From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class.
I watched it a couple years ago, before he was a household name. Didn't have an ideal upbringing: addicted Mom, no Dad in the picture, abusive family members, etc. He clawed his way out of it, gotta give him that. Patrick
ReplyDeleteIt's a very good read. Don't know how faithful the movie is.
ReplyDeleteI read the book. If memory serves, he earned his four year degree in Engineering from Ohio State in two years. Hell of a work-ethic.
ReplyDeleteTough childhood. He seems to have compassion and the human-touch.
Liked Obama when he wrote the book. That may have changed as he grew older. Seems like the kind of person who is CAPABLE of learning rather than locking-on and doubling-down.
The difference is Obama did not write his book, Bill Ayers did.
DeleteGood book. Hard to tell if it's too good to be true .
ReplyDeleteAs someone who grew up poor in Appalachia, this book hits hard. Every character from this book reminded me of someone I knew, many of them relatives.
ReplyDeleteOutstanding read, drug addled single mom, poverty to VP nominee
ReplyDeleteaye
DeleteOH-hy-ya.
ReplyDeleteme too.
PART 2:
ReplyDeleteThe Marine Corps assumes maximum ignorance from its enlisted folks. It assumes that no one taught you anything about physical fitness, personal hygiene, or personal finances. I took mandatory classes about balancing a checkbook, saving, and investing. When I came home from boot camp with my fifteen-hundred-dollar earnings deposited in a mediocre regional bank, a senior enlisted marine drove me to Navy Federal—a respected credit union—and had me open an account. When I caught strep throat and tried to tough it out, my commanding officer noticed and ordered me to the doctor.
We used to complain constantly about the biggest perceived difference between our jobs and civilian jobs: In the civilian world, your boss wasn’t able to control your life after you left work. In the Marines, my boss didn’t just make sure I did a good job, he made sure I kept my room clean, kept my hair cut, and ironed my uniforms. He sent an older marine to supervise as I shopped for my first car so that I’d end up with a practical car, like a Toyota or a Honda, not the BMW I wanted. When I nearly agreed to finance that purchase directly through the car dealership with a 21-percent-interest-rate loan, my chaperone blew a gasket and ordered me to call Navy Fed and get a second quote (it was less than half the interest). I had no idea that people did these things. Compare banks? I thought they were all the same. Shop around for a loan? I felt so lucky to even get a loan that I was ready to pull the trigger immediately. The Marine Corps demanded that I think strategically about these decisions, and then it taught me how to do so.
PART 3:
ReplyDeleteJust as important, the Marines changed the expectations that I had for myself. In boot camp, the thought of climbing the thirty- foot rope inspired terror; by the end of my first year, I could climb the rope using only one arm. Before I enlisted, I had never run a mile continuously. On my last physical fitness test, I ran three of them in nineteen minutes. It was in the Marine Corps where I first ordered grown men to do a job and watched them listen; where I learned that leadership depended far more on earning the respect of your subordinates than on bossing them around; where I discovered how to earn that respect; and where I saw that men and women of different social classes and races could work as a team and bond like family. It was the Marine Corps that first gave me an opportunity to truly fail, made me take that opportunity, and then, when I did fail, gave me another chance anyway. When you work in public affairs, the most senior marines serve as liaisons with the press. The press is the holy grail of Marine Corps public affairs: the biggest audience and the highest stakes. Our media officer at Cherry Point was a captain who, for reasons I never understood, quickly fell out of favor with the base’s senior brass. Though he was a captain—eight pay grades higher than I was—because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was no ready replacement when he got the ax. So my boss told me that for the next nine months (until my service ended) I would be the media relations officer for one of the largest military bases on the East Coast.
By then I’d grown accustomed to the sometimes random nature of Marine Corps assignments. This was something else entirely. As a friend joked, I had a face for radio, and I wasn’t prepared for live TV interviews about happenings on base. The Marine Corps threw me to the wolves. I struggled a bit at first— allowing some photographers to take photos of a classified aircraft; speaking out of turn at a meeting with senior officers—and I got my ass chewed. My boss, Shawn Haney, explained what I needed to do to correct myself. We discussed how to build relationships with the press, how to stay on message, and how to manage my time. I got better, and when hundreds of thousands flocked to our base for a biannual air show, our media relations worked so well that I earned a commendation medal.
PART 4:
ReplyDeleteThe experience taught me a valuable lesson: that I could do it. I could work twenty-hour days when I had to. I could speak clearly and confidently with TV cameras shoved in my face. I could stand in a room with majors, colonels, and generals and hold my own. I could do a captain’s job even when I feared I couldn’t.
For all my grandma’s efforts, for all of her “You can do anything; don’t be like those fuckers who think the deck is stacked against them” diatribes, the message had only partially set in before I enlisted. Surrounding me was another message: that I and the people like me weren’t good enough; that the reason Middletown produced zero Ivy League graduates was some genetic or character defect. I couldn’t possibly see how destructive that mentality was until I escaped it. The Marine Corps replaced it with something else, something that loathes excuses. “Giving it my all” was a catchphrase, something heard in health or gym class. When I first ran three miles, mildly impressed with my mediocre twenty-five-minute time, a terrifying senior drill instructor greeted me at the finish line: “If you’re not puking, you’re lazy! Stop being fucking lazy!” He then ordered me to sprint be- tween him and a tree repeatedly. Just as I felt I might pass out, he relented. I was heaving, barely able to catch my breath. “That’s how you should feel at the end of every run!” he yelled. In the Marines, giving it your all was a way of life.
I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself—that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability. This is why, whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.” The Marine Corps excised that feeling like a surgeon does a tumor.
A few days after my twenty-third birthday, I hopped into the first major purchase I’d ever made—an old Honda Civic— grabbed my discharge papers, and drove one last time from Cherry Point, North Carolina, to Middletown, Ohio. During my four years in the Marines, I had seen, in Haiti, a level of poverty I never knew existed. I witnessed the fiery aftermath of an airplane crash into a residential neighborhood. I had watched Mamaw die and then gone to war a few months later. I had befriended a former crack dealer who turned out to be the hardest-working marine I knew.
When I joined the Marine Corps, I did so in part because I wasn’t ready for adulthood. I didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, much less how to complete the financial aid forms for college. Now I knew exactly what I wanted out of my life and how to get there. And in three weeks, I’d start classes at Ohio State.
I haven't read the book, but I've talked with several people in the Ohio gun community, and Vance is considered to be a mental lightweight at best. One very knowledgeable person said that Vance makes Kamela look like a Nobel Physics winner by comparison.
ReplyDeleteFor me, it doesn't matter. I'm not voting at all in this election, unless the Dems do the right thing and recognize Palestine as the real government over there.
Monk, your killin me with your BS 🤣
DeleteThe last half of your comment reveals the weight of the first half.
DeleteNot voting and being so disillusioned by the fact that Monk feels compelled to publicly announce his stupidity.
DeleteJEEZ!!!
I trust the plague is well advanced and will remove your presence and posts soon.
DeleteI looked Vance up awhile back and found he is mostly fictitious bloviation. He's a doughboi and bends easily in the wind. I'm not impressed.
ReplyDeleteVery helpful comment in making up my mind to vote, and vote Trump/Vance.
DeleteHill Billy Elegy has been a NYTimes and Amazon best seller TWICE, when it was first published and since Vance was announced as Trump's VP pick.
ReplyDeleteVance graduated Summa Cum Laude from OH State with degrees in political science and philosophy, no mean feat.
Vance was accepted at Yale Law School, no mean feat for a person with his background and especially being an ex Marine at one of THE MOST liberal Law Schools in the country. He graduated with a JD degree on an almost full ride scholarship. He clerked for a U.S. district Court Judge in Kentucky after graduating. He's a United States Senator. All in all. a pretty accomplished fellow at 39 years old.
Personally, I would rather Trump picked Matt Gaetz as his VP. I think Trump needs a real firebrand as VP, in addition to someone who really knows the ins and outs of DC. Vance hasn't been in DC that long, just a couple years, and I don't think he knows just how vicious DC is, yet.
However, he's a really smart guy, so he'll be OK.
Forgot to identify myself - Nemo
DeleteIt doesn't really matter who's in the White House. The people behind the scenes that run things will remain the same.
ReplyDeleteNot impressed. Too much fanfare, and too much made of a rather common story. Grandparents and the military have righted many a boy into a man.
ReplyDeleteHe hated Trump and now is his boy. WTF? I smell a globalist tool. I hope I am wrong,,,, afraid I am not. Not nearly enough push back by the MSM and RINOS, IMHO. Trumps' hiring skills are abysmal. Hope he can clean this mess up. The deck is stacked against him bigly.
Like Vance, I didn’t trust Trump in 2015-2016. I laughed out loud when he said that he’d rewrite NAFTA. Then he got elected and did everything he promised to do, including rewriting NAFTA Trump gained my respect. It appears that Vance had a similar journey.
Delete👆🏻👆🏻
DeleteHe’s right.
All of those "Never Trumpers" who are here and who think that the libtards will make our once-great nation better are as disillusioned as they sound. Obama followed his handlers' instructions and claimed that he would "take America down a notch." The truth be told, the libtards are hell bent to reduce the US to just another shithole Third World nation. Godless, moral less, directionless, clueless, irresponsible and totally dependent on the federal government for their lives.
ReplyDeletei read the book. Against a lot of odds he made something of himself, gotta respect that.
ReplyDeleteIt is very good. Explains how you can’t explain Trump without accounting for the midwestern communities forgotten under Obama.
ReplyDelete