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%must be run from master directory
\input mla8.tex
%%Prompt:
% In his book, Democracy in America, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville claims the American Dream is the charm of anticipated success. In 1931, historian James Adams first defined the American Dream as "that dream of a land that should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement."
% Trace the idea of the American Dream through Vance's book. How do the above ideas fit with the poeple in Hillbilly Elegy? What determines success or failure? Who is responsible and ultimately pays the price for failure to attain the dream? Is the American Dream attainable?
%%Preamble
\def\ifcited{\expandafter\iftrue \def\ifcited{\iffalse}}
\def\vancite#1{%cites J.D. Vance in particular
\cite{\ifcited \newcite \nameinline \fi
\name{Vance}{Vance, J.D}%
\contain{Hillbilly Elegy}%
\publish{Harper Press}%
\pubdate{Jun 2016}%
\pagenum{#1}%
}%
}
%%Document
\numberfirstpage
\name{Holden} \last{Rohrer}
\prof{Jones}
\clas{AP Lang}
\header
\title{{\it Hillbilly Elegy} on the American Dream}
The American Dream is nebulous. When investigating its meaning, we see a personal aspect and a social aspect. Prosperity plays a major role in both. But it needs some differentiation between who succeeds and who doesn't because scarcity exists. The American Dream posits that those who prosper should practice productivity and diligence. %reword, super awkward
``[The American Dream is] that dream of a land that should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability and achievement,'' claims John Adams.
%THESIS
J.D. Vance's memoir {\it Hillbilly Elegy} argues that factors outside of individual control affecting attitudes and opportunities obstruct the American Dream for a large segment of the population.
%I really want to include "Such a pure meritocracy can only exist in theory"
%Assume that all readers have already read the book
Childhood adversity develops those attitudes possibly more than any other single factor. It impacts Vance most strongly in his earliest years. ``I began to do poorly in school. Many nights I'd lie in bed, unable to sleep because of the noise---the furniture rocking, heavy stomping, yelling, sometimes glass shattering'' \vancite{71}.
His experiences with Mom begin to shape him into a person with all of the trademark Appalachian flaws: excess hostility to outsiders, drug abuse, a complete lack of work ethic, and poor parenting.
However, Mamaw gave Vance an option most of his peers didn't have---a stable home which supported his education. ``If Mamaw could drop \$180 on a graphing calculator $\ldots$ then I had better take schoolwork more seriously'' \vancite{137}.
This, of course, opened many doors directly: finishing his high school education let him get into the military, Ohio State, and eventually Yale Law. More importantly, he uses the work ethic he learned in high school to succeed in boot camp---another door opened by good parenting, a luxury in the Rust Belt.
Those opportunities which Vance describes as provisions of ``family, faith, and culture'' can't be given through government programs \vancite{238}. But the government still tries, creating the desolate class of ``welfare queens.'' Mamaw feels deeply ambivalent on if the welfare queen actually deserves to fail. %Is this quote-worthy?
On one hand, she feels wronged by them, having achieved her position through hard work \vancite{141}.
But she also recognizes that the degraded economy and environment produced them. People who work hard deserve unambiguously to succeed, but are those who never learned to work hard equally liable to do so? No reasonable person can hold them to such standards because regardless of their inherent abilities, they have none of the emotional, social, educational, and financial backing to achieve upward mobility.
Concretely, that backing necessary to succeed is social capital. ``Virtually everyone who plays by those rules fails %Specify?
$\ldots$ Successful people are playing an entirely different game $\ldots$ They network'' \vancite{214}. Hillbillies don't network for two reasons. First of all, their immediate surroundings don't have anyone with whom a connection would be valuable because everyone who could leave left, following the jobs. Second, they simply don't learn to do it. The knowledge, social capital, and actual capital all concentrate at the top of the pyramid.
Extending networking, relationships are also poorly modeled in Appalachian families. ``Caught between various dad candidates, Lindsay and I never learned how a man should treat a woman'' \vancite{89}. Vance's relationship with Usha starts to show some of the same poor communication. ``Put two of me in the same home and you have a positively radioactive situation,'' he writes \vancite{230}. But, because Usha is an outsider (usually completely shunned by the Irish-Scots fierce sense of family), she didn't have the same issues. ``I tried to get away, but Usha wouldn't let me. I tried to break everything off multiple times, but she told me that was stupid unless I didn't care about her'' \vancite{225}. Vance has less than no relationship skills. In order to survive as a child, he learned a set of aggressive, defensive, and evasive strategies, which don't transfer at all into adult life.
Vance supports the ideal meritocracy completely. He believes that hard work has value and should be rewarded, but he recognises that in real life no one starts on a level playing field. He, like Mamaw, is a firm dreamer of the American Dream, the right to opportunity with respective achievement, leading to his criticism of the stagnant internal values and harmful external structures such that the Irish-Scots ``were people with serious problems, and they were hurting'' \vancite{142}.
\biblio
\bye
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