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[quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele]Has anyone read "Hillbilly Elegy" and interested in talking about it? I just finished the book and have very mixed feelings. It was an interesting memoir, but I don't feel like it lived up to its billing. I don't think that it shed a lot of light on the greater community of "hillbillies". While it was good at highlighting problems, I would have liked to have seen more analysis of the causes of those problems and ideas for solutions.

I'd be interested to hear thoughts about this book from those who are well-read in similar literature about the black community, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates' books. I think there could be some interesting similarities.

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I haven't read the book, but I'd be interested in talking about it based on the interview with JD Vance that I did read. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/

Just a cursory guess, but I think the core of the problem is a culture that's been socially and politically groomed over generations to not complain or ask for anything in return for providing low-cost labor in very grueling and dangerous occupations.  Steel and coal industries leave their labor force with lifelong health problems in the best of conditions and high risk of terrifying death in the best.  How do you keep people coming back to work when the empirically bad effects are all around them?

Well, pride helps. Pride that you're not dependent (though you are); pride that you're not minority and/or immigrant; pride in roots and tradition; pride in a loosely defined freedom and independence to live life by your own terms.  Pride in being exactly who you are, where you are, because there's little chance those things can be changed.

Again, just making a quick guess and it's based on Vance's first answer in that interview.  [/quote]

I don't know if Vance had the best press agent in the history of press agents, people who reviewed his book and interviewed him didn't actually read it, or those people have never read any other book. But, I strongly disagree with this part of the introduction to that interview:

"You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square."

My feeling was that this is exactly what the book failed to do and other posts in this thread seem to agree with me. I think, for instance, that Jim Webb's book "Born Fighting" did a much better job of this.

Your idea that they were "socially and politically groomed" is interesting. Both Vance and Webb stress how much this group -- "hillbillies" to Vance, "Scots-Irish" to Webb --  places tremendous value on independence. Failing to integrate and adapt to change as other groups did, left them with few options. So, it may be less that they were groomed for coal and steel than that those were their only choices. Or, a combination of the two.

But, you hit on the biggest disappointment I had with the book. Vance describes the things he experienced and suggest that those experiences are widely shared among that community, but he doesn't do much to explain what factors led to the community having those experiences. It's almost simplistic such as: they were poor, families argued and fought a lot, people got divorced, children weren't supported, they took drugs, rinse and repeat (except for a few like Vance who broke the cycle). It seems to me that there is a lot more to it than that.

Then, there seems to be things that Vance avoids discussing except in cursory fashion. His family was attracted to Middletown due to jobs in the steel factory. The American steel industry was nearly wiped out as a result of international competition. Vance discusses how the company was bought by a Japanese company and how Middletown suffered a tremendous economic downturn but he doesn't do much to connect these dots. I suspect that because Vance politically is very tied to neocons who value globalization above almost all else, he is reluctant to dwell much on the downside of globalization. As is evident in the interview to which you linked, he doesn't like the idea that "things have been done to" hillbillies and they are nothing but helpless pawns. But, I think that like it or not, if their jobs disappeared because of decisions made in Washington, DC or Tokyo, there is no escaping the fact that there is a lot of truth in that. 
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Wow.  I grew up about 20 minutes' drive from Middletown - I didn't know that was his upbringing as well.  It's about halfway between Dayton and Cincinnati, two Ohio cities that have suffered the effects of globalization but have still come out exceptionally well compared to others in the rust belt.  There  are closed down factories, but also crops of newly built McMansions for the workforce flocking to academia, healthcare, corporate regional and HQ offices, etc.  Some are struggling, but most in the area are doing quite well.

I'm AA, my parents are from Texas and settled in Ohio when my dad started working in the 60s as an engineer at the air force base there.  So of course, my experience is completely different from the hillbilly culture that is definitely settled in the area.

But I think there's something to what he says about no one paying attention to the suffering going on those communities.  Because it's true.  I work for HHS, at an agency that's about getting health care to underserved communities, and he's absolutely right that rural america is waaaaay down on the priority list, even while the problems there can't be called anything but acute, dire, crisis and all other synonyms you can think of.  One-fifth of Americans live in rural areas and the majority live in suburbs but it boggles me the way people still refer to "inner cities" as the crux of social and economic problems.  Maybe what needs to happen is just new blood, new ideas, new mindset from people who are able to get out and get perspective but still want to return to their roots to solve problems. [/quote]

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