Retired NASA engineer Homer Hickham writes about Coalwood, West Virginia, in ways that are inspirational, or quirky. I like those books. I give them to my mom for Christmas. J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy has some of those elements, but includes all the stuff that Hickham leaves out. The four-letter words, the drunkenness, the meth labs and the opiate overdoses. The violence, between adults and from adults to children. The beauty of the mountains and the trash dumped into the hollers.   

I wrote about a month ago about how much I hate litter. This is despite the fact that my family for years had a small but obviously illegal dump on one corner of our property (or maybe because of it). In fairness, the dump was already there when my dad bought the property, but we continued using it for glass and metal for years and years, until I had moved away and my younger brother finally got around to cleaning it up. All the other trash we burned in the back yard. Recycling was not a thing then. I think it's still not a thing, there.   

Us kids used to go down to the dump with our BB guns to shoot the glass bottles, jars, and aluminum cans. The fact that we were using air-powered pellet guns well into our teens instead of rifles means that we were not real hillbillies, as does the fact that our sister was not allowed to come with us. But, really, hillbilly is a relative term. When I went north to graduate school, a Jewish dentist apologized for making a joke about inbreeding in front of me, because he didn't know I was from Kentucky, and people believed me when I jokingly told them I knew a feller called “Mouse.” Rochester, the city of one million where I was currently in graduate school, was the sticks as far as any of the humanities students from NYC were concerned, and there were plenty of rednecks duck-hunting the Finger Lakes.   

With all those nuances in mind, then, let me say that J.D. Vance is not fucking kidding.     

His story is full of all the drugs and violence any middle class voyeur could ask for.  For me, the most valuable passages are not when he’s making me feel sorry for him, but when he uses the lens of his personal experience to invert a narrative:   

“President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of many of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it – not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”   

When Vance goes off on those of the same community who believe that implanted data chips are the Mark of the Beast, without which you can neither buy nor sell, I can relate. I’ve heard those same things from some of my own family members.   

“This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society … We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get good jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society.”   

This is a failure of what Peter Turchin calls aasabiyah, an Arabic word for a society-wide spirit of cooperation. Vance, as a libertarian, attributes this failure to personal choice and lack of responsibility. Other, more left-leaning observers would blame the robber barons at the top.  

But it’s both.    

When a rational person detects that a game is rigged, a rational person quits that game and moves to another, fairer game – unless no other, fairer game is obvious. Then a rational person, like a rational animal, lies down in the shade to wait for better times, conserving energy that would otherwise be wasted and hasten starvation.  Or they adapt, in a frighteningly efficient way (tracks 7 and 8).    

It’s the optimist, the entrepreneur, who is irrationally optimistic.   

From an interview with Vance:

But I remain incredibly optimistic about the future.  Maybe that’s the hillbilly resilience in me.  Or maybe I’m just an idiot.  But if writing this book, and talking with friends and strangers about its message, has taught me anything, it’s that most people are trying incredibly hard to make it, even in this more complicated and scary world.  The short view of our country is that we’re doomed.  The long view, inherited from my grandparents’ 1930s upbringing in coal country, is that all of us can still control some part of our fate.  Even if we are doomed, there’s reason to pretend otherwise.

In the film Big Trouble in Little China, the wily old sorceror Egg Shin tells the dumb American blue-collar protagonist, Jack Burton, that “China’s in the heart.” And he’s right. Kentucky, or Middletown, Ohio, is a state of mind as much as it is a location.  

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