Hillbilly Elegy

[Spongebob]

This same story has been told, more than once or twice.  

Never read  tis or seen the movie.  One of my hillbilly grannies read angelas ashes and told me it wasn't worth a shit, lol..so I never ended up getting around to any of his stuff.  Vances story seeks to explain what he sees as the decline of rural culture by it's loss of manliness and old timey religion - by the damage wrought by drug addicts and the countless poor masses who are only poor because they lack the wit or wherewithal to bootstrap themselves up and out - too busy beating their wives and children, and whatnot.

IDK if that's what Frank McCourt wrote about, but if so...I guess my hillbilly granny had him pegged - and...again because this is very important, there's nothing in there that screams out appalachian experience to me.  Seems like he came from a shitty family and he didn't quite escape whatever shitty ideas his shitty experiences lead him to.   All of this while stoking the flames of white victimization in a bid to insist that any other thing must explain the bigoted lurch of rightwing america.  What I saw were good families working hard and making good decisions and watching the american dream slip further and further away.  It's not that we didn't know people like the characters in vances story..just that they were the aberration and the cautionary tale and the thing we had to be thankful for all at once.  His story might explain him and what he believes..and it was very clearly intended to serve this purpose - but it has nothing to do with us.

Brutal honesty, it's a story about welfare queens and rural savages in need of conservative civilizing laundered as a primer on americans to a gullible and willing audience.  Many of whom, left and right, have wholly swallowed this particular flavor of koolaid looooong ago.  It's uniquely gruesome in that the very ideology which the author is selling is the force which has palpably victimized those americans and now courts them as though only it has their interests at heart.  I'd say he gets one thing right precisely because he gets so much wrong.  Rural americans own choices are the heart of their troubles - and that choice has been to sign off on the fantasy being sold by people like Vance.

But, you know.....they got glenn close to do it - and didn't mention any of that, so.

My extreme apologies, the book and film I meant to refer to was, indeed, "Angela's Ashes".  One major difference here is that McCourt was an English major, so his ability to spin a yarn may be greater than Vance's.  'tis was a later book he wrote, but not quite as good as the first.  It's been decades since I read either.  But, yeah, the book was about how many (not all) families in early 20th century Ireland were impoverished and how it affected their life.  And yeah, there was an abusive father involved.  I never read it to be saying, "hey, look at all the pitiful Mick's."  In McCourt's tale, his mother was the one holding the family together and Frank eventually found success as a teacher in the US and later as an author.  As you said, there are many such stories and I don't see them as offensive as long as it's not implicit that the people must be pathetic due to their nature, which I never got from Hillbilly Elegy either.  If it's suggested that circumstances have transpired to create a world where they are struggling, then I can't fault the work.  And I may read the book and see for myself how Vance uses his story to explain the Trump phenomenon.  Whether he is right or wrong, he is certainly right that such a phenomenon exists and it appears that Trump's promises, no matter how outlandish or ridiculous, are what drives people to him.  I have read part of the book "White Trash", published in 2016, which goes much deeper into the history of poverty and politics in the US.  I got distracted and put it down but now I think its time to finish it.  I think Vance's book might fit within this book as a paragraph or two.