When education saves a life
JD Vance was headed for trouble when his grandmother intervened and he got serious about school. Other parts of his story are less clearcut, finds Eleanor Black.
Growing up, it seemed JD Vance’s fate was sealed. He was poor, his people were uneducated and felt hopeless, violence, and drug abuse were rife in the communities where he lived. His mother was a drug addict and utterly unreliable as a parent or daughter. Friends were addicted to cheap booze and petty crime, squandering their best years in jail.
Yet Vance won a scholarship to Yale, became a lawyer, and is now an executive at a Silicon Valley investment firm. He lives in one of the most affluent parts of the United States.
His first book, Hillbilly Elegy, is really a homage to his grandmother, Mawmaw, the acid-tongued woman who made sure that he made something of himself despite having very little money or an education herself. When she took Vance into her home, she saved his life. It really is as stark as that.
Vance writes affectingly about the poverty of the Appalachian region where his family still lives, and the devastation wrought when the local mill shut down and people became dependent on welfare or they were forced to leave.
But he also lays blame at the feet of those people he believes cheat the welfare system and are loathe to take responsibility for their own lives. He is one of those formerly underprivileged people who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, was showered with praise, and now expects everyone else to do the same. But not everyone has a Mawmaw.
‘‘Jackson is undoubtedly full of the nicest people in the world,’’ he writes of his grandparents’ home town. ‘‘It is also full of drug addicts and at least one man who can find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them. It is unquestionably beautiful, but its beauty is obscured by the environmental waste and loose trash that scatters the countryside.’’
In the closing months of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Hillbilly Elegy was used to explain why the American working poor voted for a
Vance lays blame at the feet of those people he believes cheat the welfare system and are loathe to take responsibility for their own lives.
blowhard billionaire who had never shown any interest in their plight. Trump promised to Make America Great Again, and somehow that was enough. Feeling disenfranchised and left behind, the working poor were willing to try their luck with a man who cynically harked back to the faraway time when their communities prospered and their children thrived.
I don’t think this book offers any such explanation for Trump, whose ascendancy seems to me a calamitous coming together of racism, xenophobia, sexism, and reverence for celebrity – but it does offer a sobering glimpse at a sector of the population that has been abandoned and deserves better.
Its message is not confined to America either.