printOn the immigration front, the “Open Sesame” magical phrase that gets you into polite, conservative company is J. D Vance’s “True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration.”
Banal. Puke. Yawn.
“True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration” is the typically bankrupt, conciliatory, “conservative” argument we’ve come to expect from these quarters, regarding America’s promiscuously loose immigration policy, under Republicans and Democrats alike.
First, the “moral” preening component: “All’s I’m saying, you folks, comes out of the goodness of my hillbilly heart.”
For the second point, allow me to excerpt from my “Immigration Scene,” written in 2006 (has anything changed? why vote?):
Everyone (and his dog) currently concurs that we have no problem with legal immigration, only with the illegal variety. It’s now mandatory to pair an objection to the invasion of the American Southwest with an embrace of all forms of legal immigration.
Vance opposes the rot of our immigration reality simply because he’s so kind, diverse and open, but still law-abiding.
Note the name-dropping from our hoedown Hillbilly, a member of the elite by any other name:
“… my friend (and my wife’s former boss) Brett Kavanaugh [of the] Supreme Court...”
Ooh. Impressive. While Vance forgot to brag directly about having married an Indian-American lady, who “Rid Him of His Hillbilly Ways“; he brought her up indirectly while touting his elite credentials.
Then there’s the shtick that is the constant mentioning of his “working-class background.” Once they’ve “arrived” in the power zone; conservatives like Vance are as good at lefty elitists at assuring us of their (manifestly fake) authenticity.
By the way, Appalachian folks, whom Vance depicted in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, say justifiably that “Vance was not an authentic hillbilly or an example of the working class.”
Cassie Chambers Armstrong, an Appalachian and author of Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, tells why her Aunt Ruth didn’t think much of JD Vance’s endeavor:
portrayal of Appalachia is designed to elevate Vance above the community from which he came. Remember that it seeks to tell his story in a way that aligns with a simplistic rags-to-riches narrative. Think critically about how that narrative influences the way we are taught to think about poverty, progress, and identity.
When all is said and done, J. D. Vance utters the code words at the door of the Establishment, Left and Right, when discussing immigration–and has been allowed in.
The right answer, the one J.D. Vance wouldn’t dare give, is this:
Vance and his phony conservative friends misplace compassion. Their job is not to flaunt their virtue to The World currently on its way to America.
True compassion demands that American politicians and policy makers stick strictly to their mandate—and that is looking out ONLY for their American constituents, and sending all the rest THE HELL HOME. These politicians are hired hands: hired by the American electorate to do its bidding, alone.
Except for a tiny elite, Americans are struggling. But the political class, Dem & Republican, has developed crooked ways of virtue signaling about immigration, using these safe words: Humanitarian crisis! The Kids are in cages. Trafficking. Cartels. Sex.
See:
Do We Still Have A Country? Part I
“We Aren’t Americans; We ARE The World (Part II)”
UPDATE:
The GOP is RIP to me: Typically, Sen. John Kennedy, with his contrived Southern act (he’s Ivy League) and rehearsed, overwrought cracks, puts Trump’s party back decades, tells “Fox News Primetime” host Trey Gowdy that Americans love 1 million legal immigrants coming in annually, object ONLY to illegal, Biden-created chaos on border. (3/9/021)
Well now, dear friend Ilana, of this little blog gem, I can truthfully say (I can say it of much that you’ve written), “wish I wrote that myself.” Ever since this fellow Vance emerged, he’s kind of left a bad taste, hasn’t he? That and a noxious odor. The olfactory unpleasantness was only compounded with each new (seemingly daily) bouquet Vance’s fast friend Rod Dreher threw him after the much-celebrated release of (I’ll call it) That Book came out. I read enough reviews of That Book to realize I wanted to read it about as much as I wanted to read a whole year’s worth of Dreher’s own blog. Talk about a season in purgatory!
Tell you what sticks in my craw is both these characters are what passes as Southern conservatives these days, at least to the broader Fox News-watching contingent among the Deplorables. No wonder otherwise fine people like Tucker Carlson still say nice things about Lincoln and the great Union that was preserved at Appomattox. Come on, Tuck! Dig a little deeper, and maybe discover real Southern smart people like Clyde Wilson or Rebecca Dillingham, and the whole Abbeville crowd!
It’s problematic (as libtards say) this tricky word “hillbilly,” you know, which is applied with a broad swath, so far as I can tell, to the totality of non-college educated whites in flyover country, but the term is generally associated with Southerners. My God! Vance grew up in a little town in SW Ohio, just outside of Cincinnati, citadel of the vile abolitionist plutocrat Salmon P Chase, and a stone’s throw from Grant’s birthplace. Sure, it’s across the river from Kentucky, but that’s the part of Kentucky made famous by Meyer Lansky, not bluegrass redoubt that gave us thoroughbreds, Jeff Davis (go see the obelisk in Southern Ky., the UDC put up for Jeff; it’ll take your breath away), and the novels of Caroline Gordon.
As for real Southern hillbillies, well, you know that word isn’t necessarily always a pejorative, as it comes off in the usage (or so I perceive) by Vance. There is, for instance, the Hillbilly Thomism of Flannery O’Connor and her underrated advocate Marion Montgomery. And there is epithet Piedmont Matriculators at UNC-Chapel Hill applied to their fellow classmates who hailed from the far-to-the-West regions of the Tar Heel State, from the Blue Ridge Mountain environs in and around the city of Asheville, like one of America’s greatest writers (IMO) Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938). Also, North Carolina’s first great governor, one of my Southron heroes, and as it happens, another man named Vance, Zebulon Vance, a real character, and someone we all probably would’ve liked sitting on the porch with, swapping stories, along with a bit Dutch Courage (or pick your poison).
Ol’ Zeb was a real Hillbilly from real Hills. and one of the most (to me The Most) beautiful parts of the lower 48. Zeb like most of his generally-slave-less region, like the sainted Lee, at first opposed his state leaving the Union, but once the evil Lincoln’s 75,000 proxies crossed the Rubicon née Potomac into the Old Dominion, Ol’ Zeb turned on a dime of principle and said we’re not having any of this. Willing to fight for his principles, Zeb Vance got himself shot up at Malvern Hill, before realizing that he could help out a lot more as governor of his state than as a corpse of a not-so-good battlefield general. BTW, you’ll know you’re at the center of fair Asheville today when you’re standing by the obelisk Vance’s own grateful fellow Ashevilleans erected for him. The Old Kentucky Home, so- called, is walking distance from there, and you can see where the great writer Wolfe grew up and ever after looked homeward.
Now see what you’ve done! Got me off on Zebulon Vance and Asheville and our Southern Highlands, and now I can barely remember I started talking about JD Vance and his BFF Rod Dreher. Maybe I need to permanently retreat to those hills, to where it was once hoped Robert E Lee would retreat, regroup, and fight on. In the trusting spirit of conciliation, Marse Robert laid down his sword. His later correspondence with Lord Acton indicates that maybe he regretted giving up the fight too soon. Perhaps his new home at Washington College in the pleasant Blue Ridge town of Lexington, VA might’ve had something to do with that. Still a few smart hillbillies thereabouts who wouldn’t want to be lumped in Ohioans drawing caricatures and profiting off airing the dirty laundry of their own hapless and defenseless families.
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@juvenal
when I hear a Lincoln statue was toppled by BLM I say Yee-haaw, yes, it is very annoying to hear Tucker praise the original villain, but I think he must or he will get fired.
@Ilana