Hillbillies Need No Elegy
bittersoutherner.com
bittersoutherner.com
The fact is, Appalachia is largely "just" economically depressed region like Northwest Kansas or the Mississippi Floodplain or the drive from Tucson to El Paso, where most jobs are retail and government and the best jobs are in mineral extraction or transportation or industry, but far fewer than in times past. Transportation is a pain but yet it's crisscrossed by critical routes, and life there is pretty normal for rural America. Really, there's only a handful of areas in the US where you can ride the a boom if you time it right, everywhere else things are just okay. In some places you have fewer options. People try to get by, or try to leave. It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it.
Did you and I read the same book? Most of this story is occurring in the Rust Belt[0], in Middletown, Ohio[1]. He discusses the mass Appalachian flight into Rust Belt towns and the mixing and clashing of culture.
If anything, I'm glad the author kept things largely, as the subtitle would imply, a memoir of sorts. He focuses on his family history and his life to give a face to the problem, but makes you aware that these are major problems in that community. From there you can draw your own comparison based on your experiences.
As someone who lives in one of those cities, it seemed like a clear correlation could have been made. It was chance to unite a rural and an urban problem across race and I thought it was a missed opportunity. I still enjoyed the book, but think it is even more powerful when read in tandem with a book like Evicted [1] that views the problem from another perspective.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/...
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina are key swing states. That's the primary reason Appalachia gets so much attention. This electoral reality goes all the way back to the war on poverty.
If anything, Appalachian are uniquely under-represented nationally. While the region as a whole contains nearly 25 million people, WV is the only state to have two Appalacian senators. I think TN has one as well, but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention.
They also serve (willingly or not) as exemplars held up by Republicans, particularly in the populist ideology of Trump supporters, of those "real Americans" who have been betrayed by globalism and progressivism, and to further the narrative of an intractable cultural and political divide having formed between the rural right and urban left (and to contrast the cultural and ethnic purity of the former against the corrupting influence of multiculturalism and secularism among the latter.)
Technically that is 50% more senators than California with twice the population.
Appalachians don't have the type of land that benefits from those subsidies, and they don't have enough clout to get an equivalent type of economic benefit package. The TVA was the last major economic project the feds funded, and it was hugely popular because it did actually improve the lives of people there. Better federal representation at the Senate level wouldn't solve every problem, but it could definitely alleviate some of the pain.
Midwesterner here.
You don't speak for me. JD Vance doesn't speak for me.
Try listening for once.
I'm not talking about inflection. English doesn't use inflection except vestigially, though our grammar is every bit as subtle (compare English verb tenses to those of a Romance language). I'm talking about the employment of reference, accent, dialect...
The Romances can have hugely brutal nested sentences as nothing.
Would you dare to read Don Quixote in the original and non-modernized Spanish? I think not.
That book mixed a parody of Medieval Spanish and the pre-Enlightentment era one.
The discovering of America put the Church on a lower-closer to the Earth place and became the roots of modern Humanism.
Don Quixote is a pun on the Dark Ages, myth and religion, compared it to Sancho Panza who is a metaphor of the almost Enlightened humanistic/pragmatic folk who doesn't believe on myths and doesn't have crazy religious-like hallucinations on giants.
Trust me, a lot of grammar from the crazy knight is stilL¡l valid today even if looks outdated.
Heck, it already was outdated, as I said Don Quixote was the old fart pun from the 1600s.
English' grammar is a joke compared to the versatibility of Romances. And, even forther back in time, Latin used similar traits.
No, thank you. I studied Italian and French (old, middle, and modern), Latin, and Ancient Greek, though most of that has vanished from disuse.
I'm not talking about the grammar (which is simply different in English despite a couple centuries of attempts to make it fit into Latin), or the degree of nuance Cervantes or Rabelais can extract from their linguistic milieu. I'm talking about the range of nuance that a educated, contemporary speaker of the language has available to them. It is simply vastly greater in English than in, say, modern French.
The typical New Yorker article is CEFRL C2 [1] or ILR 3/3+ [2]. Most internet comments are at CEFRL A2 or so, with some (often faulty) more thoughtful responses at B1 or B2.
Said another way, your median high schooler can read and understand a typical internet comment, but the median high school student cannot read and comprehend a typical New Yorker article.
There are three aspects of writing in the New Yorker that elevates the level:
1. Vocabulary level. Often this is used to add color, and it typically does so well.
2. Complex structure at passage level with appropriate cohesive devices. This loses a lot of people, but makes the article linguistically rich.
3. There can be a great deal of inference and/or tone in New Yorker articles that some folks just don’t get. It will sometimes cause less proficient readers to take away substantial misunderstandings about the contents of the article.
If you try to talk about a New Yorker article in detail with most people, it is not that tough to reach linguistic breakdown.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of...
I wonder if there is a similar scale for cartoons, and if (inscrutable) New Yorker cartoons are at D1 or higher.
2. A scale for cartoons would be interesting. The top level would probably require something like awareness of current events, knowledge of one or more complex/academic theoretical concepts, and deep cultural embeddedness and awareness of cultural trends.
whereas in the UK a cartoon might make a reference to a cartoon from 50-60-70 years ago and you would be expected to understand the reference with out labelling
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2019/jun/0...
It's a comment on the pageantry around the 75th anniversary of D-Day, and directly refers to a famous cartoon from WW2, which was published on VE Day by the (also socialist) cartoonist Philip Zec:
http://www.cartooncounty.com/serendipity2/uploads/Zec2site.J...
The whole genre isn't self-referential, but it's not unusual for leader cartoons to refer to other cartoons, famous paintings, television, or other things.
Regardless, all of the main points still hold.
The most prolific example of the reading level mismatches causing trouble is Paul Krugman's August 2002 column: Dubya's Double Dip? https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-di...?
The famous sentence from the article:
> To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
If you read the whole article and think that Krugman says this housing bubble is a good idea your reading level can't be that good. Too many people did read the whole article and failed to grasp the tone and nuance. Even Arnold Kling had to point out this to his readers http://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/06/defending_what.html
That kind of writing can still be inaccessible to lower reading comprehension levels. If you are uncertain of his writing skills, I don't know what to say.
https://econjwatch.org/articles/a-beginner-s-guide-to-esoter...
> This article is a republication, by permission, of a chapter of the author’s book Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (University of Chicago Press, 2014). The piece provides a beginner’s guide to techniques and devices used in esoteric writing. Among the techniques and devices described are the following: dissembling the true message (sometimes by presenting it as from a disputant, beggar, or buffoon, sometimes by arguing against it in ways that enhance awareness of its truth); dissembling the true target (exoterically speaking of Y when the real target is some other thing Z); developing a compelling argument and then taking it back; textual incongruity (for example, departing from a declared plan); conspicuous inconsistency or self-contradiction; the commission of errors that the author’s demonstrated competence and mastery would not allow (for example, altering a quotation in a significant way); dispersal (dispersing argumentation for a tacit viewpoint throughout the text); expressing very striking or intense thoughts in an oblique or ancillary fashion, such as in a meandering digression or in the notes; meaningful silence or conspicuous omission (as when the text creates expectations of coming to something that then remains unaddressed or unstated); alluding subtly to the writings or opinions of a significant figure; and placing thoughts of particular significance in middle of the text or in the exact center of a list or sequence.
That's really not a meaningful argument as to its merit. In fact, it's so famously not a meaningful argument that it has its own fancy name: argumentum ad antiquitatem.
The standard ways to measure text complexity in English for native speakers are the Flesch-Kincaid readability and grade level tests. These depend on the length of words and on the number of words in sentences so they're obviously not perfect, in particular they do not measure the use of rare vocabulary or references nor of difficult content.
I tested the OP and found: Flesch reading ease 53.2 (fairly difficult)
Gunning Fog 11 (hard to read)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 10.1 grade
Coleman-Liau 10th grade
SMOG Index 9.6 grade
ARI 9.5 grade
Linsear Write Formula 11.4 grade
Where the references to grade are to American school grades. In other words this text can be read by average American 10th graders without difficulty.
I ran an article from the current New Yorker through as well (the one on Basquiat) and that came out as 11th grade reading level.
This is almost exactly equivalent to saying that an average ten year old can read the New Yorker. A ten year old already has their native language down, the rules of grammar and syntax, the accent, the vocabulary, the capacity to discriminate between words with the same denotation but different connotations. There are ten year olds who can profitably read the New Yorker but very few. At least 10% of the adult population will have an absolute score on an IQ test similar to the average ten year old’s.
There are undoubtedly New Yorker articles that a ten year old could completely understand with sufficient exegesis but it’s the US’ premier literary journal and has been for decades. If they haven’t published articles with the depth and complexity of a Supreme Court judgment on some level I will be greatly surprised.
Most people are literally incapable of passing a law degree just as they are of learning calculus. You can write formal logic in English prose instead of using the symbols. The English prose version will be no more comprehensible to an average native English speaker than the one with mathematical symbols.
That's a ten dolla word if I ever saw one.
:)
It is not because it is fundamentally incorrect to say that the New Yorker is a C2 level text.
The CEFR is not intended as a scale to measure the complexity of written text for native speakers and/or readers of a language, it is intended as a four part (listening, reading, speaking, writing) assessment scale of the overall language abilities of people. At most, one could say that a text was consistent with what would be expected of a successful CEFR C2 candidate in the reading portion of the test.
One of the reasons that you cannot use the CEFR to characterise the proficiency of native speakers is that it assumes that you can understand texts of a similar complexity in your native language. Most such assessments are given to educated people, usually adults, so the texts reflect that.
Yes, there are people who are not highly proficient by the standards of a native speaker at reading and particularly writing in their native language. Who knows, I may be wrong to think that they would easily pass the written portion of a CEFR test, certainly they would smash the oral portions.
However the CEFR tests are fundamentally not designed to assess quality of education for native speakers. You could shoehorn them into that role but we already have other measures of language ability (in the US often calibrated to grade level) that are specifically designed to measure this.
19% of Americans cannot read well enough to fill out a job application correctly.
The organization for economic cooperation and development found that 50% of U.S. adults can't read a book written at an 8th grade level, which is a statistic which obviously requires the estimate of "average American reading at a 7th or 8th grade level" be questioned heavily.
I've seen many estimates that the average high school student reads at a 6th grade level, and only 15% of the country is at an undergraduate level despite 30% of people having a degree.
I don't know where you get the idea that "grade level" relates to grades completed, but the average American is likely at a 5th grade reading level.
It doesn't change the fact that the CEFR framework is not intended either to measure native proficiency nor to assess the difficulty of a written text.
I'm not disputing that the New Yorker is written at a higher level than the average American cares to read, just disputing the use of CEFR framework to assess the text.
You’re right about this, but these are the systems I know, and they are arguably more useful in this context that most of the grade-level models you listed (very abstract, and most folks don’t really understand the level they are based on).
> Everyone that speaks English as a first language would pass a C2 level examination very easily.
C2 is the equivalent of a highly educated native speaker. This does not describe most Americans, even ones with seemingly appropriate credentials.
A discussion I’ve heard about native speakers of English expected to pass a C1 test in a foreign language: “Can they pass C1 in English?” The answer was not always so clear.
> In other words this text can be read by average American 10th graders without difficulty.
These are more like ideal goals for a high-performing Xth grader. I have worked with the vocab lists that textbooks writers are supposed to use — the expectations are very high.
Anyway, thank you for your response.
I've lived in Appalachia my entire life (West Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New York).
Although I can't generalize about the people of either the Midwest or Appalachia, there are some big differences between rural Appalachia and some other rural places.
1) Landscape. Due to the difficulty of building roads, some Appalachian places (closer to WV and KY) were extremely isolated until the 20th century. This affected culture, education, wealth, and industry. It's a huge factor in the region even today.
2) Agriculture. In most of Appalachia, you can't have a massive corn plantation. You rarely see a large field of anything at all. Most of the exports are capital-intensive and extractive (mining or timber), and the result is that there's a pattern of wealthy outsiders plundering the resources and leaving locals with little of the gain.
3) Stereotypes. A strong Midwestern accent (from, let's say, rural MI or PA) does not have the same connotation as a strong Appalachian accent (from KY or WV). The stereotypes of the regions just aren't the same, and they do affect people applying for jobs.
I've been around motorsports most of my life and I used to see this all the time at racetracks in America. Even in NASCAR country, lots of people assume the "good ol' boy" accent means a person is just a shade-tree mechanic even if they're the most well-educated person in the garage.
For most of the rodeo he spoke with a thick drawl, obviously going for the "good ol' boy" vibe.
A few times, he slipped up and spoke with a very plain Portland/PNW accent. It was jarring when I heard it but he went right back to the good ol' boy accent and I don't know how much anyone else noticed. But it came across like it was all an affectation, for the reasons you described.
(He also occasionally herded his cattle by sticking his head through the roof of an ancient VW Beetle. But that's another story.)
FYI I'm a Midwesterner and problems relating to pictures isn't a regional trait that I'm aware of. A picture of X is in pretty direct correspondence to the visual experience of X itself, so it turns out pictures are pretty easy to digest! If you're a Midwesterner, you should definitely give pictures a try. If you're not a Midwesterner, it's possible that meeting a few more of them would change your idea of what they can relate to.
Perhaps the people with the compulsion to leave have already done so? Kind of what is being call "The Big Sort", where (politically) like-minded people seem to be congregating to the same neighborhoods:
* https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/10/the-big-sort-revisite...
* https://www.economist.com/united-states/2008/06/19/the-big-s...
Something similar happening to the ambition-minded?
(Someone once remarked / joked that perhaps America is so stereotypically optimistic is perhaps all the people who left the Old Country for the New World were probably the more adventurous, go-go types, and those that stayed behind were more chill.)
Similarly, we worry about disrupting natural biomes through deforestation or overfishing, but we don't think about sustainability applied to human communities, with a few exceptions (reservations get some attention, though not sufficient attention).
What do we do? For one, I don't think it's hard to make an ethical case for remote first workplaces.
Fwiw, I tried moving away to Seattle, but despite my educational attainment and liberal leanings, I found that I just prefer NC. There's something to be said for living somewhere you don't feel like an outsider. After 5 years in Seattle, I still couldn't lose that feeling.
Brilliant.
This book is specifically written from one (white guy's) point of view -- somebody who grew up in the area.
I'm not sure how the ideas that circulate about this place do active harm. Most (if not all) accounts I've heard about this place are personal accounts. The truth from people who have lived or traveled there.
Sometimes the truth hurts. Denying it's truthful isn't helping anybody.
“In the new book “Appalachian Reckoning,” dozens of mountain voices combine to talk back to J.D. Vance’s best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy.” Today, an exclusive story from its co-editor and a powerful essay (which involves Granny, her .38 pistol, and some coal trucks) excerpted from the book.”
Part of the point of the article (which was very good) was that there is not singular truth about a place a vast and varied as Appalachia. This new book seems to be much more than a commentary on Hillbilly Elegy.
This is natural, so we use shortcuts as heuristic predictive tools: so the Russians throw numbers at war, the Chinese steal your secrets, the Appalachians are poor, the New Yorkers rude, the Japanese clean and neat. And the San Frannigans bristle at that demonym while they shit themselves in the street.
So, no, the fact that there is complexity and uniqueness in culture is normal. It is not interesting. The only value is what you extract as the weak trendline. Imagine a scatterplot with loads of overlapping red and blue dots, but there are more blue dots above some line than red dots, by a considerable number. Most of them will interact, some red dot may even be higher than any blue dots, but you will be reduced to the fact that blue is higher than red on the graph. It is a weak decisioning tool because the complexity is both incompressible and useless for prediction.
Yes, and the facile reduction of that complexity is the source for much of the political stupidity making us miserable. Also, thank you, Internet, for spreading it around so prolifically.
https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf
"I do claim that the more we tend to value nuance as such—that is, as a virtue to be cultivated, or as the first thing to look for when assessing arguments—the more we will tend to slide toward one or more of three nuance traps. First is the ever more detailed, merely empirical description of the world. This is the nuance of the fine-grain. It is a rejection of theory masquerading as increased accuracy...."
There is wisdom in your words.
BS! Morgantown is definitely not the heart of Appalachia:
- It’s only 9 mi into WV!
- has population that doubles during the school semester
- has three or four federal agencies (FBI, NETL, NIOSH)
- showered with federal and state largess (thank you senator Byrd)
- has traffic jams worthy of a city with 10x it’s population
- has one of my favorite restaurants in the US
- has a significant private sector economy (Mylan, for one)
-if I recall, technically it didn’t have a recession in ‘08.
I’ve lived in Morgantown for a while. And while I certainly caught a glimpse of Appalachia, it certainly isn’t the heart. Maybe it’s about as redneck as the president of WVU dares to venture.
I'd say the real heart of Appalachia is Pikeville KY.
Beautiful state and people.
Edit: And while Morgantown is only 9 miles into WV, really the entire state of WV is the heart of Appalachia. No matter what part of the state you leave from you're still going to be in Appalachia, just in a neighboring state.
I get it. The author uses “heart of” as an expression, like I use “literally” in a figurative sense.
But, it also gives me a sense that it betrays the authors almost complete ignorance of Appalachia; which the article purports to explain :S
I don't know about that, that's weird logic to me. Atlanta is barely Appalachia, at best it's at the very terminus in the south. Pittsburgh is much more a part of Appalachia to me, though honestly I'd say both those cities have their own unique culture that's perhaps related or influenced by Appalachia (yinzers are kinda Appalachia). I guess somewhere around Roanoke would probably be the true geographic middle, but eh. Close enough.
But Atlanta is really close. at the “Piedmont” of the if you will ;)
Nary a coal miner, nor axeman to be found in this ivory tower meeting.
Also, it wasn't an "ivory tower" (such a limp, worn-out descriptor) meeting, it was a book launch, and it was literally open to the public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-se...
If the other commenter here is correct about Morganstown being only kind of half-Appalacian, as opposed to their claim of hailing from the heart of Appalacia, that really just puts the cherry on top.
JD Vance was born and raised in Middletown OH. This is far SW Ohio, on the border with Indiana. (It was something of a surprise to me that any part of Ohio is considered Appalachian, but then I've spent most of my Ohio time in Toledo. [0]) There are hills, but those hills are not the Appalachians. JD Vance is from the Midwest. Has he actually claimed to be Appalachian? As far as I can tell he has claimed to be a "hillbilly", which is fine but hardly limited to Ohio or the Appalachians. My neighbors and I in the Ozarks have at least as strong a claim to the term, but we don't seem to get as uptight about this stuff as the folks back East get.
And this is denigration, which would be accepted for no other region or nation. In the first place, because it defies logic that some lawyer with no particular sociological training would be accepted as some sort of authority about a region he visited as a child during some summers when his hectic home life allowed. Second, because blaming culture for the misfortunes of any particular group of people is the oldest trick of racists, trickle-down economists, and other awful people. This book is full of corny anecdotes proving Vance is one of those awful people; he judged this person for showing up to work late and that person for smoking too many cigarettes. Third, because ITT we've seen Morgantown WV questioned as "authentically Appalachian"; this is serious double standards.
It's one thing to dislike a particular person, for whatever reason. It's quite another to see that person as an exemplar of the negative attributes of all the residents of another region where you have never lived. It's another yet when the exemplary person you dislike is also not from that region...
As a history buff, I have a difficult time watching many "based on a true story" movies or movies claiming to represent some important person or event in history. It's for the same reason: people consume information through narrative, and narrative forces reality into predefined tracks. This means that any art form claiming to represent a people, region, person, or event must necessarily be lying to you. The better the art the more likely the lies are big ones.
And so storytellers are forced to lie, both by drastically-reducing scope and by smoothing out the edges. Then they consolidate characters, generalize over things that are not part of the narrative. They find a hero. They bump the contrast up a bit to make the narrative consumption more enjoyable.
I love this, I love art and storytelling, but it means that there are great masses of people who don't know jack squat about a ton of topics that they think they do.
I grew up here. I've traveled all over, spending quite a bit of time in SF and other very cosmopolitan places, but this is home. If I were forced to scope it down, I'd probably start with the mountains, then the coal mines, then the Scots-Irish cultural backdrop. The writer made an astute point when they mentioned all the outsiders passing through and screwing us over in various ways for their own selfish reasons. That's been a persistent theme, but it is slowly dying off. There's also the tent revival culture, but that's also going away.
The only other generality I'd add if I were scoping down a story about this place is the stereotype of the ornery eccentric. This character has been played up for comic relief over the years, many times making them out to be simpletons. Instead, there are a lot of PhD-level folks who just don't give a damn about society and don't want to. They're nice enough. They just want to be left alone. You find that plenty of other places as well, but Appalachia has a long history of those folks and we tend to cherish them, even if we're making fun of them.
Andrew Jackson almost beat a man to death with his cane after he tried to assassinate him (His gun misfired. He grabbed a backup. It also misfired. Jackson commenced to beating on him and had to be pulled off). After the Civil War, Ewell went back to his home, picked back up his law practice, and started writing books about what a bunch of jackasses all those people who misunderstood the war were. We always wave at people here: the best way to tell if people are from far away is when they don't wave. Had a neighbor once that when I waved at him he would make various obscene gestures and curse. He just wanted to be left alone.
I wouldn't live anywhere else, and it's not because I haven't tried out a bunch of other places. There's something about the mountains that keep calling me back. I don't know what.
Another piece of media that I felt was a strong statement about Appalachia is Ever South[1] by Drive-by Truckers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwM2yd2QZ2Q - live rendition at KEXP
I think the saddest thing about Appalachia is the fact that much of the really interesting parts are disappearing. Everything in the country, including Appalachia, is WalMart-i-fied. It's all strip malls and chain stores. Everybody listens to the same music, surfs the same sites, and buys the same swag. As a species we are homogenizing everything.
I have fond memories of walking into a country store in Grundy, Virginia where I bought a coke. The guy behind the counter spoke in a language I couldn't understand at first. Then I realized it was English. I have another fond memory of walking into a startup where they were on their way to making billions. These memories happened only several dozen miles from each other. There's a lot of cool stuff going on here. I can guarantee that whatever media you've consumed about it misled you in many ways.
However, I think that Hillbilly Elegy has been influential based specifically on insight it gives into why the region supported someone like Trump. The author may be correct that Hillbilly Elegy is incorrect; however, since the article doesn't present an alternative explanation I'm not sure that it is very useful.
The fact that you grew up there is relevant to what you're saying, of course. But it's not relevant to whether your comment broke the site guidelines. Internet forums can't handle that level of nuance, and a comment like this is going to lead to a big old flamewar by default.