That Time I Made JD Vance Sad
As we head into the final days for election 2024, I would like to share an embarrassing moment for the ‘creepy’ candidate
There was a time when we thought 2016 was the “worst” year — do you remember? Before the Trump years, the border camps, the pandemic, the disintegration of news media, and the final destabilization of the climate. Ah, hindsight! But we did see something in 2016 that presaged the future. We saw the success of a strange book, a requiem for good old days that never were, a bit of moralizing nonsense wrapped in false dichotomies and American myths (and not a few outright lies). I speak, of course, about Hillbilly Elegy.
If you aren’t familiar, lucky you. If you need a primer, you can’t do better that this one by Dustin Rowles: “I am not one to play misery Olympics, but relative to much of white-working-class America, Vance’s upbringing is not particularly extraordinary. I had expected something akin to a redneck version of Augusten Burrough’s Running with Scissors, but mostly it read to me like a memoir where its author thought he was better than his bumpkin family and had to quit them to propel himself.”
Yes, JD Vance wrote a book about how his family and community are a lost cause to be rejected while he sought greatness by going to Yale. And…
