Selections from Vance’s reworked ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ Trump edition
After deleting his old anti-Trump tweets, “Hillbilly Elegy” author and Senate candidate J.D. Vance has been on an apology tour. “I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy,” he told Fox News.
Neat! He repents of his error — the error was criticizing Donald Trump, in any way.
Vance has a busy schedule with running the currently third-most-successful Republican campaign for Ohio’s open Senate seat, so I have gone through “Hillbilly Elegy” for him to update the text in light of his new insights that Trump is right and he himself is wrong. Please let me know where to send this.
Where it currently reads, “Mom changed my name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel. ... Any old D name would have done, so long as it wasn’t Donald,” please substitute, “Any old D name would have done, as long as the most perfect and beautiful name a man could have was already being taken off the table. In later years, I would come to curse the fate that had severed me from this wonderful name, which I could have shared with the one president who really did understand everything that was going on in this country.”
After it says, “I thought about Papaw. ... He taught me that lack of knowledge and lack of intelligence were not the same. The former could be remedied with a little patience and a lot of hard work,” please add, “— but didn’t need to be, if you had Donald Trump’s gut instincts.”
And where it reads, “We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance,” please update to read: “We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: and it is! Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the truths we tell ourselves!”
Also on Obama here ... “But if a third of our community questions the president’s origin — despite all evidence to the contrary — it’s a good bet that the other conspiracies have broader currency than we’d like,” should now read, “But if a third of our community questions the president’s origin — despite all evidence to the contrary — it’s a good bet that they’ve been listening to Donald Trump, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as far as I can see!”
“But these problems of family, faith, and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist,” should be altered to read, “These problems of family, faith, and culture are like a Rubik’s Cube: something Donald Trump can solve easily, one-handed, probably without even looking!”
The afterword requires a little more massaging. It should definitely not read, “And despite all of my reservations about Donald Trump (I ended up voting third party), there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me.” It should probably say, “I had no reservations about Donald Trump and voted for him three times,” or, “I had some reservations about Donald Trump (was America ready for such greatness yet? Did it even deserve the kind of good government only he could give it?), but I quickly overcame them.”
And, last, where there is a long and loving description of “Mamaw,” crediting her constant support and wisdom with helping the author set his life on its upward trajectory and suggesting she could never be replaced, simply substitute “Mamaw” with “Donald J. Trump.”