|
The timeliest reminders often arrive by the most improbable routes.
It has taken the rise to political prominence of a vainglorious grifter from the seamy quarter of the business world to remind us that the movement of people from the country to the city has been a consequential development in human history. The peasants, farmhands, and homesteaders who made that journey entered a world wholly unlike the one they had left. As urban dwellers they had to adapt to new kinds of work and leisure, new daily routines and yearly rhythms, new standards for measuring success and fulfillment. Even at the sensory level, the urban world looked, smelled, and sounded like nothing to which they were accustomed. Getting one’s bearings in this situation required that one become, literally and in short order, a new kind of person.
Some folks have always stayed put. Because of the amenities available in the city, the people enjoying them looked back at those who chose to remain and saw deprivation. When rural dwellers clung proudly to their way of life, urban dwellers saw ignorance. When country and small-town people started voting for Donald Trump, city people saw lowbrow rednecks and hillbillies. The rural/urban divide now outperforms the divisions of race, class, and gender as a predictor of cultural sensibilities and political loyalties.
These perceptions have shaped the reports that journalists from the corporate and progressive media alike have filed on what they have designated “Trump Country.” Reporters fan out into states that lean Republican by a large percentage, seek out people sporting MAGA hats or Trump lawn signs, and extract a string of quotes to ornament a story that was scripted in advance of any investigation. It makes no sense to these writers that anyone would vote for someone like Trump so those who do must lack good sense. Since the behavior is unreasonable, explanations for it find their material in the deficits – lack of education, cultural backwardness, resentment, bigotry – that disable the reasoning faculties. The Trump votes affirm what city people long believed to be true about the perils of rural isolation.
Millions of book readers learned much of what they know about Appalachia from J. D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy purported to be an insider’s account but it was nothing of the sort. Vance’s grandparents left Kentucky and settled in a rust belt Ohio town decades before he was born. His ties to the eastern Kentucky town they vacated after the war are hard to trace. Early on, he claims to have spent “his summers and much of the rest of my time” there, which only rings true if he was not attending the public schools in Ohio he subsequently describes. A bit later and, one presumes, a bit more candidly, he confesses that while Jackson, Kentucky owned “his heart,” Ohio “had most of my time.”
That Vance is more constructing his roots after the fact than reporting on any sustained, real-life embeddedness in the region becomes even clearer when one considers what is missing from his memoir. In his imagined Appalachia, nary a banjo or flat top guitar is ever picked on a porch full of kin. On no occasion does Vance or anybody he knows feast on venison from the woods or greens from the garden. There is much intellectualizing about religion but no churches – his family rarely set foot in one and such encounters as Vance had with Kentucky churchgoers only sowed the seeds for his “outright rejection of the Christian faith” (he has since converted). The dread that settles into the hearts of those who must exchange the easy conviviality and rootedness of small-town life for the bought pleasures and anonymity of the city figures only as backdrop for his heroic refusal to succumb to it. He neither offers his own insights into this wrenching process nor relays conversations with anyone who has given the matter any thought. The only familial relationship he describes that is neither nasty nor barren is the one he enjoys with his Mamaw, the meanest and battiest of the lot but who managed to provide the emotional support Vance needed to escape the shithole (surely both Jackson and Middletown would fall into that Trumpian analytic category) into which he was born.
Vance’s links to Appalachia are constructed from materials he acquired after stepping onto the escalator that lifted him from his impoverished, small town environs into the gated sanctuary of the moneyed and elected elite. His encounter with the brand of identity politics that flourishes in educational institutions like Yale Law School gave him the idea that he might create a grievance genealogy for himself. His Appalachians are distinguishable from other Americans by a cluster of traits to which Vance affixes an ethnic label – “Scots-Irish.” The traits he lists – intense family loyalty, an iron-clad code of honor, a hasty recourse to violence when either loyalty or honor has been besmirched, however slightly, by anyone within reach – sound more Hollywood Sicilian than bonafide Appalachian. By his definition, we would have to rate Don Corleone and Tony Soprano as exemplary hillbillies.
The Clampetts, on the other hand, barely qualify. The creators of The Beverly Hillbillies needed Jed and his family to stick to their Ozark folkways so that they might serve as laughing stocks for a national TV audience. Not once during a nine-season run did a Clampett beat the crap out of anyone. Instead, their cultural inheritance came equipped with a homespun ethic of fairness and propriety that functioned in the show as the wellspring of moral judgment and practical wisdom. When measured by that rustic standard, the denizens of Beverly Hills came off as self-serving, shallow, and untrustworthy. With no tangible connection to the customs of rooted country people but fully enmeshed in the ways and means of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Vance more resembles the bankers and con artists than the mountaineers on the show. There is more hillbilly in Jed Clampett than there ever was in J.D. Vance.
It should not be difficult to locate an Appalachian capable of giving a credible insider’s account of the hillbilly way of living and thinking. Plenty of bluegrass and country musicians from the region write songs about their desires and disappointments, their joys and heartaches, their unearned blessings and unpardonable sins. We should be wary, however, of the artists who populate the commercial charts. The rules of money-making often require an adherence to formulas and these provide a fertile breeding ground for the same hillbilly stereotype that made the Clampetts comical and the Appalachian MAGA voter comprehensible. We will want an artist whose ambition runs in the direction of craft rather than fame. We should definitely steer clear of guys in big hats.
Jason Isbell meets these specifications. Most of his stories bear the imprint of his upbringing in a small town in the hills of northern Alabama. The characters he creates are identifiably rural, the predicaments in which he places them well-familiar to anyone who has grown up in Appalachia or, indeed, any mountain or backwoods region besieged by the onslaught of industrial modernity. He seems to believe that the best way to pay homage to this kind of a people and place is to gaze without blinders at such fine-grained details as a seasoned storyteller could use to dramatize just what it feels like to inhabit such a situation. He is neither sentimental about where he came from nor disdainful of the people who grew up alongside him. In interviews, he usually names honesty as the quality that enables such insights as his fans value in his work. Bruce Springsteen speaks in similar terms about the bonds he aspires to honor between himself as an artist, his audience, and fellow inhabitants of the Jersey shore. The devotion exhibited by fans of both artists suggests to me that they have managed to build that honesty into their songs. Along with chord structure, lyrics, and instrumentation, that quality is audible in the recordings and live performances.
Isbell’s apprenticeship began on his porch on Sunday evenings. Like most everything in a small community still in communion with what’s casually handed down, music-making was a family undertaking. He learned how to make the chords and sing the words from old men with old guitars smoking Winston lights and old women harmonizing with the wind/singing softly to the savior like a friend. The gift of musical storytelling – the something to love that he found as a kid and now recommends to his audience and his daughter – came wrapped in a tradition of finding meaning and pleasure live and nearby. Staying true to an artistic vision, for Isbell, means keeping faith with that tradition both as an ethical standpoint and a musical sensibility.
Step off that porch and we find ourselves in a world that operates by different principles altogether. By the end of the 1870s, railroad lines transected much of Appalachia, making its resources available to wealthy outsiders who viewed this gorgeous landscape as a zone of “rip and run” money-making. The clear-cut loggers showed up first and did the most damage – “[o]f the 10 million acres that had never been cut in 1870, only 1.5 million stood in 1910” (for these figures, and this discussion, I am indebted to Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow). This assault on the Appalachian forest wiped out the material base of the Appalachian way of life – the family-based hunting, foraging, small-plot agricultural economy that undergirds such habits as highlanders have always preferred to anything that required hiring out for a wage. The clear cuts thus did to mountain smallholders what the slaughter of the buffalo did to Plains Indians – destroyed their means of living and, by so doing, depleted their cultural reserves. The same projection of raw power that drove indigenous tribes onto reservations funneled Appalachian clans into the coal mines and, grudgingly, into the wage economy. Both fought to preserve a disappearing way of life against the same merciless, marauding enemy – American corporations, American banks, and the U.S. government acting in lockstep. Neither have fared well against such a foe.
When Isbell wonders if he might be the last of my kind, he is positioning himself to visualize the ravages of modernity from a seat on the Appalachian front porch. After the family farm gives way to a parking lot for Walton’s five and dime, it is the customs of meaning-making and pleasure-seeking handed down from elders that lie buried beneath the avalanche of plastic and polyester issuing nonstop from sweatshops located halfway around the world. When meaning can no longer be found in communal traditions, the search for pleasure loses its bearings. It becomes more solitary, more quietly desperate. In Isbell’s telling, rural folks in this situation end up chasing two options, often simultaneously. They sink into the distractions available in the digital age, most commonly by succumbing to the urge to live inside my telephone. Or they stumble towards oblivion in the old-fashioned way – drug and alcohol addiction, leading to family instability and petty criminality. His characters are haunted by the possibility of someday just giving up. They take a hard look at their lives and want to disappear. They fear being swallowed whole by the forces that have overwhelmed them. They reside in speed trap towns, barren now of the cultural vitality that once emanated from thriving local institutions. The consequences are grim: Ain’t much money in the old-time mandolin/so I cash my check and I drink ’til I’m on my ass again.
Battered and besieged as it is, the culture of the front porch endures. Isbell’s various protagonists are kept afloat by their upbringing – their raisin’. Only when they give in to the temptation to forget where they come from does the line between right and wrong grow faint.
Otherwise they respect that line and do their best to put themselves on the right side of it. No one suffers alone. His characters, however compromised themselves, shoulder without complaint the responsibility of taking care of friends and kin. They consider moving away but cannot bring themselves to leave vulnerable ones behind – what would my momma say?/I’m all that she has left and I’m with her every day. They hold out a lifeline to those with a death wish, struggle to make themselves worthy of the love given to them when they are spiraling down, stay up to sing classic country songs to friends dying of cancer. They lack the power to avenge the damage done to their way of life (you know what revolution means/and you know it’s not an option now) but they make do in loving, dignified ways with what is left to them to manage. Theirs is a culture of belonging, not acquiring. Against great odds they stay attached to small places, as the values they most revere – compassion and fairness, humility and fortitude – find little field of exercise in the predatory climate that settles in after everything scales up and incorporates.
At the end of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance casts a judgmental eye on those he left behind. He worries that the hillbilly stereotype might have some truth to it after all, given how few stir themselves to escape as he did. His memoir becomes at this moment a morality play premised on the certainty that getting out is the only intelligent thing to do. A decision to stay put appears, from this perspective, like sloth or ignorance. Vance’s bootstrapping narrative thus leads him to the same stock representation of poor mountain people that furnishes the imaginations of urban observers.
The adversity that hijacks Isbell’s characters is of the sort that good people are bound to run into when good options are scarce. They do their best to build some kind of well-being into their lives but figure bidding farewell to their small town lives and hometown friends is too high a price to pay for “making it,” particularly after a fashion they feel no inclination to follow. An artist who aspires in good faith to represent these people, Isbell describes what he has seen and experienced firsthand in its full complexity. He both knows and cares too much to judge.
For the narrator of “King of Oklahoma,” for example, a carelessness born of boyish overconfidence gets him into trouble: I was emptying my bladder on a 20- foot ladder, should’ve climbed down and found myself some shade. A back injury sends him to a doctor who, following the routine that became common in these parts thanks to the efforts of quota-driven pharmaceutical salesmen, prescribes opioids for the pain. The narrator gets addicted and his back never heals enough to allow him to go back to work, so he conspires to steal some copper pipe from a work site, only to have some bastard beat me to it. The story is told in such a way as to suggest that this could happen to anyone. Any judgment one might be inclined to levy is directed not at the jobless addict but at a system that throws poor people to the dogs when misfortune puts them in need of a service – humane health care – priced beyond their means. The narrator does not break character to draw this conclusion; Isbell never sheds his role as a storyteller to score political points. The narrator fixes instead on the woman who is now threatening to leave him: she used to wake me up with coffee every morning/and I’d hear her homemade house shoes slide across the floor/she used to make me feel like the king of Oklahoma/but nothing makes me feel like much of nothing anymore. This chorus, sung in as full a voice as Isbell can muster, invokes the feeling of emptiness that sets in when one loses the affection and admiration of someone who once offered those up freely. Love and respect, of course, are the bonds that provide most of the cohesion in a culture of belonging. The narrator both suffers and grieves like a native of the American backcountry.
A similar logic governs Isbell’s handling of race. He rejects unequivocally the entitlements of white supremacy: I’m a white man living in a white man’s town/Want to take a shot of cocaine and burn it down. But he too bears the burden of Southern racism, recalling that he was once one of the guys/who pretended not to hear another white man’s joke. Like Wendell Berry, who has agonized at length about the role of racism in the agrarian tradition he aspires to refurbish, Isbell refuses to condemn categorically a whole region or, for that matter, individuals who will still adopt a posture of superiority when Black people show up in their lives. As a native of Appalachia he knows better than to create a “deplorables” bin and toss into it everyone with whom he might have shared a bottle or a bed. Unlike Vance, he has watched hillbillies, in their family and community doings, shape their behavior in accordance with an ethical code grounded in love and responsibility. For that reason, he holds out hope that if they are called to account in the language of that code, small town bigots might be shamed into perceiving racial prejudice as a violation of it. In “Cast Iron Skillet,” Isbell tells the story of a father who cut off all contact with his daughter after she fell in love with a boy with smiling eyes and dark skin. He condemns the act (how did he get so low?) not as sign of inbred malice but as a breach of parental trust: the father who once carried his daughter on his shoulders watching fireworks in the sky has condemned her to going through life without her daddy by her side. The daughter is deprived of the love and support that the father was duty-bound to provide, the rest of the family is dishonored by their complicity – she found love and it was simple as a weathervane/But her own family tried to kill it. We do not find out if remorse for this abdication of responsibility had any effect, but the song does situate racism in a context where redemption seems possible. Surely it is hard for a father anywhere, but especially one doing his parenting in a culture woven from family ties, to go through life without his daughter by his side.
I grew up in eastern West Virginia, tracked with my high school friends to the state university in Morgantown, then after graduation came back home for seven years to play in an assortment of rock-and-roll bands and acoustic acts before following a career path out and away. The scene I inhabited during those years had the easy conviviality that prevails whenever musicians play for the fun of it with no ambitions of making it big. Styles and genres mixed and mingled, but one pure country song functioned as an anthem in nearly every venue. Most performers eventually got around to doing their version of Charlie Daniels’ “Long Haired Country Boy” and when they did most everybody in attendance voiced their approval by singing along. Two ideas in lyric form made this song seem an honest assertion of such truths as these small town residents were poised to acknowledge:
Kinda like my old blue tick hound I like to lay around in the shade
I ain’t got no money, but I damn sure got it made
and
I ain’t asking nobody for nothing, if I can’t get it on my own
If you don’t like the way I’m living, you just leave this long haired country boy alone
The first idea invokes the spirit of a place where time is more valuable than money. There is a good life to be had that does not depend upon how much you possess and thus does not require that you work your ass off to acquire what no self-respecting hunting dog would lift her head to chase. The second reads like the classic rural American declaration of independence. Just as idea #1 can be mistaken by outsiders as evidence of hillbilly laziness, idea #2 can be interpreted as an anti-social, potentially violence-prone, individualism. It seems at first blush that Daniels and the people who know his song by heart are confirming the stereotype.
Set those ideas loose in the moral universe Isbell calls forth in his songs and a different picture emerges. What looks to the uninformed like indolence is an attitude towards time and work that lives on in the cultural memories and, for some, the lived experience of people who find much of what they need near at hand in rivers and woodlands, small farms and gardens. There is work to do but on your own schedule, following your own plans and inclinations, subject to the constraints imposed by nature and the judgment when work is done of locals with an eye for skill and practicality rather than a boss who cares only for speed and efficiency. That is what getting things on my own amounts to in a front porch culture. The proud indifference to what anybody might think is directed at those who, lacking any knowledge of such a culture, judge this way of living deficient. It is not aimed at country folks themselves: the lyrics weigh the merits of “poor” and “rich” on a scale tilted to favor the former. The song is an inside joke, rooted in a mode of sociability barely clinging to life against the onrush of what we have been bribed to think of as progress. Those trained in urban modes might hear an ungenerous individualism but long haired country boys and girls know it as a neighborliness grown bristly for having been habitually maligned by ungenerous outsiders. A rugged communalism.
That, in any case, is what we might need to ponder if we want to solve the mystery of a city-bred real estate tycoon’s appeal to the inhabitants of the American hinterlands. The “greatness” they hope to see return inheres in the standards of propriety and good will that once set the tone in the small places – family farms, townships and villages, highland homesteads – of this country. Trump does not abide by them, indeed mocks those who do as wusses and losers. But his call to restore something that has been lost has struck a chord in those who know what it means to value those standards and try to live by them. They know he is a scoundrel. They would not trust him with their wallet or their daughter. They vote for him for the same reason most people on the Left hold their noses and vote for yet another stiff from the Clinton New Democrat mortuary – he is better, by their reckoning, than the alternative. They have decided, for the moment at least, to hop onto the wrecking ball and see if it might clear the ground of such structures as unbridled globalization has planted in their home towns. They do not care much for the urban professionals who manage those structures or the ideas that a credentialed elite feels entitled to instill in everyone else. They do not believe they are made safer or more prosperous by all the wars and foreign entanglements that a global economy requires. They do not believe the country can absorb all the immigrants gathering at the border. They cannot be roused to defend the rule of law because they recollect that all the policies that dumped hardship into their laps were enacted in strict accordance with the Constitution. They would like to see everything get smaller and slower, less bureaucratic and more face to face.
They are about to be bitterly disappointed, of course. Trump has tapped into their discontent but will only worsen their predicament. Whatever money is saved from the budget cuts and firings will flow into the pockets of those who are sponsoring his dog and pony show. The trimming serves the larger purpose of making the government more powerful, more intrusive, more nakedly coercive, more exclusively responsive to the designs of the wealthy. As compensation, those who have been fooled into thinking they were getting less government will witness in daily installments, on media controlled by the same moneybags, the even greater suffering of people being persecuted by a no-holds-barred state because of their race, gender, nationality, or sexual preferences. Raised to pride themselves on kindness and fairness, these Americans will be invited to harden their hearts to continuous displays of cruelty enacted on the bodies of people who had no hand in the pillaging of their small towns, farms, and businesses. Everyone, regardless of what they believe, will experience an intensification of the disasters that become commonplace in a climate driven into chaos by the impact of commerce as currently conducted.
The Trump agenda is a rip and run operation designed to ransack social and ecological systems in the early stages of collapse. No one knows better than the billionaires issuing the orders that a time of reckoning will arrive. The ratcheting up of surveillance and control, the poisoning of the wells of information, the crushing of media independence and dissenting opinion generally – all these efforts are preparation for that moment. Trump might be unschooled but some among his patrons have thought this through and are seizing the opportunity his popularity provides to formally institutionalize an even tighter monopoly on wealth and power. They intend to seal off any avenue that does not terminate in abject subservience.
Vance is being groomed for that same moment. The wealthy can only implement the oligarchic program if they maintain a loyal base of bamboozled commoners. Who better than an erstwhile hillbilly to sell that program to a crowd of restive rednecks? The hyped memoir, the religious conversion, the beard – all these were part of the same preparation, at this stage outfitting a social climbing Ivy Leaguer to look the part of a good ol’ boy. Hopefully, Vance has offered prayers of thanks to the deity who whisked Mamaw into the sweet hereafter before he made his political ascent. As he noted in his memoir, “[s]he loathed disloyalty, and there was no greater disloyalty than class betrayal.” Vance likely commits that transgression a hundred times every day between morning coffee and nightcap cognac. If Mamaw had survived into the Trump years, some MAGA functionary would have had to pay a Proud Boy to drive down to Kentucky and pay one of the Blanton boys to drive up to Ohio and pump a musket ball into her hard head before some journalist gave her the opportunity to tell the world just what she thought about ol’ JD planting his proud, Scots-Irish lips on the ample buttocks of a lyin’, cheatin’, whorin’ plutocrat from the stinkin’ bowels of Babylon.
The majority of those who fled Appalachia after the mowing of the mountainsides and the winding down of coal mining found a new kind of misfortune. Having uprooted themselves from their rural homelands, they negotiated urban hardship unaided by any tradition that might provide guidance or comfort. They had no money and were nowhere near having it made. Faced with that situation, one could either admit bitterness into your heart and seethe or take flight again, this time into the realms – tech, finance, government – where there were still fortunes to be made. Vance’s family is typical of those who chose the former. Vance exemplifies those who used a knack for book learning to crash the parties where “social capital” circulated, his phrase for the connections that magically materialized once he was awarded a Yale degree. Both constituencies – the repeatedly dispossessed and the ruthlessly ambitious – were primed to applaud the provocations of a public figure who literally embodies unhinged rage and unabashed self-promotion.
The tracks on which ambition rides in an acquisitive society all lead into the sanctum where money alone is sacred. There appears to be no lie so blatant, not bit of bigotry or thuggery so vile, that Vance will not promote or perform it in service to those who paid his freight on that line. He and everyone in Trump’s retinue bidding for the same favors dwell in a place where redemption dares not show its face.
The members of Trump’s humbler constituency might still hope for better. The world we have lost – the values that inspire neighborly good will in Isbell’s songs and Berry’s writings – is still available to those who yearn for the ease and warmth of the front porch, regardless of whether they have settled in mountain hollows, rural townships, or urban neighborhoods. Recovering those values, however, awaits our reckoning with a truth that cannot be spoken in the language we now use to assess our prospects: a culture of belonging cannot survive amidst economic and political bigness. Big corporations, big banks, big government are and will forever remain agents of rip and run ruination. That is how they grow and if they are not growing they are dying. Just by doing what they must do to thrive they destroy the only environs congenial to the values we seem to be pining for when we grasp at promises of renewed greatness. Capacities for affection and cooperation evolved in small groups. They wither away in big ones, no matter who is running them. If we are to treat one another in ways that honor us as caring and trustworthy beings, if we are to secure our sustenance in ways that do not lay waste to the natural systems that sustain life on this planet, we will do so as inhabitants of small places.
We have much cause to worry but neither comfort nor clarity will come if we fixate on widening polarization, Constitutional crises, or warring cultures. Those maladies are symptoms of a more profound distress. They have grown acute because the underlying condition has not been properly diagnosed. Modernity itself, as a mode of production and a system of rule, is in its death throes. There is nothing left to do or prescribe. The Republicans have caught the smell of death and are maneuvering to make sure that they alone are in position to rob the corpse of its remaining valuables. The Democrats, at once more thoughtful and less discerning, are applying heart paddles to a body politic beyond saving. Both parties are beholden to wealth and dazzled by bigness. Neither is equipped or disposed to meet the myriad disasters now unfolding at an accelerating rate. If we are going to enjoy any kind of liberty or well-being in the period ahead, we will, as Mr. Daniels suggested, have to get it on our own.
|
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Lloyd recently retired after working for three decades in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside. He specialized in twentieth-century U.S. intellectual and cultural history. He writes now as an advocate for localization, which he sees as the most promising strategy for defusing the many crises we face and reconnecting to the things that make life pleasurable. His essays and a “localist manifesto” are available at Occupy the Hearth.
|
|Back to Title|
LINK TO THE CURRENT ISSUE
LINK TO THE HOME PAGE
|
