Hillbilly Hypocrite

Humiliation has long been a strong deterrent to failure in America. Our culture’s tendency is to blame the person, not the country or its capitalism. If you are in the ditch, you got there because you did not work sufficiently hard or smart, and you should not expect too much help climbing back up on the road to prosperity. The government was not designed to provide you a safety net. Capitalism and America did not fail; you did, and you alone are responsible for redemption. Especially in the post World War II economy, Americans were convinced X amount of effort always produced a Y total of abundant results.

And they were wrong.

In the Midwestern factory town where I was born and raised, no shortage of muscled backs and arms ever occurred when labor was required to build cars and trucks. Millions of hard-working souls came up from the South, Blacks and Whites, looking for a brighter tomorrow than what was possible while chopping cotton and praying that rain would follow the plow. Mostly, though, they exchanged one form of sweat for a different endeavor that did not immediately prove as profitable as envisioned. They worked, however, long and hard hours because there seemed an endless demand for the Fords and Chevys and Dodges that rolled off the 24-hour assembly lines.

Most of the hourly wage employees at the factories were labeled as “hillbillies,” which was a pejorative assigned to under-educated migrants from south of the Mason-Dixon Line, a historic pre-Civil War demarcation that separated free and slave states. Technically, hillbillies were supposed to be from impoverished Appalachia and the Ozarks of Missouri but in the industrial Midwest the term came to encompass former residents of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and, ultimately, all the Southern states, or Dixie, east of the Mississippi River. It was the hillbillies, in fact, whose bent backs and long arms set the American economy on fire and filled the pockets of investors and tax collectors and all the manufacturers of parts and materials for cars and trucks. Rain never did follow the plow but the economic boom did chase the hillbillies.

No people worked harder than my mother and father. Ma waiting tables at a burger joint up on the Dixie Highway for .65 cents an hour and nickel and dime tips while Daddy earned a little over $1.50 hourly. If there had been more hours to a day, they would have taken the additional work. There was never enough money to feed and clothe their children and the mortgage payment, less than $100 monthly, created a household crisis every thirty days. The strains caused emotional and psychological breakdowns in my father and our mother struggled mightily to hold together her family. She was an immigrant and had nowhere to turn.

Ma finally found some assistance from county government, which was disbursing United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) food to needy families. There was embarrassment for her, though, in having to seek help because it became a kind of public proclamation to your neighbors that you had failed. Even though her education had not gone beyond eighth grade on her home island, she was clever enough to figure out a way to avoid the judgment of others when it came to earning a living and caring for her children.

The popular local grocery store used to bag groceries in our town with thick paper sacks that bore the store’s name and bright red logo on the side. Families kept these bags for various uses like storage and containing garbage to be taken curbside. They were referred to, and might still be, as “Hamady sacks,” branded with the surname of the store owners. Eventually, those brown bags became painful memories for me because they symbolized my mother’s shame. I think I was nine years old when she asked me to travel with her to the county welfare office and bring a Hamady sack.

“Get me a Hamady sack from behind the ‘fridge, son, and put on your coat,” she said, one gray Michigan winter day.

“What do you need it for, Ma?”

“Never mind. Fold it up so I can put it in my purse and go put on your jacket.”

“Where are we going, Ma?”

“To get groceries.”

“We have to bring our own bags?”

“Never mind, I said, son.”

When we arrived at the county assistance offices, my Ma put on a pair of sunglasses, which I did not know she owned, and we walked inside a brown brick structure not far from the Buick plant where my father worked. There was a line and we waited a half hour as I watched my Ma peeking over the tops of her sunglasses like she was looking for someone she might know. Eventually, we got to the counter and she filled out some papers and was handed tickets before being directed to another window.

A man behind the counter took the tickets and returned with long blocks of cheese, boxes of cereal, powdered eggs and milk, and cans of soup. They were all packaged in brownish-green cardboard and had large lettering that said USDA on the sides. Ma took the Hamady sack out of her purse, unfolded the heavy, brown paper, and placed the food inside and led me out the door. I did not grasp until I was much older that the sack was more about deception than convenience. The government packaging was very noticeable, and Ma did not want anyone she knew to see her carrying the food. When I was a boy, I cannot recall that there was anything to be said about a family that was more demeaning than, “They’re on Welfare,” and that described our circumstances.

I cannot stop thinking about how hard labor wore down my parents to where they had no energy, will, nor money to enjoy the latter years of their time. My father had nervous breakdowns, multiple electroshock therapies, and incidents of violence where he lost himself and hurt his wife and children. Ma was afraid and lived too much of her time without hope or money, but she never abandoned her children. When I read disaffected souls like Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance write of his childhood and suggest that too many Americans “lack agency” for their own lives, and have a “feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,” I feel a need to scream issuing from my throat. Instead of blaming bad industrial planning and management for factory failures and loss of jobs, Vance puts the collapse on the shoulders of the wage earners.

In his book, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance contradicts his own theories. When his parents’ marriage failed and his mother fell into drug addiction, his grandparents stepped in to raise him and protect him from the streets. No one passed him off to Child Protective Services, his family gave him safe harbor in his youth. Vance indulges in more than a bit of self-aggrandizement with his personal narrative of success while ignoring the fact that not everyone has the resources or the courage to leave their hometown. What “agency” does a family of four have over their lives when the steel factories shut down and both parents are suddenly without income and the mortgage banker is eyeing a foreclosure? People living paycheck to paycheck, as probably is the case with the majority of Americans, cannot simply jump in their clunky old car and take off for a western horizon convinced there is a new job and better life over the hill. They cannot even pay for gasoline.

Vance seems convinced, too, that there is such a creature as the “Welfare Queen,” an unmarried woman who does not work, gets government checks, and rides around inner-city Detroit or Cincinnati in designer clothes with a dozen children living off taxpayers. The notion is apocryphal and even if there were millions of such women, their waste would never begin to approach what the U.S. military has allowed to disappear into the Mideast and defense contractor boondoggles like the Osprey or the Joint Strike Fighter jet, which both crash frequently and never appear to serve the nation’s defense without multi-billion dollar failures. These catastrophes are ignored by political pseudo-intellectuals with Vance’s credentials because they have a rigid belief that the government has no real role beyond defense and low taxation to sustain businesses. You are always on your own in America and no government program needs to catch you when you fall or offer you a hand up.

Vance’s immaturity is unveiled with his conspiratorial thinking on matters of geopolitics and policy. His tortured visions show him a President Biden scheming with his Democratic consorts to open the U.S. Mexico border as part of a vast national plan to kill MAGA voters with drugs. “If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?” he said during an Ohio speech. “It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it.”

The absurdity of this claim is counterintuitive to Vance’s argument that people ought to take agency over their lives and their fortunes, regardless of their economic circumstances. He is suggesting that MAGA voters, whom he trusts, will, instead, simply use fentanyl because it ends up in their communities, thereby reducing the number of people able to support Trump. In J.D.’s world, are not MAGAts the strongest, most independent, and able thinkers who do not need the government and would exercise intelligent judgment to “just say no” to Biden’s drug cartels?

Further, though, his facile argument ignores the fact that conservative American politics from his party have caused the rush on the American border. Our geopolitics in Central America, coups we have facilitated, and fruit and oil companies we have given provenance in place of indigenous governments, have caused a social and economic collapse in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America that will not soon stop sending people to our doorstep. As for fentanyl, it does not cross the frontier in immigrant backpacks; it is smuggled across in motor vehicles at legal ports of entry. J.D. could ask U.S. Customs and Border Patrol if he wanted real data like information that fentanyl seizures have dramatically increased during the Biden presidency.

Vance’s Ivy League law degree must also be curling at the edges from his beliefs on legal issues. He described Trump’s hush money trial for business and political corruption in New York City as “a threat to democracy,” which is, to understate the matter, profoundly ignorant in a manner that does not suggest deception or disingenuousness. Evidence was collected through legal investigation, testimony was acquired through deposition, and charges were filed based on the preponderance of what that material indicated. A trial was held on the 34 felony charges, and Trump was convicted. This was American jurisprudence working the way it was designed, a critical element of our democratic foundations. The only threats were the less than veiled violent ones made against the judge and prosecuting attorney.

Vance also does not care about the Constitution, which he would be sworn to uphold should Trump and he win. (I will, should that happen, seek to become an Australian emigre’.) Our outdated Electoral College, proscribed in the Constitution, calls for “electors” in each state to represent before Congress the candidate who won the most presidential votes in that state. They then gather in Washington to cast their votes and the Vice President is required to certify the results. Vance said he would not have certified the 2020 results were he the VP, and would have encouraged states to send additional slates of electors, you know, maybe people who loved Trump even though he did not win and they would not be qualified to vote as electors. Vance would happily defy the constitutional laws he was sworn to uphold.

“If I had been vice president,” he said, “I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.” That’s not how it works, J.D. Freshen up on your constitutional law. Maybe take a remedial course or two.

It is impossible to understand, Senator Vance, how you became who you are and what you took away from the childhood you described so eloquently in your book. My suspicion is your transformation to Trump acolyte after ridiculing him for a few years might make you the most craven pol of your generation. You are looking at that chronically obese low intellect, tottering around with arteriosclerosis and coronary heart disease and sniffing Adderall, who believes exercise is stupid because it uses up your limited number of heartbeats, and you are thinking, “I may very well end up the youngest president in American history when this guy tops off.” Let’s hope not.

But either way, there are millions of hard-working Americans like my parents, if they were still around, who would like to have a word.