CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter…
[Caveat lector: this is twice as long as a blog post should be and
does not conclude very satisfactorily, but at least there is a “nice” photo
from my hillbilly farm boy days.]
Helen says that one of the
advantages of raising smart kids is that they give you good books at Christmas.
So smart daughter Mary Beth gave me this Christmas J.D. Vance’s, HILLBILLY ELEGY: A Memoir of a Family and
Culture in Crisis. It is a fascinating book, a well-written story that is
hard to put down.
Vance grew up in a culture
of family violence, of poverty, of close-mindedness, without models of
achievement. Yet he achieved, through the Marines and an Ohio State U and Yale
Law School.
Although separated by
fifty years or so in age, JD Vance and I grew up in a very similar culture, the
hillbilly culture, because that culture never changes through the years. Nonetheless,
Vance became a hillbilly conservative and I became a hillbilly liberal. [1]
There was one major
difference in our formative lives: our families. Mine was no picnic, and in
later life my father told me I wasn’t actually his child [2]. Compared to
Vance’s family, however, mine was “Ozzie & Harriet.”
JD’s family was a mess.
His father walked out. His mother was a narcissistic alcoholic and drug addict
who brought man after man into their ever-shifting houses, some trying to be a
father to JD and his sister, some just to be there for a while. None lasted
long. They were always on the edge of poverty.
It is said that a child
can survive a tumultuous childhood if there is one dependable adult in its
life. JD had that, his mamaw, Bonnie Vance, a gun-wielding foul-mouthed nasty
woman who scorned everyone and everything, except her grandson.
Vance and I even share
some common ground, SW Ohio. My family had roots in both SW Indiana and SW
Ohio, starting in the late 19th century in Cedarville and Dayton and
extending later down to Oxford and Hamilton. During the industrial expansion
after WWII, the companies there, in places like Middletown, where Vance grew up
off and on, recruited workers from Kentucky. They were smart enough to recruit
whole families, thus creating a more stable work force.
Their culture, however,
remained hillbilly. It was linked inexorably to “home,” the hill county of the
Hatfields and McCoys in Kentucky. Every weekend there were long lines of cars
going to and from “home.” When you asked them where they were from, they named
their county in Kentucky. The SW OH industrial area was never “home,” but just
where they resided and worked.
Here is basically what
Vance says about hillbillies, and I think he’s right. Hillbillies are
tribalistic. They are pugnacious. They value toughness—they fight hard and
drink hard. They also work hard if it’s something they’ve chosen to do, but if
they’re working for someone else, the main point is to get paid without
working. They are patriotic, in a tribalistic nationalistic sense. They are
identified not by what they trust but by what they distrust. They distrust
outsiders. They distrust the Law. They distrust education and educated people.
They assume they are stuck in poverty. They deplore government welfare but
depend upon it. They are gullible. They think they are smarter than educated
people, “pointy headed intellectuals,” as my father called them. They live by a
misogynistic “honor” code, in which a man is allowed to abuse “his” women
freely but is honor-found to avenge them if some other man mistreats them.
Once again, a major
difference between his hillbilly culture and mine. My extended family and the
people around me were patriotic and proud of military service but deplored
stupid violence, especially in the family. They honored education and
achievement. Their honor code was “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s
pay.” You were to respect others, even if you disagreed with them.
Vance does not say, “I
made it on my own.” He is much too smart for that. He knows it he made it with
a lot of help. He deplores the close-mindedness of his own people who believe
things like Barak Obama was born in Kenya and is not a Christian. He says that
good social policy is better than bad social policy.
I say that Vance “became”
a hillbilly conservative. That’s both true and false. He started out
conservative, because that is part of hillbilly culture. He became one by
choice as an adult. He is a thoughtful and responsible conservative, but I
still have trouble understanding it.
He says that government
help won’t make a difference, that people will have to be responsible for
themselves. That’s the part conservatives like. But he also says that hillbilly
culture is so depressed that nobody sees a way out of it. There are no models
of how to achieve or incentives to do so. There are no models of good
marriages. He himself went to the Marines instead of trying for college when he
graduated high school because he and his mamaw together couldn’t even figure
out how to fill out the application forms and knew no one who could help them.
His is a fascinating story
of personal achievement. But it stops there. With being a hillbilly
conservative. My own growing-up story is much like his, except I am a hillbilly
liberal. I agree that good social policy is better than bad social policy.
There is always going to be a social policy of some sort, and I don’t think “I
made it and you’re on your own” is very good social policy.
JRMcF
johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com
1] Both Vance and I use
“hillbilly” only as a descriptive term, not a derogatory word, and we both use
it with a certain amount of pride, the way Jim Webb does in Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped
America.]
2] I don’t believe it,
and, anyway, I don’t care.
3] I remember once my
Uncle Randall, who worked at Fisher Body in Hamilton, telling how a fellow
worker asked him what county he was from. He was surprised. “Butler,” he said.
The man looked puzzled. “Where’s that?” “Right here,” Uncle Randall said. The
man looked more puzzled. “No, I mean your county in Kentucky,”
I tweet occasionally as
yooper1721.
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