"It seemed to offer a firsthand report, both personal and analytical, on the condition of the white American working class/ And while the book [by J.D. Vance] didn’t really explain the election... it did venture a hypothesis about how that family and others like it encountered such persistent household dysfunction and economic distress.... He suggests that the same traits that make his people distinctive — suspicion of outsiders, resistance to authority, devotion to kin, eagerness to fight — make it hard for them to thrive in modern American society.... The film is a chronicle of addiction entwined with a bootstrapper’s tale.... The Vances are presented as a representative family, but what exactly do they represent? A class? A culture? A place? A history? The louder they yell, the less you understand — about them or the world they inhabit. The strange stew of melodrama, didacticism and inadvertent camp that [director Ron 'Opie' Howard] serves up isn’t the result of a failure of taste or sensitivity. If anything, 'Hillbilly Elegy' is too tasteful, too sensitive for its own good, studiously unwilling to be as wild or provocative as its characters. Such tact is in keeping with the moral of its story, which is that success in America means growing up to be less interesting than your parents or grandparents."
I watched the trailer and suffered tremendously from the music, which is emphatically not hillbilly music:
I mean, the point seems to be that other people are unsophisticated, and that swelling, heavy-handed soundtrack is as unsophisticated as you can possibly get. And how about that ham acting? I don't know about the real-life people Vance wrote about in his best-seller, but these Hollywood folk are awfully backward!
And I tried to read his book. I meant to get back to it, but I never got past page 40:
Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw: That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do when people mess with your kid. “What I mean is that they were united, they were getting along with each other,” Uncle Jimmy conceded when I later pressed him. “But yeah, like everyone else in our family, they could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat.”
That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do... ? I can get by without getting that sort of thing hammered into my head a thousand times.
That book was pretty big stuff when it came out. I gave a copy to my far left sister who can't recount a simple neighborhood event without including the ethnic origin of every person involved. I don't know if she ever read the book.
A sports talk radio guy was talking about the movie the other day and he said he had never heard of the book. Typical, uninformed know-it-all Liberal is what I thought.
"He suggests that the same traits that make his people distinctive — suspicion of outsiders, resistance to authority, devotion to kin, eagerness to fight — make it hard for them to thrive in modern American society"
Gotta control for IQ first.
"success in America means growing up to be less interesting than your parents or grandparents"
J.D. is "less interesting"?
"I watched the trailer and suffered tremendously from the music, which is emphatically not hillbilly music"
Yes, "music" makes a lot of stuff hard to "watch." Althouse should do a separate post on the bad effects of bad music.
“Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw”
Imma skip this one...but via Wiki: As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled...
So the author- and with the movie, Hollywood- has contempt for this behavior coming from rural Appalachia. Walk into the Cambridge, MA Trader Joe's the morning after EBT cards get reloaded and you'll see this kind of behavior, too. I suspect the author and Hollywood would see that as a victory.
I have not read the book. But from what I understand, the movie version is less layered, with less character development than the book- which is typically the case. Also typically the case are left-wing reviewers and review sites that will never allow a conservative writer to have a good review. Period. So I would take those Rotten Tomato reviews with a grain of salt.
Not sure I'm compelled to read this book, not with the 30 I'm already backlogged on. But perhaps I'll get to it someday if someone I know and respect tells me to read it.
I didn't read the book, but I read an interview with Vance a year or two ago. Seemed like a nice guy. He looked on his success as putting on a suit of clothes, not making him a differnet person.
As soon as I read, "The movie has a 26% rating at Rotten Tomatoes," I thought, I bet that's the critics, and clicked over to see what fraction of the audience liked it.
86%.
Now, it could be the movie is crap, critics recognize this, and the audience is less discerning than critics. (I know I am.)
Or it could be that the critics largely disdain these people, and hate the fact that the movie doesn't. And when the critics and the audience split by 60% or more, there's usually class or politics - but I repeat myself - involved.
(See also Dave Chappelle's "Sticks and Stones," which I see is up to 35% among Rotten Tomatoes critics. It was at 1% for months after it first came out.)
Anything Hollywood has put out for public consumption since January 21st 2017 is unworthy of interest. And just so you know, anyone who doesn’t live in NYC, S.F, L.A or D.C., is a hillbilly as per the elites. Which includes our totalitarian leftists blog viewers
So Opie turned out just like Andy and actually hates those people he seemed to have such affection for. Turns out A Face in the Crowd was the most accurate character he inhabited.
"Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw: That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do when people mess with your kid.“
That's bullshit. I grew up maybe a 30 minute drive north from that guy, parents and family all migrants from Appalachia to Ohio for the jobs and my parents would never have done such a thing. I don't know how the kid was messed with, but if I or my siblings were ill treated my parents would have stood up for me, but they wouldn't have threatened anyone or destroyed property. There would have been some harsh words and then I would be told not to go into the store any more.
You might consider reading "Born Fighting" by James Webb (USMC, fmr Sec. Navy) or the relevant portions of "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer. Both trace Scots-Irish culture in the US, particularly Appalachia. The rest of Fischer's book covers the Puritans, Quakers, and Cavalier cultures in their respective regions, including architecture, play, music, and all manner of informative things.
Sounds like the briar patch I was born and bred in. None of those traits are a problem. All they need to add is money and education. Than you get George S Patton and Harry Truman. Trump is smart enough to offer them a loyal leader and request loyalty back. The oldest trick in American politics. Europeans hate it until they need a Scots Irish leader themselves and go get a Churchill.
The book was good until the author gets to Yale Yale School. He buys into the myth that the world's smartest people go there -- you know, intellectual giants like Hunter Biden. That caused me to reassess what I had read up to that point. I guess you can be an elite snob regardless of your roots.
Destroying store merchandise, indeed burning the store down, will make you a celebrated hero in the more urbane parts of the country. Minneapolis is an absolute heaven of looting and conflagration. Too bad those unsophisticated goobers didn't know the approved phrases to chant while torching other people's livelihoods.
I remember liking the book but feeling like it was the story of a family that was marketed as the story of a people--I was expecting a sweep that wasn't there.
I remember liking the book but feeling like it was the story of a family that was marketed as the story of a people--I was expecting a sweep that wasn't there.
Exactly. Violence and general assholery may have been normal to his shitty grandparents, but they're not characteristic of the region or its people.
The better book, which presaged Vance’s by about 20 years, is Jim Goad’s The Redneck ManifestoA. You can also read Goad’s review of Vance’s book here. For a look at the pathological side of Appalachian values, watch the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. For a more studious examination, read Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture.
I watched the 2019 documentary Hillbilly (directed by Sally Rubin and Ashley York). They address the hillbilly stereotype. This is the link to the trailer.
As a native on Pennsyltucky, I read Hillbilly Elegy, and while some of it rang true, and some of it made me think I'm glad I moved away, a lot of it seemed a bit -- exaggerated.
I read the book three years ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I grew up in Ohio, and knew more than a few poor white families who had similar circumstances and attitudes to the ones Vance describes. I saw the book being less about class feelings, and more about how Vance bootstrapped himself up from a series of poor home environments, and into the Marines, an undergraduate education at Ohio State, a scholarship to Yale Law School, an internship with entrepreneur Peter Thiel, and finally a loving home with an amazing woman. Quite an inspiration!
I listened to the book on Audible. The author was the presenter. I loved it. What crap they made of it for the movie...who knows. There are all kinds of people who have deep roots in Appalachia...like me. His family and what they went through could be the story about a family from anywhere...really. Dysfunction isn't just for "Hillbillies". Madison and the whole state of Wisconsin seems to have plenty of it. The Madison City Counsel who voted to remove the Confederate Civil War monument from a freakin' cemetery comes to mind. Give me a "Hillbilly" any day over those assholes and those who thought they were right. I'm finally, just simply, offended.
The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia ... "is a 2009 documentary film directed by Julien Nitzberg, chronicling the White family of Boone County, West Virginia." (Wiki)
""[C]rime rates in Appalachia are only about 50 percent (for violent crime) to 65 percent (for property crime) of the national levels."
Not at all surprised to hear that. I have a book at home (don't remember the title) written by a researcher who looked into the violence that existed in mining towns of the old west. Using contemporary newspaper reports, he determined that big eastern cities such as Chicago and New York were more dangerous places to live with regards to crime than the mining towns, despite "common knowledge" that the west was a violent, lawless place.
The best movies are the ones with low “rotten tomatoes” scores and high “popcorn” scores. A low rotten tomato score is just a warning that the movie is not politically correct.
IOW, just about 50% and 65% of the national average, as mentioned above.
(1) There is social pathology outside of crime. (2) It is unsurprising that rural areas with low popuation density will have less criminal activity than denser urban areas. (3) There is a huge racial gradient to crime, so I am not sure how those numbers would look if you controlled for race and only looked at crimes committed by whites (4) In more rural areas, it is not uncommon for a crime to occur (e.g. a brawl at the local watering hole) that does not get reported to the police and thus not captured in crime stats. (5) For an examination of a similar phenomenon but in a different context (northern vs southern Italy), see Edward Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Clannishness is a big component.
I remember Amy Adams when she was doing dinner theater in Chanhassen, MN. Then she ended up in Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) which was filmed locally, and the rest is history.
I’ve not read the book and you cite the reasons why.
Growing up in Ludlow, KY, half my family came from the Appalachian regions of KY. I also attend Eastern Kentucky, which has a critical role in the education of the Appalachian region of the country - a role the university has done a fine job of fulfilling over its history. A huge number of my classmates came from Appalachia. I worked in the steel industry in Ohio, which is very much an expanded region of Appalachia because of migration out of the mountains (they used to joke that the Eastern Kentucky education system was readin’, writin’, and Route 23 North.). Oddly, I’ve also attended an Ivy League university.
While I grew to deeply appreciate Appalachian culture, all I’ll ever be is a tourist. I can’t imagine writing a book that is critical of this culture and that sets myself up as the hero. If in a hero’s journey, the worst obstacle the hero faces is a couple of summers in Eastern Kentucky, that isn’t exactly storming the beaches of Normandy, is it?! What a horrible and self-absorbed thing to do.
What makes it worse is that we can’t imagine this director or these actors participating an “Over-the-Rhine Elegy” movie adaptation of a book written by someone who grew up in Hyde Park. Rightly, the world wouldn’t accept that cultural exploitation. And, yet, here we are.
Unknown said... "(2) It is unsurprising that rural areas with low popuation density will have less criminal activity than denser urban areas."
He didn't say there was "less criminal activity". He said there was a lower rate of criminal activity.
"(3) There is a huge racial gradient to crime, so I am not sure how those numbers would look if you controlled for race and only looked at crimes committed by whites."
Yeah, it does seem that if you subtract the Blacks, America turns out to be a pretty law-abiding country. Infant mortality goes way down, too. Go figure.
I find the Tomas Sowell thesis that the most undesirable traits of ghetto-Black behavior were traits that poor, uneducated Blacks adopted from poor, uneducated and mostly Scots-Irish Caucasians appealing in its irony.
Any chance that this is cultural appropriation? I wonder if they got more things wrong about Appalachia in the Gary Cooper film, Sgt. York. The martial spirit as opposed to the spirit of wokeness is far more fashionable in times of war. Anyway, if you inaccurately praise rather than inaccurately criticize a group, then that group is inclined to give you a pass....I knew some Italians from Bensonhurst who considered Saturday Night Fever wildly inaccurate. I was an outsider to that community,but I noted some things that they got right....Glen Close has the look down. I wonder if the part involved pigging out on BBQ and gaining a few pounds. There's something to be said for method acting and immersing yourself in the role.
“But yeah, like everyone else in our family, they could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat.”
That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do... ?
It's interesting how it's okay to talk about cultural dysfunction when we're talking about white people.
It's also okay to just assume that these people are dysfunctional because they're just fucked up, and not because they've been the victims of systemic ethnic, regional, or class oppression. Because, of course, the only oppression that can be "systemic" is racism, an idea that Marx himself would have found bewildering, to say the least.
Hollywood's been doing Hillbilly minstrel shows since the 20s. How many actual Scotch-Irish Appalachians were cast in this movie? But taciturn real mountain folk isn't what Hollywood wants. Retarded banjo pickers and violent anal rapists amid swelling musical tributes to natural beauty (with ominous notes, of course) is what sells tickets.
And Puritan gatekeepers have been paying Southern regional writers to betray and exploit their roots since forever. (Faulkner, Agee, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, Willie Morris all prospered with this formula.) Tom Wolfe is the exception that proves the rule.
Tom said that he didn't read the book, and one reason why is: "If in a hero’s journey, the worst obstacle the hero faces is a couple of summers in Eastern Kentucky, that isn’t exactly storming the beaches of Normandy, is it?!"
I did read the book, and spending summers in Eastern Kentucky was not the worst obstacle that the author faced. His home life was chaotic to say the least, for one thing, and the general message from his local culture was one that devalued education and achievement. My impression was not that he wrote the book to pat himself on the back--it's part memoir and part examination of a particular sub-culture with a lot of pathologies.
I an an Atlanta native and live now part-time in Appalachia but was a full-time resident there for most of 45 years. I have not read the book nor plan to watch the movie. I am a member of three different private FB groups for people living in or from Appalachian and there have been a number of discussions of the movie there. The reviews have been almost 100% negative. I will admit the place where I live in Appalachia is somewhat special and may not be representative of the region as a whole but from the reviews I read of the book I could not relate to a lot of it.
" IOW, just about 50% and 65% of the national average, as mentioned above."
(1) There is social pathology outside of crime. (2) It is unsurprising that rural areas with low popuation density will have less criminal activity than denser urban areas. (3) There is a huge racial gradient to crime, so I am not sure how those numbers would look if you controlled for race and only looked at crimes committed by whites (4) In more rural areas, it is not uncommon for a crime to occur (e.g. a brawl at the local watering hole) that does not get reported to the police and thus not captured in crime stats. (5) For an examination of a similar phenomenon but in a different context (northern vs southern Italy), see Edward Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Clannishness is a big component.
Leftist is confronted with Objective fact.
Leftist responds with a list of subjective garbage to hold on to previously held convictions.
I didn't recognize either actress. And I have no opinion whatever about the Ron Howard corpus--I haven't seen most of the movies cited. Nor have I read Vance, though I've seen him a few times on the TV.
But I have read Goad, McWhiney, Webb, and Fisher. Webb takes his thesis too far but there are some good nuggets; McWhiney too liked his ethnocultural notions simple.
If I've read Goad on Vance, I've forgotten, but will take a look at the review.
AFAWK my ma's folks, for all their Scots-Irish genes (probably 50%, the rest other Britons) never were hill and holler people. They had some education and status as defined in their time and place, certainly more than my German side.
That said, there was nothing in the trailer that I haven't seen up close and personal; vein-bulging screaming matches--not always accompanied by substance abuse and violence--failure and betrayal, the military and/or education as the way out (if there is one).
Things have calmed down considerably since so few of us are left now, but my last brother and I can still bellow and rant at one another if we spend too much time together. (He's like Ma that way.)
Narr OK, when did WLS Churchill become Scots-Irish, for crying out loud?
I'm from a Scots-Irish hillbilly-ish family based in far southwestern Pennsylvania, almost West Virginia really. Grandfather was a coal miner whose sons moved to nearby Ohio for manufacturing jobs. While our family was stable and law-abiding (other than a lot of drinking and several shotgun weddings), the local culture was definitely more "hillbilly." I remember visiting relatives as a child and having to hide in the house because a neighbor was carrying a rifle around, searching for "his woman." Fortunately he didn't find her, that day anyway.
My family's culture was also fiercely independent, kin-centered, patriotic, and four of the seven grandchildren went into law enforcement (including me). I see the echoes of the Scots-Irish culture. Maybe that's why Hillbilly Elegy resonated with me.
And where does "nimrod" come from? There's a Nimrod in the Bible, but I don't think he's the basis for the pejorative. It sounds like one of those words that is doing duty for a stronger term, like "Heck". Maybe dipshit -> dipstick -> nimrod? With a hovering nuance of dim bulb?
Or any modern society. Or civilization. Or a subsistence farming village. Or a band or hunter-gatherers.
Can we still have a talk about this or are you immersed in something?
I wanted to inquire about the spectrum that I see possibly being developed here.
Putting aside the political accords that make up a government. If you are going to put Ethiopia or Sudan on one end and lets say ancient Egypt on the other. China would be more towards the Egypt side and Russia is somewhere towards the Sudan side.
None of that matters. None of it. The only thing that matters is the character of the people.
Are the people in a country capable of living in a high trust society.
Are people in Portland capable of this?
Are people in Appalachia capable of this?
The problem for Howard is he knows the answer to both questions.
He wasn't talking to you. But you are a Leftist. Interesting that you don't know it. Maybe a Leftoid? Leftover?
Considering I wrote the words he quoted, he was talking to me. And since you seem to know my politics better than I do, why don’t you explain what makes me a leftist. Thrill me with your acumen.
Vance married an (East) Indian law school classmate who clerked for Kavanaugh (a couple stereotypes blown up in that sentence).
I was going to go on to comment on the complicated genealogical connection between Glenn Close, Dina Merrill and Barbara Hutton, but nobody's interested, and those who are can look it up for themselves.
That's never been a problem. Got the old time fiddlers convention in Galax, VA sometime. You won't see many hillbillies, but you will see a hell of a lot of New Yorkers trying their hand at playing Solider's Joy and Forked Deer.
I wonder if they got more things wrong about Appalachia in the Gary Cooper film, Sgt. York.
They got more right than wrong. Unusual for Hollywood.
Nimrod was a mighty hunter in the Bible. It's speculated that Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd (who was hunting him) a "nimrod," and people who didn't know that the name referred to started using it as an insult. Nimrod, dim bulb, numbskull -- it's understandable.
Once again, J Farmer calls it. Jim Goad's book tackles the real issue: why we so frequently minimize our dominant minority urban dysfunction by scapegoating real but occasional poor white rural violence, without Goad even barely excusing either. Goad is an honest man -- who happens to cheerfully live in one of the most "diverse" non-white communities in the nation, Stone Mountain, which has more famous dead rappers and Nation of Islam burka shops and "trafficked" minors than grocery stores. I've seen more normalized and grotesque violence against women and children there than I choose to remember.
Hollywood has a 90 year history of cheerfully lying about and exploiting poor rural whites, sexually and otherwise, while excusing and glorifying the vile behavior of elites, Kennedys, urban minorities,and all the rest of their preferred patron groups. I call it Mayella Ewelling. It's been going on forever. Even Sartre made three or four pervy "white trash" exploitation films.
And screw everyone who brings up Deliverance. Porn for the type of people who excuse Woody Allen because of pure zip code prejudice. James Dickey deeply regretted the way his metaphoric novel about a frigging water dam project was exploited, and the fine people of Clayton deserved no such abuse.
So Opie turned out just like Andy and actually hates those people he seemed to have such affection for. Turns out A Face in the Crowd was the most accurate character he inhabited.
I've met some of Andy's neighbors who lived out on Manteo and a few people who had dealings him when he was filming Matlock in Wilmington. It wasn't a case of him being prejudiced; Andy was just an asshole in general.
Vance, however, is sucking up to snobby Palo Alto types and has probably been dining out on his hillbilly stories for years.
After Sharp Objects, I can't possibly watch Amy Adams do anything but apologize for crudely exploiting entire regions, genders, cultures, family units -- or even drug addicts, Confederate recreators, and self-cutters.
J. D. Vance’s story of heading down the path to personal ruin and being redeemed by the USMC parallels my life. In my case it was the USCG. And the love of a good woman. The hillbillies are the only class of people in this country that all the rest of us can insult, demean, and dismiss as a group. Try it with anyone else, in spite of those bothersome crime stats, and that’s it for you.
And Puritan gatekeepers have been paying Southern regional writers to betray and exploit their roots since forever. (Faulkner, Agee, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, Willie Morris all prospered with this formula.)
Don't forget Flannery O'Connor! She deserves her ration of shit, too!
“P.S. Despite being poor, NOBODY in our neighborhood was on any kind of welfare.”
I never knew we were until as an adult my older brother told me that that’s where the powdered milk, bricks of American cheese, powdered eggs, and my favorite seriously, the canned boned chicken came from. I wish I could buy some of that USDA canned chicken today. My mother hid the fact that we were on food stamps from us.
"I can get by without getting that sort of thing hammered into my head a thousand times. “
It’s why I don’t watch TV or recent movies. “This is Us”? "This is What You Deplorables Need to Learn" would be a more accurate title. Rosanne was “us."
He wasn't talking to you. But you are a Leftist. Interesting that you don't know it. Maybe a Leftoid? Leftover?
Considering I wrote the words he quoted, he was talking to me. And since you seem to know my politics better than I do, why don’t you explain what makes me a leftist. Thrill me with your acumen.
So you are Unknown in the post?
If I had known it was you I wouldn't have called you a leftist.
Hollywood has a 90 year history of cheerfully lying about and exploiting poor rural whites, sexually and otherwise, while excusing and glorifying the vile behavior of elites, Kennedys, urban minorities,and all the rest of their preferred patron groups. I call it Mayella Ewelling. It's been going on forever. Even Sartre made three or four pervy "white trash" exploitation films.
The aristocracy hate poor people that want to live on their own without government help.
So they make up lies about them and their usual racist hate.
Nearly every American movie today is a morality play designed for the improvement of the people paying good money for the tickets and approved by our moral betters. No criticizing China! I am getting into French movies, and while they are getting a little bit infected, they are not so fucking preachy. I wish I knew a better way to pick out the good Bollywood movies, because I like those too when they are good.
I was going to mention Born Fighting but you beat me to it. Great book even if the author is a world class scumbag. (For letting his aid sit in jail for 2 days for carrying Webb's gun)
Also like Albion's seed though I found it a bit of a slog.
For the Netflix inclined there is a documentary about the White family of West Virginia. They pretty much define White Trash.
But they sure could dance! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zf7tgRbvGY
Ron Howard's made some good stuff: Parenthood, Apollo 13, Backdraft, Cocoon, A Beautiful Mind. Unfortunately, the last one on that list was made in 2001. Since then, not much.
I find the Tomas Sowell thesis that the most undesirable traits of ghetto-Black behavior were traits that poor, uneducated Blacks adopted from poor, uneducated and mostly Scots-Irish Caucasians appealing in its irony.
Theodore Dalrymple, who is worth reading for many reasons and on many levels, wrote a booke 20 years ago called Life at the Bottom.
It is about the pathologies of poor white Britons. He was a doctor practicing in a prison hospital.
I found the book, and Dalrymple, because Thomas Sowell wrote a review. The thing that stood out in my mind was his comment that the pathologies were not racial. They were class.
After Sharp Objects, I can't possibly watch Amy Adams do anything but apologize for crudely exploiting entire regions, genders, cultures, family units -- or even drug addicts, Confederate recreators, and self-cutters.
I agree. She porked up for this role, guess she's angling for an Oscar, maybe we'll get lucky and she won't be able to slim down!
Well that's certainly a topic you're quite familiar with. Like earlier this year when you kept telling us all that covid was going to be memory holed by April. Maybe you and that dumb bitch you're married to don't know as much as your fat heads would like to believe. But then again, being dead wrong never dissuades blowhard dipshits like yourself.
I knew some hillbillies when I was in the service. I don't think they were excessively prone to violence, but I wouldn't want to get on their bad side. My impression was that they would behave much better in a foxhole than I would, but I would probably have the edge in a classroom discussion of Donne's poetry....On the minus side, I think they took more interest in cars than money. That kind of attitude will cost you as time goes by, but, as a practical matter, it's probably better to know more about butterfly valves than Donne's conceits......What's worse than being stereotyped? Not being stereotyped. Being totally ignored. There are any number of ethnic minorities who are not celebrated or derided but are simply forgotten. Jewish and Irish immigrants never shut up about their experiences in America. The Chinese are now starting to get in the act too. Italians make great movies. I have heard that some of them are even literate. What writer or filmmaker or poet has defined the Polish or Czech experience in America.
Birkel said... I would love to be on a debate stage with Vance. His related experiences sound made-for-Hollywood and not particularly realistic. His is not reality. ***************
Do you deny that he grew up poor?
If not, please tell us what first-hand experiences *you* had growing up, what better "reality", that you would "debate" him over.
So I commented about Webb being a scumbag (though a good writer) and next ran across this:
Insanity Wrap Has a Crush on Lauren Boebert
Indulge yourself in the unadulterated awesome that is Congresscritter-elect Lauren Boebert:
A firearms-toting congresswoman-elect who owns a gun-themed restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, has already asked Capitol Police about carrying her weapon on Capitol grounds, her office has acknowledged. If she does so, she apparently won’t be alone.
If I'm not mistaken, the movie comes out on Netflix today. I wanted to see it in the theater but didn't make it. The trailer makes it appear that the movie focuses primarily on the relationship between Vance, his mother, and his grandmother but the book covers a lot more ground. However, the love of his grandparents with all their faults does seem to be the most powerful influence in J.D. Vance's life.
My mother was one of twelve children of sharecroppers and the were "the poorest of the poor." She was the only child in her family to graduate from high school and she worked after school and all summer to pay for her clothes so she could go. They did not have indoor plumbing until they moved to town in about 1945. She graduated in 1948. My father was one of six children and none of them went past the eighth grade. He was better educated than the majority of high school graduates today. He literally walked to school early with his older brother Robert and they started the fire in the winter. Uncle Robert never was right when he came back from the Battle of the Bulge. He was a tanker.
I grew up going to tent revivals and Assembly of God churches often with my aunts and uncles although we regularly attended the Baptist Church. We always went to Church on the Sunday's that Daddy left on Friday and still wasn't home yet. The women all hated alkyhall and several of the men were bad alcholics. I'm from Tennessee but I was born in Chicago when my parents and half their brothers and sisters had moved up there for jobs in the fifties. They all trickled back to Tennessee eventually. I related to the book and understand the issues since I an not ignorant of the culture like many people who were born into other circumstances seem to be so miserably proud to report.
I read the book and I'd say it wasn't about Appalachia so much as about what happens when cultural characteristics that work in Appalachia are transported to a manufacturing town in Ohio. Even there those characteristics have some success: JD Vance was rescued by his grandmother and aunts who had all succeeded in the transition and who all felt they must help their kin. And JD Vance succeeded as a Marine because what the Marine Corps wanted tracked with what JD valued from his family past. And then, from that base of success, JD Vance went on to be a writer while in the Marines and then a writer and lawyer in his life. The people of Appalachia opposed slavery as group - they broke away and formed West Virginia. Lincoln whose family came from this group was always trying to get Union armies to go into eastern Kentucky and Tennessee where they would be supported by the people and from there across to Virginia and on to Richmond by the back door. But the terrain could not support a marching army. The opposition of this region to the Confederacy was noted and after the Civil War the region was deliberately starved of resources such as railroads, good roads and education and its people were demeaned. And so in the 20C when they were rediscovered by folklorists they seemed backward, frozen the time - especially because the folklorists valued everything that was frozen in time. But the time when things froze in Appalachia was 1860 when they opposed the Confederacy and because they opposed the Confederacy. And their poverty was imposed by supporters of the Confederacy and is now being mocked by ignorant people who have picked up that pro-Confederate mockery and are too proud of themselves to know who they are copying. The same people who pushed Colonel Hegg's statue in to the lake in Madison. And tore down statues of Washington. And who say, as the Confederate theorists like Calhoun did, that the US Constitution made a place for slavery not as a temporary exemption, but as a guarantee. The Confederate theory was opposed by the Union theory that the Constitution meant freedom for all. But that's too hard for university students of 2020 to understand though it was understood and done at great personal cost by the then residents of Appalachia in 1860 - poor, ignorant, deluded people, Who had not been trained to be Confederate supporters at UW-Madison.
The Germans are in a bit of a quandary. For obvious reasons, it's kind of bad taste for a German-American to celebrate their ethnic background. Well, Germans in the twentieth century made very poor Europeans but very good Americans....I read a lot of Vonnegut. He was aware of his German background. It added a certain amount of post modern irony to his experience at Dresden....Betty Smith wrote A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. She tried to pass the protagonist off as Irish/Austrian, but Betty Smith was herself German-American on both sides of the family. The largest ethnic minority in America are people of German ancestry, but you don't see or read many movies or novels that are explicitly about their experiences here
The largest ethnic minority in America are people of German ancestry, but you don't see or read many movies or novels that are explicitly about their experiences here
Read the book and loved it. I don’t finish most books I start anymore but this one was a page turner for me. I’m Scots-Irish, mostly, so maybe that’s part of it. But my family was fundamentalist Baptist, not hillbilly or at least a generation or two from hillbilly. I never thought of myself as clannish, rednecky, etc. but in reading Elegy and Webb’s Born Fighting I saw something deep within my dna that I hadn’t recognized before.
I anxiously await watching the movie ... but need to finish The Crown first.
Well that's certainly a topic you're quite familiar with. Like earlier this year when you kept telling us all that covid was going to be memory holed by April. Maybe you and that dumb bitch you're married to don't know as much as your fat heads would like to believe. But then again, being dead wrong never dissuades blowhard dipshits like yourself.
I did underestimate the level of committment of the aristocracy to push their totalitarian wishes.
I also did underestimate the level of stupidity in the masses.
Mostly I underestimated the level of cowardice in mostly establishment republicans.
I agree that was stupid.
By the way how many people have died of Covid Farmer?
I found the book, and Dalrymple, because Thomas Sowell wrote a review. The thing that stood out in my mind was his comment that the pathologies were not racial. They were class.
John Henry
That may have been true when written, but gangster culture has led the pathologies of the ghetto to spill over into middle class black communities, so it's much more a race issue than it might once have been.
wildswan--who sometimes makes sweeping statements that I challenge--is on point with the Appalachian subculture as distorted by the lenses of others. One irony of early 20th C American history and demography is that so many of the po white that moved North had no particular Southern much less Confederate identity. Those were imposed by the host population-- in a way similar to what Handlin said about so many 19th C European arrivals: they probably didn't know they were "Italians" or "Germans" or "Poles" until they got here.
The words he quoted were posted by Anonymous. If you can't remember who you are, it really isn't fair to expect the rest of us to keep track.
I don't control Blogger. And I don't expect anything from you. You chimed in, fuckwit. And like so many others here, not knowing what the fuck you're talking about didn't dissuade you.
I've worked with many primary source materials from WWII, letters, diaries, memoirs, etc, and Southern middleclass WASPs were more likely to express appreciation of jazz and blues by "Negro" performers than of what they called 'hillbilly' music.
"And since you seem to know my politics better than I do, why don’t you explain what makes me a leftist. Thrill me with your acumen."
Fair enough. As I said, you don't seem to realize that you are a Leftist, and you aren't really a Leftist like, say, Cookie, who couches his fulminating indignation in classical Marxist boilerplate. Your political positions are all over the map, I guess it's more your style of reasoning that I identify, perhaps erroneously, as Leftist. You have a way of slithering back and forth between a we're-all-in-this-together, appeal-to-reason type argument, and a Ho-Ho-Ho-aren't-you-a-dumb-rube style more reminiscent of Howard in troll mode. I haven't forgotten your theory that it was OK if the Norks nuked Seattle because you lived in Florida. Maybe not Leftist, but definitely Leftoid.
Although at this point, I'm about ready to let them have Seattle myself.
Hillbilly Elegy illustrates that America is more classist than racist. The underclass have the same underlying cultural struggles regardless of race.
To be underclass in America all you need is a disdain for police and education, violence as a solution to problems, drug addiction and lots of teen pregnancies. Voila! Welcome to the underclass.
I read Vance's book when it came out, but don't have much interest in watching the movie. The vignette that sticks out in my memory is his story about a recruiting lunch while a student at Yale LS. The recruiter from some large firm took him and another potential recruit to lunch at a fancy place in New Haven (surprisingly for anyone who spent time there, it seems there are such places now). And Vance starts shvitzing about which fork and knife to use -- there were a lot of both at his place setting. Culture shock comes in many forms.
Then there was the time you waxed sentimental about how you and your ass-fucking partner were thinking about buying a child to play with. I associate that sort of carefully worked-out moral incompetence with the Left. I suppose it is more accurate to say that the Left embraces all such moral atrocities because of its fundamental enmity with functioning society. Would you say that the Left supports you, and the crimes you are considering indulging in, but you don't extend them the same courtesy? Should I maybe be capitalizing "You"?
Read David Hackett Fisher's "Albion's Seed", and you'll get it.
The backcountry of VA, TN, KY, NC, SC, and PA was full of emigrants from the Scots-Irish borders who brought their folkways with them. Think Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk. Their attitudes and traditions--all of them--persisted in the New World.
A thoughtful reading of JD Vance's book reveals that some of Vance's family, including his mother from time to time, did quite well. Her demon was addiction coupled with a career in the health care world--access to drugs did her in. So JD was saved by his grandma, who was a little rough but knew that you have to persist in life to get anywhere. A hitch in the Marines squared him away, and he went through Ohio State in 18 months and then on to Yale Law School.
JD has some sympathy for the folks who came out on the short end of globalization because he saw them all around him in Middletown OH. Think of it as Kenosha with a twang or Flint without Michael Moore.
Then there was the time you waxed sentimental about how you and your ass-fucking partner were thinking about buying a child to play with. I associate that sort of carefully worked-out moral incompetence with the Left.
Hahahaha. Your desperation is reeking. Can you give me your home address? I'll mail you a quarter and you can call someone who gives a fuck. Honestly, though, I never make a major life decision without running it past Anonymous Internet Douche #7. So your feedback is duly noted.
p.s. So should I strike you from the baby shower invitees list?
The words he quoted were posted by Anonymous. If you can't remember who you are, it really isn't fair to expect the rest of us to keep track.
I don't control Blogger. And I don't expect anything from you. You chimed in, fuckwit. And like so many others here, not knowing what the fuck you're talking about didn't dissuade you.
But you can see the confusion can you not?
You posted the same anecdotal drivel someone would expect from a leftist deep in the throes of confirmation bias and the name showed up as Unknown.
Either way you posted anecdotal drivel from deep in the throws of confirmation bias.
I am sure you have some movies that would back your subjective analysis up though.
Then there was the time you waxed sentimental about how you and your ass-fucking partner were thinking about buying a child to play with. I associate that sort of carefully worked-out moral incompetence with the Left. I suppose it is more accurate to say that the Left embraces all such moral atrocities because of its fundamental enmity with functioning society. Would you say that the Left supports you, and the crimes you are considering indulging in, but you don't extend them the same courtesy? Should I maybe be capitalizing "You"?
That shit goes too far.
You are participating in the same prejudiced and stereotypical thinking he was and adding your own moral judgements which are wrong.
Farmer has demonstrated nothing that would make a reasonable person think he would be anything other than a good parent.
If anything, 'Hillbilly Elegy' is too tasteful, too sensitive for its own good, studiously unwilling to be as wild or provocative as its characters.
This quote makes it sound like the reviewer was upset that it didn't lampoon rednecks enough. I never read Hillbilly Elegy, but whenever I hear about Scots-Irish culture, I'm reminded of the one essay in Thomas Sowell's book, Black Redneck, White Liberal. In the same-named essay, Sowell basically says that black culture today is largely a continuation of the Scots-Irish culture that dominated the South. Though he suggests that most of White Southerners have 'grown out of' that culture but it persists in Black communities. Whether it is true or not I don't know. Most of my interaction with Rural America is with family in South-East rural Wisconsin. While I will admit there is some suspicion of outsiders and devotion to kin, there isn't really any quickness to anger. If anything I would characterize the culture as somewhat stoic and prudential. Though Sowell talks about this too in his essay and attributes that to German farmers in the North versus the Scot-Irish in the south.
Farmer has demonstrated nothing that would make a reasonable person think he would be anything other than a good parent.
Thank you for the kind words. And I apologize for getting personal with you earlier. I didn’t realize some of my posts were coming up “Unknown.” Still, no excuse.
My mother's grandfather was a tobacco farmer in Appalachia, specifically the Asheville area of NC. I have photos of them and they definitely look like 'hillbillies'. Having traveled in that area a few times I admit to feeling a curious magnetic pull as if some of my roots were reaching out to me. Beautiful country. And super-nice people.
Farmer, we're having a perfectly pleasant and interesting discussion here about the topic of hillbillies. But, as usual, all you want to do is argue. You probably can't help your compulsive behavior but it's a real pain in the ass at times. In fact, most of the time.
"Farmer has demonstrated nothing that would make a reasonable person think he would be anything other than a good parent."
It is my considered view that the best environment for raising children is a family, consisting of a man, a woman, and their children. When that is not possible, there are other arrangements, less than ideal, which may nonetheless be considerably better than nothing. It is even conceivable that being raised by two homosexual males is better than, say, an orphanage. Conceivable. However, to contemplate paying for the creation of a child, so that you and your deviate sexual partner can pretend to be a normal family, is depraved. In effect, the widespread acceptance of this depravity endorses the view that a family consists of two (or more) people who sometimes have sex together, along with one more minors with dining privileges. Maybe that describes your family, it doesn't describe mine.
I'll grant he probably wasn't serious about Seattle. There are a lot of things he probably isn't serious about.
Jupiter certainly is a nimrod fuckwit. Farmer has him pegged. Also there is something really creepy and slimy about bringing up Farmer’s future children and including it in a paragraph about his sex life. Lord only knows what you do behind closed doors, nimrod.
Is the reviewer upset that Ron Howard didn't make Tobacco Road (1941) or Wise Blood (1979)? Based on this snip of the review, perhaps Ron Howard views the people he portrayed as actual people, people who contain the divine spark in equal measure to their better-heeled judges.
This seems to be a point we have all just decided to forget about. A homosexual judge in California ruled that a measure endorsed by over 60% of the electorate was "unconstitutional", a position he certainly knew would have been incomprehensible to any of the people who signed the Constitution, and suddenly anyone who disagrees is a "bigot". The unspoken assumptions that justify homosexual "marriage" are that heterosexual marriage is about sex, and sex is about pleasure. Thus, if Bob and Rob enjoy fucking each other, they have all the necessary qualifications for marriage. It is quite astonishing that this logic, and its implicitly contemptuous and reductionist view of marriage, is acceptable to even a tiny minority of adults. And as many have pointed out, from there to polygamy is not even a slippery slope. Sauce for Bob and Rob is sauce for Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.
You probably can't help your compulsive behavior but it's a real pain in the ass at times. In fact, most of the time.
Please do me a favor. Go back and read my very first comment on this thread at 9:08AM. Then read the replies to that comment and explain to me why I am always the target for these little lectures of yours. Also, when there are threads that are hundreds of comments of Drago and Readering and Chuck and whoever slinging insults back and forth, are you showing up with your kumbaya routine? No, you're piling on. So spare me your we're-all-just-trying-to-have-a-nice-chat horseshit.
Hey Nimrod, this blogpost isn’t about homosexuals. It’s obvious you are trying to rationalize your slimy and creepy comments directed to Farmer. Why don’t you climb back under your rock and let commenters here discuss the subject matter of the blogpost.
“That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do... ? I can get by without getting that sort of thing hammered into my head a thousand times.”
All the I’m a Scots-Irish and I can act like this or like that, whatever, nonsense is so tiresome. There is no nationality that has a distinct inborn group personality.
Yo, RBE... That wasn't the "Madison City Counsel" which Talibanized the bronze memorial plaque in the Madison Municipal Cemetery marking the mass graves of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of Confederate prisoners who died of such horrific and irresponsible maltreatment at the then Madison POW camp, that the mortified Feds closed it down and moved the operation to Chicago: that was an initiative by erstwhile Mad Town mayor Soglin, who was way, way ahead of the present virtue-signaling/deplatforming curve. (The Yiddish epithet, "a shandeh fur die Goyim" superbly characterizes Hizzoner; then and now.) Chances was mighty slim that any of the Southerner dead were slaveowners, and most were shellshocked bedraggled survivors captured following an extraordinary battle over —and their heroic failed defense of— a Confederate fort at a bend/choke point which severely impeded river navigation by Northern forces; and so warranted the most ferocious bombardment.
"Also there is something really creepy and slimy about bringing up Farmer’s future children and including it in a paragraph about his sex life."
It was Farmer who introduced those topics, in this forum, in that conjunction, some time back. But let me ask you, Dear Igna; If I were to mention, as I might well and indeed may have done, that I am male, I am married to a woman, and we have children. Would you consider it "creepy" for some other commenter to allude to those facts in subsequent posts? "Really creepy and slimy". Is that what you would call it? Or is there something specific to Farmer's plan to purchase a child to supplement his and his sexual partner's fantasy life that you feel should not be mentioned?
I grew up in hillbillie country. I wasn't one of them because my parents came from Chicago, but I know all about the poverty, the addiction, the wastefulness, the resourcefulness and the good, strong work ethic that contradicts itself. The thing is that JD Vance's book could be rewritten by just changing the geographic locations and no one would be the wiser. There is absolutely nothing unique about appalachia that cannot be put into any other region of America, rich or poor. That same story plays out in families all across America, and for every firebrand hillbilly grandma and drugged up mama, there are multitudes of gentle, disciplined and well rounded people that can proudly call themselves hillbillies.
If you think James Dickey was hard on hillbillies in "Deliverance" you should see what he did for B-29 tail gunners (young men who grew up in the wilds of northern Alaska) in "To the White Sea."
FYI, many years ago Brad Pitt got the film rights to that book, intending to play the tail gunner. But the movie was never made.
Or is there something specific to Farmer's plan to purchase a child to supplement his and his sexual partner's fantasy life that you feel should not be mentioned?
I'm flattered my personal life is of such interest to you. I'm afraid I can't say the same of yours.
I have a brother-in-law who was raised in Tennessee. He is a redneck hillbilly but that is not to say he is uneducated. He worked in a museum and curated the section that featured antiques. He also does different kinds of art and sculpture. He fondly recalls sitting on the front porch in the mountains with his grandmother and other relatives playing music and singing. But the violence part is true too. His father was murdered when he was pretty young. When I visit with him it is hard to avoid adopting his "country" way of talking. Oh yeah and he was also a Marine (Semper Fi!)
...and I took as the central message of the book, that his grandmother, despite her faults, inspired him to work hard and succeed in school. His mother was such a loser she tried to get "clean urine" from him so that she could pass a drug test. So basically having one parental figure in your life that will kick your ass when you need it can save you from your inherited destiny.
"No, she does not. She deserves nothing but praise. Her writing is the work of an extraordinarily subtle, insightful, and compassionate mind."
That settles a question that has long perplexed me. In my youth, having been informed that Flannery O'Connor was a brilliant writer, I slogged my way through - was it "Tough Guys Haul It Off Somewhere"? Something like that. Fifty-odd pages of random nastiness, and then "She'd have been a good woman if someone shot her in the mouth." I think that was it. Just did not make any sense to me. But it is finally clear that was because I lacked subtlety, insight and compassion.
Inga said... “That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do... ? I can get by without getting that sort of thing hammered into my head a thousand times.”
All the I’m a Scots-Irish and I can act like this or like that, whatever, nonsense is so tiresome. There is no nationality that has a distinct inborn group personality. *****************
Hah! Try telling that to all the Woke Folk who excuse and normalize bad black behavior with, "that's just the way they are".
It's why black criminality is explained away and ignored, even when it's a huge factor in police-black interactions like the one involving junkie-criminal George Floyd.
That stuff drives people like Larry Elder and Candace Owen crazy. They say it gives the Dems a means of controlling blacks, telling them that it's OK to be irresponsible and criminal, that they will protect then against the evil Whitey.
It really was not that long ago, that America reveled in The Beverly Hillbillies, in which the Clampitt's absurd antics inevitably proved to be more sensible than the craven graspings after phantom joys of the "modern" urbanites they lived among. What Uncle Jed "reckoned" was generally dead on the mark, and then there was Ellie May. Ellie May was quite popular with young boys who liked animals.
Less, O.T... shortly after coming back from a year as an infantry grunt in Eye Corps, and appalled/freaked out that the party on the home front was going more full-blast than when I left —the cars bigger and the music louder— I relocated from the NY 'burbs where I grew up to rural West Virginia, where I spent much of the following decade: first as a forestry grad student at WVU, and thence a hippie farmer atop Bunner Ridge, above White Day Creek, a tributary of the Monongahela River, about 70 miles upstream of its confluence at Pittsburgh PA with the Allegheny, to form the Ohio. First place I ever lived where I didn't feel smarter than my neighbors, of whom several I stay in touch with even now. Couldn't believe as a ex-groupie of the Washington Square-Greenwich Village folkie scene, that on Sundays after church, people on the Ridge gathered together to play the banjo and sing southern gospel hymns. Residuum of the Frontier Revival, where nearly everybody was then still some flavor of Wesleyan from mainline Protestant to snake-handler. Was last back there just five years ago and it's been mostly gentrified into conventional suburbia.
O'Connor of course being RC, a woman, and a Southerner.
Mamaw/Meemaw and Papaw were and are not exotic terms around here. No blood relative of mine ever answered to the name, but plenty of friends and in-laws use them.
Jim Goad's review is interesting-- he generally is--but blame-talk bores pretty quickly, and his aside about his own father "not knowing why he was fighting in the Battle of the Bulge" (paraphrased) hints at a naivete about war that surprises me.
My older brother was forced to choose probation at home, or the army, by a hard-ass juvie judge at the age of 17. To his credit he chose the army (in '67 no less) and served well enough to get an honorable discharge after 3 years.
But gradually, and then swiftly and permanently, it fell apart from too much exposure to his pre-army pals.
When haughty historians try to make a poor, struggling idealist and would-be artist, son of a nobody from the sticks, a decorated soldier, writer, and political innovator sound like a bad guy for just trying to stave off the cultural and political ruin of his people!
They was Clampetts in Californy, not Clampitts.
Narr Jethro played by a German-Jewish-Irish-Catholic
And BTW, Farmer...I don't read the posts of those three you mentioned. Yours I do read because I often find them informed and articulate. So there's that...
Jupiter at 3:31–that is quite a summary of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I think the line from the Misfit is, she could have been a good woman if there was somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
Daniel Woodrell's novels about Ozark Celtic hillbillies and their culture are quite good. He's the author of "Winter's Bone" and "Tomato Red." The movie "Winter's Bone" was excellent and followed the novel closely. Woodrell knows his subject. Born and raised in the Ozarks, high school dropout, Marine veteran, BA from U Kansas and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop -- he's the real deal.
a) It was indeed Clampetts. I apologize. In penance, here is an Uncle Jed quote;
"I reckon if Granny'd been shootin' at you, you'd be casting a polka-dot shadow."
b) A lingering case of something, but probably something less transitory than a day of the week. I really didn't get O'Connor. I just could not understand why there kept being another paragraph when the previous ones had accomplished so little.
c) Right, it was Good Man Whatever, not Haul Away Whatever. But I distinctly recall that she was to be shot in the mouth. The image unsettled me. Like Orwell's description of The Future.
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230 comments:
1 – 200 of 230 Newer› Newest»Amy Schumer would have been better than Amy Adams.
I watched the trailer .. not hillbilly music
I read the book, and it wasn't about hillbillies.
That book was pretty big stuff when it came out. I gave a copy to my far left sister who can't recount a simple neighborhood event without including the ethnic origin of every person involved. I don't know if she ever read the book.
A sports talk radio guy was talking about the movie the other day and he said he had never heard of the book. Typical, uninformed know-it-all Liberal is what I thought.
"He suggests that the same traits that make his people distinctive — suspicion of outsiders, resistance to authority, devotion to kin, eagerness to fight — make it hard for them to thrive in modern American society"
Gotta control for IQ first.
"success in America means growing up to be less interesting than your parents or grandparents"
J.D. is "less interesting"?
"I watched the trailer and suffered tremendously from the music, which is emphatically not hillbilly music"
Yes, "music" makes a lot of stuff hard to "watch." Althouse should do a separate post on the bad effects of bad music.
“Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw”
Lemme just call BS on that.
Imma skip this one...but via Wiki: As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled...
So the author- and with the movie, Hollywood- has contempt for this behavior coming from rural Appalachia. Walk into the Cambridge, MA Trader Joe's the morning after EBT cards get reloaded and you'll see this kind of behavior, too. I suspect the author and Hollywood would see that as a victory.
And I tried to read his book. I meant to get back to it, but I never got past page 40
Books, news sources, I have noticed that you have trouble dealing with things that might force you to confront your biases.
I have not read the book. But from what I understand, the movie version is less layered, with less character development than the book- which is typically the case. Also typically the case are left-wing reviewers and review sites that will never allow a conservative writer to have a good review. Period. So I would take those Rotten Tomato reviews with a grain of salt.
Not sure I'm compelled to read this book, not with the 30 I'm already backlogged on. But perhaps I'll get to it someday if someone I know and respect tells me to read it.
I didn't read the book, but I read an interview with Vance a year or two ago. Seemed like a nice guy. He looked on his success as putting on a suit of clothes, not making him a differnet person.
As soon as I read, "The movie has a 26% rating at Rotten Tomatoes," I thought, I bet that's the critics, and clicked over to see what fraction of the audience liked it.
86%.
Now, it could be the movie is crap, critics recognize this, and the audience is less discerning than critics. (I know I am.)
Or it could be that the critics largely disdain these people, and hate the fact that the movie doesn't. And when the critics and the audience split by 60% or more, there's usually class or politics - but I repeat myself - involved.
(See also Dave Chappelle's "Sticks and Stones," which I see is up to 35% among Rotten Tomatoes critics. It was at 1% for months after it first came out.)
Anything Hollywood has put out for public consumption since January 21st 2017 is unworthy of interest. And just so you know, anyone who doesn’t live in NYC, S.F, L.A or D.C., is a hillbilly as per the elites. Which includes our totalitarian leftists blog viewers
Howard had his best days as Opie.
"Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw"
So- nothing at all like sophisticated Portland and Seattle, then?
I would love to be on a debate stage with Vance.
His related experiences sound made-for-Hollywood and not particularly realistic.
His is not reality.
We all can't be as sophisticated as the lyin', incompetent NYT.
Now finish your twatwaffles.
So Opie turned out just like Andy and actually hates those people he seemed to have such affection for. Turns out A Face in the Crowd was the most accurate character he inhabited.
I thought the movie "Deliverance" taught us everything we needed to know about hillbillies.
He had optioned gray lynchs bio, but it went nowhere. (He was the twice decorated marine who went ashore at playa giron)
"Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw: That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do when people mess with your kid.“
That's bullshit. I grew up maybe a 30 minute drive north from that guy, parents and family all migrants from Appalachia to Ohio for the jobs and my parents would never have done such a thing. I don't know how the kid was messed with, but if I or my siblings were ill treated my parents would have stood up for me, but they wouldn't have threatened anyone or destroyed property. There would have been some harsh words and then I would be told not to go into the store any more.
I remember when they got the gang back together to promote obama, (howard griffith and co)
You might consider reading "Born Fighting" by James Webb (USMC, fmr Sec. Navy) or the relevant portions of "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer. Both trace Scots-Irish culture in the US, particularly Appalachia. The rest of Fischer's book covers the Puritans, Quakers, and Cavalier cultures in their respective regions, including architecture, play, music, and all manner of informative things.
These folks are a Woketard's nightmare.
I thought that was Amy Schumer. It looks like Amy Adams put on weight to play the part.
The louder they yell, the less you understand — about them or the world they inhabit.
So it is with drama. And so it is with a lot of movies where people aren't yelling at each other. And maybe even with some movies AO Scott liked.
James Webb made a lot out of his Scotch-Irish heritage too. Whatever happened to that guy?
Sounds like the briar patch I was born and bred in. None of those traits are a problem. All they need to add is money and education. Than you get George S Patton and Harry Truman. Trump is smart enough to offer them a loyal leader and request loyalty back. The oldest trick in American politics. Europeans hate it until they need a Scots Irish leader themselves and go get a Churchill.
The book was good until the author gets to Yale Yale School. He buys into the myth that the world's smartest people go there -- you know, intellectual giants like Hunter Biden. That caused me to reassess what I had read up to that point. I guess you can be an elite snob regardless of your roots.
Destroying store merchandise, indeed burning the store down, will make you a celebrated hero in the more urbane parts of the country. Minneapolis is an absolute heaven of looting and conflagration. Too bad those unsophisticated goobers didn't know the approved phrases to chant while torching other people's livelihoods.
I remember liking the book but feeling like it was the story of a family that was marketed as the story of a people--I was expecting a sweep that wasn't there.
We are are just slaves to the corrupt leftwing elite at the top. the escape? become one!
"Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw"
So- nothing at all like sophisticated Portland and Seattle, then?
""[C]rime rates in Appalachia are only about 50 percent (for violent crime) to 65 percent (for property crime) of the national levels."
I remember liking the book but feeling like it was the story of a family that was marketed as the story of a people--I was expecting a sweep that wasn't there.
Exactly. Violence and general assholery may have been normal to his shitty grandparents, but they're not characteristic of the region or its people.
The better book, which presaged Vance’s by about 20 years, is Jim Goad’s The Redneck ManifestoA. You can also read Goad’s review of Vance’s book here. For a look at the pathological side of Appalachian values, watch the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. For a more studious examination, read Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture.
I read the book. I liked it.
One revealing passage reminded me of how *good* factory jobs went begging. His generation were uninterested. And I remember that.
Vance wrote the factories in Ohio couldn't find enough workers. And then the factories went away.
You don't know what you got til it's gone.
I watched the 2019 documentary Hillbilly (directed by Sally Rubin and Ashley York). They address the hillbilly stereotype. This is the link to the trailer.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-OcuyGz5ehM
As a native on Pennsyltucky, I read Hillbilly Elegy, and while some of it rang true, and some of it made me think I'm glad I moved away, a lot of it seemed a bit -- exaggerated.
I read the book three years ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I grew up in Ohio, and knew more than a few poor white families who had similar circumstances and attitudes to the ones Vance describes. I saw the book being less about class feelings, and more about how Vance bootstrapped himself up from a series of poor home environments, and into the Marines, an undergraduate education at Ohio State, a scholarship to Yale Law School, an internship with entrepreneur Peter Thiel, and finally a loving home with an amazing woman. Quite an inspiration!
It's been a long time since Glenn Close boiled that bunny.
I listened to the book on Audible. The author was the presenter. I loved it. What crap they made of it for the movie...who knows. There are all kinds of people who have deep roots in Appalachia...like me. His family and what they went through could be the story about a family from anywhere...really. Dysfunction isn't just for "Hillbillies". Madison and the whole state of Wisconsin seems to have plenty of it. The Madison City Counsel who voted to remove the Confederate Civil War monument from a freakin' cemetery comes to mind. Give me a "Hillbilly" any day over those assholes and those who thought they were right. I'm finally, just simply, offended.
The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia ... "is a 2009 documentary film directed by Julien Nitzberg, chronicling the White family of Boone County, West Virginia." (Wiki)
"Boone County violent crime is 11.9. (The US average is 22.7)
Boone County property crime is 24.6. (The US average is 35.4)"
IOW, just about 50% and 65% of the national average, as mentioned above.
""[C]rime rates in Appalachia are only about 50 percent (for violent crime) to 65 percent (for property crime) of the national levels."
Not at all surprised to hear that. I have a book at home (don't remember the title) written by a researcher who looked into the violence that existed in mining towns of the old west. Using contemporary newspaper reports, he determined that big eastern cities such as Chicago and New York were more dangerous places to live with regards to crime than the mining towns, despite "common knowledge" that the west was a violent, lawless place.
Blogger BarrySanders20 said...
It's been a long time since Glenn Close boiled that bunny.
And oh so many trips to the plastic surgeon.
Liked her in american hustle, more than jen lawrence, i remember some of adams more colorful early entries in her imdb before she hit the big time.
The best movies are the ones with low “rotten tomatoes” scores and high “popcorn” scores. A low rotten tomato score is just a warning that the movie is not politically correct.
Other than "A Beautiful Mind", you can't make me watch anything Ron Howard directed.
Ron Howard did a good job with his movie "Parenthood" but that was a long time ago.
Since then, I think he and everybody in Hollywood have changed too much.
Glenn Close? My first thought that Robin Williams was reprising “Mrs. Doubtfire”, and then I remembered he died, but maybe CGI?
"As a native on Pennsyltucky,”
Ha! Haven’t heard that one in a while unless it was out of my own mouth or one of my brothers. I kind of always thought that we had made up up.
The trailer looks like Poverty Pr0n. I don't expect much else from Howard, so my bias may be showing.
Ever since "Willow" his directing has all been downhill.
@Fernandinande:
IOW, just about 50% and 65% of the national average, as mentioned above.
(1) There is social pathology outside of crime.
(2) It is unsurprising that rural areas with low popuation density will have less criminal activity than denser urban areas.
(3) There is a huge racial gradient to crime, so I am not sure how those numbers would look if you controlled for race and only looked at crimes committed by whites
(4) In more rural areas, it is not uncommon for a crime to occur (e.g. a brawl at the local watering hole) that does not get reported to the police and thus not captured in crime stats.
(5) For an examination of a similar phenomenon but in a different context (northern vs southern Italy), see Edward Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Clannishness is a big component.
I remember Amy Adams when she was doing dinner theater in Chanhassen, MN. Then she ended up in Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) which was filmed locally, and the rest is history.
I see JPS beat me to it:
"he movie has a 26% rating at Rotten Tomatoes," I thought, I bet that's the critics, and clicked over to see what fraction of the audience liked it.
86%."
A lesser Ron Howard film that I really enjoyed was The Paper with Michael Keaton, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, and Randy Quaid.
Amy Adams in "Requiem for a Dream"
My own Scots-Irish forebears lived in Canada, where there's no shortage of them.
Any Adams in "Requiem for a Dream"
Jennifer Connelly
Yes “resistance to authority” AKA a desire for personal freedom, does make it hard to "thrive in modern American society"
They really do have a lot more drama in their lives. The overacting comes naturally to them. Don't ask me how I know.
Call 911!
Yes “resistance to authority” AKA a desire for personal freedom, does make it hard to "thrive in modern American society"
Or any modern society. Or civilization. Or a subsistence farming village. Or a band or hunter-gatherers.
I’ve not read the book and you cite the reasons why.
Growing up in Ludlow, KY, half my family came from the Appalachian regions of KY. I also attend Eastern Kentucky, which has a critical role in the education of the Appalachian region of the country - a role the university has done a fine job of fulfilling over its history. A huge number of my classmates came from Appalachia. I worked in the steel industry in Ohio, which is very much an expanded region of Appalachia because of migration out of the mountains (they used to joke that the Eastern Kentucky education system was readin’, writin’, and Route 23 North.). Oddly, I’ve also attended an Ivy League university.
While I grew to deeply appreciate Appalachian culture, all I’ll ever be is a tourist. I can’t imagine writing a book that is critical of this culture and that sets myself up as the hero. If in a hero’s journey, the worst obstacle the hero faces is a couple of summers in Eastern Kentucky, that isn’t exactly storming the beaches of Normandy, is it?! What a horrible and self-absorbed thing to do.
What makes it worse is that we can’t imagine this director or these actors participating an “Over-the-Rhine Elegy” movie adaptation of a book written by someone who grew up in Hyde Park. Rightly, the world wouldn’t accept that cultural exploitation. And, yet, here we are.
Yes “resistance to authority” AKA a desire for personal freedom, does make it hard to "thrive in modern American society"
"[C]rime rates in Appalachia are only about 50 percent (for violent crime) to 65 percent (for property crime) of the national levels."
I would like to compare and contrast resistance to authority in Appalachia to resistance to authority in Portland.
No Clint Howard? Nobody embodies the look feel and sound of white trash like Opies brother.
Now substitute black for white hillbillies. see if someone will dox you...
Unknown said...
"(2) It is unsurprising that rural areas with low popuation density will have less criminal activity than denser urban areas."
He didn't say there was "less criminal activity". He said there was a lower rate of criminal activity.
"(3) There is a huge racial gradient to crime, so I am not sure how those numbers would look if you controlled for race and only looked at crimes committed by whites."
Yeah, it does seem that if you subtract the Blacks, America turns out to be a pretty law-abiding country. Infant mortality goes way down, too. Go figure.
Apollo 13 was a great movie - one of my favorites.
I find the Tomas Sowell thesis that the most undesirable traits of ghetto-Black behavior were traits that poor, uneducated Blacks adopted from poor, uneducated and mostly Scots-Irish Caucasians appealing in its irony.
Any chance that this is cultural appropriation? I wonder if they got more things wrong about Appalachia in the Gary Cooper film, Sgt. York. The martial spirit as opposed to the spirit of wokeness is far more fashionable in times of war. Anyway, if you inaccurately praise rather than inaccurately criticize a group, then that group is inclined to give you a pass....I knew some Italians from Bensonhurst who considered Saturday Night Fever wildly inaccurate. I was an outsider to that community,but I noted some things that they got right....Glen Close has the look down. I wonder if the part involved pigging out on BBQ and gaining a few pounds. There's something to be said for method acting and immersing yourself in the role.
“But yeah, like everyone else in our family, they could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat.”
That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do... ?
It's interesting how it's okay to talk about cultural dysfunction when we're talking about white people.
It's also okay to just assume that these people are dysfunctional because they're just fucked up, and not because they've been the victims of systemic ethnic, regional, or class oppression. Because, of course, the only oppression that can be "systemic" is racism, an idea that Marx himself would have found bewildering, to say the least.
Hollywood's been doing Hillbilly minstrel shows since the 20s. How many actual Scotch-Irish Appalachians were cast in this movie?
But taciturn real mountain folk isn't what Hollywood wants. Retarded banjo pickers and violent anal rapists amid swelling musical tributes to natural beauty (with ominous notes, of course) is what sells tickets.
And Puritan gatekeepers have been paying Southern regional writers to betray and exploit their roots since forever. (Faulkner, Agee, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, Willie Morris all prospered with this formula.) Tom Wolfe is the exception that proves the rule.
Tom said that he didn't read the book, and one reason why is: "If in a hero’s journey, the worst obstacle the hero faces is a couple of summers in Eastern Kentucky, that isn’t exactly storming the beaches of Normandy, is it?!"
I did read the book, and spending summers in Eastern Kentucky was not the worst obstacle that the author faced. His home life was chaotic to say the least, for one thing, and the general message from his local culture was one that devalued education and achievement. My impression was not that he wrote the book to pat himself on the back--it's part memoir and part examination of a particular sub-culture with a lot of pathologies.
Rotten Tomatoes:
All Critics: 26%
Top Critics: 21%
Verified Audience: 86%
All Audience: 73%
I an an Atlanta native and live now part-time in Appalachia but was a full-time resident there for most of 45 years. I have not read the book nor plan to watch the movie. I am a member of three different private FB groups for people living in or from Appalachian and there have been a number of discussions of the movie there. The reviews have been almost 100% negative. I will admit the place where I live in Appalachia is somewhat special and may not be representative of the region as a whole but from the reviews I read of the book I could not relate to a lot of it.
Unknown said...
@Fernandinande:
" IOW, just about 50% and 65% of the national average, as mentioned above."
(1) There is social pathology outside of crime.
(2) It is unsurprising that rural areas with low popuation density will have less criminal activity than denser urban areas.
(3) There is a huge racial gradient to crime, so I am not sure how those numbers would look if you controlled for race and only looked at crimes committed by whites
(4) In more rural areas, it is not uncommon for a crime to occur (e.g. a brawl at the local watering hole) that does not get reported to the police and thus not captured in crime stats.
(5) For an examination of a similar phenomenon but in a different context (northern vs southern Italy), see Edward Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Clannishness is a big component.
Leftist is confronted with Objective fact.
Leftist responds with a list of subjective garbage to hold on to previously held convictions.
The sun rises in the East.
I didn't recognize either actress. And I have no opinion whatever about the Ron Howard corpus--I haven't seen most of the movies cited. Nor have I read Vance, though I've seen him a few times on the TV.
But I have read Goad, McWhiney, Webb, and Fisher. Webb takes his thesis too far but there are some good nuggets; McWhiney too liked his ethnocultural notions simple.
If I've read Goad on Vance, I've forgotten, but will take a look at the review.
AFAWK my ma's folks, for all their Scots-Irish genes (probably 50%, the rest other Britons) never were hill and holler people. They had some education and status as defined in their time and place, certainly more than my German side.
That said, there was nothing in the trailer that I haven't seen up close and personal; vein-bulging screaming matches--not always accompanied by substance abuse and violence--failure and betrayal, the military and/or education as the way out (if there is one).
Things have calmed down considerably since so few of us are left now, but my last brother and I can still bellow and rant at one another if we spend too much time together. (He's like Ma that way.)
Narr
OK, when did WLS Churchill become Scots-Irish, for crying out loud?
@Achilles:
Leftist responds with a list of subjective garbage to hold on to previously held convictions.
I’m not a leftist you fucking stupid nimrod. Get another gimmick.
I'm from a Scots-Irish hillbilly-ish family based in far southwestern Pennsylvania, almost West Virginia really. Grandfather was a coal miner whose sons moved to nearby Ohio for manufacturing jobs. While our family was stable and law-abiding (other than a lot of drinking and several shotgun weddings), the local culture was definitely more "hillbilly." I remember visiting relatives as a child and having to hide in the house because a neighbor was carrying a rifle around, searching for "his woman." Fortunately he didn't find her, that day anyway.
My family's culture was also fiercely independent, kin-centered, patriotic, and four of the seven grandchildren went into law enforcement (including me). I see the echoes of the Scots-Irish culture. Maybe that's why Hillbilly Elegy resonated with me.
Blogger J. Farmer said...
"I’m not a leftist you fucking stupid nimrod. Get another gimmick."
He wasn't talking to you. But you are a Leftist. Interesting that you don't know it. Maybe a Leftoid? Leftover?
And where does "nimrod" come from? There's a Nimrod in the Bible, but I don't think he's the basis for the pejorative. It sounds like one of those words that is doing duty for a stronger term, like "Heck". Maybe dipshit -> dipstick -> nimrod? With a hovering nuance of dim bulb?
"Or any modern society. Or civilization. Or a subsistence farming village. Or a band or hunter-gatherers.”
LOL, OK, I guess it all comes down to degree, doesn’t it. Slavish obeisance to authority has been the downfall of more than one society.
Calm down J Farmer. If Achilles calls you a leftist, it means you are not part of his death cult.
Didn't recognize Glenn Close.
Didn't think it was possible to make Amy Adams not smoking hot.
They po folk.
They look about as poor as we were growing up, but nobody did hard drugs when I was a kid...
Thanks, China!
J. Farmer said...
@Achilles:
Leftist responds with a list of subjective garbage to hold on to previously held convictions.
I’m not a leftist you fucking stupid nimrod. Get another gimmick.
Hm.
That was from way out in left field.
Do you mind explaining where that came from Farmer?
P.S. Despite being poor, NOBODY in our neighborhood was on any kind of welfare.
It wasn't as prevalent in the '60s and '70s I guess, but even if it was my dad wouldn't have touched it.
Same for all our blue collar, white (Italian, German, Irish) neighbors.
YH - 10:18
Thank you.
J. Farmer said...
Or any modern society. Or civilization. Or a subsistence farming village. Or a band or hunter-gatherers.
Can we still have a talk about this or are you immersed in something?
I wanted to inquire about the spectrum that I see possibly being developed here.
Putting aside the political accords that make up a government. If you are going to put Ethiopia or Sudan on one end and lets say ancient Egypt on the other. China would be more towards the Egypt side and Russia is somewhere towards the Sudan side.
None of that matters. None of it. The only thing that matters is the character of the people.
Are the people in a country capable of living in a high trust society.
Are people in Portland capable of this?
Are people in Appalachia capable of this?
The problem for Howard is he knows the answer to both questions.
Joe Smith said...
P.S. Despite being poor, NOBODY in our neighborhood was on any kind of welfare.
ding ding ding!
THIS IS BIDEN'S AMERICA
@Jupiter:
He wasn't talking to you. But you are a Leftist. Interesting that you don't know it. Maybe a Leftoid? Leftover?
Considering I wrote the words he quoted, he was talking to me. And since you seem to know my politics better than I do, why don’t you explain what makes me a leftist. Thrill me with your acumen.
Vance married an (East) Indian law school classmate who clerked for Kavanaugh (a couple stereotypes blown up in that sentence).
I was going to go on to comment on the complicated genealogical connection between Glenn Close, Dina Merrill and Barbara Hutton, but nobody's interested, and those who are can look it up for themselves.
William said...
Any chance that this is cultural appropriation?
That's never been a problem. Got the old time fiddlers convention in Galax, VA sometime. You won't see many hillbillies, but you will see a hell of a lot of New Yorkers trying their hand at playing Solider's Joy and Forked Deer.
I wonder if they got more things wrong about Appalachia in the Gary Cooper film, Sgt. York.
They got more right than wrong. Unusual for Hollywood.
Nimrod was a mighty hunter in the Bible. It's speculated that Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd (who was hunting him) a "nimrod," and people who didn't know that the name referred to started using it as an insult. Nimrod, dim bulb, numbskull -- it's understandable.
'I can get by without getting that sort of thing hammered into my head a thousand times'
I can't comment on Hillbilly Elegy, but I feel the same about Bob Dylan.
And not the Beatles as songwriters, but as some sort of pseudo-religious idealism surrounding the Beatles.
You're not carrying enough to last.
Once again, J Farmer calls it. Jim Goad's book tackles the real issue: why we so frequently minimize our dominant minority urban dysfunction by scapegoating real but occasional poor white rural violence, without Goad even barely excusing either. Goad is an honest man -- who happens to cheerfully live in one of the most "diverse" non-white communities in the nation, Stone Mountain, which has more famous dead rappers and Nation of Islam burka shops and "trafficked" minors than grocery stores. I've seen more normalized and grotesque violence against women and children there than I choose to remember.
Hollywood has a 90 year history of cheerfully lying about and exploiting poor rural whites, sexually and otherwise, while excusing and glorifying the vile behavior of elites, Kennedys, urban minorities,and all the rest of their preferred patron groups. I call it Mayella Ewelling. It's been going on forever. Even Sartre made three or four pervy "white trash" exploitation films.
And screw everyone who brings up Deliverance. Porn for the type of people who excuse Woody Allen because of pure zip code prejudice. James Dickey deeply regretted the way his metaphoric novel about a frigging water dam project was exploited, and the fine people of Clayton deserved no such abuse.
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
So Opie turned out just like Andy and actually hates those people he seemed to have such affection for. Turns out A Face in the Crowd was the most accurate character he inhabited.
I've met some of Andy's neighbors who lived out on Manteo and a few people who had dealings him when he was filming Matlock in Wilmington. It wasn't a case of him being prejudiced; Andy was just an asshole in general.
Vance, however, is sucking up to snobby Palo Alto types and has probably been dining out on his hillbilly stories for years.
MountainMan said...
Rotten Tomatoes:
All Critics: 26%
Top Critics: 21%
Verified Audience: 86%
All Audience: 73%
Takeaway: The movie wasn't sordid enough for the critics.
After Sharp Objects, I can't possibly watch Amy Adams do anything but apologize for crudely exploiting entire regions, genders, cultures, family units -- or even drug addicts, Confederate recreators, and self-cutters.
Nobody deserves that.
I enjoyed the book. What does the author think about the movie?
J. D. Vance’s story of heading down the path to personal ruin and being redeemed by the USMC parallels my life. In my case it was the USCG. And the love of a good woman. The hillbillies are the only class of people in this country that all the rest of us can insult, demean, and dismiss as a group. Try it with anyone else, in spite of those bothersome crime stats, and that’s it for you.
robother said...
And Puritan gatekeepers have been paying Southern regional writers to betray and exploit their roots since forever. (Faulkner, Agee, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, Willie Morris all prospered with this formula.)
Don't forget Flannery O'Connor! She deserves her ration of shit, too!
I wouldn't stop to take a piss on Ron Howard if he was going up in flames.
But by all means rent this work of cinematic art. You might as well write a check to the DNC.
“P.S. Despite being poor, NOBODY in our neighborhood was on any kind of welfare.”
I never knew we were until as an adult my older brother told me that that’s where the powdered milk, bricks of American cheese, powdered eggs, and my favorite seriously, the canned boned chicken came from. I wish I could buy some of that USDA canned chicken today. My mother hid the fact that we were on food stamps from us.
Flyover country? #HateLovesAbortion
"I can get by without getting that sort of thing hammered into my head a thousand times. “
It’s why I don’t watch TV or recent movies. “This is Us”? "This is What You Deplorables Need to Learn" would be a more accurate title. Rosanne was “us."
J. Farmer said...
@Jupiter:
He wasn't talking to you. But you are a Leftist. Interesting that you don't know it. Maybe a Leftoid? Leftover?
Considering I wrote the words he quoted, he was talking to me. And since you seem to know my politics better than I do, why don’t you explain what makes me a leftist. Thrill me with your acumen.
So you are Unknown in the post?
If I had known it was you I wouldn't have called you a leftist.
I would have just called you dumb.
Tina Trent said...
Hollywood has a 90 year history of cheerfully lying about and exploiting poor rural whites, sexually and otherwise, while excusing and glorifying the vile behavior of elites, Kennedys, urban minorities,and all the rest of their preferred patron groups. I call it Mayella Ewelling. It's been going on forever. Even Sartre made three or four pervy "white trash" exploitation films.
The aristocracy hate poor people that want to live on their own without government help.
So they make up lies about them and their usual racist hate.
Nearly every American movie today is a morality play designed for the improvement of the people paying good money for the tickets and approved by our moral betters. No criticizing China! I am getting into French movies, and while they are getting a little bit infected, they are not so fucking preachy. I wish I knew a better way to pick out the good Bollywood movies, because I like those too when they are good.
Gilbert P,
I was going to mention Born Fighting but you beat me to it. Great book even if the author is a world class scumbag. (For letting his aid sit in jail for 2 days for carrying Webb's gun)
Also like Albion's seed though I found it a bit of a slog.
For the Netflix inclined there is a documentary about the White family of West Virginia. They pretty much define White Trash.
But they sure could dance! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zf7tgRbvGY
John Henry
Ron Howard's made some good stuff: Parenthood, Apollo 13, Backdraft, Cocoon, A Beautiful Mind. Unfortunately, the last one on that list was made in 2001. Since then, not much.
Blogger Bilwick said...
I find the Tomas Sowell thesis that the most undesirable traits of ghetto-Black behavior were traits that poor, uneducated Blacks adopted from poor, uneducated and mostly Scots-Irish Caucasians appealing in its irony.
Theodore Dalrymple, who is worth reading for many reasons and on many levels, wrote a booke 20 years ago called Life at the Bottom.
It is about the pathologies of poor white Britons. He was a doctor practicing in a prison hospital.
I found the book, and Dalrymple, because Thomas Sowell wrote a review. The thing that stood out in my mind was his comment that the pathologies were not racial. They were class.
John Henry
Scotch-Irish are also genetically more susceptible to clinical depression.
John Henry
Tina Trent said...
After Sharp Objects, I can't possibly watch Amy Adams do anything but apologize for crudely exploiting entire regions, genders, cultures, family units -- or even drug addicts, Confederate recreators, and self-cutters.
I agree. She porked up for this role, guess she's angling for an Oscar, maybe we'll get lucky and she won't be able to slim down!
@Achilles:
I would have just called you dumb.
Well that's certainly a topic you're quite familiar with. Like earlier this year when you kept telling us all that covid was going to be memory holed by April. Maybe you and that dumb bitch you're married to don't know as much as your fat heads would like to believe. But then again, being dead wrong never dissuades blowhard dipshits like yourself.
Vicky Lawrence and Ken Berry did it better.
"genetically more susceptible to clinical depression."
I believe that. But is it correlation or causation?
The scots irish in my family tree were sober uptight Methodists, but reading their letters I find myself wishing they'd take a drink and mellow out.
I knew some hillbillies when I was in the service. I don't think they were excessively prone to violence, but I wouldn't want to get on their bad side. My impression was that they would behave much better in a foxhole than I would, but I would probably have the edge in a classroom discussion of Donne's poetry....On the minus side, I think they took more interest in cars than money. That kind of attitude will cost you as time goes by, but, as a practical matter, it's probably better to know more about butterfly valves than Donne's conceits......What's worse than being stereotyped? Not being stereotyped. Being totally ignored. There are any number of ethnic minorities who are not celebrated or derided but are simply forgotten. Jewish and Irish immigrants never shut up about their experiences in America. The Chinese are now starting to get in the act too. Italians make great movies. I have heard that some of them are even literate. What writer or filmmaker or poet has defined the Polish or Czech experience in America.
I would take Appalachia over NYC any day. The people are far more civilized.
Amy Adams was perfect in a very underrated movie, The Muppets.
Birkel said...
I would love to be on a debate stage with Vance.
His related experiences sound made-for-Hollywood and not particularly realistic.
His is not reality.
***************
Do you deny that he grew up poor?
If not, please tell us what first-hand experiences *you* had growing up, what better "reality", that you would "debate" him over.
Wanna give us something?
So I commented about Webb being a scumbag (though a good writer) and next ran across this:
Insanity Wrap Has a Crush on Lauren Boebert
Indulge yourself in the unadulterated awesome that is Congresscritter-elect Lauren Boebert:
A firearms-toting congresswoman-elect who owns a gun-themed restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, has already asked Capitol Police about carrying her weapon on Capitol grounds, her office has acknowledged. If she does so, she apparently won’t be alone.
The practice is allowed for lawmakers,...
John Henry
If I'm not mistaken, the movie comes out on Netflix today. I wanted to see it in the theater but didn't make it. The trailer makes it appear that the movie focuses primarily on the relationship between Vance, his mother, and his grandmother but the book covers a lot more ground. However, the love of his grandparents with all their faults does seem to be the most powerful influence in J.D. Vance's life.
My mother was one of twelve children of sharecroppers and the were "the poorest of the poor." She was the only child in her family to graduate from high school and she worked after school and all summer to pay for her clothes so she could go. They did not have indoor plumbing until they moved to town in about 1945. She graduated in 1948. My father was one of six children and none of them went past the eighth grade. He was better educated than the majority of high school graduates today. He literally walked to school early with his older brother Robert and they started the fire in the winter. Uncle Robert never was right when he came back from the Battle of the Bulge. He was a tanker.
I grew up going to tent revivals and Assembly of God churches often with my aunts and uncles although we regularly attended the Baptist Church. We always went to Church on the Sunday's that Daddy left on Friday and still wasn't home yet. The women all hated alkyhall and several of the men were bad alcholics. I'm from Tennessee but I was born in Chicago when my parents and half their brothers and sisters had moved up there for jobs in the fifties. They all trickled back to Tennessee eventually. I related to the book and understand the issues since I an not ignorant of the culture like many people who were born into other circumstances seem to be so miserably proud to report.
Blogger William said...
What writer or filmmaker or poet has defined the Polish or Czech experience in America.
Well, you have Polanski but I don't think anally raping 13 year old girls is really part of the normal Polish experience.
John Henry
I read the book and I'd say it wasn't about Appalachia so much as about what happens when cultural characteristics that work in Appalachia are transported to a manufacturing town in Ohio. Even there those characteristics have some success: JD Vance was rescued by his grandmother and aunts who had all succeeded in the transition and who all felt they must help their kin. And JD Vance succeeded as a Marine because what the Marine Corps wanted tracked with what JD valued from his family past. And then, from that base of success, JD Vance went on to be a writer while in the Marines and then a writer and lawyer in his life. The people of Appalachia opposed slavery as group - they broke away and formed West Virginia. Lincoln whose family came from this group was always trying to get Union armies to go into eastern Kentucky and Tennessee where they would be supported by the people and from there across to Virginia and on to Richmond by the back door. But the terrain could not support a marching army. The opposition of this region to the Confederacy was noted and after the Civil War the region was deliberately starved of resources such as railroads, good roads and education and its people were demeaned. And so in the 20C when they were rediscovered by folklorists they seemed backward, frozen the time - especially because the folklorists valued everything that was frozen in time. But the time when things froze in Appalachia was 1860 when they opposed the Confederacy and because they opposed the Confederacy. And their poverty was imposed by supporters of the Confederacy and is now being mocked by ignorant people who have picked up that pro-Confederate mockery and are too proud of themselves to know who they are copying. The same people who pushed Colonel Hegg's statue in to the lake in Madison. And tore down statues of Washington. And who say, as the Confederate theorists like Calhoun did, that the US Constitution made a place for slavery not as a temporary exemption, but as a guarantee. The Confederate theory was opposed by the Union theory that the Constitution meant freedom for all. But that's too hard for university students of 2020 to understand though it was understood and done at great personal cost by the then residents of Appalachia in 1860 - poor, ignorant, deluded people, Who had not been trained to be Confederate supporters at UW-Madison.
The Germans are in a bit of a quandary. For obvious reasons, it's kind of bad taste for a German-American to celebrate their ethnic background. Well, Germans in the twentieth century made very poor Europeans but very good Americans....I read a lot of Vonnegut. He was aware of his German background. It added a certain amount of post modern irony to his experience at Dresden....Betty Smith wrote A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. She tried to pass the protagonist off as Irish/Austrian, but Betty Smith was herself German-American on both sides of the family. The largest ethnic minority in America are people of German ancestry, but you don't see or read many movies or novels that are explicitly about their experiences here
Biden announces he apppoints the first woman to lead intelligence. Keep a straight face through that.
Maybe you were raised on this...https://www.teenvogue.com/story/biden-political-unity-myth
@wildswan: Thanks for an interesting and informative post.
alkyhall
Thus establishing your bona fides.
The largest ethnic minority in America are people of German ancestry, but you don't see or read many movies or novels that are explicitly about their experiences here
Who was the best German general of WWII?
Eisenhower.
(Yeah, yeah, you can quibble or disagree -- the meta-point stands).
Liberals are constantly projecting their own bigotry, prejudice and classism on to normal people.
Also... needs a "Gorillas in the mist" tag.
[C]rime rates in Appalachia are only about 50 percent (for violent crime) to 65 percent (for property crime) of the national levels.
>>>
Anybody who doubts this, just ask yourself, would you rather be hanging out at a bar in eastern Kentucky or in West Oakland.
My bet is on the former.
The reason being you're not going to get mugged in Kentucky.
Done.
J. Farmer said...
"Considering I wrote the words he quoted, he was talking to me."
The words he quoted were posted by Anonymous. If you can't remember who you are, it really isn't fair to expect the rest of us to keep track.
Read the book and loved it. I don’t finish most books I start anymore but this one was a page turner for me. I’m Scots-Irish, mostly, so maybe that’s part of it. But my family was fundamentalist Baptist, not hillbilly or at least a generation or two from hillbilly. I never thought of myself as clannish, rednecky, etc. but in reading Elegy and Webb’s Born Fighting I saw something deep within my dna that I hadn’t recognized before.
I anxiously await watching the movie ... but need to finish The Crown first.
Unknown said...
@Achilles:
I would have just called you dumb.
Well that's certainly a topic you're quite familiar with. Like earlier this year when you kept telling us all that covid was going to be memory holed by April. Maybe you and that dumb bitch you're married to don't know as much as your fat heads would like to believe. But then again, being dead wrong never dissuades blowhard dipshits like yourself.
I did underestimate the level of committment of the aristocracy to push their totalitarian wishes.
I also did underestimate the level of stupidity in the masses.
Mostly I underestimated the level of cowardice in mostly establishment republicans.
I agree that was stupid.
By the way how many people have died of Covid Farmer?
What are your sources?
Darkisland said...
I found the book, and Dalrymple, because Thomas Sowell wrote a review. The thing that stood out in my mind was his comment that the pathologies were not racial. They were class.
John Henry
That may have been true when written, but gangster culture has led the pathologies of the ghetto to spill over into middle class black communities, so it's much more a race issue than it might once have been.
Ike-bashing is so 60s.
wildswan--who sometimes makes sweeping statements that I challenge--is on point with the Appalachian subculture as distorted by the lenses of others. One irony of early 20th C American history and demography is that so many of the po white that moved North had no particular Southern much less Confederate identity. Those were imposed by the host population-- in a way similar to what Handlin said about so many 19th C European arrivals: they probably didn't know they were "Italians" or "Germans" or "Poles" until they got here.
Narr
Germano-Southern-American
@Jupiter:
The words he quoted were posted by Anonymous. If you can't remember who you are, it really isn't fair to expect the rest of us to keep track.
I don't control Blogger. And I don't expect anything from you. You chimed in, fuckwit. And like so many others here, not knowing what the fuck you're talking about didn't dissuade you.
I've worked with many primary source materials from WWII, letters, diaries, memoirs, etc, and Southern middleclass WASPs were more likely to express appreciation of jazz and blues by "Negro" performers than of what they called 'hillbilly' music.
Narr
That's just a fact
"And since you seem to know my politics better than I do, why don’t you explain what makes me a leftist. Thrill me with your acumen."
Fair enough. As I said, you don't seem to realize that you are a Leftist, and you aren't really a Leftist like, say, Cookie, who couches his fulminating indignation in classical Marxist boilerplate. Your political positions are all over the map, I guess it's more your style of reasoning that I identify, perhaps erroneously, as Leftist. You have a way of slithering back and forth between a we're-all-in-this-together, appeal-to-reason type argument, and a Ho-Ho-Ho-aren't-you-a-dumb-rube style more reminiscent of Howard in troll mode. I haven't forgotten your theory that it was OK if the Norks nuked Seattle because you lived in Florida. Maybe not Leftist, but definitely Leftoid.
Although at this point, I'm about ready to let them have Seattle myself.
Hillbilly Elegy illustrates that America is more classist than racist. The underclass have the same underlying cultural struggles regardless of race.
To be underclass in America all you need is a disdain for police and education, violence as a solution to problems, drug addiction and lots of teen pregnancies. Voila! Welcome to the underclass.
"Vicky Lawrence and Ken Berry did it better."
Dam that show was a hoot!
I read Vance's book when it came out, but don't have much interest in watching the movie. The vignette that sticks out in my memory is his story about a recruiting lunch while a student at Yale LS. The recruiter from some large firm took him and another potential recruit to lunch at a fancy place in New Haven (surprisingly for anyone who spent time there, it seems there are such places now). And Vance starts shvitzing about which fork and knife to use -- there were a lot of both at his place setting. Culture shock comes in many forms.
Then there was the time you waxed sentimental about how you and your ass-fucking partner were thinking about buying a child to play with. I associate that sort of carefully worked-out moral incompetence with the Left. I suppose it is more accurate to say that the Left embraces all such moral atrocities because of its fundamental enmity with functioning society. Would you say that the Left supports you, and the crimes you are considering indulging in, but you don't extend them the same courtesy? Should I maybe be capitalizing "You"?
Read David Hackett Fisher's "Albion's Seed", and you'll get it.
The backcountry of VA, TN, KY, NC, SC, and PA was full of emigrants from the Scots-Irish borders who brought their folkways with them. Think Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk. Their attitudes and traditions--all of them--persisted in the New World.
A thoughtful reading of JD Vance's book reveals that some of Vance's family, including his mother from time to time, did quite well. Her demon was addiction coupled with a career in the health care world--access to drugs did her in. So JD was saved by his grandma, who was a little rough but knew that you have to persist in life to get anywhere. A hitch in the Marines squared him away, and he went through Ohio State in 18 months and then on to Yale Law School.
JD has some sympathy for the folks who came out on the short end of globalization because he saw them all around him in Middletown OH. Think of it as Kenosha with a twang or Flint without Michael Moore.
@Jupiter:
Then there was the time you waxed sentimental about how you and your ass-fucking partner were thinking about buying a child to play with. I associate that sort of carefully worked-out moral incompetence with the Left.
Hahahaha. Your desperation is reeking. Can you give me your home address? I'll mail you a quarter and you can call someone who gives a fuck. Honestly, though, I never make a major life decision without running it past Anonymous Internet Douche #7. So your feedback is duly noted.
p.s. So should I strike you from the baby shower invitees list?
Anybody remember The Real McCoys?
a Ho-Ho-Ho-aren't-you-a-dumb-rube style
Well, "Jupiter," when the shoe fits, I expect you to wear it.
Anybody remember The Real McCoys?
Not the TV show, but I do remember the shitty Kim Basinger/Val Kilmer bank heist movie. It was pretty goofy but fun.
J. Farmer said...
@Jupiter:
The words he quoted were posted by Anonymous. If you can't remember who you are, it really isn't fair to expect the rest of us to keep track.
I don't control Blogger. And I don't expect anything from you. You chimed in, fuckwit. And like so many others here, not knowing what the fuck you're talking about didn't dissuade you.
But you can see the confusion can you not?
You posted the same anecdotal drivel someone would expect from a leftist deep in the throes of confirmation bias and the name showed up as Unknown.
Either way you posted anecdotal drivel from deep in the throws of confirmation bias.
I am sure you have some movies that would back your subjective analysis up though.
Jupiter said...
Then there was the time you waxed sentimental about how you and your ass-fucking partner were thinking about buying a child to play with. I associate that sort of carefully worked-out moral incompetence with the Left. I suppose it is more accurate to say that the Left embraces all such moral atrocities because of its fundamental enmity with functioning society. Would you say that the Left supports you, and the crimes you are considering indulging in, but you don't extend them the same courtesy? Should I maybe be capitalizing "You"?
That shit goes too far.
You are participating in the same prejudiced and stereotypical thinking he was and adding your own moral judgements which are wrong.
Farmer has demonstrated nothing that would make a reasonable person think he would be anything other than a good parent.
If anything, 'Hillbilly Elegy' is too tasteful, too sensitive for its own good, studiously unwilling to be as wild or provocative as its characters.
This quote makes it sound like the reviewer was upset that it didn't lampoon rednecks enough. I never read Hillbilly Elegy, but whenever I hear about Scots-Irish culture, I'm reminded of the one essay in Thomas Sowell's book, Black Redneck, White Liberal. In the same-named essay, Sowell basically says that black culture today is largely a continuation of the Scots-Irish culture that dominated the South. Though he suggests that most of White Southerners have 'grown out of' that culture but it persists in Black communities. Whether it is true or not I don't know. Most of my interaction with Rural America is with family in South-East rural Wisconsin. While I will admit there is some suspicion of outsiders and devotion to kin, there isn't really any quickness to anger. If anything I would characterize the culture as somewhat stoic and prudential. Though Sowell talks about this too in his essay and attributes that to German farmers in the North versus the Scot-Irish in the south.
@Achilles:
Farmer has demonstrated nothing that would make a reasonable person think he would be anything other than a good parent.
Thank you for the kind words. And I apologize for getting personal with you earlier. I didn’t realize some of my posts were coming up “Unknown.” Still, no excuse.
Either way you posted anecdotal drivel from deep in the throws of confirmation bias.
If I may ask, which of the five points I made in that comment do you take such issue with?
Read David Hackett Fisher's "Albion's Seed", and you'll get it.
Yep, very informative and interesting read. Especially for those of us with Anglo-Scots-Irish roots.
My mother's grandfather was a tobacco farmer in Appalachia, specifically the Asheville area of NC. I have photos of them and they definitely look like 'hillbillies'. Having traveled in that area a few times I admit to feeling a curious magnetic pull as if some of my roots were reaching out to me. Beautiful country. And super-nice people.
Farmer, we're having a perfectly pleasant and interesting discussion here about the topic of hillbillies. But, as usual, all you want to do is argue. You probably can't help your compulsive behavior but it's a real pain in the ass at times. In fact, most of the time.
"Farmer has demonstrated nothing that would make a reasonable person think he would be anything other than a good parent."
It is my considered view that the best environment for raising children is a family, consisting of a man, a woman, and their children. When that is not possible, there are other arrangements, less than ideal, which may nonetheless be considerably better than nothing. It is even conceivable that being raised by two homosexual males is better than, say, an orphanage. Conceivable. However, to contemplate paying for the creation of a child, so that you and your deviate sexual partner can pretend to be a normal family, is depraved. In effect, the widespread acceptance of this depravity endorses the view that a family consists of two (or more) people who sometimes have sex together, along with one more minors with dining privileges. Maybe that describes your family, it doesn't describe mine.
I'll grant he probably wasn't serious about Seattle. There are a lot of things he probably isn't serious about.
Jupiter certainly is a nimrod fuckwit. Farmer has him pegged. Also there is something really creepy and slimy about bringing up Farmer’s future children and including it in a paragraph about his sex life. Lord only knows what you do behind closed doors, nimrod.
Is the reviewer upset that Ron Howard didn't make Tobacco Road (1941) or Wise Blood (1979)? Based on this snip of the review, perhaps Ron Howard views the people he portrayed as actual people, people who contain the divine spark in equal measure to their better-heeled judges.
This seems to be a point we have all just decided to forget about. A homosexual judge in California ruled that a measure endorsed by over 60% of the electorate was "unconstitutional", a position he certainly knew would have been incomprehensible to any of the people who signed the Constitution, and suddenly anyone who disagrees is a "bigot". The unspoken assumptions that justify homosexual "marriage" are that heterosexual marriage is about sex, and sex is about pleasure. Thus, if Bob and Rob enjoy fucking each other, they have all the necessary qualifications for marriage. It is quite astonishing that this logic, and its implicitly contemptuous and reductionist view of marriage, is acceptable to even a tiny minority of adults. And as many have pointed out, from there to polygamy is not even a slippery slope. Sauce for Bob and Rob is sauce for Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.
@mockturtle:
You probably can't help your compulsive behavior but it's a real pain in the ass at times. In fact, most of the time.
Please do me a favor. Go back and read my very first comment on this thread at 9:08AM. Then read the replies to that comment and explain to me why I am always the target for these little lectures of yours. Also, when there are threads that are hundreds of comments of Drago and Readering and Chuck and whoever slinging insults back and forth, are you showing up with your kumbaya routine? No, you're piling on. So spare me your we're-all-just-trying-to-have-a-nice-chat horseshit.
It is my considered view...
That and three bucks will get you a gallon of milk.
Hey Nimrod, this blogpost isn’t about homosexuals. It’s obvious you are trying to rationalize your slimy and creepy comments directed to Farmer. Why don’t you climb back under your rock and let commenters here discuss the subject matter of the blogpost.
“That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do... ? I can get by without getting that sort of thing hammered into my head a thousand times.”
All the I’m a Scots-Irish and I can act like this or like that, whatever, nonsense is so tiresome. There is no nationality that has a distinct inborn group personality.
Yo, RBE... That wasn't the "Madison City Counsel" which Talibanized the bronze memorial plaque in the Madison Municipal Cemetery marking the mass graves of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of Confederate prisoners who died of such horrific and irresponsible maltreatment at the then Madison POW camp, that the mortified Feds closed it down and moved the operation to Chicago: that was an initiative by erstwhile Mad Town mayor Soglin, who was way, way ahead of the present virtue-signaling/deplatforming curve. (The Yiddish epithet, "a shandeh fur die Goyim" superbly characterizes Hizzoner; then and now.) Chances was mighty slim that any of the Southerner dead were slaveowners, and most were shellshocked bedraggled survivors captured following an extraordinary battle over —and their heroic failed defense of— a Confederate fort at a bend/choke point which severely impeded river navigation by Northern forces; and so warranted the most ferocious bombardment.
"Also there is something really creepy and slimy about bringing up Farmer’s future children and including it in a paragraph about his sex life."
It was Farmer who introduced those topics, in this forum, in that conjunction, some time back. But let me ask you, Dear Igna; If I were to mention, as I might well and indeed may have done, that I am male, I am married to a woman, and we have children. Would you consider it "creepy" for some other commenter to allude to those facts in subsequent posts? "Really creepy and slimy". Is that what you would call it? Or is there something specific to Farmer's plan to purchase a child to supplement his and his sexual partner's fantasy life that you feel should not be mentioned?
The hillbillies are the only class of people in this country that all the rest of us can insult, demean, and dismiss as a group.
Catholics.
Don't forget Flannery O'Connor! She deserves her ration of shit, too!
No, she does not. She deserves nothing but praise. Her writing is the work of an extraordinarily subtle, insightful, and compassionate mind.
I grew up in hillbillie country. I wasn't one of them because my parents came from Chicago, but I know all about the poverty, the addiction, the wastefulness, the resourcefulness and the good, strong work ethic that contradicts itself. The thing is that JD Vance's book could be rewritten by just changing the geographic locations and no one would be the wiser. There is absolutely nothing unique about appalachia that cannot be put into any other region of America, rich or poor. That same story plays out in families all across America, and for every firebrand hillbilly grandma and drugged up mama, there are multitudes of gentle, disciplined and well rounded people that can proudly call themselves hillbillies.
People are not zoo animals.
My "F Off" moment is this:
"Mamaw and Papaw"
Pretty sure JD Vance wrote that from his permanent station in Wankerage, Alaska.
If you think James Dickey was hard on hillbillies in "Deliverance" you should see what he did for B-29 tail gunners (young men who grew up in the wilds of northern Alaska) in "To the White Sea."
FYI, many years ago Brad Pitt got the film rights to that book, intending to play the tail gunner. But the movie was never made.
@Jupiter:
Or is there something specific to Farmer's plan to purchase a child to supplement his and his sexual partner's fantasy life that you feel should not be mentioned?
I'm flattered my personal life is of such interest to you. I'm afraid I can't say the same of yours.
"I never knew we were until as an adult my older brother told me that that’s where the powdered milk, bricks of American cheese,..."
Powdered milk, baby! And ice milk too (cream--real milk) was expensive.
I remember the blocks of cheese now that you reminded me.
And the day-old bread store. We'd get day-old donuts too...they were still good.
I grew up in CA and fruit and veggies (my dad had a big garden) were cheap. We ate oranges by the box : )
Along with apricots and cherries that grew everywhere.
Christmas presents were always practical (socks, a shirt, etc.).
Never got anything with a battery in it. Toys were yo-yos or blocks : )
I have a brother-in-law who was raised in Tennessee. He is a redneck hillbilly but that is not to say he is uneducated. He worked in a museum and curated the section that featured antiques. He also does different kinds of art and sculpture. He fondly recalls sitting on the front porch in the mountains with his grandmother and other relatives playing music and singing. But the violence part is true too. His father was murdered when he was pretty young. When I visit with him it is hard to avoid adopting his "country" way of talking. Oh yeah and he was also a Marine (Semper Fi!)
...and I took as the central message of the book, that his grandmother, despite her faults, inspired him to work hard and succeed in school. His mother was such a loser she tried to get "clean urine" from him so that she could pass a drug test. So basically having one parental figure in your life that will kick your ass when you need it can save you from your inherited destiny.
Tina Trent @ 11:20 preach it woman!
"Scotch-Irish are also genetically more susceptible to clinical depression."
Which came first, the depression or the distillery?
: )
J. Farmer tells me: So spare me your we're-all-just-trying-to-have-a-nice-chat horseshit.
Oh. OK. ;-D
Oh. OK. ;-D
Lol. A moment of agreement! :)
"No, she does not. She deserves nothing but praise. Her writing is the work of an extraordinarily subtle, insightful, and compassionate mind."
That settles a question that has long perplexed me. In my youth, having been informed that Flannery O'Connor was a brilliant writer, I slogged my way through - was it "Tough Guys Haul It Off Somewhere"? Something like that. Fifty-odd pages of random nastiness, and then "She'd have been a good woman if someone shot her in the mouth." I think that was it. Just did not make any sense to me. But it is finally clear that was because I lacked subtlety, insight and compassion.
Was anyone expecting a New York Times critic to like this movie? Really?
Inga said...
“That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do... ? I can get by without getting that sort of thing hammered into my head a thousand times.”
All the I’m a Scots-Irish and I can act like this or like that, whatever, nonsense is so tiresome. There is no nationality that has a distinct inborn group personality.
*****************
Hah! Try telling that to all the Woke Folk who excuse and normalize bad black behavior with, "that's just the way they are".
It's why black criminality is explained away and ignored, even when it's a huge factor in police-black interactions like the one involving junkie-criminal George Floyd.
That stuff drives people like Larry Elder and Candace Owen crazy. They say it gives the Dems a means of controlling blacks, telling them that it's OK to be irresponsible and criminal, that they will protect then against the evil Whitey.
It really was not that long ago, that America reveled in The Beverly Hillbillies, in which the Clampitt's absurd antics inevitably proved to be more sensible than the craven graspings after phantom joys of the "modern" urbanites they lived among. What Uncle Jed "reckoned" was generally dead on the mark, and then there was Ellie May. Ellie May was quite popular with young boys who liked animals.
Less, O.T... shortly after coming back from a year as an infantry grunt in Eye Corps, and appalled/freaked out that the party on the home front was going more full-blast than when I left —the cars bigger and the music louder— I relocated from the NY 'burbs where I grew up to rural West Virginia, where I spent much of the following decade: first as a forestry grad student at WVU, and thence a hippie farmer atop Bunner Ridge, above White Day Creek, a tributary of the Monongahela River, about 70 miles upstream of its confluence at Pittsburgh PA with the Allegheny, to form the Ohio. First place I ever lived where I didn't feel smarter than my neighbors, of whom several I stay in touch with even now. Couldn't believe as a ex-groupie of the Washington Square-Greenwich Village folkie scene, that on Sundays after church, people on the Ridge gathered together to play the banjo and sing southern gospel hymns. Residuum of the Frontier Revival, where nearly everybody was then still some flavor of Wesleyan from mainline Protestant to snake-handler. Was last back there just five years ago and it's been mostly gentrified into conventional suburbia.
O'Connor of course being RC, a woman, and a Southerner.
Mamaw/Meemaw and Papaw were and are not exotic terms around here. No blood relative of mine ever answered to the name, but plenty of friends and in-laws use them.
Jim Goad's review is interesting-- he generally is--but blame-talk bores pretty quickly, and his aside about his own father "not knowing why he was fighting in the Battle of the Bulge" (paraphrased) hints at a naivete about war that surprises me.
My older brother was forced to choose probation at home, or the army, by a hard-ass juvie judge at the age of 17. To his credit he chose the army (in '67 no less) and served well enough to get an honorable discharge after 3 years.
But gradually, and then swiftly and permanently, it fell apart from too much exposure to his pre-army pals.
Narr
Mama tried
You know what bugs me sometimes?
When haughty historians try to make a poor, struggling idealist and would-be artist, son of a nobody from the sticks, a decorated soldier, writer, and political innovator sound like a bad guy for just trying to stave off the cultural and political ruin of his people!
They was Clampetts in Californy, not Clampitts.
Narr
Jethro played by a German-Jewish-Irish-Catholic
And BTW, Farmer...I don't read the posts of those three you mentioned. Yours I do read because I often find them informed and articulate. So there's that...
If you're interested in the sociology and history of the Scots-Irish in America, get "Born Fighting" by Jim Webb
Attended a highly-regarded progressive college. Corporate lawyer, retired. Appreciate good wines, tri-ply cookware, Maxim Vengerov, black-and-white photography.
And I'll happily - proudly - call myself a Hillbilly, for the same reasons I call myself a Deplorable.
If it distinguishes me from the garbage people now lining up to run our country, it can't be bad.
Jupiter at 3:31–that is quite a summary of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I think the line from the Misfit is, she could have been a good woman if there was somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
The trailer says it's not for men.
A proper dramatic movie has a trustworthy, empathetic man who tweaks his female partner with feminist jibes to get a comic reaction.
Jupiter said: But it is finally clear that was because I lacked subtlety, insight and compassion.
O, snap! A lingering case of the Mondays, Jupe?
Amadeus said: I think the line from the Misfit is, she could have been a good woman if there was somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
Indeed. And, of course, O'Conner meant that to be taken literally. Of course.
J. Farmer said...
"I'm flattered my personal life is of such interest to you. I'm afraid I can't say the same of yours."
What if I told you my wife and I were thinking about buying a slave?
Daniel Woodrell's novels about Ozark Celtic hillbillies and their culture are quite good. He's the author of "Winter's Bone" and "Tomato Red." The movie "Winter's Bone" was excellent and followed the novel closely. Woodrell knows his subject. Born and raised in the Ozarks, high school dropout, Marine veteran, BA from U Kansas and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop -- he's the real deal.
What if I told you my wife and I were thinking about buying a slave?
White or black?
a) It was indeed Clampetts. I apologize. In penance, here is an Uncle Jed quote;
"I reckon if Granny'd been shootin' at you, you'd be casting a polka-dot shadow."
b) A lingering case of something, but probably something less transitory than a day of the week. I really didn't get O'Connor. I just could not understand why there kept being another paragraph when the previous ones had accomplished so little.
c) Right, it was Good Man Whatever, not Haul Away Whatever. But I distinctly recall that she was to be shot in the mouth. The image unsettled me. Like Orwell's description of The Future.
The hillbillies are the only class of people in this country that all the rest of us can insult, demean, and dismiss as a group.
Straight white males.
Jupiter: I really didn't get O'Connor.
Okay with me. Not a big deal.
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