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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