15 ms·

Hillbillies Need No Elegy

129 points by zigzaggy 7y ago

temp-dude-87844 7y ago
These sorts of elaborate rebuttals, like the article or the art project it references, aren't that different from the works of outsiders that they seek to prove wrong. It seemingly is the case that Appalachia attracts a kind of journalist-meets-artist who finds plenty of material for a culture-tinged exposé of somewhat-thoughtful poverty and hardship porn, but a curated photoset of Sides of Appalachia You May Not Know is aimed at the level of The New Yorker, and not something relatable to everyday folk in the suburbs or the Midwest. It does little to dissuade the notion that Appalachia still has an odd mystique, which is a disservice to region. The fact is, Appalachia is largely "just" economically depressed region like Northwest Kansas or the Mississippi Floodplain or the drive from Tucson to El Paso, where most jobs are retail and government and the best jobs are in mineral extraction or transportation or industry, but far fewer than in times past. Transportation is a pain but yet it's crisscrossed by critical routes, and life there is pretty normal for rural America. Really, there's only a handful of areas in the US where you can ride the a boom if you time it right, everywhere else things are just okay. In some places you have fewer options. People try to get by, or try to leave. It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it.
- bitexploder 7y ago
  I grew up in the Deep South, a related cousin to Appalachia. I spent more than 30 years in the south. I have spent a lot of time in Appalachia, hiking, meeting locals. It isn’t a stretch to say “I get it”. I read Hillbily Elegy. This piece does little to change my mind about my own view point. There are parts of the culture that are worthwhile and valuable (to me) and parts I can leave quite easily. For me it is the almost resentful pride in their own ignorance of the rest of the country, and even the world, that was so hard to accept. You can paste over that, all these layers of complexity and beautiful mountain vignettes, but under that there are elements that are difficult to accept for me. There is a lot of stubborn pride for heritage that does the culture no good and I never understood it. Also, Appalachia is not unique to most other rural areas, they just have nicer scenery. Poverty is what it is and it does what it does to people. You either get out of it or it eats you. There is nothing romantic about it. There is no great stoic philosophy providing Appalachian poverty with any special resistance to poverty and being mostly ignored by the rest of the country. I don’t know, it isn’t some terrible reality to suffer through, but it is more tragic than anything else. Maybe this is the inevitable view point I have adopted as I have become more outsider to the culture I was raised in over the years. It isn’t all bad, I will still visit, hike, and enjoy the natural beauty there, but the people suffer like any other under-educated poor people do. There is no number of voices and view points that can change that. I appreciate what the author is trying to do, they must surely understand the culture well, but it is a big miss for me.
  - throw0101a 7y ago
    > Poverty is what it is and it does what it does to people. You either get out of it or it eats you. Perhaps the people with the compulsion to leave have already done so? Kind of what is being call "The Big Sort", where (politically) like-minded people seem to be congregating to the same neighborhoods: * https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/10/the-big-sort-revisited/504830/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/10/the-big-sort-revisite... * https://www.economist.com/united-states/2008/06/19/the-big-sort https://www.economist.com/united-states/2008/06/19/the-big-s... Something similar happening to the ambition-minded? (Someone once remarked / joked that perhaps America is so stereotypically optimistic is perhaps all the people who left the Old Country for the New World were probably the more adventurous, go-go types, and those that stayed behind were more chill.)
    - humanrebar 7y ago
      This is my take. For all the talk of international brain drain, we don't have a narrative for the more local equivalent. Similarly, we worry about disrupting natural biomes through deforestation or overfishing, but we don't think about sustainability applied to human communities, with a few exceptions (reservations get some attention, though not sufficient attention). What do we do? For one, I don't think it's hard to make an ethical case for remote first workplaces.
      - magduf 7y ago
        More remote work isn't going to make a significant number of people want to stay in these uneducated, economically-depressed locales. They aren't just leaving for the work, they're leaving to get away from the local culture.
        sudosteph 7y ago
        There are generally some more educated pockets within these regions that are actually quite desirable, but lack economic development. These spots, like Asheville NC (the place I ultimately would like to settle down in) are unfortunately quite expensive due to low housing supply and people from out-of-state moving in. But I've got a remote gig now, so I just need to save up more. Personally, I will be happy to be part of a culture that values friendliness, ingenuity, sweet tea and banjo music. Fwiw, I tried moving away to Seattle, but despite my educational attainment and liberal leanings, I found that I just prefer NC. There's something to be said for living somewhere you don't feel like an outsider. After 5 years in Seattle, I still couldn't lose that feeling.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Sure, but Vance is more "wrong" than his detractors are. He's the one who sees all poor people, and all poor people alike.
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    Wrong in what regard? I found nothing wrong with Vance’s book. Having a similar family background to Vance, I think he has a great outlook on the matter.
    - moorhosj 7y ago
      I think his biggest miss was failing to connect the region to the rest of the country. He could have easily compared Appalachia to Rust Belt cities facing urban decay but never made the connection. It could have made the story of the region more approachable to more people. It seemed so obvious to me how the areas are linked by economic circumstances, environmental degradation, poor education levels, distinct culture and problems with drug addiction.
      - humanrebar 7y ago
        So you wanted him to write a different book? Maybe he had different goals and that's fine.
        _dczq 7y ago
        Not what I said at all. I thought there was an opportunity to make a larger connection between what has happened in the Appalachian towns he focuses on and larger Rust Belt cities who face much of the same issues.
        humanrebar 7y ago
        He took other opportunities. Not sure why that's a failing. Someone else can still write the book you want.
      - 7y ago
- nrf1 7y ago
  > It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina are key swing states. That's the primary reason Appalachia gets so much attention. This electoral reality goes all the way back to the war on poverty.
  - sudosteph 7y ago
    Yes, but the Appalacian contingent is not a majority in any of those states. They just are historically less anti-union than other rural areas (while still socially conservative) so they can swing a bit. Overall the big cities and suburbs are usually the deciding factor there. If anything, Appalachian are uniquely under-represented nationally. While the region as a whole contains nearly 25 million people, WV is the only state to have two Appalacian senators. I think TN has one as well, but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention.
    - krapp 7y ago
      >but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention They also serve (willingly or not) as exemplars held up by Republicans, particularly in the populist ideology of Trump supporters, of those "real Americans" who have been betrayed by globalism and progressivism, and to further the narrative of an intractable cultural and political divide having formed between the rural right and urban left (and to contrast the cultural and ethnic purity of the former against the corrupting influence of multiculturalism and secularism among the latter.)
    - TomMckenny 7y ago
      >If anything, Appalachian are uniquely under-represented nationally. While the region as a whole contains nearly 25 million people, WV is the only state to have two Appalacian senators. I think TN has one as well, but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention. Technically that is 50% more senators than California with twice the population.
- thebooktocome 7y ago
  > a curated photoset of Sides of Appalachia You May Not Know is aimed at the level of The New Yorker, and not something relatable to everyday folk in the suburbs or the Midwest. Midwesterner here. You don't speak for me. JD Vance doesn't speak for me. Try listening for once.
  - asark 7y ago
    I took it to mean not relatable because we go "what's the big deal, looks like a hillier version of what and who I can see if I find a state highway and drive 20 minutes", here in the Midwest. A jab at the New Yorker more than the Midwest. That's my charitable reading based on the tone of the rest of the post, anyway—but I could be wrong.
    - nrf1 7y ago
      Exactly. The entire paragraph after that sentence confirms exactly this reading... charity not necessary.
      - asark 7y ago
        Yeah, just leaving some wiggle room to account for my own stupidity, since it looks like at least one person read it differently.
  - bshoemaker 7y ago
    Lol stfu
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't take personal swipes or lash back at another comment, even if it is wrong or seems so. Doing that only makes things worse. It doesn't help. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- whatshisface 7y ago
  There is seriously not that big a difference between the reading level of random comments on the internet and the reading level of the New Yorker, or of the average thinkpiece. Self-styled intellectuals love to pretend that they are writing in a sophisticated secret code language, but that hasn't been true since they quit Latin.
  - madhadron 7y ago
    And, to be fair, English is a vastly more sophisticated language with layers of nuance that constitute codes than Latin.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      English more sophisticated than Latin? At nuance?
    - onlydeadheroes 7y ago
      Did you ever study Latin?
      - madhadron 7y ago
        Yes. My parents taught me. They studied it at Cambridge. I'm not talking about inflection. English doesn't use inflection except vestigially, though our grammar is every bit as subtle (compare English verb tenses to those of a Romance language). I'm talking about the employment of reference, accent, dialect...
    - anthk 7y ago
      Hahahaahahaa!! The Romances can have hugely brutal nested sentences as nothing. Would you dare to read Don Quixote in the original and non-modernized Spanish? I think not. That book mixed a parody of Medieval Spanish and the pre-Enlightentment era one. The discovering of America put the Church on a lower-closer to the Earth place and became the roots of modern Humanism. Don Quixote is a pun on the Dark Ages, myth and religion, compared it to Sancho Panza who is a metaphor of the almost Enlightened humanistic/pragmatic folk who doesn't believe on myths and doesn't have crazy religious-like hallucinations on giants. Trust me, a lot of grammar from the crazy knight is stilL¡l valid today even if looks outdated. Heck, it already was outdated, as I said Don Quixote was the old fart pun from the 1600s. English' grammar is a joke compared to the versatibility of Romances. And, even forther back in time, Latin used similar traits.
- smt88 7y ago
  > life there is pretty normal for rural America I've lived in Appalachia my entire life (West Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New York). Although I can't generalize about the people of either the Midwest or Appalachia, there are some big differences between rural Appalachia and some other rural places. 1) Landscape. Due to the difficulty of building roads, some Appalachian places (closer to WV and KY) were extremely isolated until the 20th century. This affected culture, education, wealth, and industry. It's a huge factor in the region even today. 2) Agriculture. In most of Appalachia, you can't have a massive corn plantation. You rarely see a large field of anything at all. Most of the exports are capital-intensive and extractive (mining or timber), and the result is that there's a pattern of wealthy outsiders plundering the resources and leaving locals with little of the gain. 3) Stereotypes. A strong Midwestern accent (from, let's say, rural MI or PA) does not have the same connotation as a strong Appalachian accent (from KY or WV). The stereotypes of the regions just aren't the same, and they do affect people applying for jobs.
  - culturestate 7y ago
    > The stereotypes of the regions just aren't the same, and they do affect people applying for jobs. I've been around motorsports most of my life and I used to see this all the time at racetracks in America. Even in NASCAR country, lots of people assume the "good ol' boy" accent means a person is just a shade-tree mechanic even if they're the most well-educated person in the garage.
    - Frondo 7y ago
      Heh, funnily enough, a few years ago I was at a rodeo with some friends, and this was in rural Oregon. One of the announcers was a radio personality on some country station in the Portland area (I think -- something like that, at least). For most of the rodeo he spoke with a thick drawl, obviously going for the "good ol' boy" vibe. A few times, he slipped up and spoke with a very plain Portland/PNW accent. It was jarring when I heard it but he went right back to the good ol' boy accent and I don't know how much anyone else noticed. But it came across like it was all an affectation, for the reasons you described.
- jpfed 7y ago
  >but a curated photoset of Sides of Appalachia You May Not Know is aimed at the level of The New Yorker, and not something relatable to everyday folk in the suburbs or the Midwest FYI I'm a Midwesterner and problems relating to pictures isn't a regional trait that I'm aware of. A picture of X is in pretty direct correspondence to the visual experience of X itself, so it turns out pictures are pretty easy to digest! If you're a Midwesterner, you should definitely give pictures a try. If you're not a Midwesterner, it's possible that meeting a few more of them would change your idea of what they can relate to.
- btrautsc 7y ago
  I like this comment.
frumiousirc 7y ago
47 entries in uMatrix, a banner shows, no visible content. Today's web is garbage.
huffmsa 7y ago
> The room was packed with intellectuals, artists, donors, students, the president of West Virginia University and the dean of its law school. Nary a coal miner, nor axeman to be found in this ivory tower meeting.
- sebular 7y ago
  Yeah, that was the point of the sentence. A man who wasn't Appalachian was telling a room full of educated Appalachian intellectuals that Appalachians are happy making 24k a year because they don't "need to show off". Also, it wasn't an "ivory tower" (such a limp, worn-out descriptor) meeting, it was a book launch, and it was literally open to the public.
scarejunba 7y ago
I've got to tell you: every subculture of humans has fractal complexity that is not captured by any representation. We're reduced to using blind men's descriptions of elephants. Nothing can be adequately explained in any book, not Appalachia and not the subculture of people in a semi-urban locality outside of Kandy. This is natural, so we use shortcuts as heuristic predictive tools: so the Russians throw numbers at war, the Chinese steal your secrets, the Appalachians are poor, the New Yorkers rude, the Japanese clean and neat. And the San Frannigans bristle at that demonym while they shit themselves in the street. So, no, the fact that there is complexity and uniqueness in culture is normal. It is not interesting. The only value is what you extract as the weak trendline. Imagine a scatterplot with loads of overlapping red and blue dots, but there are more blue dots above some line than red dots, by a considerable number. Most of them will interact, some red dot may even be higher than any blue dots, but you will be reduced to the fact that blue is higher than red on the graph. It is a weak decisioning tool because the complexity is both incompressible and useless for prediction.
- SKILNER 7y ago
  > every subculture of humans has fractal complexity that is not captured by any representation Yes, and the facile reduction of that complexity is the source for much of the political stupidity making us miserable. Also, thank you, Internet, for spreading it around so prolifically.
  - dash2 7y ago
    Counterpoint: "fuck nuance". https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf "I do claim that the more we tend to value nuance as such—that is, as a virtue to be cultivated, or as the first thing to look for when assessing arguments—the more we will tend to slide toward one or more of three nuance traps. First is the ever more detailed, merely empirical description of the world. This is the nuance of the fine-grain. It is a rejection of theory masquerading as increased accuracy...."
- hitekker 7y ago
  >So, no, the fact that there is complexity and uniqueness in culture is normal. It is not interesting. The only value is what you extract as the weak trendline. Imagine a scatterplot with loads of overlapping red and blue dots, but there are more blue dots above some line than red dots, by a considerable number. Most of them will interact, some red dot may even be higher than any blue dots, but you will be reduced to the fact that blue is higher than red on the graph. It is a weak decisioning tool because the complexity is both incompressible and useless for prediction. There is wisdom in your words.
50208 7y ago
Seriously, if "Appalachia" is doing so great let's stop taking from wealthier states and redirecting to these poor ones. Let them clean up their broken down coal mines and polluted water resources. They can handle all the opium addicts and disability deadbeats. They should be able to prop up their own economies without handouts and programs from wealthier parts of the country. Let them continue their war against the "War on Coal". Maybe they can eat their coal. And don't get me started on the litter pretty much everywhere and trash dumped in every river of my home state (KY). I'm sure they will eventually handle that too.
- dang 7y ago
  Regional flamewar isn't ok here, just like nationalistic flamewar or race flamewar or other flamewars. Could you please not post like this to HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - 50208 7y ago
    Isn't this what the article "Hillbillies Need No Elegy" is about? Isn't this about their response to a book about the region? I grew up in the region and this is my experience.
    - dang 7y ago
      Your experience is welcome, but you need to actually share your experience. That's very different from posting a putdown rant about a region and the people who live there. The fact that you grew up there is relevant to what you're saying, of course. But it's not relevant to whether your comment broke the site guidelines. Internet forums can't handle that level of nuance, and a comment like this is going to lead to a big old flamewar by default.
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
This is important, not because of Appalachia but because of art itself. As a history buff, I have a difficult time watching many "based on a true story" movies or movies claiming to represent some important person or event in history. It's for the same reason: people consume information through narrative, and narrative forces reality into predefined tracks. This means that any art form claiming to represent a people, region, person, or event must necessarily be lying to you. The better the art the more likely the lies are big ones. And so storytellers are forced to lie, both by drastically-reducing scope and by smoothing out the edges. Then they consolidate characters, generalize over things that are not part of the narrative. They find a hero. They bump the contrast up a bit to make the narrative consumption more enjoyable. I love this, I love art and storytelling, but it means that there are great masses of people who don't know jack squat about a ton of topics that they think they do. I grew up here. I've traveled all over, spending quite a bit of time in SF and other very cosmopolitan places, but this is home. If I were forced to scope it down, I'd probably start with the mountains, then the coal mines, then the Scots-Irish cultural backdrop. The writer made an astute point when they mentioned all the outsiders passing through and screwing us over in various ways for their own selfish reasons. That's been a persistent theme, but it is slowly dying off. There's also the tent revival culture, but that's also going away. The only other generality I'd add if I were scoping down a story about this place is the stereotype of the ornery eccentric. This character has been played up for comic relief over the years, many times making them out to be simpletons. Instead, there are a lot of PhD-level folks who just don't give a damn about society and don't want to. They're nice enough. They just want to be left alone. You find that plenty of other places as well, but Appalachia has a long history of those folks and we tend to cherish them, even if we're making fun of them. Andrew Jackson almost beat a man to death with his cane after he tried to assassinate him (His gun misfired. He grabbed a backup. It also misfired. Jackson commenced to beating on him and had to be pulled off). After the Civil War, Ewell went back to his home, picked back up his law practice, and started writing books about what a bunch of jackasses all those people who misunderstood the war were. We always wave at people here: the best way to tell if people are from far away is when they don't wave. Had a neighbor once that when I waved at him he would make various obscene gestures and curse. He just wanted to be left alone. I wouldn't live anywhere else, and it's not because I haven't tried out a bunch of other places. There's something about the mountains that keep calling me back. I don't know what.
gffyfnhdv 7y ago
“Morgantown, West Virginia [...] We were in the heart of Appalachia“ BS! Morgantown is definitely not the heart of Appalachia: - It’s only 9 mi into WV! - has population that doubles during the school semester - has three or four federal agencies (FBI, NETL, NIOSH) - showered with federal and state largess (thank you senator Byrd) - has traffic jams worthy of a city with 10x it’s population - has one of my favorite restaurants in the US - has a significant private sector economy (Mylan, for one) -if I recall, technically it didn’t have a recession in ‘08. I’ve lived in Morgantown for a while. And while I certainly caught a glimpse of Appalachia, it certainly isn’t the heart. Maybe it’s about as redneck as the president of WVU dares to venture.
- RegBarclay 7y ago
  I agree. I'm originally from Charleston and have always said that it's not like the rest of WV. I'd say the real heart of Appalachia is Pikeville KY.
  - atwebb 7y ago
    Well, Hillbilly Bear is the representative picture for Pikeville on Google Maps which is a vote in your favor.
  - gffyfnhdv 7y ago
    Btw, I’m not from Appalachia, I just did a post-doc at WVU. Beautiful state and people.
- panzagl 7y ago
  The article also has pictures of Asheville and Berea, the former famous for it's ties to the super-rich, the latter a long time artists' colony. Was there even a picture of a trailer in the article? Or a church?
  - gffyfnhdv 7y ago
    “... or a church” +1
- 7y ago
golemotron 7y ago
The best way to understand what makes Appalachia what it is culturally, is to read _Albion's Seed_. The people who ended up there came from parts of Britain that required extreme self-sufficiency and had no real functional government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-se...
- sudosteph 7y ago
  I'd argue the best way would be to travel there and read actual histories from local sources. While it's nice to imagine a simple root cause to everything - it's not enough. When my great-grandparents settled in Appalachia about 100 years ago, they did it to find opportunity and escape the terrible working conditions of cotton mills. That side of the family are religious democrats who support unions and new-deal style economic reform and public education. They and their kids integrated culturally, most of them never left and never plan to. Their story is not an uncommon one, their desire for better government support is not out of the norm, and it does nobody any good to propagate a myth saying their culture of self-sufficency was decided 300 years ago when it was actually developed as a necessity after continuously being ignored. Cultures grow and Appalachian culture is no exception - we need to get past this shallow type of categorization based on original settlers.
  - 50208 7y ago
    Yes, but don't travel to Asheville or Morgantown ... go to Elkhorn City or Ashland, Ky ... or Nitro, WV. Bring your own water.
ixtli 7y ago
“The perception that mountain folk like to be poor serves someone — but it’s not the poor mountain folk. The representation of Appalachia as all white is not only inaccurate, but it preserves a false and destructive ideal of imaginary “pure white stock.” Images of decay and absence allow those in power to turn away from a place that has been forgotten, but has not disappeared. The narrow ideas that circulate about this broad place do active harm.” Brilliant.
- danesparza 7y ago
  I'm assuming the commentary is about this book: https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy-Memoir-Family-Culture/dp/0062300555 https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy-Memoir-Family-Culture... This book is specifically written from one (white guy's) point of view -- somebody who grew up in the area. I'm not sure how the ideas that circulate about this place do active harm. Most (if not all) accounts I've heard about this place are personal accounts. The truth from people who have lived or traveled there. Sometimes the truth hurts. Denying it's truthful isn't helping anybody.
  - mbreese 7y ago
    It’s right in the first lines of the article. “In the new book “Appalachian Reckoning,” dozens of mountain voices combine to talk back to J.D. Vance’s best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy.” Today, an exclusive story from its co-editor and a powerful essay (which involves Granny, her .38 pistol, and some coal trucks) excerpted from the book.” Part of the point of the article (which was very good) was that there is not singular truth about a place a vast and varied as Appalachia. This new book seems to be much more than a commentary on Hillbilly Elegy.
camelite 7y ago
It's really bizarre the lengths to which the author goes to weave the "criticism by outsiders" motif into a critique which ostensibly targets a born-and-bred Appalacian. Three full introductory paragraphs about the guy who says “The thing I like about Appalachians is that they don’t need much to be happy. They’re content with making $24,000 year. They’re not showing off...” A massive full-screen width "When outsiders tell the story" Two long paragraphs introducing Vance without mentioning where he's from. A criticism of the Netflix adaption as "filmmakers from elsewhere will put[ting] their visual stamp on the region." 2 long paragraphs complaining about outsiders defining its territorial extent. 2 paragraphs explaining how politicians and outside media represent it. It goes on to promote it's own take on the region, unsurprisingly dominated by artists, activists and academics. But the force and worth of Vance's take would be ZERO if he was an outsider. They don't, of course, lie at any point about Vance's background, but it's a flagrantly dishonest critique nonetheless. If the other commenter here is correct about Morganstown being only kind of half-Appalacian, as opposed to their claim of hailing from the heart of Appalacia, that really just puts the cherry on top.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  But the force and worth of Vance's take would be ZERO if he was an outsider. JD Vance was born and raised in Middletown OH. This is far SW Ohio, on the border with Indiana. (It was something of a surprise to me that any part of Ohio is considered Appalachian, but then I've spent most of my Ohio time in Toledo. [0]) There are hills, but those hills are not the Appalachians. JD Vance is from the Midwest. Has he actually claimed to be Appalachian? As far as I can tell he has claimed to be a "hillbilly", which is fine but hardly limited to Ohio or the Appalachians. My neighbors and I in the Ozarks have at least as strong a claim to the term, but we don't seem to get as uptight about this stuff as the folks back East get. [0] https://lookingatappalachia.org/region https://lookingatappalachia.org/region
  - jcburns 7y ago
    The southeastern portion of the state has (in what I’ve read) traditionally been considered part of Appalachia. Geophysically, it’s simple: the one-third or so of Ohio that wasn’t flattened by the glaciers. It’s rolling, increasingly hilly as you get down to the Ohio River. I went to school at Ohio University in Athens, and a bunch of classes there consider Appalachia a part of their studies and focus. I read Hillbilly Elegy when it came out and my first reaction was “hey, wait, Middletown is really more blue collar, rust belt.” My second reaction is “boy, Vance sure is willing to speak for a huge geographic area that he’s at best only on the edge of.” But to the Bitter Southerner piece, I want to say that the whole “you have to be from a place to talk about a place” thesis has, for me, been as wobbly as anything Vance puts out. So, what, born there? And the deeper inside the geographic boundaries, the better? Nah. But maybe the author (of the Bitter piece) makes a stronger point that ANY generalization of people tied to a geographic area is weak, shallow, insufficient by definition. People will surprise you. (That’s my generalization.)
psychometry 7y ago
Ignorant and under-uneducated people are susceptible to misinformation, fraud, and con men. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about Amway, predatory lenders, or Donald Trump. Let's stop beating around the bush and pretend it's anything other than bigotry and ignorance leading these unwashed masses to worship the giant orange baby with the golden toilet.
- ubertaco 7y ago
  That you went with an angry post about Donald Trump on an article that doesn't mention him once (or mention politics much at all, really) is telling. Your stereotypes are showing. Perhaps read through the article, rather than jumping at a headline? You might come away with the impression that it could be worthwhile to meet "these unwashed masses" and find out that they're people too, with just as valid a viewpoint as yours (regardless of whether you agree with it).
harimau777 7y ago
I understand where the author is coming from with wanting to depict a more diverse/nuanced view of Appalachia. However, I think that Hillbilly Elegy has been influential based specifically on insight it gives into why the region supported someone like Trump. The author may be correct that Hillbilly Elegy is incorrect; however, since the article doesn't present an alternative explanation I'm not sure that it is very useful.

129 points by zigzaggy 7y ago

These sorts of elaborate rebuttals, like the article or the art project it references, aren't that different from the works of outsiders that they seek to prove wrong. It seemingly is the case that Appalachia attracts a kind of journalist-meets-artist who finds plenty of material for a culture-tinged exposé of somewhat-thoughtful poverty and hardship porn, but a curated photoset of Sides of Appalachia You May Not Know is aimed at the level of The New Yorker, and not something relatable to everyday folk in the suburbs or the Midwest. It does little to dissuade the notion that Appalachia still has an odd mystique, which is a disservice to region. The fact is, Appalachia is largely "just" economically depressed region like Northwest Kansas or the Mississippi Floodplain or the drive from Tucson to El Paso, where most jobs are retail and government and the best jobs are in mineral extraction or transportation or industry, but far fewer than in times past. Transportation is a pain but yet it's crisscrossed by critical routes, and life there is pretty normal for rural America. Really, there's only a handful of areas in the US where you can ride the a boom if you time it right, everywhere else things are just okay. In some places you have fewer options. People try to get by, or try to leave. It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it.

bitexploder 7y ago
I grew up in the Deep South, a related cousin to Appalachia. I spent more than 30 years in the south. I have spent a lot of time in Appalachia, hiking, meeting locals. It isn’t a stretch to say “I get it”. I read Hillbily Elegy. This piece does little to change my mind about my own view point. There are parts of the culture that are worthwhile and valuable (to me) and parts I can leave quite easily. For me it is the almost resentful pride in their own ignorance of the rest of the country, and even the world, that was so hard to accept. You can paste over that, all these layers of complexity and beautiful mountain vignettes, but under that there are elements that are difficult to accept for me. There is a lot of stubborn pride for heritage that does the culture no good and I never understood it. Also, Appalachia is not unique to most other rural areas, they just have nicer scenery. Poverty is what it is and it does what it does to people. You either get out of it or it eats you. There is nothing romantic about it. There is no great stoic philosophy providing Appalachian poverty with any special resistance to poverty and being mostly ignored by the rest of the country. I don’t know, it isn’t some terrible reality to suffer through, but it is more tragic than anything else. Maybe this is the inevitable view point I have adopted as I have become more outsider to the culture I was raised in over the years. It isn’t all bad, I will still visit, hike, and enjoy the natural beauty there, but the people suffer like any other under-educated poor people do. There is no number of voices and view points that can change that. I appreciate what the author is trying to do, they must surely understand the culture well, but it is a big miss for me.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  > Poverty is what it is and it does what it does to people. You either get out of it or it eats you. Perhaps the people with the compulsion to leave have already done so? Kind of what is being call "The Big Sort", where (politically) like-minded people seem to be congregating to the same neighborhoods: * https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/10/the-big-sort-revisited/504830/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/10/the-big-sort-revisite... * https://www.economist.com/united-states/2008/06/19/the-big-sort https://www.economist.com/united-states/2008/06/19/the-big-s... Something similar happening to the ambition-minded? (Someone once remarked / joked that perhaps America is so stereotypically optimistic is perhaps all the people who left the Old Country for the New World were probably the more adventurous, go-go types, and those that stayed behind were more chill.)
  - humanrebar 7y ago
    This is my take. For all the talk of international brain drain, we don't have a narrative for the more local equivalent. Similarly, we worry about disrupting natural biomes through deforestation or overfishing, but we don't think about sustainability applied to human communities, with a few exceptions (reservations get some attention, though not sufficient attention). What do we do? For one, I don't think it's hard to make an ethical case for remote first workplaces.
    - magduf 7y ago
      More remote work isn't going to make a significant number of people want to stay in these uneducated, economically-depressed locales. They aren't just leaving for the work, they're leaving to get away from the local culture.
      - sudosteph 7y ago
        There are generally some more educated pockets within these regions that are actually quite desirable, but lack economic development. These spots, like Asheville NC (the place I ultimately would like to settle down in) are unfortunately quite expensive due to low housing supply and people from out-of-state moving in. But I've got a remote gig now, so I just need to save up more. Personally, I will be happy to be part of a culture that values friendliness, ingenuity, sweet tea and banjo music. Fwiw, I tried moving away to Seattle, but despite my educational attainment and liberal leanings, I found that I just prefer NC. There's something to be said for living somewhere you don't feel like an outsider. After 5 years in Seattle, I still couldn't lose that feeling.
jessaustin 7y ago
Sure, but Vance is more "wrong" than his detractors are. He's the one who sees all poor people, and all poor people alike.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  Wrong in what regard? I found nothing wrong with Vance’s book. Having a similar family background to Vance, I think he has a great outlook on the matter.
  - moorhosj 7y ago
    I think his biggest miss was failing to connect the region to the rest of the country. He could have easily compared Appalachia to Rust Belt cities facing urban decay but never made the connection. It could have made the story of the region more approachable to more people. It seemed so obvious to me how the areas are linked by economic circumstances, environmental degradation, poor education levels, distinct culture and problems with drug addiction.
    - humanrebar 7y ago
      So you wanted him to write a different book? Maybe he had different goals and that's fine.
      - _dczq 7y ago
        Not what I said at all. I thought there was an opportunity to make a larger connection between what has happened in the Appalachian towns he focuses on and larger Rust Belt cities who face much of the same issues.
        humanrebar 7y ago
        He took other opportunities. Not sure why that's a failing. Someone else can still write the book you want.
    - 7y ago
nrf1 7y ago
> It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina are key swing states. That's the primary reason Appalachia gets so much attention. This electoral reality goes all the way back to the war on poverty.
- sudosteph 7y ago
  Yes, but the Appalacian contingent is not a majority in any of those states. They just are historically less anti-union than other rural areas (while still socially conservative) so they can swing a bit. Overall the big cities and suburbs are usually the deciding factor there. If anything, Appalachian are uniquely under-represented nationally. While the region as a whole contains nearly 25 million people, WV is the only state to have two Appalacian senators. I think TN has one as well, but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention They also serve (willingly or not) as exemplars held up by Republicans, particularly in the populist ideology of Trump supporters, of those "real Americans" who have been betrayed by globalism and progressivism, and to further the narrative of an intractable cultural and political divide having formed between the rural right and urban left (and to contrast the cultural and ethnic purity of the former against the corrupting influence of multiculturalism and secularism among the latter.)
  - TomMckenny 7y ago
    >If anything, Appalachian are uniquely under-represented nationally. While the region as a whole contains nearly 25 million people, WV is the only state to have two Appalacian senators. I think TN has one as well, but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention. Technically that is 50% more senators than California with twice the population.
thebooktocome 7y ago
> a curated photoset of Sides of Appalachia You May Not Know is aimed at the level of The New Yorker, and not something relatable to everyday folk in the suburbs or the Midwest. Midwesterner here. You don't speak for me. JD Vance doesn't speak for me. Try listening for once.
- asark 7y ago
  I took it to mean not relatable because we go "what's the big deal, looks like a hillier version of what and who I can see if I find a state highway and drive 20 minutes", here in the Midwest. A jab at the New Yorker more than the Midwest. That's my charitable reading based on the tone of the rest of the post, anyway—but I could be wrong.
  - nrf1 7y ago
    Exactly. The entire paragraph after that sentence confirms exactly this reading... charity not necessary.
    - asark 7y ago
      Yeah, just leaving some wiggle room to account for my own stupidity, since it looks like at least one person read it differently.
- bshoemaker 7y ago
  Lol stfu
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't take personal swipes or lash back at another comment, even if it is wrong or seems so. Doing that only makes things worse. It doesn't help. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
whatshisface 7y ago
There is seriously not that big a difference between the reading level of random comments on the internet and the reading level of the New Yorker, or of the average thinkpiece. Self-styled intellectuals love to pretend that they are writing in a sophisticated secret code language, but that hasn't been true since they quit Latin.
- madhadron 7y ago
  And, to be fair, English is a vastly more sophisticated language with layers of nuance that constitute codes than Latin.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    English more sophisticated than Latin? At nuance?
  - onlydeadheroes 7y ago
    Did you ever study Latin?
    - madhadron 7y ago
      Yes. My parents taught me. They studied it at Cambridge. I'm not talking about inflection. English doesn't use inflection except vestigially, though our grammar is every bit as subtle (compare English verb tenses to those of a Romance language). I'm talking about the employment of reference, accent, dialect...
  - anthk 7y ago
    Hahahaahahaa!! The Romances can have hugely brutal nested sentences as nothing. Would you dare to read Don Quixote in the original and non-modernized Spanish? I think not. That book mixed a parody of Medieval Spanish and the pre-Enlightentment era one. The discovering of America put the Church on a lower-closer to the Earth place and became the roots of modern Humanism. Don Quixote is a pun on the Dark Ages, myth and religion, compared it to Sancho Panza who is a metaphor of the almost Enlightened humanistic/pragmatic folk who doesn't believe on myths and doesn't have crazy religious-like hallucinations on giants. Trust me, a lot of grammar from the crazy knight is stilL¡l valid today even if looks outdated. Heck, it already was outdated, as I said Don Quixote was the old fart pun from the 1600s. English' grammar is a joke compared to the versatibility of Romances. And, even forther back in time, Latin used similar traits.
smt88 7y ago
> life there is pretty normal for rural America I've lived in Appalachia my entire life (West Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New York). Although I can't generalize about the people of either the Midwest or Appalachia, there are some big differences between rural Appalachia and some other rural places. 1) Landscape. Due to the difficulty of building roads, some Appalachian places (closer to WV and KY) were extremely isolated until the 20th century. This affected culture, education, wealth, and industry. It's a huge factor in the region even today. 2) Agriculture. In most of Appalachia, you can't have a massive corn plantation. You rarely see a large field of anything at all. Most of the exports are capital-intensive and extractive (mining or timber), and the result is that there's a pattern of wealthy outsiders plundering the resources and leaving locals with little of the gain. 3) Stereotypes. A strong Midwestern accent (from, let's say, rural MI or PA) does not have the same connotation as a strong Appalachian accent (from KY or WV). The stereotypes of the regions just aren't the same, and they do affect people applying for jobs.
- culturestate 7y ago
  > The stereotypes of the regions just aren't the same, and they do affect people applying for jobs. I've been around motorsports most of my life and I used to see this all the time at racetracks in America. Even in NASCAR country, lots of people assume the "good ol' boy" accent means a person is just a shade-tree mechanic even if they're the most well-educated person in the garage.
  - Frondo 7y ago
    Heh, funnily enough, a few years ago I was at a rodeo with some friends, and this was in rural Oregon. One of the announcers was a radio personality on some country station in the Portland area (I think -- something like that, at least). For most of the rodeo he spoke with a thick drawl, obviously going for the "good ol' boy" vibe. A few times, he slipped up and spoke with a very plain Portland/PNW accent. It was jarring when I heard it but he went right back to the good ol' boy accent and I don't know how much anyone else noticed. But it came across like it was all an affectation, for the reasons you described.
jpfed 7y ago
>but a curated photoset of Sides of Appalachia You May Not Know is aimed at the level of The New Yorker, and not something relatable to everyday folk in the suburbs or the Midwest FYI I'm a Midwesterner and problems relating to pictures isn't a regional trait that I'm aware of. A picture of X is in pretty direct correspondence to the visual experience of X itself, so it turns out pictures are pretty easy to digest! If you're a Midwesterner, you should definitely give pictures a try. If you're not a Midwesterner, it's possible that meeting a few more of them would change your idea of what they can relate to.
btrautsc 7y ago
I like this comment.

frumiousirc 7y ago

47 entries in uMatrix, a banner shows, no visible content. Today's web is garbage.

huffmsa 7y ago

> The room was packed with intellectuals, artists, donors, students, the president of West Virginia University and the dean of its law school. Nary a coal miner, nor axeman to be found in this ivory tower meeting.

sebular 7y ago
Yeah, that was the point of the sentence. A man who wasn't Appalachian was telling a room full of educated Appalachian intellectuals that Appalachians are happy making 24k a year because they don't "need to show off". Also, it wasn't an "ivory tower" (such a limp, worn-out descriptor) meeting, it was a book launch, and it was literally open to the public.

scarejunba 7y ago

I've got to tell you: every subculture of humans has fractal complexity that is not captured by any representation. We're reduced to using blind men's descriptions of elephants. Nothing can be adequately explained in any book, not Appalachia and not the subculture of people in a semi-urban locality outside of Kandy. This is natural, so we use shortcuts as heuristic predictive tools: so the Russians throw numbers at war, the Chinese steal your secrets, the Appalachians are poor, the New Yorkers rude, the Japanese clean and neat. And the San Frannigans bristle at that demonym while they shit themselves in the street. So, no, the fact that there is complexity and uniqueness in culture is normal. It is not interesting. The only value is what you extract as the weak trendline. Imagine a scatterplot with loads of overlapping red and blue dots, but there are more blue dots above some line than red dots, by a considerable number. Most of them will interact, some red dot may even be higher than any blue dots, but you will be reduced to the fact that blue is higher than red on the graph. It is a weak decisioning tool because the complexity is both incompressible and useless for prediction.

SKILNER 7y ago
> every subculture of humans has fractal complexity that is not captured by any representation Yes, and the facile reduction of that complexity is the source for much of the political stupidity making us miserable. Also, thank you, Internet, for spreading it around so prolifically.
- dash2 7y ago
  Counterpoint: "fuck nuance". https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf "I do claim that the more we tend to value nuance as such—that is, as a virtue to be cultivated, or as the first thing to look for when assessing arguments—the more we will tend to slide toward one or more of three nuance traps. First is the ever more detailed, merely empirical description of the world. This is the nuance of the fine-grain. It is a rejection of theory masquerading as increased accuracy...."
hitekker 7y ago
>So, no, the fact that there is complexity and uniqueness in culture is normal. It is not interesting. The only value is what you extract as the weak trendline. Imagine a scatterplot with loads of overlapping red and blue dots, but there are more blue dots above some line than red dots, by a considerable number. Most of them will interact, some red dot may even be higher than any blue dots, but you will be reduced to the fact that blue is higher than red on the graph. It is a weak decisioning tool because the complexity is both incompressible and useless for prediction. There is wisdom in your words.

50208 7y ago

Seriously, if "Appalachia" is doing so great let's stop taking from wealthier states and redirecting to these poor ones. Let them clean up their broken down coal mines and polluted water resources. They can handle all the opium addicts and disability deadbeats. They should be able to prop up their own economies without handouts and programs from wealthier parts of the country. Let them continue their war against the "War on Coal". Maybe they can eat their coal. And don't get me started on the litter pretty much everywhere and trash dumped in every river of my home state (KY). I'm sure they will eventually handle that too.

dang 7y ago
Regional flamewar isn't ok here, just like nationalistic flamewar or race flamewar or other flamewars. Could you please not post like this to HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- 50208 7y ago
  Isn't this what the article "Hillbillies Need No Elegy" is about? Isn't this about their response to a book about the region? I grew up in the region and this is my experience.
  - dang 7y ago
    Your experience is welcome, but you need to actually share your experience. That's very different from posting a putdown rant about a region and the people who live there. The fact that you grew up there is relevant to what you're saying, of course. But it's not relevant to whether your comment broke the site guidelines. Internet forums can't handle that level of nuance, and a comment like this is going to lead to a big old flamewar by default.

DanielBMarkham 7y ago

This is important, not because of Appalachia but because of art itself. As a history buff, I have a difficult time watching many "based on a true story" movies or movies claiming to represent some important person or event in history. It's for the same reason: people consume information through narrative, and narrative forces reality into predefined tracks. This means that any art form claiming to represent a people, region, person, or event must necessarily be lying to you. The better the art the more likely the lies are big ones. And so storytellers are forced to lie, both by drastically-reducing scope and by smoothing out the edges. Then they consolidate characters, generalize over things that are not part of the narrative. They find a hero. They bump the contrast up a bit to make the narrative consumption more enjoyable. I love this, I love art and storytelling, but it means that there are great masses of people who don't know jack squat about a ton of topics that they think they do. I grew up here. I've traveled all over, spending quite a bit of time in SF and other very cosmopolitan places, but this is home. If I were forced to scope it down, I'd probably start with the mountains, then the coal mines, then the Scots-Irish cultural backdrop. The writer made an astute point when they mentioned all the outsiders passing through and screwing us over in various ways for their own selfish reasons. That's been a persistent theme, but it is slowly dying off. There's also the tent revival culture, but that's also going away. The only other generality I'd add if I were scoping down a story about this place is the stereotype of the ornery eccentric. This character has been played up for comic relief over the years, many times making them out to be simpletons. Instead, there are a lot of PhD-level folks who just don't give a damn about society and don't want to. They're nice enough. They just want to be left alone. You find that plenty of other places as well, but Appalachia has a long history of those folks and we tend to cherish them, even if we're making fun of them. Andrew Jackson almost beat a man to death with his cane after he tried to assassinate him (His gun misfired. He grabbed a backup. It also misfired. Jackson commenced to beating on him and had to be pulled off). After the Civil War, Ewell went back to his home, picked back up his law practice, and started writing books about what a bunch of jackasses all those people who misunderstood the war were. We always wave at people here: the best way to tell if people are from far away is when they don't wave. Had a neighbor once that when I waved at him he would make various obscene gestures and curse. He just wanted to be left alone. I wouldn't live anywhere else, and it's not because I haven't tried out a bunch of other places. There's something about the mountains that keep calling me back. I don't know what.

gffyfnhdv 7y ago

“Morgantown, West Virginia [...] We were in the heart of Appalachia“ BS! Morgantown is definitely not the heart of Appalachia: - It’s only 9 mi into WV! - has population that doubles during the school semester - has three or four federal agencies (FBI, NETL, NIOSH) - showered with federal and state largess (thank you senator Byrd) - has traffic jams worthy of a city with 10x it’s population - has one of my favorite restaurants in the US - has a significant private sector economy (Mylan, for one) -if I recall, technically it didn’t have a recession in ‘08. I’ve lived in Morgantown for a while. And while I certainly caught a glimpse of Appalachia, it certainly isn’t the heart. Maybe it’s about as redneck as the president of WVU dares to venture.

RegBarclay 7y ago
I agree. I'm originally from Charleston and have always said that it's not like the rest of WV. I'd say the real heart of Appalachia is Pikeville KY.
- atwebb 7y ago
  Well, Hillbilly Bear is the representative picture for Pikeville on Google Maps which is a vote in your favor.
- gffyfnhdv 7y ago
  Btw, I’m not from Appalachia, I just did a post-doc at WVU. Beautiful state and people.
panzagl 7y ago
The article also has pictures of Asheville and Berea, the former famous for it's ties to the super-rich, the latter a long time artists' colony. Was there even a picture of a trailer in the article? Or a church?
- gffyfnhdv 7y ago
  “... or a church” +1
7y ago

golemotron 7y ago

The best way to understand what makes Appalachia what it is culturally, is to read _Albion's Seed_. The people who ended up there came from parts of Britain that required extreme self-sufficiency and had no real functional government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-se...

sudosteph 7y ago
I'd argue the best way would be to travel there and read actual histories from local sources. While it's nice to imagine a simple root cause to everything - it's not enough. When my great-grandparents settled in Appalachia about 100 years ago, they did it to find opportunity and escape the terrible working conditions of cotton mills. That side of the family are religious democrats who support unions and new-deal style economic reform and public education. They and their kids integrated culturally, most of them never left and never plan to. Their story is not an uncommon one, their desire for better government support is not out of the norm, and it does nobody any good to propagate a myth saying their culture of self-sufficency was decided 300 years ago when it was actually developed as a necessity after continuously being ignored. Cultures grow and Appalachian culture is no exception - we need to get past this shallow type of categorization based on original settlers.
- 50208 7y ago
  Yes, but don't travel to Asheville or Morgantown ... go to Elkhorn City or Ashland, Ky ... or Nitro, WV. Bring your own water.

ixtli 7y ago

“The perception that mountain folk like to be poor serves someone — but it’s not the poor mountain folk. The representation of Appalachia as all white is not only inaccurate, but it preserves a false and destructive ideal of imaginary “pure white stock.” Images of decay and absence allow those in power to turn away from a place that has been forgotten, but has not disappeared. The narrow ideas that circulate about this broad place do active harm.” Brilliant.

danesparza 7y ago
I'm assuming the commentary is about this book: https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy-Memoir-Family-Culture/dp/0062300555 https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy-Memoir-Family-Culture... This book is specifically written from one (white guy's) point of view -- somebody who grew up in the area. I'm not sure how the ideas that circulate about this place do active harm. Most (if not all) accounts I've heard about this place are personal accounts. The truth from people who have lived or traveled there. Sometimes the truth hurts. Denying it's truthful isn't helping anybody.
- mbreese 7y ago
  It’s right in the first lines of the article. “In the new book “Appalachian Reckoning,” dozens of mountain voices combine to talk back to J.D. Vance’s best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy.” Today, an exclusive story from its co-editor and a powerful essay (which involves Granny, her .38 pistol, and some coal trucks) excerpted from the book.” Part of the point of the article (which was very good) was that there is not singular truth about a place a vast and varied as Appalachia. This new book seems to be much more than a commentary on Hillbilly Elegy.

camelite 7y ago

It's really bizarre the lengths to which the author goes to weave the "criticism by outsiders" motif into a critique which ostensibly targets a born-and-bred Appalacian. Three full introductory paragraphs about the guy who says “The thing I like about Appalachians is that they don’t need much to be happy. They’re content with making $24,000 year. They’re not showing off...” A massive full-screen width "When outsiders tell the story" Two long paragraphs introducing Vance without mentioning where he's from. A criticism of the Netflix adaption as "filmmakers from elsewhere will put[ting] their visual stamp on the region." 2 long paragraphs complaining about outsiders defining its territorial extent. 2 paragraphs explaining how politicians and outside media represent it. It goes on to promote it's own take on the region, unsurprisingly dominated by artists, activists and academics. But the force and worth of Vance's take would be ZERO if he was an outsider. They don't, of course, lie at any point about Vance's background, but it's a flagrantly dishonest critique nonetheless. If the other commenter here is correct about Morganstown being only kind of half-Appalacian, as opposed to their claim of hailing from the heart of Appalacia, that really just puts the cherry on top.

jessaustin 7y ago
But the force and worth of Vance's take would be ZERO if he was an outsider. JD Vance was born and raised in Middletown OH. This is far SW Ohio, on the border with Indiana. (It was something of a surprise to me that any part of Ohio is considered Appalachian, but then I've spent most of my Ohio time in Toledo. [0]) There are hills, but those hills are not the Appalachians. JD Vance is from the Midwest. Has he actually claimed to be Appalachian? As far as I can tell he has claimed to be a "hillbilly", which is fine but hardly limited to Ohio or the Appalachians. My neighbors and I in the Ozarks have at least as strong a claim to the term, but we don't seem to get as uptight about this stuff as the folks back East get. [0] https://lookingatappalachia.org/region https://lookingatappalachia.org/region
- jcburns 7y ago
  The southeastern portion of the state has (in what I’ve read) traditionally been considered part of Appalachia. Geophysically, it’s simple: the one-third or so of Ohio that wasn’t flattened by the glaciers. It’s rolling, increasingly hilly as you get down to the Ohio River. I went to school at Ohio University in Athens, and a bunch of classes there consider Appalachia a part of their studies and focus. I read Hillbilly Elegy when it came out and my first reaction was “hey, wait, Middletown is really more blue collar, rust belt.” My second reaction is “boy, Vance sure is willing to speak for a huge geographic area that he’s at best only on the edge of.” But to the Bitter Southerner piece, I want to say that the whole “you have to be from a place to talk about a place” thesis has, for me, been as wobbly as anything Vance puts out. So, what, born there? And the deeper inside the geographic boundaries, the better? Nah. But maybe the author (of the Bitter piece) makes a stronger point that ANY generalization of people tied to a geographic area is weak, shallow, insufficient by definition. People will surprise you. (That’s my generalization.)

psychometry 7y ago

Ignorant and under-uneducated people are susceptible to misinformation, fraud, and con men. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about Amway, predatory lenders, or Donald Trump. Let's stop beating around the bush and pretend it's anything other than bigotry and ignorance leading these unwashed masses to worship the giant orange baby with the golden toilet.

ubertaco 7y ago
That you went with an angry post about Donald Trump on an article that doesn't mention him once (or mention politics much at all, really) is telling. Your stereotypes are showing. Perhaps read through the article, rather than jumping at a headline? You might come away with the impression that it could be worthwhile to meet "these unwashed masses" and find out that they're people too, with just as valid a viewpoint as yours (regardless of whether you agree with it).

harimau777 7y ago

I understand where the author is coming from with wanting to depict a more diverse/nuanced view of Appalachia. However, I think that Hillbilly Elegy has been influential based specifically on insight it gives into why the region supported someone like Trump. The author may be correct that Hillbilly Elegy is incorrect; however, since the article doesn't present an alternative explanation I'm not sure that it is very useful.