We’re now approaching the Everest level in our march to the total narcissistic society: Thirty-somethings are writing their memoirs.
I’m not kidding. J.D. Vance has done a Sir Edmund Hillary in his newly released “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” This lad with ancestral roots in “Bloody Breathitt” County, deep in the Cumberland Mountains of Eastern Kentucky, is a mere 31 years old. Actually, he discloses in the book that his birthday is August 2, 1984, so he’ll be 32 when you read this. The book, a best seller on Amazon, is being especially celebrated by conservatives and libertarians because they believe it explains the phenomenon of the decline of the poor white working class in the US. New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks, who fears that disaffected white Americans are going to elect a tyrant named Donald Trump, calls it “essential reading for this moment in history.” The executive editor of The National Review is even more effusive: “To understand the rage and disaffection of America’s working class whites, look to Greater Appalachia. (Vance) gives voice to this forgotten corner of our country, and to the millions of white Americans who feel powerless as their way of life is devastated. Never before have I read a memoir so powerful, and so necessary.” No book about Appalachia has gotten this much attention since Harry Caudill’s “Night Comes to the Cumberlands” was published in 1963 and led President Kennedy to lay the groundwork for LBJ’s eventual War on Poverty. Caudill eloquently described the rape of a region and a people by colonialist coal barons allied with governments and called on the conscience of the nation for remedies. Vance begs to differ: “These problems were not created by government or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them….we hillbillies must wake the hell up.”