Light On Dark Water

J. D. Vance: Hillbilly Elegy

Donald Trump probably deserves a bit of the credit for this book's popularity. It was published in 2016 when the Great Trump Freakout was well under way, and was often described as providing an explanation for some of Trump's support. There's this New York Times review, for instance: "In ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ a Tough Love Analysis of the Poor Who Back Trump." Or this one from The Guardian: "Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance review – does this memoir really explain Trump’s victory?" These were among the top results from a Google search on the book's title.

If you aren't aware of the book, either of those reviews will give you a fairly good idea of what it's about, in spite of their emphasis on explaining Trump. On the other hand, this review in The New Republic borders on the bizarre. First the reviewer distorts, to say the least, or falsifies, to say more, what Vance says; then she goes off on a long campaign speech for the Democrats. It's something of a textbook case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Or I suppose I should just say Political Obsession Syndrome: the actual book under consideration aside, she seems to see most of life, good or bad, as being an effect of which government is the cause. 

This focus on Trump and on politics is odd and misleading because the book is not about politics, and only glances occasionally in that direction. It deals with a subculture, which in the deeper South and some other parts of the country is called redneck, but in the hills of Kentucky is...hillbilly. At any rate it's the proud and truculent subculture of the Scots-Irish, the poorer members of which are not doing very well these days.

The subtitle is perfectly accurate, and should perhaps have been more attended to by some of these reviewers: A Memoir of a Family and Culture In Crisis. The book is about a specific family with serious problems, the extent to which those problems are characteristic of their culture, and the author's own fairly narrow escape from them. The focus is, you might say, internal: it's especially on the self-inflicted wounds of alcoholism and drug addiction, and the damage that ripples out from them. Vance recognizes the difficulty of the historical, economic, and social situation in which these people find themselves, but he doesn't view them as helpless victims. No one is forcing them to drink or take pills or shoot heroin, and no one can force them to stop. 

When he steps out from his narrative into a broader view, it is to consider the ways in which the culture which he calls "hillbilly" does and does not--mostly does not--prepare and encourage its members to thrive in the society which, for better or worse, is the one that currently exists. His concern is to tell the particular story, not to explain it in general historical and political terms. The tendency of reviewers to turn it into a mostly political document may have boosted its sales, but it fostered a certain misreading.

Anyway, I have to say that although I enjoyed the book I was a little disappointed in it. I guess I was expecting a more literary work, a more artistically pleasing and interesting one. From that point of view, it's somewhat flat, straightforward but not especially vivid or rich. Still, I'd recommend it fairly enthusiastically if you're interested in the subject at all, especially if you know people like this. Or if you're one of them, in which case you may have a quarrel with Vance: if you're truly one of them, you don't take criticism of your people very well. That's not a putdown, as it's somewhat true of me. I'm not of the hillbilly/redneck class, but I guess I'm genetically pretty close, though with a large admixture of English. And although I am a timid person and don't actually respond with violence to criticism of my people, I'd sort of like to. 

(By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51957321)

And by the way, J.D. Vance became Catholic this past weekend. (The link is to Rod Dreher's account of the event--Dreher is a friend of Vance.) That's good news. There isn't much about religion in the book, but the glimpses that do appear are of an extremely individualist and probably ahistorical Protestantism. 

Sometime before too long I think I'm going to read James Webb's book about the history and influence of the Scots-Irish, Born Fighting.

My Career in Information Technology...

...would have been far more interesting if malfunctioning computers would always shoot out noisy sparks, flames, and smoke. Like they do in that TV series I mentioned, Another Life. 

Even though my wife and I had officially abandoned it, I watched another episode and a half by myself because I really wanted to find out what those aliens were like and what they were up to. But I actually laughed out loud at a couple of not-at-all-meant-to-be funny things. So okay, I give up.

I mostly agree with this review at RogerEbert.com. Some funny comments, too: "Entitled Millenials In Space." And:

Is there something elitist living inside me that I found the crew members unworthy of anything other than maybe stints on The Real World? 

I think "The Real World" is a "reality" series. I've only seen a few episodes of any of those, but the comparison occurred to me, too. Bratty young people engaged in heavy and extremely self-centered emotional dramatics. As another commenter mentions, it's hard to believe these twits would ever have been entrusted with any sort of important duty, let alone manning a spacecraft on The Most Important Mission In Human History.

Why am I even bothering to write this? I guess because I was disposed to like the show, and can't quite believe that it's this bad. It's material for a future Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.

I am certainly not a scientist, or an engineer, and obviously you have to overlook, if not accept, a certain amount of miraculous future technology in most sci-fi. But this show seemed to me to grossly abuse its privilege. Unlike Star Wars-style space opera, it isn't content just to invoke "warp drive" (or whatever) and have the spaceship travel light years. Too much of it is directly based on applications of scientific or technological pixie dust to create and resolve crises. As best I can recall, this is pretty close to an actual bit:

"We don't have enough oxygen to survive much longer! What are we going to do?!?"

"I don't know...", "Oh my God," etc.

[a few seconds of brow-furrowing]

"Wait--there's a rogue moon ahead. We can mine captive oxygen from its caves!"

More On Canonization Etc.

I've already forgotten now exactly what I was looking for, but a couple of days ago I was searching the blog for something related to Chesterton and/or canonization, and found this post from 2016. The post itself is nothing much but the conversation that follows is very much worth revisiting, as it involves both subjects.

Chesterton's Non-Canonization

I suppose anyone who's interested has heard that the cause for G.K. Chesterton's canonization has been shut down, at least for now. Here's a brief notice about it in the Catholic Herald UK. Sounds somewhat disgruntled, or at any rate gives significant space to a disgruntled voice. 

I must say that I'm more in agreement than otherwise with this decision. I count myself as an admirer of the man and his work, but with a good many reservations. Like a lot of people I was wildly enthusiastic about his writing when I first encountered it, but I soon, or fairly soon, developed a more mixed opinion. At his best, he's great, astonishingly wise and perceptive. "Astonishing" is really not an exaggeration of the initial effect on me of some of his writings, that gift he has of pointing out things both obvious and unnoticed.

For me he's at his best in his essays. I often find his style tiresome at greater length, and don't care much for the fiction, except maybe for the Father Brown stories. And he wrote so very much that it sometimes seems that he is on a sort of GKC auto-pilot, maintaining the style but not so much of the substance.

But even if his writing were uniformly brilliant it would not justify calling him a saint. That hardly needs to be pointed out. I admit that I don't know all that much about his personal life, but though he seems to have been a good man I've never seen evidence of heroic virtue. 

Be that as it may, there's another reason why it's best that this effort not be pursued, and that's the fact that he can be fairly accused of anti-Semitism. 

I say "fairly accused." I've heard the argument made both for and against him on this point. But it does seem to be justified to at least some extent. The most generous thing you can say about some of his views in that line is that they are bizarre and rather creepy. I'm thinking in particular of that passage--I have no idea where to find it--in which he advocates some sort of special dress for English Jews, something by which they could always be identified.

That was pre-Holocaust and it wouldn't have had the same resonance at the time that it does post-Holocaust. And I don't for a moment think he would have had anything but hatred for the Nazi program of extermination. I think he's on record as being anti-Hitler. Nevertheless, that one notion makes the idea of canonizing him here and now a bad one. The Church has had, over the centuries and in some circles still, enough of a problem with anti-Semitism, and is enough of a pariah in the eyes of much of our civilization, that we don't need to do something unnecessary to make that situation worse. I think the British football term for that is "own goal." Nor do we need to suggest to actual anti-Semites within the Church that their animosity is acceptable.

His importance as writer and thinker won't be any the the worse for his absence from the official list of saints. I think the whole process is being misused these days, actually, with popes being canonized, it seems, in almost a pro-forma way. "All have won, and all must have medals" seems like a bad approach.