OK y'all, mark this on your calendars because at 8PM Eastern we are beginning the reading of Hillbilly Elegy brought to you by me, the whiskey I'll be drinking, and the people who buy the whiskey to keep me reading.
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We start off in the introduction with "The coolest thing I've done, at least on paper, is graduate from Yale Law School." Which he says is quite ordinary because "two hundred people do the same thing every year."
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So he's just this totally ordinary dude who went to Yale Law right, but then also: "You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town." Here is a thing you should know about that tiny rust belt town in the book about hillbillies
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It takes about twenty minutes to drive from the outer belt of Cincinnati to that tiny town. A fun thing about the Midwest is that there's rural places but then there's suburban sprawl between cities. Middletown, Ohio, is that sprawl.
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So before we go getting our heads full of running streams with tadpoles and outdoor plumbing, here's that map:pic.twitter.com/1sWToriKdh
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ANYWAY. I'm just gonna screenshot this next bit for you, because an introduction is where an author really gets to frame their work and I would hate to miss some nuance:pic.twitter.com/4VYaIL81is
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Got that? So the odds are stacked against the guy but it's bullshit that he did anything special. This sets up the book. "Here is this extraordinary thing that I did that I should be seen for doing, and also anyone could do it."
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Now we get into the important bit: JUST WHAT KIND OF WHITE IS HE?pic.twitter.com/u92sSOqdvx
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So, this is where I lose the thread 'cause I was kind of half adopted and I don't really know what kind of white I am. Like, I have no college degree and I'm definitely working class but who am I supposed to identify with if I DON'T KNOW WHAT KIND OF WHITE I AM
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ANYWAY let's learn more about the Scots-Irish! This won't get weird at all in the sixth paragraph of the entire fucking book and not even out of the introduction yet!pic.twitter.com/gVvUHeQKF0
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I'm a couple beers and a whiskey in, and I report on white supremacy, it's one of my beats, so maybe it's just hitting my ears a bit weird to hear about how this one particular kind of white people are the group of people who haven't wholesale abandoned tradition and morality
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You guys this is the sixth paragraph this is gonna be like Ivanka where I told you I'd do the first chapter and then it was like half the book long
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Anyway next we're onto geography, which hey did you know that Appalachia was like a whole region? It's a mountain range! Whole country practically, north to south! Governors hike there! (That was my joke, not Vance's.)
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Vance name-checks Hank Williams Junior because he wrote "A Country Boy Can Survive" which is weird because I feel like this whole book is going to be a hit on "Family Tradition" but hey We all love us any of the Hanks round here In between Cinci and Dayton
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In Which Someone Nearly Gets It But Then Runs Away At The Last Second Right Before It Sinks In:pic.twitter.com/vTTBcH7zOy
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OK so I live in Appalachia now but "white people" and "hillbillies" aren't any more the same thing than "white people" and "underpaid denizens of the Inland Empire" are the same thing like come on dude
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But hey you know the real problem though? It's those shitty supportive churches and also a crisis in masculinity, and also why don't poor people just move to where the jobs are? PARAGRAPH NINE Y'ALLpic.twitter.com/kTMoepIEvi
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Anyway, and I am not dragging the dude for this conceit itself because we DO all hear the same shit over and over but anyway here's the straw man he sets himself up for, and the shape of it is telling:pic.twitter.com/OIGORE10eN
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So a fun thing about marriage and happiness: that's a Freedom Caucus talking point. Not even kidding. See, stability correlates with life satisfaction and they like to pretend that causality and correlation are synonyms
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Then there's an anecdote about this job he took the summer before Yale Law. There was one Good Coworker who was working two jobs to pursue his dream of "piloting an airplane." Then there was Bob:pic.twitter.com/ddBPThBDk5
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Now, Bob is NINETEEN FUCKING YEARS OLD. It seems like maybe we're pushing it to extrapolate anything here because I have lived me a life, I tell you what, and a thing I know is that anyone under twenty is an irresponsible asshole.
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But anyway I never went to Yale so let's all learn what we can about America and its relative stability from Bob, the nineteen-year-old facing down a pissed-off pregnant girlfriend:pic.twitter.com/cyF5hxYG9z
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I am not debating that perhaps it's a more responsible thing to wait, as I did, until you're in your late twenties and a Marine's just come home from the war to get knocked up. I'm just saying that teenaged pregnancy isn't, like, a new thing.
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Like I don't know that Bob, who was presumably 18 at the time of his child's conception, or fuck it let's give him that spare year and say 19, not using a condom is actually a sign of social decay. Or his being a shitty worker.
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I mean but again I didn't go to Yale so possibly the problem is just Bob Also LOL who's ever heard of anyone but the Scots-Irish of the foothills between Dayton and Cincinnati feeling disenfranchised in America, that's not a thingpic.twitter.com/1z2uWF3u5b
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OK no you know what just read this, this is the next paragraph and there's like whole theses in this if you happen to be in your senior year of collegepic.twitter.com/uUhvKbunOO
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Suffice to say that the Scots-Irish guy that you have to understand the Scots-Irish culture to fully comprehend would very much like you to not think about anything in this book as, like, tied to race in any way
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Surprisingly we hit the nineteenth paragraph before we got the first Charles Murray reference:pic.twitter.com/lETnbbLnu6
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Including for fairness' sake, and with this we have closed the introduction All of these people are great, even the murderers and the addicts and the lazy sods who won't just move to where the jobs arepic.twitter.com/PTIbmYcOfF
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OK. So. I have had I think two whiskies and a beer and we have established that the Scots-Irish hillbillies of the Greater Cincinnati-Dayton Area have superior work ethics, but also this isn't racist.
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Chapter One: Oh, see, his address might have been in Ohio but he always defined "home" as the holler in Kentucky. Now I'll give him this: Jackson, KY is about as rural as I am now.
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