Cincinnati
About that.
I'm going to drop a name from the past on you, one that many of you haven't heard in a long time, to make an analogy.
Jeff Foxworthy.
Back when he was at his peak, his act was controversial. A lot of people thought it was just fun harmless class self-deprecating humor. However, a lot of people despised him and his act, because they thought he was engaging in a sort of class treason in order to get personally famous and make money. Then there was the theory that he never was a redneck in any way; Both he and his father were IBM executives. And that he was just cosplaying and larping a redneck existence just to "bash" rednecks in turn to sell media and tickets.
I think J. D. Vance has some of that Jeff Foxworthy energy, and by "energy," I mean divisive controversy.
Unlike Foxworthy, Vance actually did come from generally bad circumstances, and got out and up. However, there's some of the same angst afoot. One side thinks he's altruistically and heroically calling attention to class-specific social problems and engaging in tough love and then pivoting to metapolitical imperatives. While the other thinks that he's dumping on his own class and in fact his own immediate family, petulantly taking family and class business that should have been left behind closed doors (figurative or real) and throwing it out into the open, just to make a celebrity out of his own self, and to sell books and make money off the movie rights, and then parlay that into a political career.
My take on both is the former and more benign schools. However, I can rationalize (not justify) why a lot of people are of the more critical schools.
Another way to put it is that, in the minds' eyes of those who don't like them, Foxworthy and Vance are playing the white Appalachian underclass version of the Uncle Ruckus role from the "Boondocks" cartoons. Let's just say real world rough equivalents of Uncle Ruckus are not exactly the most popular people in the American black community. One reason why the Vance slash Uncle Ruckus analogy can be rationalized here is that, just as the fictional Uncle Ruckus has a reputation for "bad mouthing" blacks to appeal to white people who want to hear someone black saying what they themselves can't ("buck dancing" or "tap dancing"), the real world Vance did somewhat of the same thing. Remember, the first big audience for "Hillbilly Elegy," the book, and then the movie adaptation, were bigoted classist elitist whites, who wanted to get a cheap jolly from trashing and feeling superior to lower class whites. Prosperous urban whites especially love to hate rural lower class whites, because it's a socially "acceptable" stand-in for that which they would be doing save that it's prohibited in polite society, which is, openly calling out the violent blacks that immediately surround them and affect them. To put it another way, prosperous urban whites in, say, Park Slope, Brooklyn, will spend all day hating white rednecks in West Virginia with rifles, because they really fear ghetto blacks in Brooklyn with handguns. Vance, at least the ca. 2016 version of him, inadvertently fed that perfidy.
It was only later that Vance transitioned to a real political career, to translate his frustrations into real public action. It was then, that his initial big audience turned on him, and are continuing to do that.
As much as I don't agree with the sentiment, I know that these flippant and very unnecessary comments from Vance that are the subject of the article linked above are only going to add fuel to the fire to those of the critical school. Which means that Vance is in an uneasy position where his original audience is mad at him because of his eventual political career and now strapping up with Trump, but at the same time a lot of his birth class are angry at him for his initial "buck dancing." (Then there's the matter that he even has an Indian wife. Goes like this: "If you love our people so much, why didn't you marry one of us?") However, that's the reason why I think that Vance himself has always had beneficent motivations, because if being a buck dancing Uncle Ruckus was ever his intention, he would have stayed doing that and never embarked on a political career in the way he has. I just happen to think that his initial fan base had ulterior and malignant motivations.
Notes: I read an article a few days ago noting the irony of Trump, actually born with a silver spoon in his mouth, being popular among blue and gray collar whites, while Vance, born without the window to throw it out of, appeals to a relatively elite and accomplished class of people. You may have also heard that the original German language publisher of "Elegy" is canceling becuase their execs are mad that Vance is Trump's running mate. The scam there is that another German publishing house is going to take it up. Here's the kicker: Both houses are owned by a Swedish-Jewish media family called Bonnier, which also owns the two biggest daily newspapers in Sweden. So it means that unless it's a matter of the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, which is possible when it's such a large and unwieldy business conglomerate, then the more cynical explanation is that Bonnier is playing both sides, trying to make shine off of Trump haters (who will flock to the publisher that dumped "Elegy"), and Trump lovers (who will buy "Elegy" from the house that will publish out out of disgust that the original house ditched it). Playing both sides is a well known tactic of that certain ethnicity, but really, it's something that anyone will do if they can get away with it; Nice work if you can get it.
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