J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is mistitled: it should be called Marine Corps Hymn. An elegy celebrates the dead. But this book has nothing good to say about the Scots-Irish working class world Vance grew up in, which isn't dead but very much with us, plagued by drugs, abusive and transient relationships, lack of role models, and too much self-hatred. What the book is really about is the self-reliance the author, still in his early 30s, learned from enlisting in the Marines.
It's also a hymn to America. He tells us: "I'm the kind of patriot the people on the Acela corridor laugh at." Who's laughing, dude? I'm already standing at attention cheering. This is beautiful stuff.
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