Posted on 04/24/2021 8:41:14 PM PDT by tbw2
Vance is the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which is a culturally compliant — namely unflattering — account of poor, white America.
Provided your thesis allows for a cozy convergence over agreeable storylines — you are well-positioned to peddle a national bestseller to the approving left, libertarian, neoconservative and pseudo-conservative smart-set.
Yes, Vance is a sellout. Not that they were asked for their take, but the archetypical folks depicted in Hillbilly Elegy contend, justifiably, that “Vance [is] not an authentic hillbilly or an example of the working class.”
(Excerpt) Read more at dissidentmama.net ...
On the backs of poor whites? How J.D. Vance elites become elites
http://www.dissidentmama.net/on-the-backs-of-poor-whites-how-j-d-vance-elites-become-elites/
Is this supposed to be about something?
Why don’t you post the whole thing.
I listened to this on audiobook and wasn’t overly impressed with it. But the author here seems quite mean-spirited.
This author obviously didn’t read the book.
feh...
The movie was good, but the book was much better.
The movie (only) focused on his personal life and family.
The book also went into detail about the damage outsourcing industries and closing factories is doing to American families.
The book also covered what he had learned about family dynamics by comparing his family upbringing with his girlfriends (very successful) family.
It was one of the better books I have read in the past 5 years.
Dissident Mama is also Incoherent Mama. That was a painfully disjointed, convoluted piece.
Thanks for letting me know I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t figure out what the hell she was talking about. I read the book, thought it was as entertaining as it was instructional and admired the guy’s determination, especially the fact that he served several years in the Marines. The article reminded me of the crabs in a steaming pot trying to pull a potential escapee back into the boiling water.
I’m a born and raised Appalachian. A literal ridge runner. To hell with these shoe-gazing intellectuals. I got the bona-fides running up and down the wall. Ask me and I’ll set ya straight.
.
Dumb attack. Vance highlights the stupidity and grotesque of these elites.
As one example, he discusses how Middle America subjugated to destructive policies on trade, manufacturing and fentanyl try to push back as their communities are destroyed.
When they do, they are dismissed, ridiculed and called racist.
Hardly selling out.
“When they do, they are dismissed, ridiculed and called racist.”
Kevin Williamson, writing in National Review, called them all losers, advised them to move someplace else where they could get a jobs (too bad if you are attached to your hometown and home place), can’t wait for this cohort to die out. Because the Asians and other non-Americans should have all their former jobs, ya’ll.
Yes, an arrogant view put up by Williamson.
So typical.
Vance’s book was one of the more powerful ones I have read in a long time.
Yes, he brings to light that poor whites, especially Appalachian whites, have some very destructive habits. Single parenthood, substance abuse, horrible diets, unemployment, and communities hollowed out by outsourcing and economic disruption.
This is all true. It has happened, and happens, in my family. Vance’s life is not mine, but if a few things had gone differently it may have been.
So this blogger is all upset that someone pointed out the massive disfunction in lower class whites. It stings her pride, her sense of place.
Get over it.
All of the social issues that many of FR attack in minority communities exists in poor whites also. Violence, abuse, sexual assault, and generations of pain. Some I grew up with fell down and died, some lifted themselves up, many just drift.
Vance did not betray his people. That is a very hateful thing to say. He pointed out that his people are resentful of change, distrustful of education, and family society is breaking down. He got out and found someone to build a family with.
While no where near as bad, I face the same things when I go home. People are mad that I went to college, married out side of the community, and built a life other than farming.
I thought it made a good point about the “open sesame” password into acceptance by his push for increased legal immigration for “compassionate” reasons. Guy sounds just like another George W. Bush to me.
You are referring to: “True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration | Opinion”?
Not sure how that sounds anything like GWB. Can you help me understand?
GUEST POST
The country is fast descending into a Dantean hell.
The Circles of Hell into which we’ve been signed, sealed and delivered are mass migration, diversity, multiculturalism, and zealous, institutionalized anti-whiteness, with its attendant de-civilization and inversion of long-held societal morals and mores.
The guiding ghost of Virgil is nowhere to be found. To ostensibly shepherd us out of hell, however, assorted serpents have slithered forth.
Beware! All the more so when they speak to you from bastions of the establishment — Newsweek is one — as J. D. Vance does in, “True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration.”
His is the typically conciliatory, “conservative” argument we’ve come to expect from the gilded elite, regarding America’s promiscuous immigration policy, under Republicans and Democrats alike.
Vance is the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which is a culturally compliant — namely unflattering — account of poor, white America.
Provided your thesis allows for a cozy convergence over agreeable storylines — you are well-positioned to peddle a national bestseller to the approving left, libertarian, neoconservative and pseudo-conservative smart-set.
Yes, Vance is a sellout. Not that they were asked for their take, but the archetypical folks depicted in Hillbilly Elegy contend, justifiably, that “Vance [is] not an authentic hillbilly or an example of the working class.”
Cassie Chambers Armstrong’s Aunt Ruth, for example.
Aunt Ruth didn’t think much of Vance’s endeavor. Her niece is an Appalachian and author of a redeeming tale, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains.
“Hillbilly Elegy’s portrayal of Appalachia,” explains Chambers, “is designed to elevate Vance above the community from which he came … it seeks to tell his story in a way that aligns with a simplistic rags-to-riches narrative. Think critically about how that narrative influences the way we are taught to think about poverty, progress, and identity.”
Chambers is perceptively correct. It’s cringe worthy — Uriah Heep slimy — but Vance all but advertises that the Indian-American Brahmin he wed has helped “rid him of his hillbilly ways.” To that end, he tells of a mild exchange with his wife: “Don’t make excuses for weakness. I didn’t get here by making excuses for failure,” he “hollers” at her.
These unremarkable, muted words Vance had with wife Usha Chilukuri he frames, self-servingly, as “the baggage of his tumultuous upbringing.” Wow!
Self-deprecation over nothing much at all amounts to very clever self-aggrandizement. Vance’s casuistry resembles a kind of Argument From Fake Modesty.
Indeed, in smug self-aggrandizement, Vance slimes his hillbilly relatives, even naming names. Credits and kudos go to the Chilukuris, wife Usha’s relatives, for “[teaching] him what a functional family looked like.”
From family unit to family unification policy: When discussing immigration, J. D. Vance is just as nimble. He utters the code words at the door of the Establishment, left and right, and in he goes. Sesame has opened.
What are some of the “Open Sesame” magical phrases that get one into polite company, conservative and progressive?
First comes the “moral” preening component: “All’s I’m saying, y’all, comes out of the goodness of my hillbilly heart.” Vance opposes the rot of America’s immigration reality simply out of the kindness of his heart: He is at pains to emphasize how he hates that “human traffickers take advantage of the desperate poor of Central America.”
After all, Vance is open, law-abiding, and properly diverse. (Vance’s marriage alone proves his PC credential; although adopting the Right Kind of Baby before running for office is highly recommended.)
Yet another part of the Vance celebrity seeking vaudeville is the incessant mention of his “working-class background.”
This reflex finds Vance at once eagerly pressing flesh “at roundtable[s]” with CEOs and “communications conglomerates,” during “masters of the universe” events, all the while moaning a lot about his disdain for them.
He mingles with millionaires under “duress” because he’s so very authentic.
A member of the gilded, conservative elite by any other name, our hoedown Hillbilly also loves to name-drop. Non-stop: While Vance forgot to brag directly in the Newsweek piece about having married an Indian-American lady, who “rid him of his hillbilly ways“; he brings her up surreptitiously when he touts his connections among conservative cognoscenti:
“… my friend (and my wife’s former boss) Brett Kavanaugh [of the] Supreme Court..”
For Vance’s second “Open-Sesame” password into polite company, allow me to excerpt from this writer’s “The Immigration Scene.” Written in 2006, it proves that not much has changed. Why vote? GOP can RIP:
Everyone (and his dog) currently concurs that we have no problem with legal immigration, only with the illegal variety. It’s now mandatory to pair an objection to the invasion of the American Southwest with an embrace of all forms of legal immigration.
So you’re clear: Vance opposes illegal immigration alone, even though its effects on the country are as pernicious as the legal and annual importation of over 1 million immigrants from India, China and the Third World.
All this misplaced compassion — day in and day out, on Fox News, too — is, frankly, nauseating. The job of American policy makers and the auxiliary punditry is not to flaunt their virtue to The World currently on its way to America, but to stick strictly to their mandate — and send them the hell home.
Trying to balance sharing the content with not scraping it from someone else’s blog ...
Because that was lip service. Did we ever get a secure border? That would be a resounding NO!
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