J. D. Vance, "Hillbilly Elegy", And The Defamation Of Appalachian Character

 Let me say unequivocally that the fact that I chose to read this book and write about it on this blog should never be considered a recommendation that anyone read the book, watch the movie, or waste your time, money, and mind on such efforts. 

Several years ago when I wrote the blog post at this link, I sincerely hoped that it would never again be necessary to write another word about J. D. Vance, his horrible and horribly ignorant book "Hillbilly Elegy", or his defamation of the character of every native of Central and Southern Appalachia who ever lived.  But now, after  the release on November 11, 2020, of Ron Howard's movie version of the Vance diatribe, I find myself once again wasting my time writing about J. D. Vance and his stupid but popular attacks on Appalachia and Appalachians in general.  Just as happened with the book, reviews of the movie are nearly universally negative.  And, just as happened with the book, a sizeable portion of the population of Appalachians, the people who should be universally incensed at this trash, are oohing and ahing at the movie which critics are using their most negative words to attempt to describe.  On several Facebook groups which are, theoretically, populated by natives of Appalachia, people are identifying with the aberrant, ignorant, criminal, and dysfunctional characterizations of the members of Vance's immediate family which both he and Ron Howard are attempting to pawn off on the general public as shining examples of the deviants whom they claim populate the entire Appalachian region.  I said in the November 2017 blog post about the book:

In my twenty years of practice as an Appalachian mental health professional, I never had a client walk into my office seeking professional therapy and carrying a biopsychosocial of their own composition.  If one ever had, that biopsychosocial very well could have carried the title "Hillbilly Elegy..."  The book is a wonderful piece of work if one were working with a single client or family unit in a mental health setting in an altruistic attempt to successfully intervene in the mental health and substance abuse problems within that particular family unit.  As a piece of literature intended to be considered as a blanket analysis of a culture, and particularly the Appalachian Culture, the book is garbage.  The fact that the book was seized upon by mainstream American critics and readers as a legitimate assessment of the overall Appalachian Culture is a great miscarriage of both justice and common sense. It is also an indictment of the decision making capacity of that general readership.(R. Hicks, Blog Post Cited And Linked Above, 2017)

I also said that earlier blog post that I had sworn when the book was released and I had read the early reviews of the book by legitimate Appalachian scholars and intellectuals that I had no intentions of ever reading the book until a copy had been given to me by my dear friend, Warene Hobson, after she and her husband, P. J. Laska, had chosen not to read it.  I swear to each of you who read this post and to the heavens above that I will never waste my time, money, or mind watching the movie, not even if some well meaning fool offers to pay me well to do so.  In a review in "Rolling Stone", David Fear and his editors chose the sub-headline "J.D. Vance’s story of growing up poor gets the prestige-drama treatment — and ends up as a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing".  I commend them in their choice of verbiage and I could not have said it better myself.  If David Fear and "Rolling Stone" had been the only major outlet to eviscerate the movie, his review could be discounted as false.  But nearly ever major writer, magazine, newspaper or press outlet which have wasted ink on reviewing the movie have concurred with David Fear in most opinions they express.  In a "New Yorker" review, Richard Brody states that 

"the film’s stagings, images, and tones are as formless and as vague as its characters’ mental lives, and that vagueness replaces elements of Vance’s book which are politically and ideologically quite explicit—and which have been criticized for the simplistic lessons that they extract from his experience." (Richard Brody, "The New Yorker", November 23, 2020)

Richard Brody is just as accurate in his assessment of the work of Ron Howard and J. D. Vance as was David Fear.  J. D. Vance, in his malignant narcissism and the resultant wounded response to the familial trauma which caused it, attempted to blame the entire world, Central and Southern Appalachia, in which his mother and grandparents grew up for his damaged psyche.   And, Director Ron Howard, who has spent the majority of his life 3,000 miles or more away from Appalachia, chose to take Vance at his word as have many of those mislead individuals who have read the book or watched the movie.  In my 2017 response to the book, I discussed the use of the cultural and ethnic epithet "hillbilly" in this manner: 

"The word "hillbilly" is just as much an ethnic and cultural epithet as the "n" word, the "q" word, the "k" word, or the "s" word.  It is just as inflammatory and derogatory as the "c" word.  Any person who would use such a word in reference to themselves, their extended family, and their dominant culture and ethnicity is both defaming and denigrating those to whom they refer.  For an excellent film discussion of the use of the word "hillbilly" to discuss and describe Appalachia and Appalachian Culture, please acquire a copy of the Appal Shop documentary "Strangers And Kin: A History of the Hillbilly Image". It is particularly enlightening to learn about the history of the mascot of Appalachian State University, a character named Yosef who is dressed as a "hillbilly" in overalls, a flop hat, and no shoes. That character is the one occasion I can remember in which anything positive ever came out of the creation of a "hillbilly" character.  If J. D. Vance had held any respect for his homeland and its people, he would have never allowed the word "hillbilly" to cross his lips, his pen, or his keyboard. And he certainly would not have used it hundreds of times, as he does throughout the book, to describe his closest family members and alleged role models.  The book is no more an assessment of the overall Appalachian Culture than it is a re-examination of "War And Peace"."(R. Hicks, 2017, Cited and Linked Above)

 I find it truly disheartening in this time when the general public is much more cognizant and enlightened about cultural stereotyping and defamation that the same cannot be said about a large portion of the natives of Central and Southern Appalachia.  If the average Appalachian were as aware of our culture and our history as is the average member of most other minority ethnic and cultural groups in America, those people like J. D. Vance who choose to defame, shame, and denigrate us could not succeed to the degree they do in achieving success in their endeavors.  In perhaps the most easily understood example of the flawed and erroneous pseudologic which Vance uses to press his argument about the negative nature of Appalachia and Appalachians, in an early chapter of the book, he makes the statement that in spite of the large number of men with whom his drug addicted mother kept company none of those men was abusive.  In the very next chapter, he tells the story of how, as a teenager, a physical fight between his mother and one of those men awoke him and he had to come from his bedroom in order to intervene in the altercation.  An error in logic of that nature would not have been well received by Vance's law professors at Yale.  Neither should it be well received by his readers. He also proudly tells the story of how, after he fell asleep on a funeral home pew, his grandparents lost awareness of where he was, assumed he had been kidnapped, and, at gunpoint, assailed the departing mourners at the edge of the parking lot in an attempt to locate him before someone, presumably funeral home staff found him asleep on the pew.  Such behavior is not admirable.  It is not exemplary of any human trait of value.  It is criminal and it is also a typical example of the behavior Vance's family members engaged in and which he attempts to pawn off as typical of all Appalachians.  

I have begun and will end this discussion of J. D. Vance, the book, and the movie, which I once again sincerely hope will be my last, as I began and ended that earlier blog post about the book in 2017.  

Let me say unequivocally that the fact that I chose to read this book and write about it on this blog should never be considered a recommendation that anyone read the book, watch the movie, or waste your time, money, or mind on such efforts.

 

"Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy" Edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll--Book Review

This is a book which I should have immediately bought, read, and written about as soon as it was released in March 2019.  I'm only 13months late which is pretty good for me at times in my effort to keep up with my "To Be Read List".  The book was created as a response to the horribly defamatory "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis" which I have written about in this blog a little over two years ago.  Since I mentioned "Hillbilly Elegy..." let me append the opening and concluding sentence of review of that drivel here: First and foremost, let me say unequivocally that the fact that I chose to read this book (Hillbilly Elegy...) and write about it on this blog should never be considered a recommendation that anyone read it."  No one, whether or not they consider themselves to be Appalachian, should ever read that book without first having read "Appalachian Values" by my friend Loyal Jones.  Although I am not totally pleased with "Appalachian Reckoning...", I will say also that it would be a good idea to read this book as well before entering the intellectual wasteland of J. D. Vance.  

And, since I have mentioned that piece of garbage, I have appended above the sentence with which I began and ended my thoughts on J. D. Vance's screed about the region of which he knows little and cares nothing: "Appalachian Reckoning..." was conceived and edited to be a response to Vance's diatribe in the form of essays, poetry, and a few photos and photo essays by various writers who perceive themselves to be native to and writing in the best interests of Appalachia.  It is a lengthy work of slightly over 400 pages and I read it, as I often do collections by numerous authors, in fits and starts because I prefer to allow one writer's work to congeal in my mind before I further muddy the water with more on the same topic(s) by other authors.  That is both an advantage and a disadvantage with a work of this size.  It greatly enhances the reader's ability to fully grasp the writing in a single essay and the collective total but simultaneously lengthens the time involved from start to finish in completing a book of this size.  But it a technique which I have utilized in my reading for many years, one to which I am long accustomed, and one which I believe makes me a better reader in the long run.

The list of authors in this book ranges from the editors themselves to established experts on the region such as Dwight Billings to others whose existence was relatively unknown and unheralded until the publication of this book.  They range in their areas of expertise across the spectrum of the written word including academics, essayists, novelists, photographers, and poets.  On the face of it all, they can be argued to have been a broadly based and well selected group of authors.  But, the number of genuine, proven experts on the sociology, history, and economics of the region is a bit thin.  While I found a few essays to be well reasoned, well written, and solidly grounded in knowledge of the region, I found at least one or two to be works which I doubt most other professional Appalachian editors would have included in a work intended to dispute, disprove, and de-legitimize Vance's misbegotten best seller.  At least one of the essays is at best an apology for Vance, and at worst, an attempt to justify his illogical conclusions and should never have been included in the book. Most of the poetry is above average, reasonably well written, and acceptable.  But I question the use of artistic works in general in an expository work intended to be a disputation of another which was mislabeled, based in a plethora of misconceptions, and  often accepted as being accurate in its conclusions.  I love poetry and even have one friend, Dale Marie Prenatt, who has an excellent poem in the book; but, I do not love poetry as a form of academic argumentation.  Let me go further and say that my argument about this aspect of the book is not against the poets or their poetry.  It is against the inclusion of that poetry in such a book with such a stated purpose.  

I have been aware for many years that there are three different definitions of Appalachia, which I have stated in this blog in other places.  While the Appalachian Mountain Range extends from Central Alabama to Newfoundland and Labrador in the maritime provinces of Canada   that definition is purely geographic and used primarily by the US Geologic Survey and other federal government agencies.

The Broad Geographical Map of The Appalachian Mountains--Photo by Thomas's Legion

 The definition of Appalachia which the US Congress and the Appalachian Regional Commission uses extends from Mississippi to Upstate New York and includes 35 counties in Alabama, 32 in Ohio, 52 of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania, and is purely a political and economic definition which came about over the years in congress as the need for votes to approve various pieces of pending legislation caused this mythical region to spread much like a fungus solely in the interest of pork barrel politics.

Appalachian Regional Commission Map by the ARC

The definition of Appalachia I use is purely cultural and is rooted in the work of early Appalachian scholars including John C. Campbell and Horace Kephart.  That definition does not cross the Ohio River and does not extend into the northeastern US beyond Western Maryland and the eastern panhandle of West Virginia.  It only includes a small number of Alabama counties in the Sand Mountain area and does not remotely include any portion of Mississippi or Ohio.  For those who would belabor this definition, I urge you to go stand in the middle of the Ohio River and convince that little puddle that it does not constitute both a geographical and a cultural barrier. This final map which I have appended below is very close to my definition of the cultural region of Appalachia although, in my opinion, those counties of Pennsylvania which are included are not truly culturally Appalachian.  I also state for the record that for a more than three years I worked for a Pennsylvania based human services company and performed home visits all over the state while living for a year in Venango County Pennsylvania which is not remotely Appalachian but is included in the political and pork barrel definition of the region which is used by the Appalachian Regional Commission.  I also spent a year living in the Mid-Hudson region of New York State, some of which is included in the ARC map which is far too inclusive in terms of cultural accuracy.

Map of Cultural Appalachia by Medium.com

I freely admit that hundreds of thousands of native Appalachians left the region of Central and Southern Appalachia and moved into the midwest and industrial north.  Some of them remain there as displaced Appalachians but their descendants are not Appalachian in any way other than heritage. Moving to Appalachia or Watts or Harlem does not make a non-native of any of these areas a legitimate Appalachian, African American, or Hispanic.

Now, let's get back to my discussion of the book in question, "Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy".  In conclusion, it is a generally readable and enjoyable book.  But I do not remotely believe that the book has yet been published which will serve as the best, most logical, most accurate response to "Hillbilly Elegy..." I do hope that someone, someday writes and publishes that book.  If you read "Appalachian Reckoning..." I would suggest that you read it with a jaundiced eye, scan every essay closely the truths you know about the Appalachia which you know, use your critical thinking skills to examine it, find what truths you can in it, but do not blindly accept it as the authoritative response to "Hillbilly Elegy...". 

"Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir Of A Family And Culture In Crisis" by J. D. Vance--Book Review

Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York. Harper Collins 2016)

First and foremost, let me say unequivocally that the fact that I chose to read this book and write about it on this blog should never be considered a recommendation that anyone read it.  When the book was released in 2016 and the first highly negative reviews by legitimate native Appalachian scholars began to reach ink, I realized that it was likely to be a waste of time for anyone to read the book.  I never bought it, never read it, never borrowed it from a local library, never pretended in anyone's presence that I intended to ever read it.  I made a vow to keep my mind and soul uncorrupted.  But during my aforementioned long vacation in the southwestern United States, I spent quite a bit of time in the company of my friends, P. J. Laska (post #1) and his wife, Warene Hopson.  One day Warene called me into another room of the house and told me that she had a book she wanted to give me.  As she presented me with the book, she was honest enough to tell me the full story of why she had chosen to pass it on.  Warene has a friend who reads quite a bit and apparently knows little or nothing about Appalachia and Appalachian Culture.  This unnamed woman buys books, reads them once, and passes them on to others with the stipulation that they be passed along further after each recipient is done with them. Warene informed me that she was done with "Hillbilly Elegy..." the first second it was placed in her hands and she never read it and had no intentions to do so.  She also informed me that her husband, my long time friend P. J. Laska (post #2), also had no intentions of ever reading the book.  It is also pertinent to say for those of you who still do not know who P. J. Laska (post #3) is that he is a native Appalachian, a doctoral level retired professor of philosophy, and a life long student and professor of Appalachian Literature and Culture as well as a former National Book Award finalist in poetry.  Warene Hopson is not a native Appalachian but she has been married to P. J. Laska for the past 48 years and has known the great majority of the best scholars and writers in the field of Appalachian Studies during that time. She also lived for several years in the heart of Appalachia in the Beckley, West Virginia, area.  Let it suffice to say that all three of us had chosen independently to avoid reading "Hillbilly Elegy..." for the same reasons based on publicly printed reviews of the book and the private opinions expressed to us by our many friends and colleagues in the field about the extremely negative and derogatory nature of the book.  But due to the nature of the gift and my respect for Warene Hopson, I chose to overrule my better judgment and read it anyway.  I also chose to honor the original owner's stipulation that the book be passed on to another after each recipient had finished with it.  

Let me also preface my comments about the book with the information that I know a great deal about Breathitt County Kentucky, the home territory of J. D. Vance and both sides of his extended family. I was raised in Knott County, a contiguous county to Breathitt.  For the past twenty-five years, I have lived in Morgan County Kentucky, another contiguous county to Breathitt.  For a total of about seven years, I worked in the human services and mental health fields in two other contiguous counties.  During that work period, I specialized in substance abuse and mental health therapy.  I was also the only certified provider of Kentucky's Twenty Hour DUI Education Program for first time offenders in that general area.  I worked with numerous residents and natives of Breathitt County during that time.  One of the agencies I worked for is headquartered in Breathitt County.  It is my considered professional opinion that I am at least as well qualified as J. D. Vance to discuss the strengths, weaknesses, assets, and liabilities of Breathitt County Kentucky.

I had actually read several chapters of the book before I left the Southern Arizona area where P. J. Laska and Warene Hopson live.  When I told them that I had read that much of the book, they asked me about my opinion of it.  The remainder of this paragraph is a close approximation of what I told them and what I still believe about the book after reading it fully from "kiver to kiver" as my ancestors used to say. In my twenty years of practice as an Appalachian mental health professional, I never had a client walk into my office seeking professional therapy and carrying a biopsychosocial of their own composition.  If one ever had, that biopsychosocial very well could have carried the title "Hillbilly Elegy..."  The book is a wonderful piece of work if one were working with a single client or family unit in a mental health setting in an altruistic attempt to successfuly intervene in the mental health and substance abuse problems within that particular family unit.  As a piece of literature intended to be considered as a blanket analysis of a culture, and particularly the Appalachian Culture, the book is garbage.  The fact that the book was seized upon by mainstream American critics and readers as a legitimate assessment of the overall Appalachian Culture is a great miscarriage of both justice and common sense. It is also an indictment of the decision making capacity of that general readership.

First and foremost, let me address the title itself.  The word "hillbilly" is just as much an ethnic and cultural epithet as the "n" word, the "q" word, the "k" word, or the "s" word.  It is just as inflammatory and derogatory as the "c" word.  Any person who would use such a word in reference to themselves, their extended family, and their dominant culture and ethnicity is both defaming and denigrating those to whom they refer.  For an excellent film discussion of the use of the word "hillbilly" to discuss and describe Appalachia and Appalachian Culture, please acquire a copy of the Appal Shop documentary "Strangers And Kin: A History of the Hillbilly Image". It is particularly enlightening to learn about the history of the mascot of Appalachian State University, a character named Yosef who is dressed as a "hillbilly" in overalls, a flop hat, and no shoes. That character is the one occasion I can remember in which anything positive ever came out of the creation of a "hillbilly" character.  If J. D. Vance had held any respect for his homeland and its people, he would have never allowed the word "hillbilly" to cross his lips, his pen, or his keyboard. And he certainly would not have used hundreds of times, as he does throughout the book, to describe his closest family members and alleged role models.  The book is no more an assessment of the overall Appalachian Culture than it is a re-examination of "War And Peace".

I further believe that if there is an afterlife with awareness of and ability to influence the events occurring in the earth from which the deceased has departed that the ghosts of both Jack Weller and Harry M. Caudill were whispering encouragements into the ears of J. D. Vance as he was writing this latest attack on Appalachia and its people.  This book is just as damaging, derogatory, defamatory, and debilitating to its subjects as "Night Comes To The Cumberlands" and "Yesterday's People".  J. D. Vance has used this book to become a member of that ill-informed and uncaring brotherhood of those who seek to further the negative image of Appalachia and Appalachians without even a minor degree of the necessary knowledge to accurately understand or describe the culture .

"Hillbilly Elegy..." is a splenetic diatribe about Vance's extended family which he has attempted to pass off as a discussion of the great values he sees in his deeply flawed family while also attempting to attribute the familial flaws to the general culture of which they are a minor part.  Vance proudly discusses the rearing he received from two grandparents he freely admits once held mourners at gunpoint as they left a funeral because the grandparents had failed to notice that the youthful Vance had fallen asleep in a funeral home pew and assumed he had been kidnapped.  He equally admires the virtues of a grandmother who curses like a sailor in the presence of young children, screams at family members as a form of purported affection, and generally makes herself a fearsome addition to the community in which she lives.  In an early chapter of the book, Vance makes the statement that in spite of the large number of men with whom his drug addicted mother kept company none of those men was abusive.  In the next chapter, he tells the story of how as a teenager, a fight between his mother and one of those men awoke him and he had to come from his bedroom in order to intervene in the altercation.  A error in logic of that nature would not have been well received by Vance's law professors at Yale.  Neither should it be well received by his readers.

I read "Hillbilly Elegy..." primarily because it was a gift from a friend whom I respect and admire.  The time I used to read it while on a long vacation road trip would probably have been wasted in an even more egregious manner if I had not read the book.  The most positive aspect of the experience is that I can now say  I fully understand why so many intelligent, educated, committed Appalachian activists have received the book with such scorn and disgust and I must admit they warned me in advance.  Now I am warning you with the same words which I used to begin this review.   Let me say unequivocally that the fact that I chose to read this book and write about it on this blog should never be considered a recommendation that anyone read it.