Still, this is pretty on-brand. I mean, Vance’s book was all about enriching himself by leveraging a people and a place of which he is a not a part, so using Georgia taxpayers for this Ohio-set movie in about a guy who wants people to think he’s from Kentucky is only right. I’m not sure how the dissonance between the whole taxpayer subsidy thing and his by-your-own-bootstraps ethos will be resolved, but I’m sure he’ll make an effort to do so in some glib New York Times editorial soon.
If you’re wondering why I’m so cranky about this, you can go back and read the stuff I wrote about Vance and his book in the past. It’ll explain it all:
- Hillbilly Elegy: good memoir, crap political science;
- J.D. Vance and the insufficiency of good intentions;
- J.D. Vance joins forces with Steve Bannon
The short version: while Vance had a genuinely rough upbringing and talks about it in frank and often affecting terms in his book, he is far more interested in using his experience as a vehicle with which to advance a conservative political agenda which blames the poor for their own struggles. His doing so found an eager audience on both the right and the left, with conservatives citing his personal success as evidence of the efficacy of their blame-the-poor ethos while liberals nodded along with him, not questioning his portrayal of the rural poor because his version helped assuage their guilt and gave them license to continue to look away. It’s pretty odious all around.
If you want two better books about what it means to live in Appalachia and which explains the actual, not imagined, struggles Appalachian people face, I’d ask you to go read Elizabeth Catte’s “What you are getting wrong about Appalachia” and Brian Alexander’s “Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town.”
They won’t make fancy movies starring Amy Adams out of those books, but they have the benefit of containing actual information.
