RE: Hillbilly Elegy
December 2, 2020 at 9:45 am
(This post was last modified: December 2, 2020 at 9:53 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Here's a salient aspect of why Vances story might actually be true to him, but a strange exception to hillbilly culture.
He describes the decline of ohio industry and it's effect on the migrant whites who flocked to the area. He omits that the historic decline of those areas was precisely and intentionally due to that migration. People who had been, for centuries, exploited to the point of abject poverty were seen as safe alternatives to the striking and unionizing labor force - and they were. So they brought them in. Part of why the natives, as it were, rejected them and othered them was that they were very literally there to steal their jobs at the explicit request of their boss, for far less pay. This would be repeated again, in short order, replacing them and relocating factories even further into the impoverished south - and then ofc, beyond the shores of the us entirely.
At the time...hicks rednecks and hillbillies were commonly seen as more detestable than The Blacks, and only slightly less so than criminals..which they all were one way or another, anyway. This isn't because they were hillbillys, or because hillbillys saw themselves this way - but because they had ceased to be hillbillys and become migrant sub-white laborers. It's a tragic arc. They were no longer the people of the mattewan massacre - but far more likely to have sided with the pinkertons and the owning class. That became their driving ethos and subsequently the core thrust of contemporary right wing nutball shit.
Thing is, most of us didn't go that route - and it was only open for a brief time and there were just too many of us to leave and not enough of us who could. If Vance is accurately describing a culture in decline, it's his own, and pursuant to a very specific and very well studied migration in living memory. It's as different from hillbilly culture as it was from the industrial midwestern culture that rejected it, and which it...in turn... sabotaged. My wife recognizes his story and his politics from her childhood in ohio. My grandmother recognizes the story of migrant white labor from kentucky losing their jobs but from a full generation before ours (and a different state) and doesn't recognize his politics as anything that any hillbilly she knew held. I think she'd even agree with him about the sorry state of those migrants, she decided that shit wasn't for her after all, and moved to the deep south. I only recognize his politics. I was born in kentucky, grew up all over the south, came back to kentucky with my gaggle of heathens to work the land, lol.
He describes the decline of ohio industry and it's effect on the migrant whites who flocked to the area. He omits that the historic decline of those areas was precisely and intentionally due to that migration. People who had been, for centuries, exploited to the point of abject poverty were seen as safe alternatives to the striking and unionizing labor force - and they were. So they brought them in. Part of why the natives, as it were, rejected them and othered them was that they were very literally there to steal their jobs at the explicit request of their boss, for far less pay. This would be repeated again, in short order, replacing them and relocating factories even further into the impoverished south - and then ofc, beyond the shores of the us entirely.
At the time...hicks rednecks and hillbillies were commonly seen as more detestable than The Blacks, and only slightly less so than criminals..which they all were one way or another, anyway. This isn't because they were hillbillys, or because hillbillys saw themselves this way - but because they had ceased to be hillbillys and become migrant sub-white laborers. It's a tragic arc. They were no longer the people of the mattewan massacre - but far more likely to have sided with the pinkertons and the owning class. That became their driving ethos and subsequently the core thrust of contemporary right wing nutball shit.
Thing is, most of us didn't go that route - and it was only open for a brief time and there were just too many of us to leave and not enough of us who could. If Vance is accurately describing a culture in decline, it's his own, and pursuant to a very specific and very well studied migration in living memory. It's as different from hillbilly culture as it was from the industrial midwestern culture that rejected it, and which it...in turn... sabotaged. My wife recognizes his story and his politics from her childhood in ohio. My grandmother recognizes the story of migrant white labor from kentucky losing their jobs but from a full generation before ours (and a different state) and doesn't recognize his politics as anything that any hillbilly she knew held. I think she'd even agree with him about the sorry state of those migrants, she decided that shit wasn't for her after all, and moved to the deep south. I only recognize his politics. I was born in kentucky, grew up all over the south, came back to kentucky with my gaggle of heathens to work the land, lol.
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