Here's an interesting piece from Rod Dreher on Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance. Dreher's review/essay is very long and (by his own admission) a bit rambling, but very much worth your time. The author of the book in question grew up in a poor, Appalachian household—no steady father figure and a mother who traded partners freely and resented his efforts to get out.
And get out Vance did, by joining the Marine Corps before eventually getting his law degree from Yale. He's now writing about what he left behind. It isn't pretty. Here's a short excerpt from Dreher's review:
Vance’s people come from Kentucky and southern Ohio, a deeply depressed region filled with hard-bitten but proud Scots-Irish folks. He begins by talking about how, as a young man, he got a job working in a warehouse, doing hard work for extra money. He writes about how even though the work was physically demanding, the pay wasn’t bad, and it came with benefits. Yet the warehouse struggled to keep people employed. Vance says his book is about macroeconomic trends — outsourcing jobs overseas — but not only that:
But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man [one of Vance’s co-workers] with every reason to work — a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.
This is the heart of Hillbilly Elegy: how hillbilly white culture fails its children, and how the greatest disadvantages it imparts to its youth are the life of violence and chaos in which they are raised, and the closely related problem of a lack of moral agency. Young Vance was on a road to ruin until certain people — including the US Marine Corps — showed him that his choices mattered, and that he had a lot more control over his fate than he thought.
While reading Dreher's essay—and again, you should take ten minutes to read the whole thing—I was reminded a bit of FX's Justified, which wrapped up its six-season run last year. It too was a tale of the white working class's social disfunction in the hills of Appalachia, the story of a man (Raylan Givens, played with laconic charm by Timothy Olyphant) who escapes the coal mines of Kentucky and an abusive father to make something of himself while his nemesis Boyd Crowder (wide-eyed and wily Walton Goggins) fell on the other side of the law.
Justified's setting was a rare rural outpost in a TV landscape dominated by cities and the young hip people who live within them. As I noted last year, the show was at its best when it was dealing with the insular nature of that community and the unwelcome presence of outsiders. Here's how Matt Zoller Seitz praised its social commentary toward the end of its run:
There’s a low-level sense of continual upheaval: The world is changing, but the people are unwilling or unable to change with it. The characters are intoxicated by nostalgia and legend, but the show itself sees through them, even though its constant invocation of Kentucky’s past as a mining economy and the loving shots of dilapidated shacks and covered bridges suggest otherwise. Modernity is growing over tradition like kudzu, and from the very start, Justified has been hip to this process. The show’s main theme, "Long Hard Times to Come," by Gangstagrass and T.O.N.E-z, lays rap over hip-hop backbeats over bluegrass guitar and banjo.
"The world is changing, but the people are unwilling or unable to change with it." That sounds like a pretty perfect precis of Vance's book, which I hope to check out soon.