By Deanne Stillman
Let’s say it all started with Jerry Springer. And then it graduated to Dr. Phil, Honey Boo Boo, and a zillion reality shows in which train wreck families dominated the airwaves. It reached a new level with the candidacy of Sarah Palin and the rise of Joe the Plumber and hit yet another height with the veneration of Duck Dynasty and their affiliation with Donald Trump during the 2016 election. The whole thing was certified by Trump himself when he awarded Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The late radio fright monger had made a career out of being cruel and outrageous. He bashed the little girls Amy Carter (President Jimmy Carter’s daughter) when she was nine years old and then Chelsea Clinton (President Bill Clinton’s daughter) when she was twelve, both because of their looks. He followed up on all of this during Abu Ghraib, describing what was depicted in the leaked, disturbing photos of treatment of Gulf War captives as akin to “a fraternity prank.” Perhaps most lastingly, he introduced use of the term “Democrat” instead of “Democratic” because it ends in “rat”; his legions of listeners, aka “Dittoheads,” picked up the term and use it to this day, and it’s now in general use by GOP members of the House and Senate.
And now we have the advent of JD Vance, the Ohio senator who may soon be a heartbeat away from the Presidency (although his slot on the Trump ticket may be in jeopardy). As we all know, he has written about his childhood in a memoir called Hillbilly Elegy, about a poor white family in Appalachia out of which he jettisoned himself into the upper middle-class, at least income and academia-wise, Yale-washing his way into national politics and now the slot for Vice President. Riding the train on which working class white folks have been presented for years as freaks who emerge occasionally when noticed by the upper classes or as novelty acts for television, the political stage, or diner interviews with reporters crazy for chicken fried steak and sound bites, he is amping up the divisiveness and hate which Trump unleashed six years ago. Could this be a legacy that was passed down through his family? Weirdly, a close read of his memoir reveals that this MO may well be his legacy. On page 24, he writes that a cousin married into the Hatfield family and murdered the Union soldier Harmon McCoy, thus kicking off the notorious Hatfield McCoy family feud – quite possibly America’s first Jerry Springer Show, studied in schools as a hallmark of battling relatives, an enduring American saga. His connection with the Hatfields and McCoys – that a relative literally started this forever feud – has been overlooked in the rivers of ink spilled over coverage of his book. And yet, it seems to be the key that unlocks him.
I have travelled a parallel path, but in the opposite direction. An Ohio native like Vance, I experienced a reversal of fortune as a child when my parents got divorced and my mother, sister, and I moved from an upper middle-class neighborhood of Cleveland into a working-class community, instantly becoming persona non grata to certain relatives who were embarrassed that we landed in the wrong zip code. At school, I quickly became aware of America’s dirty little secret – class – finding myself with diminishing access to certain amenities of life and instantly realizing that my schoolmates never had them. Later I came to understand that I was mired in a scenario called “crabs in a bucket” by which I was mocked by new-found friends for planning to attend college (“going for an M. R. S. Degree?” some would ask, among other things). In short, escape routes were blocked or met with disdain, but escape I did, having maintained connections with those members of my family who came to my rescue over the years and provided a lifeline. This escape, however, was not easy, and after much turmoil including an illegal abortion after which I was sick for days, I finally made my way out of Dodge, mainly due to my mother, who knew that my path was a writer’s.
You see, I had been writing since I was a little girl, taught to do so by my father, and we even had our own “writer’s room” where we would retreat and cook up stories and characters. Sometimes I submitted the pieces to Mad Magazine or the New Yorker, in my elementary school handwriting. I still have some of the rejection letters, at an early age learning how to deal with the phrase “not right for us.” After my parents got divorced, it was literature that showed me the way out. I retreated into a fantasy world of books about the West, escaping into the land of red rock mesas and wild horses and renegades and rebels, and I fantasized about hitting the road and vanishing into our wide-open spaces, joining up with iconic American figures who lived out there forever.
After high school, I did indeed go to college, not for an MRS Degree, and ultimately settling in Los Angeles. At the time, I had been writing comedy, pursuing a way of looking at things which was kind of a family style that originated with my father and his side of the family. Pretty much everything was funny and I began making a living as a staff writer on such TV shows as “Square Pegs” (Sarah Jessica Parker’s first series) and then others, until there came a time when nothing seemed funny anymore and I walked away from the scene, even cancelling a dinner with Dave Letterman regarding a possible job on his show. Serious matters had been calling me; my own pain had come forth, foreclosing a style of instant reaction, and it was during many a desert sojourn that I faced my childhood wounds, and one day after a hike in Joshua Tree National Park, I overheard a conversation in a bar about two girls who had been “sliced up by a Marine.” This was shortly after the Gulf War and I immediately inquired, dismayed by the gossip.
“Who were the girls?” I asked.
“Just some trash in town” came the reply.
“What were their names?” I asked.
"Just two girls.”
It became a litany that I couldn’t shake. A long-time pilgrim in the region, I knew there was much more to the refrain, and it wasn’t long before it overtook my life. I vowed to give the girls their names.
“For the next ten years,” I wrote here, “I followed a trail of tears deep into the Old Testament territory of the Mojave, from one wretched desert shack to the next. I learned that the girls were named Mandi Scott and Rosalie Ortega. I learned that the two had died together, and that in two days Mandi would have turned 16. I learned that Rosalie grew up in a hut in the Philippines and that Mandi was a descendant of those who had come West with the Donner Party. I learned that the girls carried a legacy of poverty and violence that stretched back for generations, and I learned that, in spite of the blood jinx, they were heroes in their community, cooking for, playing cards with, babysitting the children of, making love to all the lonely young tribesmen who wandered the desert in search of connection -- all the Marines, Crips, Bloods, vatos, bikers, dead-end kids - - all the wasted souls of the American night who sooner or later make their way to Twentynine Palms, California.”
This story became my book Twentynine Palms, which to my everlasting good fortune, Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” I’ve been on this trail ever since, writing about outcasts and people on the edge in one way or another for a long time. The elegy that JD Vance is singing for hillbillies is not for the people I have known and who have let me into their lives to tell their stories. In fact, I really don’t know who the elegy is for. To give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it really is for his own family and community, which has evidently led him to urge women to remain in violent marriages for the sake of the children.
Some of the people I’ve written about have done just that and almost did not live to talk about it. One of them, a figure in my book named Debie McMaster, is a woman who followed in the footsteps of her mother, a victim of years of domestic violence, including incidents inflicted by her husband, a member of the Hell’s Angels. Debie herself hooked up with the Angels when she was a teenager, became involved with a number of abusive men, and one day, married one of them. Debie told me that he became especially violent whenever the Dallas Cowboys lost a game- a situation many women can recognize. But that was only one such instance; certainly other matters could set him off, and finally Debie was able to get away, fleeing with her three children and hiding in a motel for several weeks, until several bikers come to her aid and she made her way to the desert, to start over in the place where everyone starts over, joining the endless parade of camp followers to the big blank slate where you can always find work at bars, gas stations, fast food establishments, all the places that pop up around military bases and the Marine base at Twentynine Palms was the largest such base in the world. Here, a single mother could live on the cheap – a scenario which in recent years is vanishing, as the town has become somewhat gentrified and was recently featured in Travel and Leisure Magazine as a fashionable destination.
In addition to Debie and her family, I also got to know members of the Lunch Box Gang, a fierce circle of teenage girls including Debie’s daughter Mandi, so named because they would hang out at Debie’s house during lunch break from junior high which was across the street. This was a diverse group – Samoans, Latinas, Filipinas, blacks, whites – at a time before diversity was a thing; these girls weren’t hanging out to make a sociological point but just because that’s the situation they found themselves in and so what? I don’t think I’ve ever met such a devoted alliance of like-minded souls. All children of working-class parents who were either away at war, training for war, veterans of wars, and/or toiling away as truck drivers, maintenance personnel, or in “logistics” at one of the dozens of warehouses across the desert, they would fight anyone to the end if one of them was threatened by an outsider and they partied hard and always had a good time. But the flipside was that they lived amid violence; sometimes when I would visit, one of them would have a broken arm, or a “busted spleen,” or a black eye. They would wave off my questions, but not always, and in any case, it was clear to me that their households were filled with drug and booze-filled physical upheaval, and it was routine and there wasn’t much they could do about it.
One of the most amazing parties I’ve ever attended was Debie’s bar party for her daughter Mandi to present a $1000 scholarship “to help an average girl get out of Twentynine Palms.” Working for years as a bartender after she landed there, Debie had wanted to make sure that another girl did not meet Mandi’s fate, which is to say being stranded in the Mojave, her dreams and very life life squelched – on the eve of her 16th birthday no less. She had raised money for the award via bar tips and other ways, with her devoted regulars donating food stamps, matchbook collections, whatever they had that was valuable in some fashion. The award was for whoever wrote the best essay about how they would put the funds to use; the winner penned a statement about wanting to become a juvenile cop some day and make sure that the kids in town did not head off the rails. The cherried-out used Camaro that Debie had saved up for as a birthday gift for Mandi remained parked in the driveway on the morning after Mandi was killed, never to provide an escape for someone who badly needed it.
For JD Vance to have suggested that women should remain in violent marriages is an abomination. In his world view, the mothers who remain in violent marriages for the sake of the children (often a cover story that hides fear), quite possibly wanting to get out but not having the means or the wherewithal, should stay there. Fearing a weakness in his proposition, he recently changed “women” to “parents,” a weird, equal opportunity way to trash everyone at the same time - although it must be said that men are often stranded at the low end of things just like women, inheritors of violent and dead-end pathways themselves and laboring under expectations that are higher and not possible to fulfill.
If this isn’t a “crabs in the bucket” scenario, I don’t know what is. Making it even less likely for the beleaguered to escape their fate, he also adds that women who have been raped or victimized by incest should not be permitted to have abortions, indicating that such violent behavior has no consequences for the perpetrators. Vance was able to extract himself from a brutal world, yet now – fearing the unknown and maybe even a new age of…women laughing? Men who like them? - Whatever it is, he seeks to keep his brothers and sisters mired in an ancient zip code, perhaps to get tapped for an appearance on the next Jerry Springer show and display their raw style of communication so that we can all watch in shock and amazement, just as reporters do at Trump rallies when they ask attendees idiotic questions such as “how can you vote for someone who likes Putin?” - only to be met with predictable displays of ignorance guaranteed to attract attention in a landscape obsessed with “likes.”
Yet there is hope in the offing. The possibility of now having Tim Walz as Vice President turns the “white guy as ignorant yahoo/shaman” upside down. And the rise of “White Dudes for Harris,” judging from the social media posts of hardhats, 4-wheel aficionados, bearers of arms and numerous others in a long, blue-collar parade, is a far cry from the decades of battling Caucasians who have been paraded across our television screens in a ratings bonanza, a welcome indicator that the Hatfields and McCoys divide that originated in Vance’s own family may be coming to an end, no thanks to JD himself who encourages only American discord. Does this mean we will be spared the presence of another Honey Boo Boo? Probably not, but there is so much change afoot that we may soon be singing an elegy for reality television and the plague of sad folks whose only escape route was to be mocked in the public square.
