…I'm confused. Usually you're deeply and reliably snarky. This is… ambivalent?
Naaah, dawg. This here be a powerful book.
Perhaps it's due to what you think of as a unique background.
My background is hardly unique -
Tell them where you're writing this from.
…Seat 1A, first class for my fourth flight of this young month. But it's not like I paid for it.
Who's comparison-shopping Porsches and Mercedes in his spare time?
I drive a '95 Dodge. I'm looking at used cars. My cousin likes to call himself an opportunistic depreciation monkey. If I blow $15k on a used Porsche it'll be less than I spent on my wife's Honda.
Wouldn't happen to be the same guy who spent half a day on Rodeo Drive looking at quarter million dollar watches, would it?
Like I was gonna buy one of those. Market research for a career I'd need an associate's degree to pursue.
Pretty sure I saw an IWC Schaffhausen Portuguese Tourbillon on your wrist not a week ago.
I have also driven Ferraris. That does not mean I will purchase one.
Because you can't, fucker. You're a deeply aspirational sonofabitch but you and I both know that your ass grew up on food stamps, that cockroaches and mice were regular roommates and that Rit dye turns Thriftown scrapings into sort-of new clothes and having relatives that live in the poor hispanic community down the hill doesn't make you cool, it makes you an auslander, even if their 1600 square feet and half acre of beans is the largest house you've ever seen. You know what, kid? Nobody else's parents told them to hit first, hit hard and look out for knives. Nobody else's mother used a stilletto to peel apples. Nobody else's dad told them that the easiest way to kill a mouse is to step on it, even if you're barefoot. Nobody else's parents saved the bladders out of boxes of Gallo wine for storing used motor oil. You could BUY that Ferrari and you'd STILL be white trash.
I'll have you know my great grandmother hosted Daughters of the American Revolution meetings. Four generations of Herwits went to Harvard. They still do.
You're not a Herwit! You're three generations removed from that, white trash. They kicked your grandfather's folx out when they ran out of money, and they kicked your grandmother out when she married your loser goy grandfather. And what about the dirt farmers on your dad's side? They finished what, sixth grade?
Eighth.
Sixteen hundred square feet. A veritable mansion. Built it out of masonblock themselves, didn't they? You buried them in a dirt lot so far out of town you'd never been there before, after the Masons forgot their song mid-way through.
Shut up. They bought those plots themselves back in the '60s. We never knew.
Sweet tea, wasn't it? Six Lipton bags and a cup of sugar? And what did you call her cookies? "white trash cookies?"
What the hell else would you call a box of yellow cake mix with all the liquids replaced with Wesson. My great uncle helped invent LORAN -
You never met your great uncle. The family stopped talking to your grandfather when he dropped out of Harvard upon knocking up the Jewish girl. Your family drove two hours out of their way, went around his lake, parked in his driveway, and then left without so much as knocking on the door. You might as well have been singing "Here's your one chance Fancy", White Trash. Your grandfather was a machinist.
A machinist who was regional president of the AFL -
yes, yes, yes, white trash, who was mandated early retirement and died bitter in a two bedroom hovel in dirt-poor Albuquerque, surrounded by Hispanics. Funny thing about Hispanics in New Mexico - lots of their families have been there four hundred years and have counties named after them. They might be poor, but they'll never be trash like you.
Can we talk about the book, please?
There is no "we", white trash.
So the interesting thing about this book is it lays bare the fact that here in the land of the free home of the brave, we have since the very beginning followed the exact same classes and structures as English society but that due to our foundation as a representative democracy we have to pretend we haven't. Isenberg starts by pointing out that most of the immigrants to the United States were indentured servants who faced worse contracts than they got in England, that they tended to die a lot, that they always got the shittiest land even when they were free and that the power structures in place were such that whatever valuables they had were generally consolidated into the holdings of genteel land-owners who recreated an Elizabethan social structure where the elites still held 99% of wealth with only 10% of the population. Further, that the exploration of North America has always been a process of "waste people" moving into undesirable lands, dying by the droves, establishing a toehold and then being swept aside by the desirable class. American history is one long lather-rinse-repeat process whereby a frontier is bought dearly by the poor who are then swindled by the rich and the reason we accept this is - actually she never says why we accept it.
I think this book is valuable to me through synthesis of some other stuff I read. There's a fascinating book called "Fame Junkies" wherein the reasons why we follow gossip are explored. And fundamentally, we have a biological imperative to align ourselves with the strongest members of the tribe, and we have a sociological imperative to find common ground with strangers through gossip. Therefore, you're going to follow a leader just because he's a leader and you're going to talk about leaders because you have nothing else to talk about. And while Isenberg spends dozens of pages laying out chapter and verse how eugenics was practiced on the poor, how you can't have a discussion in the US for the past 200 years about the poor without discussing breeding, and how stereotypes of morally lax inbred hillbillies are older than the United States, she misses some big stuff that only hit home because fuckin'A, there aren't a whole lot of people you can make fun of anymore. Furries and Honey Boo Boo. That's pretty much it.
Allow me to break the narrative for a moment but one of the things that both Methland and The Great Unwinding hammered home is that in the United States, if you're successful it's because you deserve to be and if you fail, it's because you're immoral. You didn't work hard enough. You didn't strive. But here in these United States it isn't the proletariat we worship, it isn't Tom Joad, it's fucking Kennedys and Kardashians. I've got friends that are friends with Max Landis and allow me to say this once and for all that the way you get ahead in Hollywood is by being rich and related to someone else who got ahead in Hollywood and if you aren't, Fuck You. I knew James Coburn's son briefly. Coburn never did shit for his kids. It horrified everyone I talked to because fuckin'A why don't you do shit for your kids? What's the point of nepotism if you can't go by Emilio Estevez wink wink nudge nudge? Nicholas Cage totally got to where he was by being talented, not by being Francis Ford Coppola's nephew, right?
And look. That's me. Eating a warm chocolate cookie at 30,000 feet, a complimentary double of Woodford Reserve at my elbow, pissed to fuck that I'm not getting the same opportunities as Uncle-Frank-Directed-Godfather. Let's say you're my grandpa in Bastrop County Texas and it hasn't rained in a year and the cows are dying and nobody's giving you shit and you gotta put your kids in the trailer and drive around for two years looking for fuckin' work before you luck out and get an apprentice plumber job with the AEC. Except it isn't 1952 it's 2017 and your kid's got real promise and she might actually make it out except apparently some Asian kid in Denton is gonna get her slot or some black kid in Houston is gonna get her slot or some Mexican kid in Fort Worth is gonna get her slot because if you're Hispanic or Asian or Black you're a minority but if you're not? And you can't afford school because fuckin'A you can't afford cheese? Well, you, son, you're
White trash.
And you don't deserve shit.
It has been argued - conclusively - that the hardships faced by minorities eclipse the hardships faced by white people, particularly when controlling for socioeconomics.
Sure. But what that means is that a poor black kid might get to go to college while a poor white kid gets to shoot meth. And the thing about the demagogues? They don't blame the poor people. The white folk get to look around and notice that everyone has an excuse why everyone around them isn't succeeding but if they're not getting ahead, it's because they're fuckups. They lack breeding, they lack drive, they lack ambition, they lack intelligence, they lack pluck, they lack.
That sure looks like you slagging on your peeps, white trash.
Call me a follower.
How are you not doing exactly what you slagged on that dumb bastard for doing? Isn't that a rags-to-riches story about a kid who used the social safety net to escape poverty?
He didn't UNDERSTAND it, though. One thing about this book - it makes the point that you improve the livelihood of everyone in the US by employing and educating the poor white trash. Roosevelt's New Deal did this; LBJ's Great Society did this. And ever since -
You mean the LBJ that signed the Civil Rights Act and promptly lost the South to Democrats for the next fifty years at least, right?
The very same.
- "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Lyndon B Johnson to Bill Moyers
This is perhaps the least focused review you've ever done. Just sayin'.
Fuckin' Trump, yo. On the one hand, he was mostly voted in by rich pricks who want to pay zero marginal tax. On the other hand, we keep pointing to his base as these poor dumb pricks that vote against their best interests every chance they get because Democrats are shiftless atheists that aren't doing their best to keep Darkie down. And what it really comes down to? What it really fuckin' comes down to? Is we need to throw money and education at the poor dumb bastards so they'll be less poor and less dumb. Clinton said "when people think, we win" but thinking has been discouraged amongst the poor since sixteen diggity two. I look at that heinous graph I linked yesterday and I know two things: (1) Piketty made it really goddamn clear that being middle class is an ephemeral thing but once you're a goddamn rentier it's fuckin' hard to fall and (2) that fuckin' bleeding-hot 99.9th percentile wealth class are the guys who can afford quarter million dollar watches and if the past thirty years prove anything, they prove that those guys are winning the economy.
"100 year goals", as Gem said. I really like that. That really stuck with me. My hundred year goals, from 30,000 feet drunk on $40/bottle bourbon, are fucking socialism. We follow the alphas and the alphas are rich and so long as we're stupid and struggling we're gonna watch Kardashian and live Boo Boo and we're fucking doomed and I would really like my grandchildren to not live in a neoVictorian shithole. And this book, more than any I have read, point out what a neoVictorian shithole we've created for our poor, how fucking little we ever do about it, and how our entire social structure makes the poor and uneducated the only group in America that we can all make fun of, that we can all slag on, that we can all blame for our plight without ever once going
wait a minute
hang on
if they don't know any better are they really to blame
Because we DO. We DO know better and somehow we all thought we'd get our message across with clever Youtube videos. The shows most of America watches are not the shows the intelligentsia watches and sweet jesus christ we've got a machine-made reality TV star running the goddamn country and I know like six people that worked on that show that spent weeks or months hanging out with Trump, spent their days on the goddamn jet, and here I am, flying back to work from a quick weekend with my family, daughter at private school wife with a private practice in a half million dollar build-out
and I
am going
to mix some reality TV
and there is blood on my hands.
Success is climbing high enough up the ladder to piss on your forebears.
And if my daughter goes to Harvard I will have erased three generations of societal decline, getting my goddamn bloodline right back to where it was in 1938. Jesus Christ what a fucked up society we've created. LET'S FUCKING DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
NEXT UP:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's not get carried away. These things are supposed to be infrequent.
They seem to like it around here, though, contrived narrative structure be damned.
Well it won't be Water Knife because while Bacigalupi is occasionally brilliant, that book is garbage. And I doubt anybody gives a fuck about Toland's Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. So I guess they'll just have to subscribe to the tag.
Wait a minute. Isn't it like 9am?
I cheated. hard to post from space. Here there be proofreading. dealwithit.gif
I kind of want to call you white trash for sitting in row 1, presumably there because of a status upgrade (I know I prefer row 2 with under seat storage) rather than paying for first class yourself. I'm not sure that adds anything to the conversation, but there it is.
Thank you. You were right, I did enjoy the review. I'm not too sure how to segue from that quote to this one, but I've had it rattling around my head for the past few days. From Eugene V. Deb's Canton Ohio speech: You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain. You need to know that it is your duty to rise above the animal plane of existence. You need to know that it is for you to know something about literature and science and art. You need to know that you are verging on the edge of a great new world. You need to get in touch with your comrades and fellow workers and to become conscious of your interests, your powers and your possibilities as a class. You need to know that you belong to the great majority of mankind. You need to know that as long as you are ignorant, as long as you are indifferent, as long as you are apathetic, unorganized and content, you will remain exactly where you are. You will be exploited; you will be degraded, and you will have to beg for a job. You will get just enough for your slavish toil to keep you in working order, and you will be looked down upon with scorn and contempt by the very parasites that live and luxuriate out of your sweat and unpaid labor. Here we are, a hundred years later. I feel I should have something more to say since you were kind enough to review this. But fuck I'm tired tonight.And this book, more than any I have read, point out what a neoVictorian shithole we've created for our poor, how fucking little we ever do about it, and how our entire social structure makes the poor and uneducated the only group in America that we can all make fun of, that we can all slag on, that we can all blame for our plight without ever once going
You cannot do your duty by proxy. You have got to do it yourself and do it squarely and then as you look yourself in the face you will have no occasion to blush. You will know what it is to be a real man or woman. You will lose nothing; you will gain everything. Not only will you lose nothing but you will find something of infinite value, and that something will be yourself. And that is your supreme need—to find yourself—to really know yourself and your purpose in life.
It's too bad his machine didn't end up killing the fascists. Instead he and his messages have been forgotten.
For me, garbage is preferred. Trash is the ultimate expression of reality. It is the data spewed forth from our existence. From that data, you can back out facts about said existence. I'm about a third of the way through Hillbilly Elegy, and yes it is a steamer, but that's exactly what makes it so enlightening. It's a raw, unfiltered spew of verbal diarrhea chock full of the corn, emotions, contradictions, and mindset of the author. It hasn't been polished down into a coherent, rational, deductive set of reasoning. There's more entropy, more information, more substance than just a simple argument or streamlined story being told. It's a raw, rugged, and jagged slice of the author's mind that hasn't been commercialized so that "anyone" can understand it. And memoirs like that are exactly what are needed to piece together a complicated tale. It's data, not just a model. Data will arrive filtered through a range of systematic biases and random errors. It will be twisted by the instrument's (author's) personal mental structure. And that means that it tells you a lot about that structure. Models are idealizations of the real world. They are not actual measurements or observations. They have been backtracked to try to figure out the reality that created those measurements. All models are wrong, but some are useful. They are generalizations used to describe what happens in the real world. They are a description of reality. Some can be very useful, because they can be very descriptive. But data, perception, whether it's your perception or the perception of a scientific instrument, has been filtered into reality. From that data, you can build up a model. But the data is what is actually being perceived, and it is the record of what has actually happened. When you learn from models, you build your understanding of how the world "really" is from a theoretical, rational, realistic viewpoint. When you learn from data, you build your understanding of the things that you see happening around you and how to deal with those events. If you only look at the data, you won't understand the hows and whys. If you only look at the models, you won't see obvious problems that are staring you in the face and you become disconnected from the reality of your perceptions. Indeed, your own perceptions become warped if you do not fully understand how to deal with data, and your understanding of reality becomes warped if you do not fully understand how to relate data to reality. A major problem with our world today is that people are too dogmatic with their pursuit of either data or model, while rejecting the opposite side of the science of interpreting reality. I love data. I was raised in a conservative, data-oriented world. I love taking data and trying to create some model of reality from that data. However, some people don't take the step of trying to connect data to some model of reality that their brain can comprehend and describe. Some people become too concerned with JUST the data at the expense of theory. They stop caring about what's really going on in the world. They only care about pursuing the data that makes them feel good and demonizing the data that does not. This, I feel, is the root of the cancer within the conservative movement. Conservatives feel, and forget to think about why they feel what they do. My sister went the other way. An avid reader and active on social media, she fell into the trap of creating fantasies and conspiracies - the fun way of describing data and perception. Someone who is overly concerned with their theories will only accept the data that supports their theories, and will reject all others. They are more concerned with maintaining their world view and filtering their perceptions and the actions of themselves and others to impress their models of how the world should work onto reality. This, I think, is the root of the cancer within the liberal movement. Liberals think, and forget to check the world around them and if their theories are still connected to observable fact that can be sensed (felt). But I digress. Hillbilly Elegy is garbage. It is a thrown together, unmottled collection of data about growing up as a conservative hillbilly. It is raw data from which you can construct and test any model you wish about the mindset of the author, and from there extrapolate to people like him. Although I have not read White Trash, from your analysis it sounds more like someone else's refined model. Without being able to compare that model to true data (in this case, data from the mind of an actual hillbilly, or interactions with hillbillies), you cannot test that model. I would rather build up a model from data and then use that model to predict future data and modify it as needed. I would rather not be served a neat, cleaned up model and be told "this is how the world works". All models are at least slightly wrong, and a more organically grown model that has arisen from the data will always fit the data and produce better predictions than one that has been constructed. While getting my two BSes in Physics and Math, I learned that constructed models are good guesses when venturing into unknown territory, but you will always find surprises. This has been the history of all of physics, and science in general. Constructed theories are good bases to build from, but the data is reality and you must adjust your mental models to fit the data. Human culture and psychology is so incredibly complex that data is even more valuable. Models that our brains can put into words are overly simple by comparison. For a model of something so complex to be remotely accurate it must be built up by organic means rather than constructed by simple rules. There are simply too many rules to keep track of, and each are more or less important depending on context. To truly understand these nuances, you MUST collect data. A lot of it. As the complexity of a model increases, the more data you need to constrain your understanding reality. This is a simple mathematical fact: to fit a more complicated model you need more data. A Hillbilly Elegy is nothing but data about poor whites, a group that is largely misunderstood and oversimplified by our society, and as such I feel that it is hugely important to the communication of their condition. Either that, or I'm just a hillbilly conservative who loves data and that's why I prefer it to a more model-based approach. But I do believe that having your ideas be grounded in the truth (data) is the easiest way to stay grounded to reality. This explains the focus of most scientists on comparing theories to empirical reality and the focus of most historians of reconstructing history from primary sources rather than just tales, myths, and official reconstructions. Or whatever, who really knows anything, yanno?
Just so we're clear, you've read half of a book I hate - which is a memoir - and none of a book I love - which is a sociological analysis - and have determined that the book that I love is bullshit because you can't use it to create models? Is that what you're saying? Because this statement is batshit fucking insane: There are two characters in Hillbilly Elegy and their only living relative dismisses the author's recollections of both of them as fiction.A Hillbilly Elegy is nothing but data about poor whites, a group that is largely misunderstood and oversimplified by our society, and as such I feel that it is hugely important to the communication of their condition.
Not at all. I passed no judgment on the book that you love. I'm only asking that you not dismiss the book that you hate. The characters are not the data, neither are the facts presented. The way that the facts are presented, the information flow, and the setting, circumstances, and personality are far more important to understanding the author. I'm not surprised in the least that most of what he's writing is bullshit, but that doesn't mean it isn't full of information. EDIT: Ultimately, I guess I'm saying that how you say something is more important than what you're saying. And he gives a pretty clear picture of who he is and where he came from even if the details got warped.
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Okay, I appreciate that. Apologies for coming across so harshly. That said, I finished that book, while you're still working through it. It's a shit book. The way the facts are presented is "I have a story, I'm going to make shit up, I'm not going to think about any of it, and I'm going to wedge some statistics in the middle so people see this as more than a memoir." Circumstances? "I got a job with Peter Thiel and Libertarian thinking is profitable thinking." Hillbilly Elegy is a fundamentally dishonest book. It's every bit as false as Running with Scissors. Were it bigger, I suspect it'd get a million little pieces treatment. it's a faux memoir used as justification for urban poor rage with no understanding, compassion, or accurate portrayal of the urban poor. So we're left with a tautology: "Everything I say is false." What, exactly, are you supposed to get out of that?I passed no judgment on the book that you love. I'm only asking that you not dismiss the book that you hate.
No hard feelings! Sometimes tone is hard to transmit via text, and comment sections seem to gear people towards being on the defensive. I also started my post with an opinion that conflicted with yours, so it was not unreasonable for you to think that I was attacking your ideas. Regarding Hillbilly Elegy: perhaps I will reach a similar conclusion. I am only three chapters in and have only read about his early life and childhood. Checking the table of contents, it would be more accurate to say that I am 1/5 of the way through rather than 1/3. My apologies for the misestimate while commuting home. My opinion of the book may drastically change by the end. However, much of the purpose of my post was only tangentially related to my opinions on the book in question. I was just kind of using it as a jumping-off point to ramble about whatever I was thinking. I like doing that. The middle digression, in my opinion, was the more thetic part; the intro and conclusion merely glue so that I could squeeze the expression of my opinion into the conversation. What I'm trying to say is that moreso than whether a particular book was a good or bad example of anything, I was trying to describe an idea that the rest of the post/conversation/discussion made me think of. I tend to do that more than I try to have debates/arguments. People often don't understand that I'm more interested in trying to illustrate my opinions and understand the opinions of others than try to change anyone's minds or have a coherent argument. From my experience it's a bit unusual, but I prefer it to the traditional argumentative discourse. Let's just say what we think, try to understand each other, and maybe grow from the experience. My philosophy is: don't forget to understand so you can keep on loving, and don't forget to communicate so that people who are interested can understand you.