The Way We Were, Part I

Memoirs light the corners of our minds
Misty water-colored memoirs of the way we wereThis was about to be the second and last time I said goodbye to The Nobby Works…not out of the shock that induced my first retreat, though more and more shocking things occur on a daily basis. It was just that I found it harder and harder to blog without mentioning Trump, and so he had come to inhabit my mind just as I feared he would on November 9, 2016. Dealing with his torrent of toxicity is degrading as much on a personal level as it is on a national level. But just as I was about to write my farewell post, three random things happened that converged to outline another post and remind me of why I love doing The Nob so much. The first thing was a book I just finished--JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. It had been a gift from Daughter Meagan two or three years ago, but I had avoided reading it under the misimpression that it was another soppy attempt to explain the working class white voters who had dropped Trump at the White House door like a bag of dogshit. As one reviewer wrote in The Guardian:

Our lives matter to Vance, and this “our” is the key to why his book has been such a runaway success. It dropped into a national shouting match that has pitted a hazily defined entity called “the white working class” against an equally hazy “coastal elite” as the Sunni and Shia of the American political scene. The commentariat were at a loss as to explain the ballooning support for Trump, a candidate so transparently unqualified for the job that his candidacy seemed more like a prank than a serious bid for the White House. Vance, articulate and authentically Appalachian, became a regular face on the cable news circuit, a sort of ethnographic native informant about the “other America”.

Gifts from daughters are not easily ignored of course, so I finally took a deep breath and turned an ear or two over to Hillbilly Elegy. It was no surprise that Vance was a Republican, but it was a blessed relief to learn that he was what we now call a Never Trump Republican, mentored at the knee of David Frum, one of the godfathers of Never Trumpism. As such, his book is devoid of the racism, xenophobia, and anti-intellectualism that are the hallmarks of Trumpism. The Guardian review quoted above includes this passage:

His resentment of welfare recipients is longer lasting. Some of his food stamp customers were gaming the system, reselling soda for cash and carrying luxury items such as mobile phones. “I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.”

What’s refreshing and heartening is that the welfare recipients Vance is talking about here are white. The entire hillbilly world Vance describes in such unsparing terms is white. The reviewer is correct when he describes Vance as a sort of ethnographic native informant. He’s not an apologist and he’s not a researcher explicating data. He’s more like some lost tribesman newly emerged from a primeval forest with a tale to tell of life in an alien world. He’s reasonable, perceptive and fair. In other words, he’s everything so many of my liberal compatriots have given up ever finding in a modern Republican. The second thing that happened was that I received word that Donnie Perkins had died. Donnie was a former student of mine and the subject of one of my earliest and most popular blog posts. He was also one of just two people I ever un-friended on Facebook, which will come as a surprise to anyone who ever read that post, Today is Donnie Perkins’ Birthday. It exudes the affection I felt for Donnie both as a student and later as an adult. But that affection got blown up real good in what the Guardian reviewer rightly calls the Sunni Shia divide of American politics. Ironically Donnie had a lot in common with JD Vance. Although they don’t call them hillbillies in New Hampshire, they could. Those Yankee hillbillies call outsiders flatlanders and fit the profile Vance paints of his own people from Appalachia in almost every way, both positive and negative. Had Donnie shared JD Vance’s discerning view of Trump, we would’ve remained friends until the day he died. But alas, he didn’t, and ours like many such relationships could not maintain a bridge over a widening chasm of core values. The third thing that happened…Well, the third thing that happened will have to wait until next week’s posting. This one is already approaching the limit on length I like to follow for these Nobs. Given how much more I have to say on the subject, that limit is soon to be broken. I know it’s not much, but given how quickly we seem to be spiraling out of control, someone somewhere somehow has to stay within limits. So let it be me for here and now. 


A word from our Corporate Overlord:  Now Playing Black Panther