Ambition Turned JD Vance Into The Object Of His Own Ire
In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance blamed a culture of instant gratification and accountability denial for the social and personal dysfunction of the communities in which he grew up. Now, ambition...
…to be in the US Senate has made him into the poster man-child for these same flaws.
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Sometimes what’s ironic is most biting when it comes via self-incrimination.
Sometimes pure, red-hot ambition is just plain ugly.
And sometimes the autobiographical explains a lot, but other times it just seems like an orphan when matched up with what’s going on at the moment.
All of which brings me to the race in Ohio to replace US Senator Rob Portman, to the recent Republican primary victory there of JD Vance and to my reflections on it.
Vance first came to folks’ attention in 2016 when he published his 264-page autobiographical telling and socio/political analysis in Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. But just two quotes from The New York Times of May 3 and 4 of this year are enough to give his memoir/explication some current context and show how it fits in with “irony,” “self-incrimination,” and “ugly ambition.”
“Mr. Vance’s book pointed inwardly to explain the woes of his community [Kentucky and Ohio]. He blames a personal ‘lack of agency’ for drug abuse, welfare dependency and chaotic lives. But as a politician, he pointed his finger outward, at external enemies, just as Mr. Trump did.” (May 3)
“Mr. Vance’s emergence as a Make America Great Again standard-bearer in 2022 would have been unthinkable six years ago, when he was a self-styled ‘Never Trump’ Republican and a fixture of the mainstream news media as a translator for liberals curious about the bombastic New Yorker’s [Trump’s] cultural appeal.” (May 4)
And it was also in the context of writing my book of essays, Telling Stories of Untold Feelings…And Other Stuff, that Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy fit in with my own autobiographical retelling and my own political analyses. I remember mentioning to a friend that although Telling Stories has a whole section of thirteen essays on “Politics & The Age Of Trump,” including an introduction about “Our Once And Future Hope Or Fear,” it’s ironic that the most anti-spirit of Trump essay may actually be in the book’s section on “Developing The Heart, Mind & Spirit,” and it never once mentions Trump’s name.
What follows is an abridged version of this essay. Sure, it’s very much about developing my own heart, mind and spirit. But I’d like to think that, via its references to Vance and Hillbilly Elegy, it’s also politically current. At the same time, I hope it can give you, reader, an alternative path from the often repetitively numbing, snarky or “scripted-for-anger” media commentary and bring you to a place where you can more warmly say to yourself, “Yeah, I get it. Sure, I was a nerd in school, but it didn’t mean I had to turn into an ambitious hypocrite like Vance.”
Ok, even with the editing-down, this essay is still kind of long. But trust me, even if knocking off almost 1,500 words from the original version wasn’t like shooting offspring, it still had some of the bad taste of choosing a favorite child.
And if this essay, even as abridged, doesn’t get at least one belly laugh from you, I’d be surprised.
So, here’s a chance to reflect, and, hopefully, enjoy.
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Setting The Alarm To Get Ready For The Time Of Your Life
5:45 or 6:00am on school day.
My alarm clock had just gone off. No one told me that I had to set it.
I just did.
This was back in the late 1960’s, when a high school day started at either 8:30 or 9:00am. Making time for heavy afternoon sports and other extracurricular activities along with part-time jobs had not yet dictated that classes start at 7:00 or 7:30am, as many of them do now. For me, having this extra hour or so before the sun rose and before starting to get dressed allowed me to go over my notes so that I could re-fresh my memory of what I had studied the afternoon and night before, especially for any quizzes or tests I might be having on that day ahead.
Although my study process was kind of tedious, it wasn’t all drudgery. When it came to American History, for example, which I really did – and do – enjoy, our homework assignment usually was to read a chapter or half a chapter a night. I would start out by reading a page. Then, I’d put the text book down, look at the wall or floor and try to recall what was on that page, paragraph by paragraph. I would then go on to the next page and do the same thing for that page and for each of the pages I had previously studied during that sitting. Then I’d conclude by starting from the beginning of the chapter again to “lock in” what I had just read, re-read and re-re-read. In that way, I would, in about an hour, basically memorize the whole chapter or half a chapter, paragraph by paragraph.
In other words, over the course of the year, I basically memorized my entire American History text book, The American Pageant – all 998 pages of it. I guess it’s no wonder that the 100% average that I got for the course did not fully reflect all of the credit I had built up over the semesters. When it came time to take the New York States Regents American History exam, I got 100% on that, too.
Now, not every course lent itself to that kind of studying. So, although the high school that I went to required us to read a lot of novels for English and be tested on them, I might, in addition, write up chapter summaries on them. But I didn’t memorize the entire novel. What do you think, I’m “obsessive???”
Ok, I really did like the last paragraph of A Separate Peace by John Knowles, so I memorized that one. Of course, there’s not a whole lot that you can do with that sort of information. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t try a few years later on one summer afternoon. That’s when I was going out on a date for lunch with a beautiful girl I was pretty much crazy about. I’m sure that she thought I was too much of a nerd for her – can’t understand how she’d ever get that impression. And I don’t think I helped things much when, while we were stopped at a traffic light and she mentioned that she also liked A Separate Peace (I’m afraid to think what pseudo-suaveness on my part could’ve even gotten the conversation to that point!), the words, like over of a waterfall, came gushing out of my mouth as I quoted for her that entire last paragraph.
News Flash!!! The relationship didn’t go very far.
…………………..
When I went to Hamilton College and Columbia Law School, the story was pretty much the same. In fact, so much the same that going into most of the details would be pretty boring to read about. So, I think it’s enough to point out that the path to graduating 4th in my class at Hamilton was paved with no drinking, no drugs and no dating distractions (not that on the last point there was any female attention that I needed to bat away). As for my time at Columbia, where I was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, two of the non-scholastic high points were a) finding out what a Hostess Twinkie tasted like after it had been heated up in a microwave oven (trust me, you don’t want to repeat this yourself unless you are a professional eater) and b) on the final day that I had to set my alarm clock, instead of pushing in the “off” button when it started to ring, I, with great delight, obliterated the clock with a hammer that I had dutifully placed by it the night before. The elderly woman from whom I rented a room in her apartment (her deceased husband had been a professor at Columbia’s Teachers College, and Columbia didn’t kick the widows out onto the street) for $20 a week once said to me in words that could’ve been my mother’s, as well, “Chuck, I’m worried about you working so hard.” I still remember my answer. “Mrs. Evans,” I said, “I’m doing all of this now so that it doesn’t always have to be this way.”
And in that one sentence at pretty close to the end of my school career, I summed up the “why” of what I had done year after year up until then, and it’s also a good pivot point to what I want to talk about next.
By the time I was at Hamilton and Columbia, I was pretty clear on what I wanted to do after my great escape from the school world. I wanted to work in Washington on Capitol Hill and be the most trusted aide to a United States Senator. Yeah, there was ego in that, and yeah, there was the prospect of excitement. But there was a lot of idealism, too. It was my response to the snarlingly self-confident challenge that one of Nixon’s top aides, John Ehrlichman, had made during the Senate Watergate Hearings when he responded to a question from one of the Committee members about what advice he would give to someone who was thinking about coming to work in a scandal-tarred Washington: “Come and do better.”
And that’s what I tried to do, and that’s what I think I did for seventeen years in Washington (and although I’m not presumptuous enough to say that I was “the most trusted” aide to a Senator, I was pretty close to it.) I won’t here list my “greatest hits” and bore the people who have read my other essays. But if I’m limited to re-telling just one, it would be what Dan Inouye, a Senator and a World War II hero from Hawaii, told my boss, Senator Carl Levin. Following up on a legislative strategy that I had earlier developed, Levin had just successfully offered an amendment to give more benefits to people who had been unemployed for a long time during the depth of the recession in 1982. After the vote, Inouye walked up to Levin’s desk on the Senate floor and said, “Carl, congratulations on being the first person to stop the Reagan juggernaut.”
Nice for Levin and nice for me, too. But I have to recognize that I got to that point of doing this good shit for three reasons.
First, God chose to spare me from what could have been untimely deaths from any number of near accidents or fatal illnesses, although some of those “sicknesses” might have been a bit in my imagination. Take, for example, when I went to the infirmary at Hamilton after my tongue having turned black overnight. I started out by telling the nurse that I thought I had Bubonic Plague. Warning: If you ever want to try to feel better from an upset stomach really quickly, don’t take a lot of Pepto-Bismol tablets all at once, unless you want your tongue to look like something out of a Halloween horror show.
Second, I may not have been born on third base, with only 90 feet to go before scoring. But I think it’s fair to say that I was born on second and with a healthy lead. My mother was as loving, understanding and nurturing as any Hallmark Card could ever be. My father, although never really understanding me, paid all of my educational bills (in addition to getting me some really great toys and letting us all go on some really great family vacations), which enabled me to afford to start working on Capitol Hill debt free for $12,000 a year. And my brother Tom, although eight years older, never talked down to me, other than because he was taller, as he built up my self-esteem and reinforced my creativity time after time. So, my immediate family all reveled (brother), appreciated (mother), or at least put up with (father) that I was “different.”
And, third, I made the choice and was willing to pay the price of putting fun stuff off today so that I could enjoy even better stuff and do even better stuff for myself and for other folks in my tomorrows.
But let me rush to say that I know that there are millions and millions of people in America who don’t have the luxury of making the choices that I did. They may be born into strangling poverty or afflicted with crippling physical or psychological disabilities that even the most willful determination could not reverse. Instead of the loving eyes and caring hands of family, friends and non-biological mentors to push them forward and catch them in their mistakes, they are seared with abuse and slapped with the resentments of others’ pasts that dig and brand holes into their backs that they carry with them into their own futures. And, yes, even in the face of obstacles like these, some people have beaten the heavy odds against them and have survived and excelled. But, generally, it’s either damn, damn hard, or, by any practical measure, may be impossible.
Yet there are millions and millions of others who don’t seem to recognize that the economic and personal frustrations that have now left a “vacancy” light flashing (with one or two letters flickering on and off) on their creased foreheads or bumpy spirits are directly related to the choices they did or didn’t make years and decades before. It was back then when enjoyment seemed easy and came via a lower priced ticket, a really comfortable seat and a show that was just plain fun to watch and even dance into. Gratification may not have been instant (although sometimes it assuredly was), but it seemed a lot closer than they could otherwise get through a tedious grinding of details and assignments dictated by others (and usually “olders”).
But now when they feel trapped and closed in on and when hope and change for something better in their lives seem to be as near and as far away as a big winning lottery ticket (although the actual personal histories on that score aren’t too encouraging, either), it’s in “the other” that they find the “enemy” and the “perpetrator” who are causing the effect that they no longer see an easy exit from: an other look, other race, other gender, other life-style, other religion, and/or other culture.
Something…anything…“other” than themselves and their own earlier choices.
And, at this point, I could try to go into some deeper sociological analysis of my own making. But whom would I be kidding? Many people have already said it better and said it more widely. In fact, I recently finished reading Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, which as I write this essay has been on the New York Times Bestseller List for forty-one weeks. To this discussion, Vance brings the lived experience that I (fortunately) would be giving just a (hopefully) informed speculation about. And, even more than that, he has paid the dues that allow him to say things that, coming just from someone like a privileged-life me, would sound and be harsh and patronizing. There are a lot of portions from Hillbilly Elegy that I’d like to quote from, but within the limits of copyright safety, let me limit myself to these three passages:
“This is why, whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, ‘The feeling that our choices don’t matter.’”
Reflecting on his own growing up in Middletown, Ohio, which Vance describes as the end destination for many hillbilly transplants from Appalachia, he writes, “There was, and still is, a sense that those who make it are of two varieties. The first are the lucky: They come from wealthy families with connections, and their lives were set from the moment they were born. The second are the meritocratic: They were born with brains and couldn’t fail if they tried. Because very few in Middletown fall into the former category, people assume that everyone who makes it is just really smart. To the average Middletonian, hard work doesn’t matter as much as raw talent.
Then going from this macro-observation to a micro one, Vance adds, “I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middleton bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the ‘Obama economy’ and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them.”
So, then, if not to delve into and dig out some deeper, more broadly based or more textured analysis of how our tomorrows can be influenced by our choices of today, then why even bother writing about things from my own past, other than, maybe, to share some stories that could pretty easily fit into a Woody Alan script?
While I’m not going back to high school or college or law school – not in this life, anyway (and hopefully not in the next, either) – some of the people who read this essay may be going there or may be there already. And I wouldn’t want to suggest that everything I did or didn’t do should be their pathway, as well. If I did, accusations of child or young adult abuse could be in the air. But even after putting aside my extremes, what’s still left are the guardrails of a life approach that connects the dots of choices…hard work… accountability… responsibility… and some measures of achievement and success
So, to help answer the question, “why write this essay,” let me dip just one more moment into Hillbilly Elegy, and this time it’s into the wisdom of Vance’s grizzled maternal (in more ways than one) grandmother, Mamaw, who, if she were not living near a “holler” in Kentucky, would have easily found a home in the characters’ neighborhoods of Dickens.
“‘If you want the sort of work where you can spend the weekends with you family,’ (she said), ‘you’ve got to go to college and make something of yourself.’ That was the essence of Mamaw’s genius. She didn’t just preach and cuss and demand. She showed me what was possible – a peaceful Sunday afternoon with the people I loved – and made sure that I knew how to get there.”
And unlike the hopeful come-on for a trip to a family vacation destination, “getting there” is not “half the fun.” You’ve got to be ready for it to be a whole lot less than that. Nor is there an inevitability of success. A lot of bad stuff beyond your control can drop or plop in. But if you’re trying to push the odds in your favor, then you’ve got to be willing to make the choices to push yourself forward as well, even when it can be just so damn comfortable or fun not to.
Or to further help explain why I think working on this essay is worth the effort, take this very moment as I’m writing this essay. There are other things I could be doing right now, and a lot of them easier (although few more satisfying). But I’m choosing to write it because, at the risk of sounding arrogant, I think that what I’m working on might make other people laugh a little and think a little, feel a little better about themselves and maybe even be a little more motivated beyond their (and my) comfort zone. And if that’s what I think I might accomplish, then doing it sooner (within the limits of my pulsating creative spark) is better than doing it later. Sure, as I’ve been working my way through this draft, I’ve had some moments of “I don’t know where the Hell this is going,” “This sounds kind of flat and clunky,” “I’m not sure what to say next,” and even “Maybe I’m just wasting my time.” But I’ve kept choosing to continue because I feel that to stop would be to let myself down. I’d be coming up short in doing some kind of good art or good work.
And even as I reach its end, I’m not sure how some people will take it. Too preachy? Too much information? Or just too long? But I’m willing to take the risk that even if some folks see this essay as sounding an alarm that they’d prefer not to hear or that, for them, the timing’s a bit off, they, nevertheless, won’t obliterate it with the reader’s equivalent of a hammer.
After all, I decided to write it out of the best of intentions.
No one forced me to do it.
I just did.
May, 2017