"... Vance offers what right-wing politicians have always peddled to downwardly mobile Americans: the quasi-spiritual saga of family-bred individual uplift..."

"... which serves to neatly underwrite the broader political fable of great-leader salvation.... As 'our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, cheap foreign labor, and in years to come with cheap Chines fentanyl,' Vance announced with relief, 'I had a guardian angel'—his Ohio grandmother, immortalized as 'Meemaw' in Hillbilly Elegy. The rapt convention crowd took up the chant of 'MEEMAW' in jubilant recognition, and thrilled to Vance’s later parable of Meemaw’s cache of handguns. After she had died in 2005, he related in folksy relish, 'we went through her things [and] we found 19 loaded handguns,' strewn throughout various corners of her house. The convention crowd hooted and applauded in recognition, and then Vance delivered another redemptive moral: As Meemaw contended with the challenges of aging and illness, she made sure that 'she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family.' Here the crowd plunged into a reflexive chant of 'USA!'.... What does the domestic arsenal of an aging relative have to do with the glories of our Republic?... A bellicose citizenry must rally to save and bolster its imperiled birthright by any means necessary—under a great leader’s tutelage, of course."

Writes Chris Lehmann, in "J.D. Vance’s Phony Populism Thrilled the RNC. The Rest of Us Shouldn’t Be Fooled. The vice presidential nominee pitched himself as an avatar of the working class. Don’t believe the hype" (The Nation).

Hey, at least cover your tracks if you're writing about a book you haven't read. It's not "Meemaw." Its Mamaw.

"'J.D. is kissing my ass he wants my support so much,' the former president had said — while Mr. Vance, Marine Corps veteran and Mamaw’s grandson, stood by...."

"The reliably impolitic Mr. Trump delights in diminishing candidates aching for his benediction, especially one who once asserted that he was unfit for office — who once, in fact, wondered whether he might be America’s Hitler — but who, since entering politics, has demonstrated fervent fealty. 'The best president of my lifetime,' Mr. Vance has maintained. Still, the kisses-my-ass tag has followed Mr. Vance like a yippy dog ever since, with [Tim] Ryan gleefully invoking it again in their second debate last week. When Mr. Vance maintained that Mr. Trump’s comment was a 'joke; that riffed on what he called without explication a 'false; New York Times article — about the reluctance of some Republicans to have the former president campaign for them — one of the moderators sought clarification. 'So I get this straight,' said Bertram de Souza, a local journalist. 'When the former president said, "J.D. is kissing my ass because he wants my support," you took that as a joke?' 'I know the president very well, and he was joking about a New York Times story,' Mr. Vance said. 'That’s all he was doing. I didn’t take offense to it.'"

I'm highlighting the ass-kiss references in the NYT article "J.D. Vance’s Ambition Comes at a Price in ‘Hillbilly’ Terms/The Republican Senate candidate changed his tune on Donald Trump and now has his endorsement, but a remark by the former president about Vance’s fealty is dogging him in Ohio."

"The old Southern Democrats maintained the allegiance of poor whites by making sure those poor whites felt they could look down on blacks."

"The modern Democratic Party maintains the allegiance of ­upper-middle-class whites by making sure they can look down on lower-class whites. By ­humanizing those lower-class whites, Netflix’s 'Hillbilly Elegy' calls the whole enterprise into question. Humanizing the working class was once what Democrats were about. But no longer.... In America, class war is disguised as cultural war, and cultural war is often waged under the guise of fighting racism. Thus, the Deplorables had to be cast as racists...."

Writes Glenn Reynolds at "‘Hillbilly Elegy’ critics show they still despise ‘deplorables’" (NY Post).

"'Hillbilly Elegy,' published in June of 2016, attracted an extra measure of attention (and controversy) after Donald Trump’s election."

"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."

From A.O. Scott's review — in the NYT — of the movie "Hillbilly Elegy." The movie has a 26% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

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. 

Melania tells a joke in West Bend, Wisconsin.

"Joe Biden says he could do a better job leading this nation. Apparently, when you hide in a basement, you feel safe communicating your wishful thinking."

I love the rough-hewn lumber background. It's almost as expressive of Melania's oneness with the place as Lady Gaga's pickup truck.

Now, Lady Gaga was mocked for that effort at performing American rural culture — redneckface, we might call it.

I’m voting for America #vote #election2020 pic.twitter.com/bspDNkxnhJ

— Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) October 31, 2020

Much as that deserves mockery, perhaps it's so absurd it comes all the way back around to decent respect. The dashing of the nearly full beer can onto the ground might be the equivalent of a wink. I'm kidding! But the truth is Lady Gaga really does drive a truck — a 1993 Ford SVT Lightning pickup. 

The Trump campaign has responded, not on the strange visuals, but on the issue: "Nothing exposes Biden’s disdain for the forgotten working men & women of PA like campaigning with anti-fracking activist Lady Gaga... Biden repeatedly promised left-wing activists he would end fracking, which would be an economic death sentence and financial Armageddon for families in Pennsylvania and across the country." 

Meanwhile, we could talk about the clothes Melania wore to West Bend — brass buttoned up and staunchly military — and the choice of a rough wood background in West Bend (which isn't a rural outpost). We've seen that rough-hewn wooden statue of Melania — so perhaps that background is as appropriate as Lady Gaga's big truck.

What mileage does that huge thing get? It's much bigger than the 1993 Ford pickup, which I see only gets 14 mpg in the city. You know Gaga collects cars. Here are 14 of them. That Rolls-Royce Corniche gets 9 mpg in the city. How can an anti-fracking activist have cars like that? Is there a such thing as an out-and-proud activist for hypocrisy?

"You know what's nice? A horse trough. Sit out in that. You change the water every day. Siphon it out. Use it in the garden."

Said Meade, when the topic of inflatable backyard pools came up in a news report (they're selling well, these days, we're told).

This guy did it — spent $29 [OR: did he say $129?]:



ADDED: I did a little more googling and am seeing this referred to as a "hillbilly hot tub." I say that to Meade, and he says "I invented it — 40 years ago," then adds that a lot of other guys also "invented" it. And now that I'm thinking about it, I remember seeing many TV/movie cowboys getting immersed in a horse trough (against their will). Something about like this...



That's the sort of high jinks I'm picturing for our backyard. You can play too!

BONUS: If you scroll back to the beginning of that cowboy video — for the non-horse-trough part of the fighting — you'll hear different music. I was trying to figure out what that song was, and the lyrics came to me... He's the pip... he's the king, but above everything...



Notice that Top Cat's trash can is made of galvanized steel — same as a backyard guy's horse trough.

Into the depths of "Roseanne Gets the Chair" — Episode 3 of the "Roseanne" reboot.

It's seems like candy, a sitcom. You consume it, and it's gone. It's hard to even remember enough to talk about it. Maybe you can quote (or only paraphrase) a couple of lines — that's why we put marshmallows on yams? — and purport to know the "lesson" taught — parents need to set boundaries for their kids? — and retain a question to puzzle over — did Roseanne commit criminal child abuse on her granddaughter? 

But did you really see what happened?

I watched the show last night, and even had a conversation about it afterwards, but I didn't feel capable of writing about it without watching it again. So that's what I did, first thing this morning, when I got up at 5. I rewatched. And I did a lot of rewinding and thinking. I took notes — 5 pages of notes.

So what I'm going to do now is, essentially, "live-blog" my reading of my notes. That is, I'm going to post updates as I go. I plan to go really deep, which is why I'm using the the live-blog format, which I know seems (paradoxically) shallow. It will help me not get impatient with the length of what I want to say and to discover things that I'm sure are lying just beneath the surface, waiting to emerge. It is not candy. It is a Thanksgiving feast, with all the yams and marshmallows.

"Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering 'who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?'"

"After they laughed at me a few times they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed dancing to it."

Wrote Chuck Berry in his autobiography.

That's a quote I heard on the radio a couple days ago that came to mind as I was blogging that NYT essay that said "Try to picture Barack Obama do-si-do-ing at a square dance...."

"As the cable shows signed off last night, it was dawning even on the most conventional pundits that the Republicans had not elected an escadrille of Republican archangels..."

"... to descend upon Capitol Hill. It was more like a murder of angry crows. Joni Ernst is not a moderate. David Perdue is not a moderate. Thom Tillis is not a moderate. Cory Gardner -- who spiced up his victory by calling himself 'the tip of the spear' -- is not a moderate. Tom Cotton is not a moderate. And these were the people who flipped the Senate to the Republicans. In the reliably Republican states, Ben Sasse in Nebraska is not a moderate.  James Lankford in Oklahoma is not a moderate. He's a red-haired fanatic who believes that welfare causes school shootings. Several of these people -- most notably, Sasse and Ernst -- won Republican primaries specifically as Tea Partiers, defeating establishment candidates. The Republicans did not defeat the Tea Party. The Tea Party's ideas animated what happened on Tuesday night. What the Republicans managed to do was to teach the Tea Party to wear shoes, mind its language, and use the proper knife while amputating the social safety net. They did nothing except send the Tea Party to finishing school."

Wrote Esquire's Charles P. Pierce, live-blogging the election results. I note that he called Scott Walker "the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin."

Yes, it's interesting to go back and relive Tuesday night from the perspective of someone who — we know in retrospect — is going to get deeply wounded.

A few stray observations about Pierce's style of humor:

1. Why is "red-haired" considered acceptable as an insult?

2. Why is it considered okay to call attention to what seems to be an eye disorder? Whether something is wrong with Scott Walker's eyes or not, the epithet "goggle-eyed" is disrespectful to all of the people who suffer from conditions like esotropia.

3. To speak of teaching the Tea Party "to wear shoes" is to try to be funny by evoking the stereotype of barefoot hillbillies. When will elite urban white people ever get the feeling that it's bigoted to mock rural white people? Oh, the answer is easy. You can find it in the book title "What's the matter with Kansas"? There's something wrong with these people as long as they fail to vote for Democrats.

(By the way, "escadrille" is how you say "squadron" or "small squadron" in French. I'll refrain from adding an anti-French kicker, given my attention to political correctness above.)

"Self-described Mich. ‘hillbilly’ claims $337M Powerball prize, vows to still eat at McDonald’s."

Donald Lawson says "I called her and said, ‘I got a surprise for you. I won $200,000 in the Powerball.’ She goes: ‘Oh my god. Yay!’ I said, ‘All right. Are you ready, Ma? Well, the truth is, I won $337 million and $4 in the Powerball. Ha, ha.”

Cool quote, but I want the quote where he calls himself a "hillbilly." I searched Google News for "hillbilly" and didn't find it, but I ended up with other hillbilly news. I found: "Here Comes the Hillbilly, Again: What Honey Boo Boo really says about American culture."

As Anthony Harkins observes in Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, one of the hillbilly’s signature moves is to peak, popularity-wise, just when Americans sense that things in general are headed south....

And such ridicule has always been politically coded: The hillbilly figure allows middle-class white people to offload the venality and sin of the nation onto some other constituency, people who live somewhere—anywhere—else. The hillbilly’s backwardness highlights the progress more upstanding Americans in the cities or the suburbs have made. These fools haven’t crawled out of the muck, the story goes, because they don’t want to.

This idea that the hillbilly’s poverty is a choice allows more upscale Americans to feel comfortable while laughing at the antics before them. It also pushes some people to embrace the stereotype as a badge of honor. “Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music / It’s the only thing that keeps me hangin’ on,” Dwight Yoakam once sang. For more contemporary examples of re-appropriation, you can attend any number of Tea Party rallies. The classist term “redneck,” originally coined to indicate those who worked so hard and so long in the sun that they sported sunburns in the designated anatomical location, likewise has been adopted in the name of all that’s good and holy.....

ADDED: Here's a different lottery story in the news today about a man who hadn't noticed he'd won $52 million. The money had gone unclaimed for a month, and the state circulated surveillance camera video of the winner buying the ticket:

A friend spotted the footage on the news and told Agnite, 'That's you!'

"Some of the stuff in [Sarah Jessica Parker's] house was shabby chic, and let’s just say, Anna [Wintour] wanted less shabby, and more chic."

This is completely mundane to me. Of course, a house that a real family lives in is different from the norm for a glamorous lunch party. Whether Anna Wintour or some less divine stylist is doing the redoing, it must be redone.

But it became hilarious when Rush Limbaugh — who had never even heard the term "shabby chic" — tried to get his mind around it.

Have you ever heard of the term "shabby chic"?  That is how the New York Post describes Sarah Jessica Parker's house. The decor is shabby chic.  I've never heard it, either.  I don't know what it is.  But they had... It's in the Post. Apparently, people were over there Windexing doorknobs.  This place is made out to be an absolute pigsty that Anna Wintour had to go into and clean. No, I'm telling you that's how it's written.  There are people cleaning the doorknobs, washing the windows, taking a piano upstairs, moving furniture out, moving furniture in. 

Etc. etc. After the break, he's got a definition of the term — it's from Wikipedia, though he doesn't say so — and he's quoting and riffing:

"Shabby chic is a form of interior design where furniture and furnishings are either chosen" because they look old and worn out, with "signs of wear and tear." Or if they're new items, they're made to look that way. Flaking paint, dents, little chunks taken out of the wood table in the kitchen. I have pictures of some of this stuff.  It looks like you'd run into it in one of Hatfield or McCoy's cabins.  At least to me. "At the same time, a soft, opulent, yet cottage-style decor, often with a feminine feel is emphasized to differentiate it from genuine period decor."

Anyway, Anna Wintour didn't like it. She got it out of there.  It's not even her house.  It's Sarah Jessica Parker's place.  Anna Wintour shows up, and she probably said, "I'm not going in there.  I am not setting foot in this place! I'm not having my picture taken in a place like this."  So the story goes on. She moved the piano upstairs. They were spray painting stuff, washing doorknobs inside and out.  They're making the place sound like a pigsty. 

Limbaugh obviously wants it to be that Parker is a big old slob, but "shabby chic" is a decorating term that has nothing to do with things being filthy or even messy. And "one of Hatfield or McCoy's cabins"... that's a way to say "hillbillies" without saying "hillbillies." Limbaugh wants to say: this is the case of the biggest fashionista in the room calling another fashionista a hillbilly. The material is not there, because "shabby chic" is a technical decorating term. (My Google image search tells me it's very heavy on the color white.) But Limbaugh nevertheless follows his original impulse, that Wintour and her people insulted Parker by calling her home "shabby."

IN THE COMMENTS: I say: "Note to commenters: References to Parker's resemblance to a horse have been done, done, and overdone. Come up with something new." And Crack Emcee says: "Glad to oblige," and — quoting me "The material is not there, because 'shabby chic' is a technical decorating term. (My Google image search tells me it's very heavy on the color white.)" — says "Oh, that shit is HEAVY alright." Indeed!

ADDED: An antidote to the heavy at Crack's link. By the way, we're repainting our house, and we're repainting black and white. What we need to survive... together alive...

"Defecating dog sparks US shootout."

Why did BBC publish this story? It's not exactly big international news!

Two neighbours in the US state of Mississippi drew weapons and fired at each other as an argument over a defecating dog ran out of control.... injuries are not life-threatening... "Just meet me at the levee and I'll shoot you down."...

I think the BBC is into stoking anti-hillbilly bigotry. Bob Wright was doing that yesterday:

Maybe I should set up an Althouse on-line store...

Something I thought on reading this:

It is funny that most of the conservative posters here seem to blithely wave off all of the vile quotes that Sullivan links to but if I write "Althouse Hillbillies" many of these same right wing Jethros get all lathered up about THAT!

Now I want an "Althouse Hillbilly" t-shirt.

Professor Althouse deleted me once. ...

My Dad always told us we was from the hills. Now I want an "Althouse Hillbilly" t-shirt.

Me too!

Okay, so shirts: "Althouse Hillbilly," "Professor Althouse deleted me once," etc.

Obama "looks like his own Secret Service agent."

"So cool."

You never see Hillary Clinton or John McCain or any other presidential candidate wearing sunglasses. Or.... wait... did Bill Clinton wear sunglasses when he played the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show?

Did you remember it right? Even without sunglasses though, Bill Clinton was projecting coolness. He was the last Democrat to win the presidency, so... maybe coolness is required. Maybe being a Southern governor is required. We shall see. Maybe it's coolness that works for the Democratic candidate. UPDATE: In the comments, Pissed Off Hillbilly: "Clinton played 2 songs that night. He wore sunglasses on the second one, Heartbreak Hotel." Ah! So that wasn't the embellishment of memory. And maybe we can catch somebody else in sunglasses: More? Maybe they are Transitions lenses.

Halloween costumes for females...

... none of whom seem to want to indulge in the freedom to be ugly and horrifying anymore. Every single damned costume is about looking even sexier than ever:

A theme was emerging. And it wasn’t Halloween. Since when did Halloween costumes become marital aids? The hobo has turned into the Hillbilly Honey. The traditional vampire is now the Mistress of Darkness. I have nothing against playing erotic dress-up, or even mass-market fetishism. I’d just prefer it didn’t converge with a family holiday (and wasn’t sold next to the dryer sheets). If you want to play cheerleader at home, go team. But trick-or-treating with your children in anything featuring latex and cleavage seems like a little too much trick....

I noticed that on the outside of every package was a photo of a woman modeling not only the costume, but teetering heels and bras of the push-up variety. The First Lady costume was not, as one might expect, a red business suit, but a pink crepe mini-dress. At least it had the matching pillbox hat. The angel was dubbed “heaven’s hottie.” Even the witch had a slit up her tattered skirt.

My girls were confused. “Where are the monsters?” they asked. “Where are the superheroes?” I pointed weakly to Wonder Woman and her thigh-high boots. “She’s pretty,” said my 4-year-old. Before adding, “You can see her breasts.

It's pretty lame that young women feel they must use Halloween as another day in the endless pursuit of male love, but why are the guys free to amuse themselves in more manifold ways? Perhaps because women think that it's sexy for a guy to be funny. But I wonder what the men would wear if they -- like the women -- thought overwhelmingly about looking sexually appealing to women?

The NYT does "Project Runway."

The NYT has a big article on "Project Runway":

During Fashion Week in New York a catwalk show by four "Project Runway" designers was such a hot ticket that more than one industry pro seemed miffed at having to miss the presentation because it clashed with the Ralph Lauren show. "What was Ralph thinking?" asked an editor from Interview magazine.

Such is the power of the show that even the lifeless host, Heidi Klum, who was once described by a former modeling agent as having "the personality of a German sausage," has become a celebrity, right down to her signature kiss-off, "auf wiedersehen" (because, as we know, German is the language of high fashion)....

Just as "American Idol" aspirants are forced to cover tunes in wildly varying genres — a hillbilly trying his hand at Donna Summer — "Project Runway" contestants also have to be able to juggle everything from designing high-concept lingerie (Mr. Rice's take was based on lederhosen) to an outfit for an Olympic figure skater (Mr. Rice ruffled feathers with a frothy confection likened to a Thanksgiving turkey).

These kids have to be able to cut it. And pattern-make it. Then stitch it.

And especially dish it. At the heart of the show's appeal is the campy dramedy that ensues when already brittle personalities, possessed of the ego and drive that drew them to the fashion world in the first place, are thrown together on a deadline. Viewers are transfixed not only by watching the contestants cut up their favorite outfits to make a dress, but also by watching them fashion their personas.

Nice article, though it mostly describes the show for people who don't watch it or who still don't get why America loves reality TV. I'd like to have more of the story I can't get to on my own: the details of what individual fashion industry people think of the show. Let's hear their jealous critiques!

Phrases of the year.

A panel of linguists picked "red state, blue state, purple state" as the phrase of the year. I don't know how purple got in on that action. I heard very little of that and very much of the other two. Is Wisconsin a "purple state"? According to their standard, it supposedly is, but I've only heard it called a "blue state." But then, I'm here in the absolutely blue core of the place. There should be a word for something with a blue core surrounded by lots of red, which seems to be the usual situation in a supposedly "purple" state, but I can't think of any real life object like that. Maybe a fried egg, if only yolks were blue and whites were red, and yolks were a lot smaller.

What other phrases did the linguists consider? "Flip-flopper," "meet-up," "mash-up," "wardrobe malfunction." Hmmm... not terribly strong competition. No "Rathergate," but I'll bet after going through the phrase of the year ritual for 15 years, they are absolutely sick of "-gate."

Then there were the "most creative" phrases. "Pajamahadeen" won, but there were also "hillbilly armor," "nerdvana," and "lawn mullet." I've never seen the term "lawn mullet," but I see it's "a lawn that is neatly mowed in the front but unmowed in the back." Funny, but embarrassing for those of us who have it.