J.D. Vance ends his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, relating a recurring nightmare that had troubled him for nearly two decades, from the age of seven. After some years of respite it reappeared a few weeks after he had graduated from law school. But this time, instead of being chased by a monster, he was the monster chasing his dog with the intention of throttling it. When he caught the dog it turned and gave him such a look that his anger dissipated, and instead of throttling it he hugged it. He writes that the last emotion that he felt before he woke was relief that he had controlled his temper. Before he went back to sleep he was comforted by the domestic scene he was living within and the prospect of going to work the next day, taking the dogs to the park, buying groceries with his wife and making a nice dinner. 'It was everything I ever wanted,' he writes.
And isn't it all that most people want? To live in peace, to live with agreeable, loving people, to earn a living, to have free time to relax and enjoy simple pleasures. The American Dream surely? Most people do not want the world to fall at their feet. They want freedom to go about their business. They want good company. For that to become reality we need laws to protect it and good governance by responsible, knowledgeable people.
J.D. did not have peace as a child. A great many children in America do not have peace. As he points out in his memoir, when children suffer neglect, abuse and chaos they become permanently locked in fight or flight mode, and he gives many examples of how that continued to play out in his life as an adult.
The memoir was written at 31 years old when his biggest achievement was graduating from Yale Law School. In the introduction, and it is something he refers to constantly throughout the book, he points out that his future looked grim and it would have been, except for a few people who gave him the attention, love and support he needed. It was not the hard work, which would not have happened without encouragement, and he was not particularly talented either, it was other people who helped him overcome the legacy of feeling doomed to fail and the self-defeating fight or flight mechanism.
He states that he wrote the book because 'I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it. I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. I want people to understand the American Dream as my family and I encountered it. I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently, that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.'
I don't know where that J.D. Vance has gone to. His brow sits in a constant angry furrow and his words are angry, and his arguments make no sense. If political expediency causes a person to align themselves with the wrong cause, can they escape and remember who they are, or will the monster devour them?
