Who the heck is J.D. Vance?

THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2024

Also, what's in a word? Last night, Usha Vance introduced her husband, J. D. Vance, at the Republican National Convention.

We were struck by one part of her short introduction. More specifically, we were struck her inclusion of one particular word:

USHA VANCE (7/17/26): I met J. D. in law school when he was fresh out of Ohio State, which he attended with the support of the G.I. Bill. 

We were friends first, because, I mean, who wouldn't want to be friends with J. D.? 

He was then, as now, the most interesting person I knew—a working-class guy who had overcome childhood traumas that I could barely fathom to end up at Yale Law School.

A tough Marine who had served in Iraq, but whose idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie "Babe."

(LAUGHTER)

The most determined person I knew with one overriding ambition, to become a husband and a father, and to build the kind of tightknit family that he had longed for as a child.

We were struck by her reference to her husband's childhood "traumas." We recalled a bit of the puzzlement we felt when we speed-read Hillbilly Elegy, back when it first came out.

The book contained striking portraits of many of the major figure in Vance's life during his childhood and adolescence. The only portrait which seemed to be missing was a portrait of the young Vance himself.

What was he like as a 10-year-old child? What was he like in high school?

It seemed to us that such questions went unanswered and unexplored in Vance's best-selling book. Among an assortment of others, his mother and grandmother were sharply described. Vance himself seemed to be missing.

Something else is true about Hillbilly Elegy. The book describes a childhood and an adolescence which were filled with bad behavior by some of the people charged with care of the young person in question. We refer especially to Vance's mother, who was drug-addicted at the time, and to the various men with whom she was linked by romance and by marriage.

It would hardly be surprising to learn that this childhood and adolescence was indeed marked by trauma. Also this:

By the norms of high-end American politics, the man who emerged from that tumultuous youth has behaved in unusual ways over the past dozen years.

What can there be in a word? That one word in Usha Vance's introduction took our thoughts in many directions. For today, we'll offer this:

In some cases, the price to be paid for childhood abuse or neglect will be paid later on, somewhere down the road.

Her husband's childhood involved traumas (plural), we were told last night—childhood traumas of a type Usha Vance "can barely fathom." 

Remembering the song by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee—we were in high school when we bought the album!—we'll quickly recommend a world of pity for the motherless child. 

We'll recommend pity for the lost child. That said:

In his public life, if not in his family life, the adult who emerged from those traumas has turned out to be dismissively angry in recent years and has been quite erratic. Sometimes the wages of neglect emerge a ways down the road.