Hillbillies
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nybody who can sing the lyrics to David Allan Coe’s “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” probably won’t find a whole lot in J.D. Vance’s hotly debated, bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” that’s real surprising. Fans of Jeff Foxworthy’s painfully funny “You Might Be a Redneck” comedy act will also find Vance’s action-packed childhood familiar. Like this: “If your grandma poured gasoline on grandpa, and lit him on fire for coming home drunk … you might be a redneck.” These things actually happened. Early in life, Vance writes, “I recognized that though many of my peers lacked the traditional American family, mine was more nontraditional than most.” No kidding. That said, Erskine Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road” covered much of the same territory in the 1930s, along with William Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, Larry Brown’s “Joe,” and a host of Southern novelists and memoirists too numerous to list. None of which is to diminish Vance’s achievement, nor to minimize his success in focusing affectionate, yet unsparing, attention on the ongoing plight of the poor white Appalachian immigrants he calls his people. American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher has written that “Hillbilly Elegy” “does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book ‘Between the World and Me’ did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.” Some even think Vance helps explain the election of Donald Trump, although his political message is distinctly mixed. Either way, “Hillbilly Elegy” is deservedly No. 2 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Born in rural eastern Kentucky, Vance was mostly raised by his doting, albeit violent grandparents in the decaying mill town of Middletown, Ohio — one of those “rust-belt” communities that lured Southern country folk to factory jobs that have since moved away, often to nonunion Southern states like Arkansas. I kept thinking of Bobby Bare’s homesick lament “Detroit City”: “I think I’ll take my foolish pride/and put it on a southbound freight and ride.” Vance took a less sentimental escape route: the U.S. Marines, Ohio State University, and Yale Law School. Today he lives in San Francisco with his AsianAmerican wife and works at a Silicon Valley investment firm. His memoir shows him to be the king of mixed feelings: proud and relieved to have escaped the 8
JANUARY 12, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
drug- and boozeaddicted turmoil of his youth, yet determined to evoke respect for the “loyalty, honor, GENE toughness” and LYONS fierce patriotism of the hillbilly culture back home. Like many cross-cultural migrants, Vance has a thin skin — seeing condescension everywhere he looks. Of course nobody with a Southern accent needs to search hard in New Haven. Back in the day, was asked by a haughty academician if she was an anthropologist after she said she’d been visiting her parents in Arkansas. She kept a lot of it from me for fear I might do something crazy. In the long run, it’s best to laugh these things off. The world is full of fools. At 31, Vance isn’t there yet. Even so, the portrait he draws of his people is frequently less than admiring. What they hate about President Obama, he writes, isn’t his race as much as the perception that “Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent — clean, perfect, neutral — is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening.” As such, Obama’s a standing rebuke to people like Vance’s hometown friend who bragged that he quit his job “because he was sick of waking up early,” but spends time bashing the “Obama economy” on Facebook. Hence, too, “birtherism,” a mythological construct explaining away the unacceptable truth: Maybe a lot of your problems are your own damn fault. Vance thinks that hillbilly clannishness and self-pitying pessimism are personally and politically crippling. “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society.” Exactly. Having spent the last decade living on a gravel road in a backwoods Arkansas county with even more cows than hillbillies, I can affirm that at their best, there are no finer neighbors. That said, not getting wasted every day definitely helps. However, Vance’s mother was an addict. “An important question for hillbillies like me,” he writes, is “how much is Mom’s life her own fault? Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?” Good question.
Senate challenge
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recently wandered back to “Master of the Senate,” the third volume of Robert A. Caro’s massive history of Lyndon Johnson. The book, on Johnson’s years in the U.S. Senate, highlights the lingering power of the Senate to meet the challenges facing the country and to stand up to existential threats facing American democratic institutions. Considering the national political dynamics as the Trump era arrives, it’s important to remind ourselves of the capability of the U.S. Senate — no matter its partisan composition — to live up to its potential at key moments in American history. Caro’s book focuses on Johnson’s rise to power in national politics through the lens of the 1957 Civil Rights Act that he shepherded through the body that had fended off civil rights legislation for over three-quarters of a century. As longtime New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in a review of the book: “Wheedling, threatening, stroking large egos, explaining why his goal was essential for the country’s good, [LBJ] ran an institution that had never before been run by anyone.” While some historians dispute elements of the Johnson portrayed by Caro in his series (and in “Master of the Senate” in particular), undeniably satisfying — and most timely — is the first 100 or so pages of the 1,100page tome. There, Caro contextualizes LBJ’s rise to power by tracing the history of the U.S. Senate, emphasizing its distinctive power tracing back to the Founders (take a look at James Madison’s The Federalist No. 62) and the moments of the institution’s glory (its refusal to impeach Justice Samuel Chase simply for opinions with which Jeffersonians disagreed, Daniel Webster’s soaring rhetoric against Southern colleagues’ arguments for nullification and its resistance to Franklin Roosevelt’s “court-packing” plan in 1937). Just as important, as Caro argues, such exceptionalism by the Senate is not inevitable: Across many decades an atrophied Senate also failed to use its great power to respond to the economic, social and foreign policy crises facing the nation. Johnson’s activation of the Senate — mostly for his own ambitions — marks a moment of the Senate coming to life for the good of the nation. Ira Shapiro’s more recent book, “The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis,” serves as something of an extension of Caro’s thesis regarding the Senate’s potential power for good. Shapiro argues that the Senate of the 1960s and 1970s over-
came partisanship to extend the civil rights work begun with the meager 1957 legislation, to create JAY the infrastructure BARTH for environmental regulation, and to shift the nation’s decades-long policy on China. Even more important, the Senate stood up to the executive branch’s overreach and criminality on Vietnam and Watergate, taking its duty of holding the executive accountable seriously on matters large and small. In more recent years, the Senate has retreated into inaction and partisan pettiness. (Shapiro dates it to the early 1980s when “gotcha” votes began being used in political campaigns, procedural rules began being used to stop the work of the body rather than getting things done for the American public, and long weekends away from Washington undermined the socializing that allowed problems to be solved across partisan divides). The Trump era creates a new test for the Senate. As Caro writes, “… America’s Founding Fathers had created the Senate … to stand against the President and the people, to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.” Despite his electoral success across the majority of states, relatively few Republican senators owe their seats to Trump’s popularity. Moreover, his disparagement of GOP leaders such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham means that they are further liberated from Trump and his agenda. In the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration next week, there are both positive and negative signals about the Senate’s playing its distinctive constitutional role. The assertiveness of senators from both parties during last week’s initial hearings into the role of the Russian government in attempting to impact the 2016 elections and the responsible action by a significant chunk of senators to demand a replacement for the Affordable Care Act before “repeal” of Obamacare occurs provide great promise. On the other hand, the refusal of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (a poster child of the more petty partisan modern era of the Senate) to slow down hearings on Cabinet appointees until traditional ethics investigations are completed bodes ill. For the future of democracy, America needs the Senate to be at its best in the months and years ahead.