Understanding the American hillbilly

How does a little American boy born “hillbilly” escape the hills — heartlands of drug abuse, hair-trigger tempers, flatlined expectations, ill health and, in his case, five stepfathers and a mother who tried to kill him when he was 11 — and make something of himself?

J.D. Vance, Yale-educated lawyer and author of an extraordinary new memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, is 31 and I still worry his past will catch up with him. Will this good man make old bones?

He writes with cordite. His book is devoid of the quality I most distrust, sentimentality. He indicts his people, the Scots-Irish who left Appalachia and took the “hillbilly highway” to the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan) for jobs after the Second World War. There he was raised, savagely, in Middletown, Ohio.

Vance helps answer one newsy question: who are these poor and angry whites who threaten to vote for Donald Trump? And he studies another question that has always plagued me: why did a younger generation lose themselves to drugs while their parents generally did not?

Vance loved his grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, who rescued him in the way large multi-generational families do: by offering refuge. Papaw was a violent drunk until 1983; Mamaw, who suffered terribly at his hands, once set him on fire. They repaired their lives in time to save Vance, but he makes it clear that Mamaw, who nearly killed a man when she was 12, was a foul-mouthed scary woman. She was also her grandchildren’s salvation.

It’s hard to pick the lowest point in Vance’s life. It may have been the day his mother came home demanding a cup of his fresh urine so she could pass a drug test. Then again, Harvard was pretty raw too. An ex-Marine with a state university degree and no social skills, he was asked at a moneyed dinner if he wanted still or sparkling water. He ordered “sparkling,” though it sounded ludicrous, and then spit it out. “Something’s wrong with that water,” he protested. The waitress apologized and said she’d get another San Pellegrino. He was humiliated.

But there are different levels of pain. What hurts more, saying your mother’s a nurse when in fact she lost her job for stealing drugs and rollerblading though the hospital while high, or the constant state of terrified alertness in childhood that will make his heart race for the rest of his life? Or is it the sneering of a Yale professor about “remedial education” for primitives like him?

Hillbillies don’t succeed, Vance writes. He credits his grandparents, teachers, his aunt’s happy marriage, Marinetaught self-discipline and books. I would also mention his ability to be very hard on himself. Hillbillies tend not to do this, Vance writes.

And here he says harsh things that might alienate generous Canadians, but it’s his story to tell. “Too many young men (are) immune to hard work,” he writes, and they lie to themselves about their sparse work ethic. They disparage girls. Kids don’t try to succeed in school and parents don’t push them. His mother’s generation let themselves be told that drug addiction and alcoholism are a disease but Vance says much of it is a choice, a terrible choice. For why did Papaw quit drinking while Vance’s mother moved on to heroin?

They call themselves God-fearing but they don’t go to church, and churches stopped providing the social supports ( jobs, friendship and food) they need. Detached from society, they have little understanding of the norm and are animated by a “frenetic stress” that makes them behave irrationally. In November, Vance wrote in the Atlantic last month, Trump will offer them a social opioid, simple answers, an easy escape from pain.

“No single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America,” Vance writes. His elegy is sociological, he writes, “but also about psychology, community, culture and faith.” His grandparents were faithful, self-reliant and hardworking, but his mother’s cohort was “consumerist, isolated, angry and distrustful.”

Vance says there is no Rubik’s Cube solution to the problems of the American poor and quotes one White House expert: “But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins.”

I disagree, but then I’m Canadian and I give up on nothing and no one. But he’s right that the time to help is in childhood. “We hillbillies must wake the hell up.”

Hillbillies don’t succeed, J.D. Vance writes. He credits his grandparents, teachers, his aunt’s happy marriage, Marine-taught self-discipline and books. I would also mention his ability to be very hard on himself