Jesus sacrificed himself so that others might live. The god of the Old Testament gets a lot of well-deserved criticism, but Jesus seems like good people, to borrow a phrase from back home. I’m not religious (although I have been known to pray before math tests), but I recognize the valuable moral truths in these stories. I couldn’t justify staying at a job in which I found neither meaning nor joy.


Vance brought his family on stage at the end of his RNC speech incluing (second left) his mother Beverley, who he said was now 10 years sober.
Mike Segar/Reuters

So I quit. I didn’t have a backup plan, and I was terrified. As fate would have it, a few months later I received an email from the Harvard math department, asking if any alumni were interested in teaching introductory calculus, and I deliberated for a full 10 seconds before responding yes. The next year a friend of mine mentioned a coding job at an education startup.

I’ve been at this job for over two years, doing interesting work that feels like it actually matters to someone. Next, I plan to go back to school for a Masters in education so I can someday teach. Learning–not money–changed the trajectory of my life. I want to help expose others to math or science or the arts. I want to be the Mr. Perkins in someone else’s story.

My mother shouldn’t have died at 46. She was sober for more than two years when she came down with her third round of double pneumonia in six months. Years of addiction had taken its toll on her body, and she just couldn’t keep going.


Caleb Miller and his mom, Melissa Brooks, before her passing.
Caleb Miller

Although she struggled, she was a great mom who loved her family with her whole heart and we loved her–and will forever miss her–just as fiercely. In Vance’s worldview, my mother died because she’s a bad person who made terrible choices. That’s another lie. My mother died because the American healthcare system is broken. She died because senators buckled to pharmaceutical lobbyists.

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

[janice shell]

Slamming JD Vance for his ‘homeland’ rhetoric shows how far we’ve gone off course

No, it does not. Every time anyone says "Homeland" it creeps me out. Reminds me of Hitler. You're somewhat younge than I am. But I'm sure you remember that NO ONE ever called the country "the Homeland" when you were young.

I find it nauseating.

MSNBC’s Alex Wagner called this passage an “Easter egg” of “white nationalism.”

America, she continued, is not a group of people with a shared history, but, rather, “a lot of people with different histories, different heritages.” Vance doesn’t understand this, supposedly, because he’s “someone who fundamentally believes in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity.”

She's absolutely right.

If ideas and institutions are all that count, we should love the countries of the G-7 — fellow advanced liberal democracies — as much as the United States, and be just as comfortable living in those countries as we are here. Most of us don’t and aren’t because the United States . . . is our home.

That is just weird. I lived in one of those countries for more than 22 years. It was fine. Not "uncomfortable". What does "uncomfortable" even mean in the context of living in another country?

[fuagf]

conix, It took awhile to see if you were capable of posting a live link ..
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174590710 , and you are.

I don't know if it is laziness, carelessness, drunkenness, an adolescent delight in being a nuisance
or what which explains your dead link frequency, but you better fix it or you will lose much more.

Yes, left that one, you don't have to tell me i did like you told me i deleted the other one. Last time.

[fuagf]

conix, Either you don't know J.D. Vance or you are a Christian white nationalist as he is.

You do have a past claimed despisal of Trump and a relative present joining of him, in common with Vance.

Do you believe in exceptionalism, that all in one group are more exceptional than any in other groups?
Or do you believe that some individuals in any group are more worthy of praise than others in whatever group.