Average net worth of Americans -- this is a joke, right?

[Jason]

Well, FFJ, according to J.D. Vance, its just how the crow flies, so dag nab it, don't go tarnation on me now.

Actually, in many ways, the book is a love letter to his mee maw who protected him while his mother was busy popping vicodins and banging Jethros. And to his credit, last I heard, he is taking his city folk success back to the hollow.

Another recent popular book on the topic is "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg which also attempts to explain your people to the rest of us NPR listeners. The chapter on why Bill Clinton, not Obama, was the first black President was interesting. And of course, the greatest hillbilly of them all, Elvis.

Then there is "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" by James Agee, the granddaddy of all white trash documents, which IMHO is the most beautiful non-fiction book ever written. It greatly influenced David Simon, who wrote "The Wire." Not to mention the Walker Evans photographs of real hill people. You should pick up a copy, FFJ. Maybe you got kin in there.

[Jason]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDAFy3ASNOo

"American Hollow" - The story of an Appalachian Family that has changed little in 100 years.

It's a great documentary. The sad part was when the son tried to make a life for himself in the 'Natti but came back to the life of fern hunting. Though you can understand why, it's such an insulated life. And one factor that is not often talked about is the beauty of the landscape.

[Jason]

Bottom line, I would not know that people lived like this if this it wasn't for this documentary. This is an off the grid, no infrastructure, ruthless, might as well just dig a grave now poverty. What I saw at the bottom of it all was hopelessness, not exploitation or glamorization. There was no way Clint was going to make it. He's entering another universe once he leaves that place. And if they want to eat cheetos, and drink soda, and smoke, and fuck like rabbits, I understand because what else are they going to do.

And I think we all know by now that Kennedy's are pretty much just like these people except that they can hide behind dynastic wealth.

Endemic poverty, wherever its found possesses its own hypocrisies. Like the inner city person who will eat lobster with his/her welfare check because she knows she's never getting out and she just wants a taste of it. IMHO, "pull up your bootstraps" doesn't work with a situation this deep, and ingrained. This is as much an anthropological, as a sociological study at this point. It's tribal at this point. And what I saw was an inescapable gravitational pull to the only life they knew despite it being marginal. That, to me, was what was powerful about it.

[Riggerjack]

ffj, your desire to play sociologist/documentary film maker is commendable, but you seem to be going about it all wrong.

You seem to want to show how capable and competent you and your fellow rural Kentuckians are, that the current image was crafted in error. Seriously, how are you going to sell that?!? Who is going to pay for a movie that says people are people, and puts stories in a balanced perspective?

That wouldn't inspire false sympathy or baseless feelings of superiority in your audience, nor provide victims with a narrative supporting their feelings of persecution. As near as I can tell, you seem to want to "set the record straight", as though there were an audience for that, or like there weren't a few industries dedicated to building the image you want to tear down.

No offense, but you don't seem to notice the history of dedicated work that has gone into building this image. Accuracy wasn't even a secondary goal, why do you think you could change that, or that the audience would want you to? To kill a mockingbird, was the defining work that set out the rules for stories about the rural south. Incestuous, ignorant, inbred, racist, hateful, despicable, aggressive, lazy, evil, superstitious. Pick any two, and you have the defining characteristics of every white background character, with a possibility of a rogue hero, who must be an outcast, or a knight errant.

Don't get me wrong, I loved to kill a mockingbird, and Atticus Finch is inspirational. But accurate portrayal of rural Southerners? It doesn't match my experience. And the author's best friend, Truman Capote, is known for personal betrayals, and outright lying in his "nonfiction" works. This is what they want. Note the formula repeating itself, every ten years or so. Hillbilly elegy seems to be the latest version of this narrative. Young Southern writers are welcomed in urban northern cities, so long as they can come up with a new version of the "hell is life in the rural South" story.

This pap is generated so the audience can emote at the screen, never once considering the accuracy of the presentation, or the real factors that perpetuate this storyline. Some audience members will feel superior, and some will feel sympathy, and nobody will have to actually leave their wine tasting to meet anyone outside their comfortable bubbles.

How do you sell reality to that audience? How would they recognize it, if they saw it? Even if they recognized it as the truth, it offers no emotional satisfaction, so it doesn't even provide the basic product they paid for.

Better to let it go, and let people more dedicated to the search, find someone to inspire the common man to feelings of superiority. You know who you are, and who your friends and neighbors are. Why do you care about the opinions and feelings of city folk who wouldn't dare go to your county without a bus full of sign waving, camera wielding, fellow progressive city dwellers for protection? They aren't interested in your reality, other than in getting a selfie they can post of their "outreach" for virtue signalling, when they get back home.

[7Wannabe5]

I don't know why this is particularly a South/North dichotomy. "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" by Carolyn Chute is one of my favorite white rural trash novels. I would also recommend the series by Cathie Pelletier which is set in Mattagash, Maine. Richard Russo, Raymond Carver, Grace Paley and Jim Harrison (off the top of my head, many others) all frequently wrote from the perspective of colder climate, rural, working and underclass characters. The poorest people in most Northern cities are usually African-American or recent immigrants, otherwise their stories would read the same. Just happenstance that the little boy who was called "Dogface" by some other kids because he had to have multiple reconstructive surgeries after the family pet attacked him was one of the minority white population at the school where I taught. Two of the three babies I found playing in the middle of the street unattended were of Middle-Eastern heritage, and one was African-American.

Fucked up stuff happens in places and times where resources are limited. Also recommend"Germinal" by Zola or "Blindness" by Saramago on that theme. As to why many/most writers everywhere choose to write about fucked up stuff, "Happy families are all alike..."

[Jason]

I'm serious about that offer to show you Kentucky first hand, and we can go visit Perry County too. Come on down, it's not just hillbillies living on welfare.

I appreciate the invitation, but I generally try to stay out of neighborhoods where people play the banjo on their front porches.

[Laura Ingalls]

I'm serious about that offer to show you Kentucky first hand, and we can go visit Perry County too. Come on down, it's not just hillbillies living on welfare.

I appreciate the invitation, but I generally try to stay out of neighborhoods where people play the banjo on their front porches.

I’m in. My first exposure to Appalachian culture was my Dad’s Foxfire books (which are basically utube videos on dying arts before we had utube). I also thought the music in American Hollar was good.

I don’t think rural poor people across nation are radically different from place to place. I saw lots similarities to Michigan, Wisconsin, and especially southern Iowa/Northern Missouri.

[Riggerjack]

@7w5,
Fucked up stuff sells. No question.

But tell me, when was the last time you read a story about a competent, decent white man from the South? We don't tell stories with rural southern heroes, unless the forces of evil are the incarnation of wicked, racist, stereotypical Southerners.

I understand, in modern folklore, there are bad guys who are not Southerners. But when was the last time you even saw a story based in the rural South that wasn't a moral tale of racism?

Now, I'm from the PNW, I have no skin in this game. I'm just pointing out the pattern I see. I was stationed in Missouri, Alabama,and Texas when I was in the service, and served with plenty of rural Southerners. What I saw did not match my preconceived ideas of how Southerners would behave. But I have also never lived in the rural South. If I had, I would probably be more exasperated by the constant drumbeat of (ignorance, racist, inbred, blah, blah) our media centers produce on this theme.

[Jason]

@7w5,

But tell me, when was the last time you read a story about a competent, decent white man from the South?

The Jon Voight character in Deliverance didn't seem all that bad, at least comparatively speaking.

[7Wannabe5]

@Riggerjack:

For much the same reason I occasionally indulge in the eating of macaroni salad, I occasionally indulge in the reading of genre romance, so my answer to your question would be that just a couple weeks ago, I read a novel featuring a competent, decent white man from the South. The title was "The Shop on Main" and it is part of the Comfort Crossing series. I wouldn't even recommend as particularly well-written example of this genre, but it was set in the South, and both the heroine and hero were Southern.

Geography is not my strong suit, and I usually remember human interactions more than the setting of a novel, but if I limit my answer to fairly recent fictional works deemed to have some literary merit, some characters in the works of Pat Conroy, Cormac McCarthy or Larry McMurtry might serve. Of course, any character in any modern literary novel is going to be developed with some degree of complexity, so not as likely to be portrayed as entirely decent as the hero of a junk-comfort-food romance.

[Jason]

Ok, I’m in - ERE field trip. But count me out on the white water rafting part.

[Seppia]

This pap is generated so the audience can emote at the screen, never once considering the accuracy of the presentation, or the real factors that perpetuate this storyline. Some audience members will feel superior, and some will feel sympathy, and nobody will have to actually leave their wine tasting to meet anyone outside their comfortable bubbles.

This sounds like the description of every single documentary about poverty/unlucky areas though.

Who wants to see a documentary about a shockingly average person who gets by on a normal salary with a normal life?
When the 2008 financial crisis hit, all we saw in Europe were interviews of floridians driving gigantic German vehicles whining about the fact they were homeless because they could not afford the skyrocketed mortgage on the 2618628282ft house they purchased with $0 down and variable (exploding) interest rate.

TV is a medium that doesn't incentivize showing normality an low-profile

[Riggerjack]

Yes, well, that was part of what I was trying to say, that the documentary audience is made of consumers, looking for a product that will stimulate certain well worn paths in their brains. They aren't looking for accuracy, they are looking for (righteous indignation, empathy, sympathy, a sense of superiority, pick one or more) in a prepackaged form.

So there is no use getting worked up about it.

I have the good fortune to live in an area that gets very positive reviews from the documentarians, so it stands out to me, how very differently we are treated in the same genre.

For instance, I personally know of families that could star in Appalachia style poverty videos, here at the base of the Cascades, but when documentarians come here, they have different stories in mind.

[Jason]

What are hiking boots again?