Half-truths in Hillbilly Elegy

I´ve heard about Hillbilly Elegy by the current US VP J.D.Vance few years back, as a reference for understanding roots of local elites in the US few years back and the book - and the movie made after it - returned into my TBR shortly before the US elections. 

I may reckon that I haven´t paid too much attention to both the topic and the author, until I really started paying more attention to the elites configuration within the current Trump administration. I am not a specialist in US history and politics, but obviously this is an area that cannot be ignored, and the structures of elites is as important as the recent more or less unexpected geopolitical moves. My attention for this book, a memoir ´of a familyand culture in crisis´ was generated by an article about JD Vance´s life story, his family struggles and his achivements. I do have a special interest in such life stories, from rags to riches therefore I couldn´t resist to get the book, that I had access to in audiobook format, read by the author.

Hillbilly is usually referred to unsophisticated individuals, mostly used for the inhabitants of therural Appalachian areas. 

Vance is originary from such a family, with grandparents who never graduated, with an absent father and a mother with a serious drug addiction, plus an impressive number of stepfathers. Spiritual and material poorness and hopelessness. 

I am not going too deep into the critics about what Vance actually doesn´t shared about his life, that may explain how someone with such an incredibly sad family story ended up as the US vice-president. 

But there are no bad people in this story. Even his mother who literally was about to kill him and put Pepsi in his bottle when he was only few months old is still part of his story - and she was invited to his sworn-in ceremony, among others. 

Vance, who before graduating Yale Law School enrolled in the military and even fought in Iraq, is one of the 1% of hillbillies who succeed having a normal life. There is not unusual that people from humble background succeed in life, but they usually do so because at a certain point in their life journey, they receive proper support from teachers, society or religious institutions. Individuals that encouraged hard working individuals, no matter the background. 

The memoir is useful for understanding the mentality of the deep American countryside, but for the JD Vance story itself, I will just collect some of the facts, that do not however fill the whole puzzle. I may take a look to biographies of representatives of Trump administration soon, including JD Vance at a later date though as it is always an interesting riddle to understand the educational and personal background of decision makers.

Rating: 3 stars

 

Researching the Roots of Intolerance in America

´Through greater insight into the variety of religion, the dynamics of prejudice, and gthe complexities of national life, Americans can better avoid the biases, stereotypes and provications that betray their own ideals yet have too frequently appeared on the country´s political and social landscape´.

This is the main conclusion of a book which explores the roots of intolerance into the American public culture. Religious intolerance, to be more specific. 

We are familiar nowadays with the Muslim ban and the alt-right aggressive - and sometimes deadly - public appearances, but before, in the 17th-18th and onwards, there were the Catholics and the Jews and the Native Americans. In American Heretics, Peter Gottschalk traces patterns and trends, public statements and perceptions based on fear, anger, indignation or religious panic.

It does not creates and build models per se though, but offers enough information to further explore patterns and further investigate public statements and positions. 

At what extent the religious allegiances can endanger the universal ideas the American Constitution relies upon? What are the public ´dangers´ of organised religions, other than the Protestant, in the opinion of political pundits and public opinion makers? What are the cultural basis and are those universal or rather applies on a case by case basis?

I personally expected the research to be more specific and more comprehensive for the variety of cases analysed. Obviously, it offers interesting lines of research but it obliterates relevant nuances which are by far more important in understandining the phenomenon in all its acceptions.

Who are 'The Arabists'?

I went familiar with the writings of Robert D. Kaplan through his Balkan travelogue Balkan Ghosts - part of it I translated for a feuilleton published by a newspaper I was working on, in a time when the Balkans were on interest, although deeply misunderstood - which I've largely found relativistic, sensationalist and written in a very simplistic way. It rather has the style of blog posts, at a time when there were no blogs around, written fast, to cater an audience hunger for colourful descriptions and easy explanations of century-long conflicts. Those were the times...

Kaplan is a favorite of many South-Eastern European leaders who happily invited for an insightful chat, especially when they hope to have their name mentioned in his next travelogue, wrote also about South-Eastern Asia and went embedded with US troops in Iraq. He has the knowledge and the right connections for obtaining direct reliable information but don't expect his writings to be academically insightful. You might get the shape of things, but the content must be filled with something different if looking for a solid picture.

About The Arabists, which traces the roots of the Foreign Services elites in the Middle East, I had no idea it exists, until browsing a collection of books about this part of the world. The book was written at the end of the 1980s and republished. What is fantastic about this book is the big number of references and interviews regarding various diplomatic appointees in various positions in the Middle East. Not few of them were children of methodist protestant missionaries sent by their churches to converts Arab populations to Christianism in the 18th-19th century. In some places, like in what used to be called the 'big Syria', which included Lebanon of today, those missionaries clashed with the French representatives represented by the Catholic Church. Children of those missionaries were eventually born in the Middle East, spoke Arabic, returned in the State and were included in the white Protestant elites. They entered the Foreign Service but eventually their interest decreased and went to explore other 'exotic' part of the world, like Africa.

The Protestant religious activism shaped at a great extent the political activism and Arab nationalism, including through the university network created, such as the American Universities - in Lebanon and Cairo, that still remain important institutions of high education in this part of the world. Americans themselves prefer to study there for a full immersion into the elitist version of the local societies and for improving the language. The intellectual life was developed under the Protestant spell. For instance, the first Arabic printing press in Syria was brought by American missionaries to Beirut from Malta in 1834. 

But who really are those 'Arabists'. According to Robert D. Kaplan since the early 1950s onwards, there were two definitions that will exist side by side. One, for the use of the Foreign Service and the Protestant missionaries, referred to 'someone who spoke Arabic well and had substantial living experience in the Arab world'. The other one, public and according to the author embraced by the 'Jewish public' was: 'Someone who loved Arabs, often because he hated Jews'. The latter acception prevailed sometimes in the US diplomatic approaches to the Middle East peace process, including through the policies of the American embassy in Tel Aviv - very knowledgeable in Arab affairs, speaking the language, but not Hebrew (which is spoken in only one country, anyway). I might add that the current pathos of the US administration towards Israel is often based also on a religious basis, the neo-evangelical missionarism which is equally toxic and anti-Semitic in its origin.

However, that 'love' for the Arabic speaking realm has some limits, many of them. It did not have the state-building outreach of the Brits - who, like Lawrence of Arabia or Gertrude Bell were genuinely believing that they can change the course of events and the geopolitical configuration of the region. Many were just too desillusioned with their Western bubble and were looking for an exotic connection to the outside world. They pretended not only to 'understand the Arabs' but they assumed that their disgust toward the unreliable political elites and corruption would in fact help the local societies to change. More often those diplomats chose to change their location when apparently things were not following their designs.

Following the end of the Cold War, when the local - especially Republican - American elites lost their grasp of the realities as the binary US/Russia (which generously got involved in the elite building in many places in the Middle East, Syria being one of them) conflict ceased to exist. The life of the Arabists fell the victim of the 'rampant shallowness and careerism and the sterilization of embassy life. The Foreign Service, after all, mirrors the society from which it draws it recruits, and these recruits are consumed with status and advancement and less concerned with the subject of their expertise that their predecessors were'. 

Robert D. Kaplan avoids making any conclusion. But it is enough to read only for one day the flows of news regarding America's adventures in the Middle East to see how low the standards sunk. It can't get any lower. 

About Academic Shame

One of my best friends during my university years was a very ambitious young girl whose parents were barely reading and writing and who was ambitious enough to get a superb scholarship at Georgetown University. Her hardwork was an inspiration for me, and many others that were during those times more interested to test life, love and relationships instead of dedicating the best light hours to intensive study and exam preparations. At a certain extent, we knew that sooner or later we will find our place - because we were coming from middle-class families with a clear intellectual status in the society - therefore we did not have too prove that much. Meanwhile, my friend was catching up reading the books that we had included in our weekly reading plan or learning the languages our relatives started to practice with us at a very early age. We not even need to work too hard to pay our college debts because even if our parents were not always so well-off, there will be always some successful relative that probably will help with a loan one day, when the knife was getting closer to the skin.

It was good for America that a friend like mine, with a poor immigrant background, worked so hard to get into one of the most elitist universities, preparing future American diplomats. For me, it was an example that although nightmarish sometimes, the American dream is still working. And I am still convinced that hard work and dedication pays off, although nowadays it is getting harden and harder to cope with the post-university trauma of huge debts and the lack of social and professional integration. Why do you need so much hard work and financial pressure when once you graduated, you can hardly find a good academic or professional position, as most of the best jobs are offered based on a personal CV that counts less your academic achievements instead of your good family connections. With the right high-class connections you can have any job you want, regardless your grades and the circle is shrinking more and more each day.

The recent scandal involving bribes and favoritism in top league American universities as Yale, UCLA, USC and Standford is only one of the many examples in this respect. Although it involves mostly big money paid for admissions of athletes who couldn't play in various sport academic teams, it touches violently also to the ways in which people with a certain visibility consider that their children deserve a better place into the society. The fact that a protagonist from a movie called 'Desperate Housewives' wants her offspring to be part of the American intellectual elites and pays heavily for this - possibly with some of her years as well - tells a lot about what are we talking about. 

The fact that parents with an intellectual background want their children to be part of the same elites is not commendable in itself, but it does not request a more equal status than someone else. Let's compete and show your skills, but the departure point shall be the same. There is no genetical guarantee of brain further development or conservation from an intellectual generation to the other. 

The fact that politicians and well-offs offer themselves huge donations to universities although their deep system of belief is completely against the chore system of the said universities and societies in the middle of which those operate - remember the Muammar Gaddafi's links to LSE? - is a proof that the elites' system in our brave new world is getting through a deep crisis. No 'desperate' money will help this situation, until the entire crisis is evaluated in all its details. 

A clear and immediate answer - which has to do not only with America and its system, but has to do with the ways in which education operates and contributes to the overall reproduction of elites - would probably help avoiding a further wave of non-values and mediocrity in a system aimed to promote the difference between values and non-values.