Over The Hills And Far Away,

Oh darling, darling, darling...walk a while with me?
Ooooh, you got so much (too much) so much...

In his column today, David Brooks plumps for "Hillbilly Elegy", a young Yale writer's take on the white working-class.  Brooks eats this shit up!

Many have I loved - Many times been bitten
Many times I've gazed along the open road.

Many times I've lied - Many times I've listened
Many times I've wondered how much there is to know.

Many dreams come true and some have silver linings
I live for my dream and a pocketful of gold.

Mellow is the man who knows what he's been missing
Many many men can't see the open road.

Many is a word that only leaves you guessing
Guessing 'bout a thing you really ought to know, ooh!
You really ought to know...

 Maybe Vance will be the white Teh-Nehisi Coates.  Using his "people" to further his bankroll.  And then debarking for ... Paris?

Why is it the elites love them some 'merican memoirs of folks gone wrong?  Do it help them think they understand others who share their nation?  Don't they understand that people are only too happy to serve up the slop the elites say they want to consume?

Doesn't make it objective non-fiction though...  just a subjective "I was there" new style of fiction for the new century.  Cashing in on your own kind.  That's easy.  Understanding cotext?  That's harder, and likely something they no longer can teach at Yale...

This honor code has been decimated lately. Conservatives argue that it has been decimated by cosmopolitan cultural elites who look down on rural rubes. There’s some truth to this, as the reactions of smug elites to the Brexit vote demonstrate.

But the honor code has also been decimated by the culture of the modern meritocracy, which awards status to the individual who works with his mind, and devalues the class of people who work with their hands.

Most of all, it has been undermined by rampant consumerism, by celebrity culture, by reality-TV fantasies that tell people success comes in a quick flash of publicity, not through steady work. 

 How come we can call white people hillbillies, anyway, and yet we shudder at those using words like nigger or redskin?  Riddle me that, Mr. Brooks, next time you have a book-of-the-moment to push...