Hillbilly Elegy, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, J.D.Vance
Since Trump’s election, I have changed my radio habits. I am back to listening to NPR. I feel like I personally need to keep a watch
on those crazy people in Washington and suddenly just listening to music feels irresponsible. I
think this is actually an empathic connection with the experience of many of
the people who voted for Trump. I think
they have been feeling, perhaps for a long time, that those crazy people in
Washington don’t know what they are doing and should be given the boot – why else
would we hire someone for the most complex job in the world who has no
experience with any of the elements that it demands? Especially when the other applicant had all
the relevant experience one could want?
J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” was recommended as a text
that would explain why the country voted for Trump. I don’t think it, or any text, can deliver on
a promise that broad, but it does describe some powerful social forces in one
of the key demographic groups that made the swing in rust belt states like mine
that led to the election of the least qualified candidate in history. It is a very personal story – a memoir of a
kid who grew up just a few miles from where we live but who might as well have
been on a different planet – or certainly in a different time zone or
country. And while he is generalizing
his experience to that of other Appalachians – other Hillbillies – I think it
may have relevance for other cultural groups and I am curious to learn more
about other major groups that are part of the American Cultural Quilt.
Vance’s description of the Appalachians in his family and in
the US more generally squares with the very first multicultural training that I
had when I was a paraprofessional at a halfway house for runaway teenagers in
Columbus. We had an in-service on
various groups, including the Appalachians – who lived around us. At least in my memory, the Appalachians (none
of us called them Hillbillies including the staff member who identified himself
as coming from the Appalachian culture) didn’t make as much use of our service
as other groups did. And the reason for
that was intrinsic to the training and is writ large in Vance’s description of
his people: a central tenet is “Don’t air family laundry in public”. I can criticize kin – indeed I can be savage
with them, but if you – an outsider - are, you have me to deal with. And we will unite around keeping other people’s
noses and eyes out of our business. This
is related to a deep mistrust of the government of a country that we,
ironically, are deeply proud of and happy to defend with our lives; the county
in Kentucky where Vance’s family comes from is called Bloody Breathitt county
because they were the only county in the country to fill their WWII enlistment
quota solely with volunteers. The name may
have stuck in part because of their willingness to defend family honor with
guns and knives and whatever is handy when that honor is called into question
by others.
J.D. Vance is a self-proclaimed Hillbilly – one of millions
of Scots-Irish who inhabit the mountainous eastern part of the country that includes
the Appalachian mountains (and other ranges) and stretches from Mississippi and Alabama
northward to Pennsylvania and New York.
Though the hills in the southeast corner of Ohio are part of Appalachia,
southwestern Ohio is not; specifically, Middletown, Dayton and Cincinnati where the
story unfolds – is part of a larger corridor of industrialization in the upper Midwest that extends
up to Detroit and has other branches that reach into Pittsburgh, Akron and
Cleveland . A lot of Appalachians were (and many still are)
employed in the factories that made the upper Midwest the center of
steel and automobile production. Many of
those that didn’t leave the hills worked (and work) in the Appalachian coal mines that
produced (and produces) the energy to run the plants. And all of these jobs, from Vance’s
perspective, brought income, and that was the lure that brought the
Appalachians out of the hills and away from the family spaces that they loved. Vance clarifies that the income was only part of the American dream, and the rest of
the dream did not get realized by the vast majority of those who migrated
towards the money.
Vance is an exception to the rule that Appalachians do not
transcend their culture – he made it out – way out. He is a Yale Law School graduate married to a
woman named Usha who comes from a culture that is completely different than his
native one. So he has two tasks in this
book – to describe the culture as an insider – indeed to demonstrate that he
really is a Hillbilly – and then to criticize that culture (and our greater culture that has not reached out to it) from the outside, as
it were. Of course, if he were truly an
outsider he would be run out of town on a rail after he had been shot for speaking out against the culture - even if he is also critical of the greater culture, so he is treading a complicated course in this book.
I am writing this post from paradise and feeling very guilty
about it. The reluctant son’s High
School baseball team has come south for spring training. They came down last year as well. They had a new coach – it was the first time
the team had done it and I was unprepared for the difficulty it would cause in
scheduling – the high school’s spring break is different from the spring break
of the University where I teach. So last
year I entrusted the reluctant son to the parents of other players to bring him
down. The camp was a fiasco. Housed at a former major league baseball
spring training stadium, the boys rooms at the stadium were locked (from the outside) at night. What would have happened had there been a
fire? The promised food was late or
non-existent. The staff at the camp all
carried pistols. Promised games did not
take place. On the final night, to
protect the kids from being locked in the stadium again, the parents brought
them to their motel, but there were no empty rooms, so they told the group of
boys in their care, including the reluctant son, to walk the beach while they
slept until the middle of the night, when they woke up, packed the kids in the
car, and drove all day while the boys slept in the back of the car.
Well, I may not be Appalachian, but no one is doing that to
my kin again. Of course this year the
spring breaks do not line up again, and so this year, knowing the team was coming
to the same town, but not the same camp, I rescheduled all of my midterms to
fall on this week and had a TA administer them, and I have driven the boys
down, am staying around the corner from the motel (the same one that had no extra rooms) where they have conventional rooms
with conventional locks, and will drive them back. I am spending time grading papers and
watching baseball games in the blazing heat.
And today I will take some time “off” to go swim in the ocean. I will feel guilty, but refreshed.
The new coach had coached for years at a school in a
district that was more like the place Vance comes from. He instituted the spring training week in
Florida there both to prepare the boys to play ball and to introduce them to a
different part of the country than they had ever seen. The coach says that most of the kids he
brought down had never seen the ocean before, much less swum in it. The school he is now teaching in is an inner
city school, but also a magnet school.
While there are some kids who have not been to the ocean, most
have. And many have flown down – some with
their parents. To his credit, the camp
last year had changed hands since he last coached and, apparently, it used to
be reputable. I am pleased to report
that the boys this year are having a good experience and it probably wasn’t
necessary that I come along (and I would have saved the reluctant son some
embarrassment by not being around the edges of his world).
A quick Google search suggests that about 20% of Americans –
one in five – has never flown on a plane.
About 40% of us have flown on a plane in the past year. This comes to mind because, listening to NPR
on the weekend recently, I heard a gameshow host bemoaning the loss of Virgin
Atlantic Airlines and their cool lighting.
Part of me resonated with that.
But part of me wondered about those who had voted for Trump – and came
out to see him as he flew into their area in his very own airplane. How many of them had never flown? How many of them had flown once or twice –
perhaps when they were in the military – but flight for leisure would be an
unimaginable luxury and their work does not include travel.
Vance began to distance himself from his family when he
began to fly. Before that, he was very
earthbound. Not just because he didn’t
get on an airplane, but because he was tied to Jackson, Kentucky, his Mamaw’s
hometown – the place she and his Papaw fled from when Mamaw, at fourteen, was
pregnant with Vance’s Mom. They settled
for a while in Middletown where Papaw, and everyone else from Kentucky, worked
for Armco. Mamaw and Papaw, and then
Vance’s mom, when she grew up and became a nurse, made good money. At one point, when Vance was a child in the
early 1980s, his mother and her boyfriend were making over 100,000
dollars. But they were always outsiders
to the middle- American world around them, and they spent the money on trinkets
– some of them little and some of them big – like new cars that they then
banged up when drunk and traded in on more new cars.
As an outsider, when I recount this story, it sounds much
less sympathetic than when Vance does.
He is describing from inside the culture what the experience was like. I
think this is a tremendously useful position to take – it allows me (and, I
assume, other readers) to have an empathic experience with a culture that is
foreign, even if I can’t mirror that as I write about it. Suffice it to say that I was feeling
sympathetic as I was reading about the things above that sound so stereotypical
coming out of my mouth. But rather than
fix my writing about that, I would recommend that you read Vance. What I think I can add to Vance’s story is a
perspective on how difficult his task is.
He is not just trying to describe the culture, but to describe his
experience of being raised within it – raised by a woman who spent most of his
childhood cycling through men as she cycled through drugs trying to fix
something inside her by looking to acquire something on the outside. Now that is me talking. When Vance talks, he reassures himself that
his mother was trying to find a good daddy for him. While I don’t doubt that was one of his
mother’s many motivations, I differ with him in how high it was on her priority
list.
Having written the last sentence, I am suddenly aware that I
am posting with a pseudonym and am relieved by that. The thought passes. I actually think Vance and I, if we had a
relationship, could talk about this stuff in a way that he would find
useful. But as an outsider, I am
criticizing his Momma, and them there is fighting words. He has sucker punched more than one person
over much less targeted criticisms of members of his family - and the Momma is the one that you absolutely stay away from when criticizing his kin. Vance is exposing his mother, indeed his
whole family and his whole culture to critical eyes of people like me. As he does this, he is fighting with both his
need to protect his mother and to protect his culture, but also, I think, with
an even more primal need, to protect himself and his identity as a person – the
thing that is of most value to all of us.
In graduate school I lived with two writers, a poet and an essayist who also wrote a memoir. For
them, as for Vance, I think writing served (and serves) a therapeutic
purpose. That said, I would sometimes
make comments on psychological aspects of the writing that I thought were
apparent and even intentional and discover that I had waded into territory that
was not only foreign to the author – but spaces where they felt I was being a
hostile invader (who was clueless, by the way).
I think that Vance is both showing himself and his culture and
necessarily protecting them as best he is able.
I do not fault him for this. In
fact, I think this book is a great work of courage.
One thing that Vance has helped me with – and something that
I think gets reflected in the personal memoir part of the writing – is the odd
experience I have outside the clinic where I work. Some of the clinicians do assessments for the
Bureau of Disability. There are people
who arrive in trucks and cars for an assessment to get money from the
government with bumper stickers on their cars protesting the ridiculous level
of taxes they pay and encouraging voting for people who would take away
entitlements. This internal inconsistency
is noted by Vance in the welfare mothers in his neighborhood who rail against
people who don’t pull their weight while using their food stamps to buy
groceries at the store where he worked.
He also noted that there are many who couldn’t keep a job that paid well
with good benefits loading materials with him because they inconsistently showed up for
work and took inordinately long breaks while they railed against lazy
people. Psychologically, I think that
these individuals are reacting against parts of themselves that are “not me”. They are denying aspects of their own psyche
that they are critical of and seeing it in others.
Vance notices this propensity in himself. As much as he has transcended his origins,
and he credits this to the constant presence of his Mamaw and Papaw (Papaw used
to drill him on math facts on a regular basis) who settled down after their crazier youth and the consistent presence of
his sister, as well as to having chosen to go into the Marines before going to
college – where he learned basic skills like learning to balance a checkbook and to spend within his limits, he is very much aware of the hair trigger fury
that he can unleash (with disastrous consequences) on a moment’s notice. While I could distance myself from this guy by
noting our differences (his great grandfather fired the opening shot in the
Hatfield-McCoy feud – something he is very proud of), I quickly resonate with
the flaring anger that he feels when cut off in traffic. Even though I know which fork to use at a
fancy dinner, I, too, struggle on an ongoing basis to manage the intensity of
the feelings that perceived stupidity on the part of others evokes in me, even
though I quickly excuse the same behavior when I do it myself.
While here in Florida, I have struck up a conversation with
another Dad. He is a graduate of the
University where I teach and was a basketball player there. He is rightly critical of our treatment of the
basketball athletes. We are increasingly
coddling them – protecting them from the education they are supposedly there to
receive rather than supporting their engagement in it. I have been struck by the parallels between
his (and my) concerns for those students – students whose heads are filled with
dreams of playing in the NBA, but whose realistic future involves working –
work that an education would make more financially and personally rewarding.
I am left with the question of how we make the American
Dream truly accessible to more of our citizens.
Especially as I walk the retirement neighborhoods near here that have
neat yards filled with more boats and jet skis than a family could possibly
use, I think it would be possible to, like Vance, pursue law because
it was the lawyers and doctors in his town who were rich (and since he didn’t
like blood, law was the reasonable pursuit), and, whether that goal is realized
or not, to lose track of money as a means to an end rather than the end
itself. The end is to achieve happiness –
and the means to that end is much more complicated than simply accumulating
wealth. In fact, it is much more the result of what we
acquire internally (including the ability to feel but not necessarily act on
powerful feelings) than what accumulates externally that matters. But what we see – and what attracts us away
from what will help us actually achieve the end – are all of the shiny objects.
I think this book, because it is written from the inside, is
a book that would work well in a variety of settings to help people get a
handle on their own lives. I can imagine
it as required reading in High Schools – especially in Appalachia and the rust
belt, but I can imagine many people from various parts of the country identifying with it. Many of my students identified with and were inspired by Alexander Hamilton when I assigned the musical for them to listen to earlier this year –
and Hamilton lived hundreds of years ago and in a very different culture.
I also do think it can be a useful means to understand the
alienation that a big chunk of our population feels – a group that feels
disenfranchised and cannot see their way out of a mire that, from their
perspective, they cannot escape. Vance
demonstrates that there are many doors, windows and ladders, but they require
support – especially support within the family from early on and throughout
development, connections, and hard work to access and exploit. He nicely asks, in a Ted talk, about how to get what he got to kids like him who desperately want to lead a better life.
I think that a central shift that needs to take place is a psychological one - a shift from an external locus of control - believing that others hold the key to your fate and that you are but a cog in a machine - to an internal locus of control - believing that you are responsible for what will take place in your life. The problem with this formulation, as Vance points out, is that it is a luxury that a kid who's Mom is unable to provide dinner because she has passed out from a needle she stuck in her arm is unable to experience. He really is at the mercy of forces beyond his control. How do we truly empower these children?
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