Some people back in Vance’s home region of Appalachia thought his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was hollow and inaccurate, but for a time, other people-including me-were intrigued by his writing and public speaking. I would not advise my students to use the term.īut the word is apt when I consider Vance’s silly and yet detestable moral collapse. I have been an officer of instruction at several institutions of higher education (and I remind you here that I do not represent any of them and speak only for myself). I am, in the formal sense, a man of letters. I do not use that word lightly or comfortably. To distill the essence of Vance as a public figure, the word that enters my mind is an anatomical reference beginning with the letter a. attorney for the Southern District of New York, tried to describe Vance recently and came up with “pathetic loser poser fake jerk,” but that is a lot of words.
His perfidy to his own people in Ohio is too big to allow him to escape with the label of “opportunist,” and yet the shabbiness and absurdity of his Senate campaign is too small to brand him a defector or a heretic.
Vance, the self-described hillbilly turned Marine turned Ivy League law-school graduate turned venture capitalist turned Senate candidate? Words fail. What do we call a man who turns on everything he once claimed to believe? For a practitioner of petty and self-serving duplicity, we use “sellout” or “backstabber.” (Sometimes we impugn the animal kingdom and call him a rat, a skunk, or a weasel.) For grand betrayals of weightier loyalties-country and faith-we invoke the more solemn terms of “traitor” or “apostate.”īut what should we call J.
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