Over on National Review Online, Ross Douthat notes that the venom against the Netflix production of Hillbilly Elegy is "strange" because several years ago it was a must-read for libtards--sorry, liberals, trying to understand trump voters. Today, having made a pretty okay movie, people--the usual subjects--are disgusted.
WAT IS GOING ON? He asks. Kinda.
The Omnivore is gonna tell you.
What Is Going On
After the Civil War turned into the Reconstruction, authors in the libtard--sorry, liberal woke North started writing, uhm, elegies for the South. Yes---people in the North wrote about the South in a way that was, how shall The Omnivore say, nice?
They did as much to create the myth of the noble south and the Lost Cause as any Southerner. The reason for this was, in retrospect, obvious: Since we had to live alongside our southern neighbors now we were pretty damn invested in seeing them as, erm, noble. General Lee was cast as a reluctant warrior who abhorred slavery but fought for muh States Rights and muh Glorious State and its herritage.
Never mind that he (a) owned slaves, (b) had them beaten or beat them himself, (c) had brine poured over the wounds, (d) sold them in the breaking up of families (hugely evil and traumatic) and (e) captured free black men on campaign and sold them into slavery.
Yeah--he was all good. Muh heritage--not muh hate.
Yes, well, nevertheless.
The writers coming after the Civil War created a widely read mythology that persists today that casts blacks as more or less happy slaves and the Civil War being about, erm, something else (TrAdE TaRIfFs). If you think people don't believe this, The Omnivore is here to tell you: you're being willfully blind.
What Does This Have To Do With Hillbilly Elegy?
It's pretty obvious, no? No? Okay then. The Omnivore has not seen the movie but The Omnivore did read the book . . . and liked it fine. But here's what's going on. Hillbilly Elegy shows a retrospective of growing up Hillbilly in a world of Oxy-abuse and low education with lower expectations where jobs are drying up and people are desperate.
It's not an overly glorious view and it isn't a biography of the Hillbilly. In short, the subject matter--written by a guy who joins the Army, goes to Yale and becomes a venture capitalist is a reasonable look at what these places are like. It does tell the libtard--sorry--liberal--what's going on in those red-places on the map that bleed Trump votes all over the states.
But there's a bit of a problem too: It doesn't explain Trump--at all.
Now, it's not trying to: Vance wasn't writing to explain Trump. The book was almost certainly started before Trump and certainly the material has nothing to do with Trump. Not really--but if you're reading it trying to understand how the fuck Trump happened?
It doesn't tell you that.
What we know now that we didn't know a few years ago is what Trumpism is all about. You see, with Trumpers and Red States spreading COVID unchecked with hundreds of thousands dead and refusing to wear masks--by voting in QAnon believers to congress--and by promulgating bogus charges of a stolen election they just lost because their hero was, erm, deplorable? What we know now is that the Lost Cause of Economic Anxiety that writers in libtard--sorry--liberal--newspapers rushed to use to explain Trump votes was just as bogus as the General Lee reboot.
No, we know what it is now. It's a dash of racism and a huge heaping helping of willing disinformation, culture-war zealotry, and a particularly venomous strain of Evangelical prosperity gospel religion combined with muh-Lilly-White-Jesus that has exposed these people as, erm, horrible.
People wanted to forgive a 2016 vote for Trump. After all, we didn't know then, did we? (we did if we were paying attention). But today? A few months ago, uhm, no. If you voted for Trump after all that? What the ever-loving-fuck is wrong with you?
Well, we know: you're a horrible person. Deplorable, really. Hillary's big mistake was limiting the numbers to "approximately half."
So now? Now a movie that "explains" the trumper in a way that tries to excuse the trumper--which is what Hillbilly Elegy is essentially doing by 2020--isn't going to be met with cheers. It's going to be met with distain because despite the fact that these are actors and the pain the story tells is real? The actual story--now one we've all been exposed to (and in some cases--in tens of thousands, that exposure has literally killed) is a lot uglier than the one Netflix tells.
We all know it and unlike the aftermath of a successfully military campaign complete with surrender and reconstruction? This civil war has yet to happen.
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