Is this whole culture out of order?

TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2024

The heartlessness is right here: "This whole trial is out of order," Al Pacino famously said.

Reportedly, it's one of Hollywood's most misquoted remarks. In our view, the statement should be borrowed more often, given the fact that so many elements of our culture are wholly out of order.

Candidate Vance is getting smacked for his "childless cat ladies" remark. This letter to the New York Times captures the type of diffuse anger and heartlessness lodged in such flippant dismissals:

To the Editor:

JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said in 2021, “We’re effectively run, in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

I would say this to Mr. Vance:

I was a childless cat lady: three cats, no kids.

I thought fertility was a given. There was no medical reason I couldn’t have children. Yet it did not happen. Three cats. A great career. No kids.

I was, in effect at 38, a “childless cat lady.”

I pursued fertility treatments. Treatments that many Republicans want to ban.

I had painful tests, surgeries, running to the lab—five vials of blood drawn every day at 6 a.m.—then rushing to work for a minimum 12-hour day.

Childless cat lady lawyer. Meow.

I had one fabulous child at 38 with I.V.F. She was a triplet, but I lost my daughter’s siblings.

I was pregnant three other times. I lost two other babies at four months. I needed a D and C: same procedure as an abortion. If I didn’t have the surgery, I would have died.

Another lifesaving procedure that Republicans seek to criminalize.

So, Mr. Vance: I embrace “childless cat lady.” I was one, yet I was at all times a highly effective litigator in a large and dynamic practice. I did not sit at home and bemoan my childless state.

I can promise you this, Mr. Vance: Women will look askance at voting for you and the former president.

The letter comes from Melville, New York. It's beautifully composed.

That said, also this:

As we noted this morning, we've been re-perusing Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which we speed-read in a local bookstore back in 2016, when it created a splash. 

All in all, the book received strong reviews from the major mainstream news orgs. From this vantage point, it strikes us as remarkably tedious, and as a bit of a cry for help.

After the Republican Convention, we mentioned Usha Vance's surprising reference to the "childhood traumas" she said her husband had experienced and had managed to overcome. Those traumas stemmed from what seems to have been an astonishing volume of what we'd call childhood neglect and abuse. 

Has her husband overcome those childhood traumas? Late in his book, in Chapter 14, Vance describes his attempt to come to terms with his emotional problems during his second year at Yale Law School.

After four years in the Marines, this was his sixth year away from the astoundingly dysfunctional family within which he'd been a toddler, a child and a teen. This is part, but only part, of what he writes at that point:

I tried to go to a counselor, but it was just too weird. Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit. I did go to the library, and I learned that behavior I considered commonplace was the subject of pretty intense academic study. Psychologists call the everyday occurrences of my and [his sister] Lindsay's life “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. ACEs are traumatic childhood events, and their consequences reach far into adulthood. 

[...]

I thought a lot about myself, about the emotional triggers I’d learned over eighteen years of living at home. I realized that I mistrusted apologies, as they were often used to convince you to lower your guard. It was an “I’m sorry” that convinced me to take that fateful car ride with Mom more than a decade earlier. And I began to understand why I used words as weapons: That’s what everyone around me did; I did it to survive. Disagreements were war, and you played to win the game.

I didn’t unlearn these lessons overnight. I continue to struggle with conflict, to fight the statistical odds that sometimes seem to bear down on me. Sometimes it’s easier knowing that the statistics suggest I should be in jail or fathering my fourth illegitimate child. And sometimes it’s harder—conflict and family breakdown seem like the destiny I can’t possibly escape. In my worst moments, I convince myself that there is no exit, and no matter how much I fight old demons, they are as much an inheritance as my blue eyes and brown hair. The sad fact is that I couldn’t do it without Usha. Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion—I can be defused, but only with skill and precision. It’s not just that I’ve learned to control myself but that Usha has learned how to manage me. Put two of me in the same home and you have a positively radioactive situation. It’s no surprise that every single person in my family who has built a successful home—Aunt Wee, Lindsay, my cousin Gail—married someone from outside our little culture. 

That self-portrait appeared in 2016. On the whole, the book strikes us as remarkably tedious, but it's also a portrait of the deep-seated harm that can be done when a "motherless child" is subjected to eighteen years of neglect and abuse and dysfunction.

"I continue to struggle with conflict...Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion." 

Vance published that self-portrait when he was 31. Eight years later, he's been nominated for vice president of the United States. He's running with a badly disordered person who was raised by a sociopath—or so wrote that gentleman's niece in a best-selling book, and she holds a doctorate in clinical psychology.

(That doesn't necessarily mean that her assessments are correct.)

Our advice regarding Vance remains unchanged. First, though, here's another passage from a bit later on in his book:

Not long ago, I had lunch with Brian, a young man who reminded me of fifteen-year-old J.D. Like Mom, his mother caught a taste for narcotics, and like me, he has a complicated relationship with his father. He’s a sweet kid with a big heart and a quiet manner. He has spent nearly his entire life in Appalachian Kentucky; we went to lunch at a local fast-food restaurant, because in that corner of the world there isn’t much else to eat. As we talked, I noticed little quirks that few others would. He didn’t want to share his milk shake, which was a little out of character for a kid who ended every sentence with “please” or “thank you.” He finished his food quickly and then nervously looked from person to person. I could tell that he wanted to ask a question, so I wrapped my arm around his shoulder and asked if he needed anything. “Y—Yeah,” he started, refusing to make eye contact. And then, almost in a whisper: “I wonder if I could get a few more french fries?” He was hungry. In 2014, in the richest country on earth, he wanted a little extra to eat but felt uncomfortable asking. Lord help us.

In passing, a question:

When older people go out to lunch with a younger person they don't know, do they really ask if they can share the younger person's milk shake? Do they wrap an arm around the young person's shoulder while asking if there's anything he needs?

We're just asking! (We aren't always convinced of the perfect accuracy of every anecdote in this book.) 

Having said that, now this:

There are a lot of Brians out there. There are also a lot of 15-year-old JDs. Keeping that in mind, we've often mentioned this fact down through the years:

In Blue America, we tend to feel amazingly sure that we're the smart and decent and moral people. That said, our big news orgs pay amazingly little attention to the country's underserved children. 

At the Times, they worry about Gotham's (fewer than) one percent—about the handful of kids who might end up at Yale—and they rarely seem to show much interest in anyone else. Nor do thought leaders, here in our own Blue America, seem to notice this wide-ranging lack of interest.

That's a brilliant and beautiful letter to the Times. Meanwhile, is this whole culture out of order? For starters, is it possible to comprehend how astoundingly stupid our discourse has now become? 

(More on that to follow.)

Is this whole culture out of order? Do we possibly need a new Great Awakening? We're going to guess that it possibly is, and that we possibly might.

As for us Blues, we actually aren't super-smart and no, we aren't super-caring. We'd all be better off around here if we were a bit less sure of ourselves.

Regarding Brother Vance himself, we'll stick with the heart of our prior assessments:

Pity the (motherless) child, we've said. Vote against the (diffusely angry, possibly struggling) man.