As the election looms, we take a look at Hillbilly Elegy (shitty book and shitty movie), the 'memoir' of America's fuhrer-in-waiting, weirdo venture capitalist, plutocrat fascist misogynist, Trump's pet and Thiel's puppet, J.D. Vance, in which he slathers on the hillbillyface in a grotesque and offensive performance of working class minstrelsy to the rapturous applause of centrist liberals... at least until he decided that principles were bad for his career ambitions and suddenly realised that Trump wasn't the American Hitler after all. (He is.) Breaking News Re-Release: "Hil - If Books Could Kill - Apple Podcasts JD Vance Is Actually Much Worse Than You Realize | Sarah Jones | TMR JD Vance's Weird Nazi Lie About Haitian Migrants - SOME MORE NEWS Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Here we talk about the far right, their fellow travellers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
The show is hosted by Daniel Harper and me, Jack Graham.
We're both he-him.
Be aware we cover difficult, sometimes nasty subject matter, so content warnings always apply.
And welcome, everybody.
Welcome back to the podcast that is called I Do Not Speak German.
And this is a public bonus episode.
It's probably the last thing we will put out before the election.
So enjoy that, everyone.
The upcoming election.
Which will still be upcoming.
I mean, we should get this out before the actual election day.
But we are recording on Halloween here in the US, so...
Oh, that's true.
Yes.
It's a spooky Halloween episode.
It's a spooky episode.
Put some Dracula sound effects or something in there, you know.
That's right.
Creaking door.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A squeaking bat.
jd vance talking yeah exactly that uh kind of tells you what we're going to be talking about because this is a public bonus episode in keeping with election season we've been doing a season of bonus episodes on movies about presidents and increasingly as the series has gone along the phrase about presidents has become increasingly stretched and and and pulled but we are really stretching at this time because we're talking about a movie and a book actually that's
By a man who wants to be vice president and featuring the same man.
The wonderful charisma explosion that is J.D. Vance.
We've been talking about J.D. Vance.
We've been talking about presidents.
We've been talking about the election.
Daniel, I hear that you voted.
Is this correct?
Is my intelligence accurate?
I did.
I did.
I actually did the early voting thing, which normally I just go in on the day.
But aren't you worried about fraud?
No.
Well, I was trying to participate in the fraud.
You know, I was like, hey, if I go early, you know, that way I can also go.
I mean, I've voted like five times already.
So, you know, that's, you know, I live in Michigan.
That's just how we do things here.
You know, if you're a Democrat, you can just, although, you know, I do, I do have to admit, you know, that, you know, due to the, like, the scintillating prose of J.D. Vance's book, Kill Billy Elegy, and the, just the raw, you know, the raw power of this film, I was, I was forced to, To vote for Trump.
I voted Democrat all the way down, but I did actively vote Trump.
Just on the off chance that this magnificent man, this giant, a man of steel, a man of gold, might be one heartbeat away, one faltering, McDonald's-fueled heartbeat away from the presidency.
That's certainly the thing I want out of this.
So, J.D. Vance, you got me.
Great book.
Of course, none of that is true.
None of that is true.
So in your case, the gambit has actually paid off.
Let's draft J.D. Vance to be the running mate gambit has actually worked in your case.
You may be the only person in the country that's actually been brought over to their side by the presence of J.D. Vance.
By reading the book.
The book is just that good.
So, no.
We were normally going to talk about the movie, and I had like a week to prepare.
So I went, let's try the book.
So I obtained a copy, and I did read it over the course of a day.
It took me about four hours or so to read the book, and I was kind of getting up and doing other things in between, but it's not a long book.
The EPUB has like 160 pages or something like that.
And then I watched the movie on the same day.
And so I have been inundated with J.D. Vance.
You got your full share of J.D. Vance that day.
I had more J.D. Vance in my life that day than his wife does.
That's quite a bit of time thinking about J.D. Vance.
Let's do it as a public bonus.
Let's go and we'll talk about this.
Because, as you say, this guy is, well, I mean, depending how it goes, on Tuesday, this guy could be one, as you said, McDonald's-induced heart attack away from the presidency.
And that is definitely an interesting thought.
I'm sure J.D. Vance is watching Trump very closely, you know, as Trump prances around in his reflective garbage man costume.
Yeah.
Like a small child wearing a Spider-Man outfit to go to the fair, you know?
Right, right.
Yeah, I know.
Just amusing himself enormously and thinking as Trump, you know, sort of flails as he tries to open the doors of garbage trucks and things like that and nearly falls over and increasingly just makes no sense at all.
Just don't have the stroke yet, please.
Just wait.
Just wait a little bit longer before you have the stroke.
Just a few weeks time.
Just a few weeks.
Just a few weeks.
Yeah, no.
One thing that's very clear from reading the book is that J.D. Vance very, very, very wants to be president.
You read the book.
I haven't read the book.
A disclosure, you have read the book because you are the Michael Hobbs of this podcast.
Yes.
So what did you make of it?
Well, I thought it would be more interesting to talk about the movie first because, well, A, that's more of a conversation between the two of us.
And I think a lot of the commentary I have about the book is in the ways that, well, structurally the film fails on a lot of levels.
And I think a lot of the reasons why it fails are reasons that kind of reflect the book.
Really, I'd like to get your thoughts first, because you having not read the book, just kind of knowing who J.D. Vance is, you have a purer experience of the movie than I do.
Because all I was doing, because I had read the book literally earlier that day, All I was doing was picking apart the bits that were not in the book or that were moved around to the book or all that sort of thing.
I really didn't get a chance to really analyze it artistically until I'd sat on it for another couple of days.
I watched little bits and pieces of it to process it.
I don't think either one of us liked this movie, to put it just from vague chats that we've had in our WhatsApp chat.
Spoiler, I did not like it.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
J.D. Vance was a political figure when the book was published.
He was an anti-Trump conservative at that point in time, but he was a conservative Republican.
And I think, I don't know if he was a senator by the time the movie was made.
No, he didn't enter the Senate until 2023.
But I think he had thrown up the flags of, like, I'm going to run for Senate, that sort of thing.
I mean, he was obviously kind of an up-and-coming political guy.
Really, he was just a conservative commentator.
When he was in law school, he wrote for David Frum's newsletter.
Frum's Corner or something like that.
He wrote for David Frum's thing, which tells you where he was in 2011-2012.
definitely changed since then but like he was he kind of got and i have i really can't recommend highly enough the if books could kill hillbilly elegy episode which is on their patreon you do have to be a patron to to access it but it is absolutely and i'm trying not to rip everything off of that podcast because they said so much that it's just perfect you know this book was published the book was published in 2016 and it gets like a lot of notice because i was a
Supposedly, in the eyes of a lot of the media, the book kind of described the disaffected white working class, and he became the liberal whisperer within these things, and it was completely unearned.
The book is terrible.
The movie is terrible.
But he kind of gets this cachet with him as being like, oh, he's the one who's really going to explain why the white lash happened, why these white working class voters voted for Trump.
And as if they won't always vote for Republicans anyway.
That really is the answer to the question, for most of these people, why do they vote for Trump?
The answer is because he's the Republican candidate.
Right, exactly, exactly.
Yeah.
And then I think the movie was sort of greenlit really just like a year later.
It took a few years to be made and get released.
So it wasn't released until 2020 when Vance is a much more overtly political figure.
Whereas in 2016, 2017, there's at least a defense of saying like, Well, in the popular imagination, Vance is just this kid from The Holler who made good, and he went to Yale Law School, and he's this impressive guy.
That, to me, is what the movie is really getting at.
It's like, he doesn't really get into the political angle at all.
That's where I was going, because anybody going to this film is going to go with probably some...
It's difficult to imagine audiences flocking to this, you know, at the multiplex.
It was a Netflix movie, wasn't it?
Yeah, it had a limited theatrical run, presumably, so they could get Academy notifications for it, because it's...
You have to have some theatrical run in order to play in theaters to be eligible for the Oscars, essentially.
But they took it out of theaters after a week or two, and then it's just been a Netflix movie since then, yeah.
Yeah, it's not a date movie.
It's not a, you know, you go in there with your popcorn.
So anybody going to it is going to go to it with some degree of knowledge.
J.D. Vance is this political figure, whether he's just a sort of conservative commentator or he wrote this book that the liberals have been pissing themselves with delight over.
He's an anti-Trump guy on the TV news.
Or maybe by the time you see it, he's a senator, thanks to Peter Thiel.
Whatever.
You're going to go to it with some knowledge that this is in some sense a political document because J.D. Vance is in some sense a political figure, right?
What's fascinating to me watching the film in the context of that is that it's apolitical.
There's no politics in there at all.
It really is.
It's a family drama.
It's a soap opera.
It's like a TV true crime movie, but somebody forgot to put the murder in.
It's very aimless, and as I say, it just feels like a really sort of random, aimless movie.
Slice-of-life drama that doesn't really have a particular point.
It doesn't seem to go anywhere.
It doesn't even really seem to have a proper ending.
It just kind of...
I mean, the framework of the film is, in the present day, J.D., who is at Yale, trying to get a job with a law firm.
He's in the middle of that, and at the same time, he has to go home.
He has to go back to the small town where he grew up.
Except, of course, it's not.
He didn't.
This is where it gets complicated.
We'll get into this.
We'll talk about that.
He has to go back to the small town and deal with the fact that his mother has relapsed.
She's got a drug habit and she's relapsed and she needs somewhere to be, really.
She can't get a bed for therapy or rehab or whatever.
And he's juggling those two things.
He's juggling his mother who's sick with the heroin use and trying to get the job and his relationship with his girlfriend, etc.
And it's bringing back memories of his upbringing, his childhood, with the trouble that he had with his mother when he was a kid and living with his grandmother and stuff.
So you get flashbacks to all this drama that happened when he was a kid.
And that's really it.
It just strikes me as it's like one rather disjointed episode of an ongoing soap opera.
And it just kind of stops.
And it's a very strange movie.
It's one of those things where it literally would not...
Nobody would write this as an original script.
This can only possibly be a thing as a very, very obvious...
I mean, I haven't read the book, but you can tell just watching the film.
Obviously, a very awkward attempt to encapsulate a document that is...
It's not a novel.
It's not really a political treatise or whatever.
It's a memoir.
It's not even a memoir, but we'll get there.
We'll get there.
They've tried to capture something of the flavor of a document, and the merit of the document is entirely just the fact that it is, in some sense, a political document in this particular moment, the beginning of the Trump era.
And you can tell that from just watching the film.
You can tell that this thing has no reason to exist other than that this other text existed.
And they've tried to make a film out of it and failed to turn it into anything resembling coherent drama.
And as I say, there's no politics in it.
It's a really, really curious text.
Yeah, I mean, I think as sort of formless and incoherent as the film is in terms of, you know, what is it doing?
It is that way for a reason.
The book is even worse.
The book is like, you know, there's at least a narrative to the film.
Like the whole...
The whole tension of the movie, at least hypothetically, what we're supposed to be thinking of is, is JD going to be able to navigate these two worlds?
Is he going to be able to get back to Yale for interview week?
So interview week is a real thing at Yale.
It is like, you know, you do your first year of law school at Yale.
And then really any law school, this is how it works.
I'm not a lawyer, but I listen to a lot of legal podcasts.
Which is the same thing.
Yeah, it's the same thing.
I'm practically a lawyer.
It's fine.
So you go through your first year, and then you're looking at summer internships, because law school lasts for three years.
So after the end of the first year, you're looking for a summer internship with somebody who's going to It's all about who knows who and who gets into the prestigious law firm, particularly at the Ivies like Yale.
So this interview week is high pressure.
It's something that you want to make a good impression.
You're not supposed to be the greatest lawyer ever, but you want to not put your foot in your mouth and that sort of thing.
And that's why the whole sequence with the dinner party...
I was going to say, it's very, very important above all else that you know which fork to use.
Right, exactly.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And I've got something from the book.
There's a very, very funny moment that definitely happened that we're going to describe here in a minute.
But it uses this thing because while he's at this fancy dinner, he gets the call from his sister, who is four years older than he is, and who had helped raise him.
She's acting in Loco Parentis for his mother, who I guess in the movie you really don't get a sense of the history of drugs.
In the movie it's just like she's a nurse and one day she decides to start snuffling pain medication or something from the hospital.
And that's kind of it.
That is kind of the version that Vance tells in the book.
I mean, again, we don't know exactly.
There are lots of reasons to not take this as a straightened for a narrative.
And again, we'll get to that.
But the way Vance tells it is, she starts off with some legitimate pain medication.
She starts off with a prescription and then starts pilfering drugs from her patients and from the hospital where she works.
And then she gets increasingly erratic until eventually in the film here, it's like, well, she discovers heroin and suddenly she's overdosed on heroin.
The very night that he's supposed to be doing this fancy dinner party that's going to determine the future, the shape of his career moving forward, the shape of his life is being set by getting this fancy interview and doing well.
And he's got an interview the next day, but then he's got to drive all the way from New Haven, Connecticut, back to Middletown, Ohio, which I looked at, that's about an 11-hour drive.
That's a significant drive.
He's going to drive all that way back in order to take care of his mom.
And he's going to get back the next day in order to actually like do the interview by like 10 AM.
And so there's this ticking clock and yet the film does nothing.
So first of all, this is completely, this, this narrative is completely made up for the movie.
Like, this is not how this works at all.
Like, you know, he was not called, I guess he was, he was not called on that day.
And like, yeah, that's just, you know, many of the incidents that are in the, in the movie happens.
in the book, or at least are described in the book, but they're not, it's not, this narrative is not, this narrative is completely made up for the film, you know, just to give it some kind of structure.
But then, I mean, you see him kind of counting down the hours.
Okay.
I got to leave in four hours.
I got to leave in two hours.
I got to leave here.
But then it's never, there's never like a sense of like urgency.
There's not a sense of, like, you know, I've got to get out.
I've got to do this.
I've got to...
Nothing is stopping him from just leaving except, like, this supposed obligation he has to his mother and to the family.
And it feels like, you know, like his sister is saying, like, just go.
Just go.
And he's like, no, I've got my responsibilities here.
And it's just so difficult to understand what the character motivation is because, like, The movie just doesn't give us anything to go on as to why it's this important to him.
It's because while it's doing all that, it's giving us flashbacks to previous times that his mother has been drugged up.
Previous times it is played by Amy Adams, by the way.
Amy Adams plays his mother, and then Glenn Close plays the grandmother, who is...
Well, we'll get there.
Memaw.
It's Mamaw.
Mamaw in the vernacular.
Growing up, and we're going to talk about Katie Vance's background.
Where I grew up, it was Mamaw.
That's how I had said it, so I'm going to try to say Mamaw, but I'm probably just going to say Baba.
It's just going to be the way it goes.
I'm just going to say Glenn Close.
Yeah, throughout the book, she is never referred to.
I mean, she's given a name.
We know her name from the book, but she's never named anything but Mama or Mamaw.
Anywhere.
Every time she's referred to, it's Mamaw.
And then her mother was Mamaw Blanton, but she dies early in the book, so she's not in the movie.
Lucky her.
And so we get these flashbacks, and in every single case, it's Amy Adams being...
Violent, or being drugged up, or being just nasty to her children, particularly to JD. And then his sister steps up, and this is not shown as much in the movie, but it is shown in the movie.
His sister steps up as being the surrogate mother figure, and then eventually Mamaw becomes the real surrogate mother figure that he needs.
I didn't get anything from the movie about the sister being a surrogate mother.
You see her in some scenes where she's making dinner for the two of them and that sort of thing.
And that's kind of the most you get.
She's protected to JD at times.
This is a big theme of the book.
This is a big part of the book.
It's not like a major subplot.
But it is a very big part of the book that I see it in the movie, but if you didn't notice it or you didn't catch it, then yeah, that's how little it is in the movie.
So that's the structure.
I was thinking it feels a lot like those late-night basic pay cable stuff, where usually there's the Lifetime original movie where the woman is being beaten by her husband and that sort of thing.
Yeah.
The 13-year-old boy is being abused by his mother.
That's the story it tells.
It's totally very similar to that.
It feels like a higher-budget, bigger star's version of that sort of narrative.
Yeah, that's what it's like.
It's really just a kind of melodramatic morality tale about a bad mother and a young man who gets out and makes it.
And you can kind of...
I said there was no politics in it.
And I think what I mean by that is that if you were just watching this without the knowledge of the political context, you know, that J.D. Vance is this political figure and that the text had this political significance in the early years of Trump, you would just take the film's politics as kind of pretty standard Hollywood ideology.
You know, bootstraps and, you know, stoic and make it out through your own hard graft and forgive your family members and families important and people who are drug addicts are doing it because they have a character flaw and they need to buck stoic and make it out through your own hard graft and forgive your family members and People who are drug addicts are doing it because they have a character flaw and they need to buck up their ideas and stuff.
It's pretty standard kind of lazy, moralistic ideology in the film.
I imagine from what I've heard about the book, I have listened to that If Books Could Kill episode, that it's synthesizing down what is the pretty nasty conservative politics of the book.
Yeah, the book is, I mean, ironically, and this is, I think, what kind of liberals in 2016 sort of fell over themselves over, is that it makes a show.
It pretends to show sympathy to people with drug addiction.
It tries to display the problems of poverty and the problems of I think arguably, Vance also portrays, he spends like the first third of the book.
Going through a long history of his family, of how his family came to be where they are, because you would think...
Let me ask you this.
This is not doing a pop quiz, but what state is this movie set in?
I guess I gave it to you earlier, but what state is this movie set in?
Is it set in Kentucky?
I don't fucking know, Daniel.
Is it set in Kentucky or is it set in Ohio?
Yeah.
It's set in Kentucky.
It's set in Ohio.
It's set in Ohio.
Middletown, Ohio.
No.
This is the thing.
J.D. Vance was born- He lives in Ohio through most of his childhood, doesn't he?
He was born in Middletown, Ohio.
He visited Jackson, Kentucky, which is a small town of about 800 people.
He visits for holidays.
That's about a three-hour drive in the 20th and 21st century.
Once the interstate highway system is built.
Again, I looked it up on Google Maps.
It's about a three-hour drive.
So you go back for Thanksgiving, Christmas.
You go back for maybe Easter.
You go back to see the extended family.
He doesn't live in Jackson.
He lives with his grandmother.
He spends time with his grandmother over the summers.
His grandmother lives, as depicted accurately in the film, literally six houses down.
He gives the exact address in the book.
I managed to look it up.
I just looked it up on Google Maps.
These houses are...
This is not like...
I grew up in bumfuck Kentucky.
This is...
I live in a town of 50,000 people halfway between Dayton and Cincinnati.
And even Jackson, Kentucky is not like the way that the...
At the beginning of the film, the very earliest shots, which are actually shot in...
I believe they're actually shot in Georgia.
But, you know, the sort of like going down to the swimming hole and that sort of...
No, this is like a structured town.
It's got a bunch of trailer parks.
It's, you know, like it's...
It's not in the map, but you're not talking about...
You didn't grow up not wearing shoes, which is kind of the impression that J.D. Vance likes to give.
And in the book, he talks a lot about the people who are from Jackson, the people who are from Kentucky.
And they're the Scots-Irish sort of heritage, right?
And the Hill people, they have a certain code where you might beat your wife, or you and your wife might fight, but the man doesn't hit first.
If she hits you first, you can hit her back.
And we protect our own, and we protect...
And this is very...
This honor culture type thing.
He describes...
Again, the first third of the book is an extended thing about the family, about the...
You know, Mamaw and Papa, and them, like, they were the first people in that family from Jackson to move to Middletown, Ohio, because there was a factory, there was Armco, there was an aluminum manufacturing company that was our steel, I think it's steel manufacturing, but anyway, there's a steel manufacturing company that's hiring, that's literally bringing people from Kentucky into Middletown, Ohio to It's importing people from the backwoods into the city because of employment issues.
What do you call that when people are brought in to a place from another place because people want to fill up jobs that are otherwise vacant?
There's a word for that, isn't there?
Yeah, particularly if those people are seen as violent and inbred.
And, you know, those people are seen as not being of our culture.
You know, there's a certain attitude that people have towards that, particularly in J.D. Vance's spectrum of politics.
So this is a passage, it's in chapter two of the book.
And there's an extended, I mean, there's kind of an extended thing where he talks about both the pressures that the Kentuckians who were being brought into Middletown, but were being brought into Ohio, had adjusted to the local culture, and about how the people of the local culture had issues kind of dealing with the people who were coming in from Kentucky.
And so it's kind of a two-way tension, right?
And, you know, this is obviously true, that there was tension when people from outside were This particular anecdote gives me – really, really makes you – I really just want every journalist to shove this in J.D. Vance's face for the rest of time.
And, you know, if all those freaking liberal journalists who had actually read Hillbilly Elegy back in the day, they would definitely have – there's a parallel we're going to draw here.
So he says – and this would have taken place in the early 30s.
This would have been, you know, like Great Depression era – One of Pawpaw's good friends, a hillbilly from Kentucky whom he met in Ohio, became the mail carrier in his neighborhood.
Not long after he moved, the mail carrier got embroiled in a battle with the Middletown government over the flock of chickens that he kept in his yard.
He treated them just as my mom had treated her chickens back in the holler.
Every morning he collected all the eggs, and when his chicken population grew too large, he'd take a few of the old ones, wring their necks, and carve them up for meat right in his backyard.
You can just imagine a well-bred housewife watching out the window in horrors of Kentucky-born neighbors slaughtered squawking chicken sisters few feet away.
My sister-in-law still called the old mail carrier the Chicken Man.
And years later, even a mention of how the city government ganged up on the Chicken Man could inspire Mama's trademark vitriol.
Fucking zoning laws make you just kiss my ruby red asshole.
So, JD, your family, your family, your ethnic Ken that you are defining yourself as part of.
that you are arguing that you are part of.
When they first came to, not the sticks, when they first came to the bustling metropolis that was Middleton, Ohio, the people around there questioned the sanitary practices of how they prepared meat.
It's not quite the Haitians are eating the cats.
But it's kind of the Haitians are eating the cats.
Maybe, JD, with all that he talks about, like, you know, the importance of, you know, of ethnic cohesion and, like, cultural cohesion, you know, maybe those Ohioans should have just shoved you back in the holler where you came from back in the 30s.
You know, that's certainly what people of your political ilk would have done back then.
So, yeah, I really, really want this to be, like, shoved in his face, like, at every possible opportunity.
So, Yeah, that's certainly very telling.
Back in the day, before we'd definitely decided that Irish people and Scots people were white, can we really afford to have these people in our communities?
They're eating the chickens!
Yeah.
They don't buy their chicken from a grocery store.
No, they're ringing the necks right in the yard.
Also, it's the 30s.
It's the Great Depression.
I assure you that the well-bred housewives in 1932 Middletown, Ohio, were also slaughtering chickens from time to time.
It's not like, oh, we're from the hollers of Kentucky, so we're closer to the land.
No, this is prior to the invention of plastic wrap for meat.
This is a different world, you know?
Sorry, I know I've been talking a while.
Did you have more commentary to add?
Not really, to be honest.
As I say, I found the film barely made an impression on me.
Sure, sure, sure, yeah.
It's profoundly uninteresting.
If I had not read the book, I probably would have had very little to say about this.
We'd have been like, well, we watched it and we got nothing to go on, so we're just not even going to put this out.
You know, that makes sense.
A note that I wanted to ask about was, at the start, it's a theme that seems to be abandoned.
But at the start, there's a lot of talk about this family being, quote, hillbilly royalty.
And I didn't really...
I don't really understand what that's supposed to mean.
And I was expecting that to be developed in the film.
I was expecting there to be some sort of revelation as you go on in terms of their relationship with other people in the area about what this family has done or what they're known for or how they're The local community have this special respect for them for some reason, and it never materialized.
I think that phrase was the way we made it.
I don't think hillbilly royalty appears at all in the book, and if it does, it's like a fleeting mention on page four or something.
There's no connection to them being in any way special hillbillies or better than other hillbillies or anything like that.
Except, I mean, there is a dividing line between the extended family that stayed in Jackson, the state in Kentucky versus the ones that left.
That when you come back, there is, again, there's this class tension, there's this ethnic tension between like, oh, you went to live in the big city of Middletown, Ohio.
As opposed to staying here with us at Jackson, there is this kind of sense of differentiation there.
Although, you know, by Vance's telling, like all of...
So there's Mamaw and Pawpaw who are in the film, and then there's...
So she has a number of brothers.
I think she has...
It's like six brothers or something like that.
It's a menagerie of...
It's a cast of characters, you know?
And they're all described as having, you know, very violent upbringings and very violent pasts.
I mean, in present and future, they're all described in this, like, you know, there's a story of, like, one of his uncles, you know?
Like, one of them is named, like, Uncle Pet.
One of them is, like, Uncle Dean or something.
They all have these very backwater hillbilly descriptors given to them.
And so I have no idea how accurate this genealogy is.
But at one time, he describes one of his uncles, and he has two memories of his uncle.
And I could pull up the exact quote, but I'm not going to go search for it now.
Where I have two memories, and one of them is I was being chased by him.
He was carrying a switchblade, and he threatened to cut my ear off.
And then the second is I knew I loved him because when he died, he died young, and I remember crying.
And those are the two functional memories that JD has of this uncle.
They're all described as being hard-working, industrious men who...
It's like, oh yeah, this is the wealthy brother.
He owns a bunch of car dealerships.
This is the guy who...
The other one, this one is the one who...
He has a successful construction business that he runs out of Jackson.
These are people who are described as being...
By the standards of American economic prosperity, they're doing fine.
They may live in Jackson, Kentucky, but they choose to live in Jackson, Kentucky.
These are not the people working in those places.
These are not day laborers or anything like that.
These are people who made something of themselves.
Yeah.
One of the things that I felt with the film was that I felt like I was kind of joining the story after all the interesting stuff had happened.
Because I think there's certainly a drama to be told about the process of people who had been, quote unquote, hillbillies, you know, people who'd lived that very rural life, gradually being drawn out of that world and into the gradually being drawn out of that world and into the modern world and into city dwelling, you know, urban and suburban living and working in factories and stuff like that.
And the tensions between the older generation and the younger generation as that process is underway, you know, because that sort of thing happens to several types of communities.
It's happening to...
I don't know about this word.
Some people call this...
Some people consider this word a slur.
Some people use it.
I'm not sure.
But it's happening to gypsy communities.
I don't mean any disrespect if that's the wrong word.
But yeah, I mean, I felt like if we're going to make a film about the social situation of people in these communities...
As a result of the economic changes that are going on in their lives, then yeah, that's potentially a really interesting story.
But as I say, watching the film, I feel like I'm joining it after that's kind of all happened.
And we're watching the aftermath of it.
Except that the film isn't telling that story either, because it's not really telling you what the past was.
It's not giving you anything to chew on in terms of what is the past that this, what I'm seeing now, is different from.
Well, yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, the more interesting story is the story that happens in the 30s, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
Maymaw, before she was Maymaw, obviously, but, you know, when she was 13 years old, she was dating the 17-year-old Papa, and she got pregnant.
And this is a line in the movie, you know, this is a line, you know.
But she gets pregnant.
And one of the reasons that they left Jackson was to get away from the social problems that would cause in Jackson, Kentucky.
And so they come to Middletown.
Not said in the book, what's not stated in the book is that Pao Pao had a relative, one of his uncles or one of his cousins or something, was already working for the steel company and got him in the door.
So that's not something that J.D. Vance tells you.
That's something that a fact checker found after the book was published.
It came out.
So they moved to Middletown and they have all this tension and they have a very violent, again, there are sequences in this.
I think the film was trying to show the cycles of violence.
It's just doing a really poor job of it.
You do see a younger Mamaw and Pawpaw having violent outbursts to each other.
You do see at one point, and this is a story that's in the book, I mean, almost every incident that happens in the movie was somewhere in the book.
It's not in this order and sometimes taken out of character, taken out of context or whatever, but a lot of the violence is actually described in the book.
There's one notable difference, but one notable exception.
Well, they didn't put the fucking couch in the film, did they?
No, no, no, no.
I kept waiting for that one in the movie.
I was like, yeah, no, this is going to get sexy all of a sudden.
And then, no, it didn't happen.
I think it's during the Marine training sequence.
I think that's when he came back home for a little R&R and was just like, well, that couch.
Yeah.
Look at the tassels on that armrest.
It's in the director's car.
It's in Ron Howard's extended.
The moment where, for instance, Mamaw, a young Mamaw, sets Papa on fire, that's legitimate.
Again, if we take J.D. Vance at his word, and I don't think we have a reason not to take at least some of this, it's pretty true.
By Vance's story, that's actually family lore.
That's something that...
You know, everybody knew she did back in the day, you know?
And, you know, a lot of the book, again, the first third of the book or so, it's like, the book is basically a third.
The first third is sort of like the family backstory, and you get all the, like, colorful stories of all these hicks who are now in Ohio and all that sort of thing, and sort of the family history of Jackson.
Right.
And then the middle third is kind of the stuff that's in the movie, like all the stuff with the young JD, the JD of like 13 years old, kind of navigating this world and kind of the mother getting deeper into drug addiction.
And sort of like JD's high school years are kind of that middle section, particularly the first couple of years where he's like, It's cut in class.
You know, the scenes where the young J.D. is hanging out with his friends and Mau Mau calls them, you know, she calls them losers or something and orders them and says, you never get to come back.
It's that sort of thing.
That scene is not in the book, but, you know, that sort of, you know, that stands in for a lot of the, like, getting into trouble.
And by his own admission, he barely graduates high school, for instance.
Yeah.
Because of absenteeism.
He just doesn't go to school because he has a messed up home life.
And yeah, no, it sounds like it sucked.
I mean, again, I think we'll talk a little bit about my feelings about this background just a little bit, but he goes through terrible things his mom does.
She eventually marries five times, I think, and In the film, we're just kind of given J.D. and his sister.
J.D. and Lindsay, his sister.
But J.D. was born of another father.
They were married for, I think, less than a year.
And then the second father was the one...
The second or third husband is the one that...
Now, Lindsay was earlier, JD was second, but they have a different father.
And there are at least two more husbands that play in the book.
And then there's one more that's kind of towards the end.
It's like, oh, and then mom married one more time or whatever.
I forget the exact sequence.
But this thing where this guy, one of them was her boss at the...
At the nursing home.
That's actually, that's in the book.
You know, he's not described as being, I forget what, I don't know, I don't think he's ever described as what his ethnicity is because none of that's ever in the book.
You're always just, they're always just white people in the book.
There's an interesting way that they use ethnicity here.
Whenever there's a cop, it's always a black guy or a woman or whatever.
That's just not the way it's described.
They're not really described in the book.
I'm just saying the movie does actively go out of its way to include a little bit of cast diversity.
That seems to have been a deliberate decision on the filmmakers' part.
Slightly relieve the wall-to-wall mayonnaise of the whole thing.
He moves in in the book and JD moves in with his biological father for a while and had no contact with him for years and years and then moves in with him some 30 miles away in some other town in Ohio.
And he moves in with dad.
And dad's like, I mean, this is like the mid-90s.
And the dad's like a huge evangelical guy.
And he's got all the Christian movies and all the Christian music.
And he can't listen to Leonard Skinner anymore.
You gotta listen to the Christian stuff.
And he starts talking about evolution and all that stuff.
And he's this very hardcore 90s evangelical conservative Christian.
And J.D. lives with him for a few months or six months or something.
I mean, it's Some of the timelines are very sketchy here.
It's not clear exactly what's going on, but a lot of this stuff is in the book, and it's just not in the movie at all.
So if it feels like you don't know who some of the characters are in the movie, and you don't know because who is this guy that his mom is supposed to be living with now?
I've seen him maybe twice, and I don't know anything about him.
And that's very much taken from the truth of the book is that she bounces around a lot in terms of her background and in terms of and it's not providing a good environment for her children.
But in the movie, it's more like it's an excuse for Amy Adams to look like a drug addict.
And I think that's why the actors I think I really like Amy Adams and I really like Glenn Close and a lot of stuff.
And I don't like them here because they're given nothing to do.
Yeah.
Except for their one character trait.
The one thing they're allowed to be is like Amy Adams is a drug addict and Glenn Close is a profane grandma.
And there's no story here.
There's nothing we're not given anything.
So they just pulled a bunch of the choice, the little actory bits in the script.
They just pulled a bunch of that in and just dramatized it on screen.
There's a moment where Amy Adams, as Bonnie, she puts on roller skis.
skates.
She like takes a bunch of, it takes a bunch of drugs.
Yeah.
She puts on roller skates.
It goes like rolling through the halls.
And apparently again, that is a moment in the, in the book, but that seems to be a much, it seemed to be a smaller incident.
I didn't, I think it was just like in one hospital room or something, you know, as opposed to being like going down the halls and like, you know, Woo!
There are moments where the film is going for a sort of manic pixie, junkie, abusive mother thing with Bonnie.
Yeah, and I mean, I would love to see Amy Adams play that kind of role, given a decent script, given something to work with.
I don't blame the actors in this.
The characters are flat because the movie is flat because of the book.
I'm kind of describing the book to you.
The book barely has dialogue, to be clear.
Glenn Close particularly has a very difficult job to do because the film, I don't know about the book, obviously, but the film never makes its mind up about who this woman is.
Because she seems to be, she's being painted as like the font of down-home wisdom and tough love and stuff like that.
The calculator scene, for instance.
Yeah, we will talk about the calculator scene for sure.
But at the same time, I mean, it's implicit in the film that she's been a really bad mother.
Well, and again, this is where the film, a better film, a better film with these elements that wasn't shackled to this book could make the generational trauma argument, right?
Could say that Mama was abusive towards Bonnie.
Therefore, Bonnie revisits those sins onto her kids.
And JD's goal and Lindsay's goal is to not continue that cycle, right?
And there's a little bit of this in the book.
I mean, it's a little bit more lucid in the book.
But the book and the movie really have no idea what to think about these characters.
there's really never a sense of well these characters are living people who have contradictory elements to them it's really like they do one thing one day and they do another thing another day and there's never a sense of how that fits into a larger character how that fits into a larger personal dynamic it's just they're just kind of incoherent And so, obviously, I mean, you know, there's a lot of evidence, there's a lot of indication that this book is, like, heavily, heavily fictionalized, you know?
I'm sure that a lot of the elements, you know, kind of occurred, but, like, it does feel like it's...
I mean, Vance describes it as a memoir.
He describes it as, like, this is, you know, this is a memoir.
And, like, the very first page of the introduction, like, the very first line is, like, it may seem silly to me that I've written a memoir, because I haven't done anything.
I'm just 31 years old.
And this is just a, I'm just a kid from the sticks who get to go to law school, you know?
And of course, this is his political ambition that's making this happen.
But yeah, no, so the calculator scene.
So in the movie, he needs a calculator for his algebra class because his algebra class requires him to have this fancy calculator.
And Glenn Close gets a...
When she's like, well, go get a calculator then.
And he's like, well, it's $89.
And she says, what is it, made of gold?
I mean, I think...
That's not in the book.
That's a pretty good line.
I like that.
I like that.
That's how my mom would go for that.
Yeah, that's a grandma line, yeah.
Yeah, that's a grandma line.
I like that.
We'll give it its props.
When it does something right, we'll give it its props.
And there's one performance I actually liked in this, and we'll get there, but...
So in the movie, he wants to go steal the calculator from a radio shack and gets caught.
And then Mamaw gets called because he's living with Mamaw at this point.
And then Mamaw just gives him the calculator and says, okay, I just bought it for you, you little shit.
And then he throws it out.
And then there's this big confrontation.
But they talk about family and you've got to work hard and you've got to get yourself together and all this sort of thing.
None of that happens.
Mamaw just buys him the calculator in the book.
Also, he says it's like a $189 calculator.
I remember I was alive in 1987, and I was buying Texas Instrument products.
$89 is much closer to the price of that calculator than $189.
But Vance describes this as memoir.
And I describe it, I mean, I was reading it, and the more I think it's really more of a parable.
Because there is no real through line.
There is no real structure.
There's no dialogue.
There are no characters.
It's just like, I'm telling stories about my childhood, about where I grew up, and the I'm making vaguely a soft sociopolitical argument for gumption and bootstraps and get on your two feet and that sort of thing.
I did it so anybody could do it against this culture of dependency, this culture of drugs.
Nobody wants to work hard.
Nobody wants to do anything to better themselves in life.
I mean, that's really the point of the book.
These people are poor because they spend loads of money on smartphones and flat screen TVs and fancy refrigerators.
And if they would just spend their money more wisely on things like scientific calculators so that they can do well in algebra at school, then they could get qualifications and they could go to Yale and meet Peter Thiel and be rich.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, that's the argument of the book, for sure.
And the movie partakes in that.
The movie, it doesn't have that explicitly, but it's included in the DNA. But the scene of J.D. stealing the calculator, that is not in the book.
That's one thing that was actually put into the book, into the movie specifically, that has no counterpart in it.
I bet he was thrilled when he saw the film.
He's an executive producer on the film.
So presumably, he was involved in at least some of the process.
I mean, an executive producer could be anything, but he's actually an executive producer on this.
Obviously, they paid the rights to adapt the novel, so maybe that was part of the contingency deal.
He gets an executive producer credit, but no, his name is actually on the film.
There's another noise in the film that I noticed, which is the idea of sort of the clan, the clan loyalty, you know, and this sort of hillbilly-o-murter.
If the cops turn up, you don't say anything.
There's the scene particularly where JD is pressured to not tell the police about the fact that after the argument in the car and Bonnie speeds and then she chases him into this stranger's house and so on and so forth, and Hits him.
Really wallops him.
And then the cops turn up and they say, you know, just tell us what happened.
We can help you.
And the whole family are there, particularly Mamar, staring at him like, don't say anything.
I couldn't help relating that to the complete, unscrupulous, in-group, team player...
Sort of tribal politics thing that you get from the right.
Oh yeah, no, no, absolutely.
Circle the wagons.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
Deny everything.
This is a big part of the book.
It's arguably what the first third is really trying to say.
And I mean, it makes this, and this is where I think, again, sort of the liberal read of it, the sort of the, is where it complicates this a little bit.
Because it does have this element to it of, well, we kind of create our own problems by not talking to the cosmos, by having this clannishness.
But we rely on this clannishness because we don't have social support networks outside of that.
In the book, it's actually a little bit more complicated.
We're going to cut social support.
The whole point of the movie was like, my mom just overdosed on heroin and she doesn't have any place to go.
Maybe we should have drug rehabilitation programs to take people, regardless of their history.
But no, J.D. Vance is not supporting that.
He's like, well, you've got to pull yourself up with your bootstraps.
How else are you going to get in the yellow hospital?
Buy yourself a scientific calculator.
That's how you do it.
Instead of cigarettes.
I own a very similar scientific calculator to that one, by the way.
I've owned several in my life.
It is very useful.
We could talk about the TI, about the structural issues around that calculator being used in the algebra class as well, but that's way afield for what we're doing in this podcast episode.
So basically Texas instrument says like a, has like a stranglehold on the American educational system because of a history of how they approach the schools.
When the calculator technology is being developed to basically use their products to, to write, to, to like use as demonstrators for the books.
And then that gets like grandfathered in over the course of.
course of years.
And so these TI calculators, there's more computing power in my watch than there is in one of these calculators.
I mean, literally, that's true.
And yeah, they still cost like $200, and they should cost like $10.
You get knockoff brands from India for like $10 or something.
It's nothing.
I said I wasn't going to do the calculator thing, and then I did a little bit of the calculator thing.
But there's just a little in the movie.
You have to go off script just a little bit.
movie about the opioid crisis, putting Donnie's drug habit in the context of the opioid crisis, certainly not in the context of the fucking Sackler family flooding that region with opioids in order to make gargantuan profits from human misery, untold suffering certainly not in the context of the fucking Sackler family flooding that region with opioids in order Nothing about that in the movie, and I'm guessing probably nothing about that in the I mean, he talks a bit about the, I don't think he uses the word opioid crisis.
He talks a little bit about, I mean, he does mention quite often details about, you know, drug addicts and the various people in his town were drug addicts.
In both Middleton and in Jackson, he kind of talks about that, but never in an explicit way of a policy that we should regulate painkillers better.
He's touching on...
He pretends to touch on these more complicated issues because he pretends to show sympathy and empathy.
But then once you kind of present him with a political argument, once you're really kind of put, well, what do you think should happen?
It's all like...
Well, it's kind of up in the air.
I guess people really do need these painkillers, so I guess you can't just regulate them out of existence or whatever, and it's like, yeah, that's...
You admit that it's complicated, but you're not going to do anything to actually justify any kind of real policy that might work in this situation.
You come from this world, and I mean, you know, for all...
I'm going to talk a little bit...
We're going to get into how I feel about how he presents his background here, I think, towards the end, but...
There is a very real sense in which he pretends to talk about these issues to get away from having to actually talk about them, if that makes sense.
I bring it up, and I'm seen as sophisticated and thoughtful for saying, oh, it's a complicated situation, but then I don't actually engage with that in any way.
And then later on, as a politician, as a commentator, he routinely goes for the absolute most right-wing option that he can.
Yes.
One of the things I've heard people say about the book, again, I haven't read the book, and I don't plan to.
You don't, you know, you shouldn't.
I suffered for this.
You don't need to suffer for this.
I mean, it is the most pedestrian read.
Your eyes will just, like, fall off the page.
Like, it's just so...
You didn't learn your lesson from the Wolf of Wall Street podcast that we did years back.
You've made the same mistake again.
Wolf of Wall Street was a much more entertaining read than Hilderoy Elgin.
I'm going to say that.
It's also a deeply, deeply bad book, but Wolf of Wall Street is, you know, at least it's propulsive.
At least it gets you through the day.
Although, yeah, no, you should not read him.
Anyway, you're going somewhere, so go ahead.
I was going to say, one of the things I've heard people say about it is that he writes in it about how he would try to ingratiate himself with his latest stepdad, and he would try to get into what the stepdad was into.
And I think that's quite revealing as well because his political career has been completely to sort of subsume himself to a succession of sort of powerful sugar daddies.
You know, firstly, obviously there's Peter Thiel and he seems to have completely allied himself with Peter Thiel's, you know, Anti-democratic, essentially sort of fascist, libertarian, eugenics political project that Thiel gets from Curtis Yarvin and all that stuff.
And he's having gone from, you know, Trump is the new Hitler, Trump is to America what opioids are to Appalachia.
He's now done it again with Trump.
And I think you can, if you squint at it, you can kind of see how the child is father to the man.
I think one of the absolute basic animating passions of J.D. Vance is misogyny.
Yes.
And I think the film is going for sympathy for the two main female characters.
But I can also sort of sense...
The deep hostility and resentment and misogyny of the source material through the glossy Hollywood script treatment.
The movie hates Amy Adams.
It hates Beverly with a passion.
Or Bonnie.
It's Bonnie.
She hates Bonnie.
Beverly is Mamaw's name.
She's named once, and then she's always Mamaw after that.
That's, again, very, very funny for him to be in a Yale Law School interview.
He's like, I was just worried about Mamaw.
How was I going to do these exams and all that sort of thing?
Because he just continually goes back, and he just uses Mamaw, Mamaw, Mamaw, Mamaw, Mamaw, you know?
Again, we'll get to this, but in a very calculated, in a very self-serving way, I think.
Yeah, no.
There are kind of four main female characters in the movie, I think.
There are kind of four women in the movie with lines, as far as I can tell.
You get occasional, but you've really got Mamaw, and you've got his mom.
And then you've got Lindsay, the sister.
I actually have a sister, but the sister.
And you've got Usha.
Usha is his girlfriend at Yale.
She is his real-life wife.
I mean, he is now married to Usha.
They have, I think, five kids together.
She...
In the film, she's basically just an angel in human form.
Oh, yeah.
No, she's...
I mean, she's in the book, but she's much more in the movie than she is in the book.
And she kind of represents, like, something positive for J.D., I think.
She represents this...
Again, you say it's an angel figure.
I think he even describes her as the angel who's going to help him get through this dinner party at one point.
So, you know...
Yeah, no, that's definitely, that's 100%, like, just the case.
That's just how Mausha is portrayed.
I like her.
I think she's very charming in the movie.
I think the actress is good.
I think she does what she's asked to do.
And I come away from this going, like, there was one thing I liked in this movie.
I liked that performance.
There's not much there, but I think she's charming.
And the actor who plays the adult JD, I think, is...
He's got his charms about him.
He's a little bit of a blockhead, but he's not given anything to do.
I think the fact that Usha is in this film a little bit more, and is actually given this kind of minor subplot, is like, am I going to tell Usha about the heroine or not?
And the fact that she's given at least something to do, which she is not given in the book.
There's never an arc of hers at any kind.
It's just like, when we met, she helped me study for law school.
We were in a study group together.
And then eventually we married.
And that's the end of the story.
In the film, Usha's kind of in a different film.
She's kind of in a separate film off to the side.
She's in a rom-com off to one side while this rather overwrought pedestrian drama is going on.
In a different part of the film.
She's actually physically separate from it.
She's almost like a chorus character who's off to one side.
It would be very funny to do a screwball comedy version of this in which instead of it being this melodrama, it's like Mom's on heroin again, and then you have her scrambling around in the background, and he's got to keep the door closed so that Usha doesn't hear him over the phone.
There is a way to write a really bad comedy version of this that would be a lot more entertaining than what we have.
That reminds me of another idea I had watching this, which is a sequel.
We do Hillbilly Elegy 2.
We get all the same people back, all the same performers, and we do the rest of J.D. Vance's life.
So we dramatized him teaming up with a sweaty, potato-faced German fascist entrepreneur, and we could have...
I don't know who you could cast as Kurdish Yavin and right the way through to becoming a senator on Thiel's Money and all the podcast interviews he does.
We could dramatize all that.
Yeah.
I bet the actor would be game for it.
We should find out.
I could definitely see that.
We could have scenes where Usha meets Donald Trump, you know, and he sort of looks at her like, what's this thing?
You know, and she and JD can have conversations about the people that are on their side in the campaign talking about, well, how can we trust this guy?
He's got an Indian wife.
That is actually like 100% like what the Daily Show guys and all that say about Usha is like, well, he can't be a real man because he has an Indian wife.
Yeah, that's what Fuentes said.
Oh yeah, no, it's all over that world now, completely.
So yeah, helping the elegy to Hollywood, call me.
That was the one performance that actually kind of brought me any kind of joy, any semblance of happiness was watching that performance and wishing I could have the dumb rom-com instead of the completely limp family drama.
So I liked that actress.
Yeah, that's about all I liked about the movie, though.
Like, that's...
That's just about it.
And again, I like Amy Adams.
I like Glenn Close.
I think they're doing the job that they're asked to do, but the script is so limp and there's just so little material to work with.
There's so little narrative here.
It's just impossible to take any of it remotely seriously.
Yeah, I agree.
I don't know that I have anything else to say about it myself.
I want to talk a little bit about Vance and how he is framing himself.
So move away from the movie, talk about the book a little bit, but about sort of what this does for Vance politically.
What angle is this?
And I am not saying that he didn't grow up in an abusive household.
I'm not saying he didn't have an alcoholic and a drug-addicted mother.
But he pretends, oh yeah, I'm from Jackson, Kentucky, this tiny town.
I grew up, there's literally a line in the book, I grew up chasing frogs and barefoot in the creek and that sort of thing.
It literally goes that far.
And then when you look at, like, where he's from, like, I mean, you know, it's like, no, you're not from Jackson, Kentucky.
You're from Middletown, Ohio.
You're from, like, a suburb.
You're from, like, an industrial area.
Industrial area in the 80s that was still going strong.
I mean, you know, now, I mean, all that, you know, because of neoliberal policies, because of right-wing dipshits like yourself, you know, those areas have been devastated, you know?
Yeah, that's...
Yeah.
That's the cause of the social problems in those areas, decades of right-wing government, particularly under Republican administrations.
Right.
Yes.
No, absolutely.
And, you know, I, again, everybody knows, everybody listening to my voice, I think, knows I grew up in the South.
I grew up in the real South, you know?
I grew up in, outside of Montgomery, Alabama.
Yeah.
You know, the house that I grew up in, we lived in apartments and eventually we got a house.
You need to write a memoir.
I need to write a memoir.
I mean, I'm like four years older than J.D. Vance right at this point.
So I know exactly what the South was like in this period.
And a, well, JD doesn't even, he lives in Ohio, he lives in the Midwest, where I live in the Midwest now.
The house that, like, again, I Google mapped that house that he gave us the address.
I Google mapped it.
I know exactly what house he lived in.
Stalker.
That house is way better than the house.
That house is way better than the house I grew up in.
They didn't shoot.
They actually shot in that neighborhood.
They shot, like, three streets away.
I found online a place where they showed where they shot it.
Because on the, like, if you stare at, like, JD Vance's front door, And then you turn 180 degrees.
There's a public park right behind it.
A very lovely, I mean, it's a municipal park, but it's got a playground.
It's got, you know, a little, you know, a Lexus soccer fair, whatever.
It's a park, you know?
This is a pretty nice little neighborhood.
It's a bit difficult to make the case that, you know, this is why people vote for Trump because they're the left-behind forgotten white rural working class, you know, just been abandoned by the coastal elites.
And, you know, I don't want to play this card of like, you know, I'm more Southern, I'm more authentically Southern than you.
I moved away from the South like many years ago, you know, and I'm, I don't intend, I was...
Hickier than thou.
Right, I'm not, I'm not trying to pretend like I have street cred on this or anything like that, but, you know, I kind of do have street cred on this.
I did grow up in this area.
I did, you know, I grew up much more economically disadvantaged than J.D. Vance.
In a lot of ways.
I had much fewer resources available to me in terms of making sure I could do well in life.
And I have not done particularly well in life in that matter.
I do find it offensive.
I do find it offensive, just on a personal level.
That he goes this far.
I mean, like you could have said, I'm from a little town in Ohio and we have, you know, and you could have been a lot more honest about like what your actual background is to play up into redneck stereotypes or the hillbilly stereotypes as well to, to, to play into this idea that, you know, we're all a bunch to play into this idea that, you know, we're all a bunch of like violent hicks who buy two, buy big trucks instead of, you know, instead of, you know, investing in our children's futures, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah.
There's always this thing of like, you know, like is it as bad as a blackface sort of thing, you know, like, is it, you know, and I don't think it's to that level obviously, but it is not, this is, this is, this is like deeply unpopular.
It is a kind of minstrelsy, though.
It's a minstrelsy, yeah.
It's deeply unpleasant for me, because I'm actually someone who could have been helped by some of these policies.
If there had been a stronger social network, I could have been helped by this.
For J.D. Vance to kind of go out and put on this face, put on the southern face, put on the hillbilly face, and act like this, it's deeply, deeply hurtful.
To me personally.
And I just wanted to really get that on record.
Even if I liked his politics, I would find this distasteful.
And the fact that he's actively shitting on the people that he says he came from, that he's actively going to hurt them more, that just makes it even more despicable for me.
Again, I wanted to get that out there.
I wanted to just express it in that many words.
It's not a huge part of what I wanted to do in this podcast, but I did want to mention it.
Anyway, the last third of the book, by his telling, he barely graduates high school.
He gets through by the skin of his teeth with a 2.0 GPA or something like that.
And he has no money prospects.
He has another systematic thing.
Because of his mother's history and because he's been living with his grandmother, in order to get financial aid, in order to fill out the FAFSA, you have to do certain things like you have to disclose your mother's income.
Well, he doesn't live with his mother.
He lives with his grandmother.
And his mother is, like, in and out of rehab and doing, and they don't know whether, like, her medical benefits are going to count towards, and if you lie on those forms, that's a federal crime.
And so he's like, well, so he couldn't really do financial aid, so I didn't really have access to that.
We should definitely, there should have been resources for you in 1997.
Or, no, he would have graduated in 2001.
So he graduated, you know, years after I did.
Yeah.
And college shouldn't be ruinously expensive and leave you with mountains of debt.
Exactly.
So he enters the Marines and you get like kind of a chapter or like three quarters of a chapter of Marine stereotypes of like he's just running around.
They get his head shaved.
You know, they don't let him eat sweets anymore, et cetera, et cetera.
In the Marines, he served as a press liaison.
And so I want to kind of make this clear.
Like, he comes, he barely, he scrapes through high school.
He's clearly a bright kid, but he scrapes through high school because he didn't give a fuck.
He enters the Marines.
Apparently, he's a good Marine because he's given kind of a pretty cushy job, you know, of being press liaison, even though he says, well, I fucked that up because I one time let some reporters get a picture of a classified plane they weren't supposed to have access to, you know?
And after getting out of the...
He serves his four years in the Marines, and then he enters Ohio State.
And he completes a four-year degree in two years, a little under two years, which is, again, an impressive accomplishment while working.
So in the movie, you kind of get this...
He's going through the financial aid office at Yale, and he's trying to get the money.
He doesn't have $30,000, and the internship will pay you $30,000.
That's horseshit.
He took loans to go to Yale.
Everybody takes loans for law school.
There's not financial aid.
You take loans out for that.
He did have financial aid for his undergrad, and that's why he had to work several jobs.
At one point, he discloses, I took a job for a state senator.
Hold on.
You took a job for a state senator?
I'm rereading that section.
It appears to me like he was working at a call center or something, that he wasn't.
But you're politically engaged.
You don't go work for a state senator.
That's not like you just happened your way into it.
I just walked into the senator's store and asked for a job.
That's not how this works.
You chose that.
You made that decision.
And then after he finishes college, he does very well in school.
Again, it's not said in the book.
He studied sociology and political science, I believe.
So he has a double degree.
And then he applies to Yale Law School.
And that's when you get to basically the sequence with Silver Spoons.
And I'm going to end this on the most ridiculous thing in the book.
There are a lot of ridiculous things in this book.
This is the most ridiculous thing for me, okay?
So, he's at the fancy dinner party.
He's kind of gawking at the, you know, this is the wine glasses that look like they've been windexed.
It looks like the linens of the table look softer than my bedsheets, and he has to resist the urge to touch them.
So he's acting like I'm the hillbilly that's stuffed into a two-tight suit, and I'm just trying to get my way through it.
And then he says, My bearing lasted another two minutes.
After we sat down, the waitress asked whether I'd like tap or sparkling water.
I rolled my eyes at that one.
As impressed as I was with the restaurant, calling the water sparkling was just too pretentious.
Like sparkling crystal or sparkling diamond.
But I ordered the sparkling water anyway.
Probably better for me, fewer contaminants.
I took one sip and literally spit it out.
It was the grossest thing I'd ever tasted.
I remember once getting a Diet Coke at a subway without realizing that the fountain machine didn't have enough Diet Coke syrup.
That's exactly what this fancy place's sparkling water tasted like.
Something's wrong with that water, I protested.
The waitress apologized and told me she'd get me another Pellegrino.
That was when I realized that sparkling water meant carbonated water.
I was mortified, but luckily only one other person noticed what had happened, and she was a classmate.
I was in the clear.
No more mistakes.
And then you sent back your gazpacho soup because it was cold.
It's a very Arnold River moment.
No, no.
And I just want to, like, look.
This is 2011.
Sparkling water has only recently been invented, to be clear.
This is a new phenomenon.
No, not at all.
He's acting like, I grew up with a hauler.
I grew up not wearing shoes, and I'm out there, and suddenly I'm in this fancy dinner party, and I've got to impress these people.
And this is, like, J.D., you scraped through high school, then you spent four years in the Marines, where you were press liaison for at least part of that.
You did two years of college in Ohio State.
You worked, like, two to three jobs.
He says three jobs, but he really, he quit the job with the state senator.
So he worked two jobs, but...
He was working at a tile store and he was working at a Target.
That's how he tells it.
I guarantee you've seen a bottle of Pellegrino before.
It's not some new fancy thing.
But he writes it this way.
And he writes it as if, oh, I'm just one of those country bumpkins.
When the way you write this makes it very obvious that you're not this country bumpkin.
That is not who you are.
And so he's putting on this faux working man, not because the people of Appalachia, not the people who actually grew up this way, the people who actually are in this place, would recognize him as one of them.
He's writing to the elites and pretending that he's one of the hillbillies, pretending that he's from the backwater.
It's how he's burgeoning his credentials.
And again, it goes back.
It's just disgusting.
It's absolutely disgusting.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, well, I mean, we know that the guy is completely without any integrity or honor or, you know, seriousness about his moral convictions.
This is a guy who called Trump, you know, the American Hitler.
And now he's so far up his ass that he can look out through from the back of Donald Trump's throat, you know, past his teeth and see the rest of us.
Yeah, that's absurd.
That's ridiculous.
I knew what sparkling water was when I was 10, when it first started being, you know, widely available to buy in shops in Britain.
And this is like the mid-80s.
Sparkling water's been a thing since forever.
That is such complete crap.
And...
Yeah, as you say, there's no way he doesn't...
What he's doing...
You remember that David Brooks column where he tells an anecdote about going to a restaurant with a working-class friend, and they don't understand the menu, so he feels very self-conscious and embarrassed about having put his friend in this position, and he says, would you like to go somewhere else?
And the friend says, yes, please, because I'm frightened of all these French words.
Yeah.
Obviously, you know, another entry in the Things That Definitely Happened column.
Right, exactly.
Vance is doing the same thing from the other angle.
He's playing being that friend.
He's performing being that character for those people.
No, absolutely.
And I would believe he doesn't drink sparkling water typically, but to say, sparkling water, like a sparkling diamond, it's just so fake.
It's so fake.
I mean, so much of the book feels fake, but that's just playing.
It is putting yourself in this mystery.
It's putting you in this southern blackface type idea.
It's like pretending to be this character.
Again, it's funny not because he makes it funny.
It's funny.
I mean, he wants it to be a funny moment, you know?
But it's funny because it's absurd.
And then, like, towards the end, like at the end of this chapter, he's like, and then all of us who went to this interview, including the doofus who spit out his sparkling water, all got job offers.
And it's like, yeah...
You made it through just fine, buddy.
Because, of course, you were.
It's not about the gazpacho soup.
It's not about the sparkling water.
You've been invited to this interview.
They're just tested to whether you can walk and chew gum at the same time.
You're already in Yale Law School.
You've made it, buddy.
You're fine.
That's right, yeah.
Yeah, the whole idea, like, you know, if you say the wrong thing at the dinner, your career's over.
No, no, we don't buy that.
It's another way of pretending that it's all merit-based.
You know, even in that position, you still have to perform perfection, and otherwise you're screwed, and you'll be right.
No, we don't buy that.
We don't buy that.
It's obviously a tick of his, you know, making jokes based upon sparkling beverages, because he did the same thing at the Republican conference, didn't he?
The infamous Mountain Dew is Racist joke that nobody laughed at.
I don't remember that one, but he does talk in the book about Mountain Dew Mouth, whereas these poor hillbilly mothers will give their children so much sugary soda when they're young that they lose their teeth.
So it's like Meth Mouth, Mountain Dew Mouth.
I've never heard that term before.
These people all have bad teeth because of their feckless mothers that give them sparkling sugary drinks.
Not because of this shitty dental care that's too expensive for people to afford.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, so we did the sparkling water, and we did the eating cats bit, the slaughtering chickens.
So that's all this book you really need to be absorbed to, you really need to be exposed to, ever.
And so I guess we're close.
I guess that's it.
Yeah.
Okay, well, from the depths of the backwoods, we wave goodbye to you, listeners, as we strum our dueling banjos and snap the buckles on our dungarees and say goodnight to John Boy.
I'm eating hardtack right now in a bed that's shared between all my family, you know, wearing a straw hat and overalls.
Yeah.
Okay.
Do that thing you do, listeners, and thanks for letting us do the thing that we do.
And we'll see you around.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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