DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: May 25, 2025

Reading Recommendation:  Just finished ‘Gone Girl’ by Gillian Flynn.  I hear they made a movie of it, but I never saw it.  If you like the twisted fiction of Patricia Highsmith, you’ll love this.  I do, and I did. You’ll think you see the final twist coming about three different times, but you won’t.  But it’s all there, if you’re paying attention.

Speaking of Highsmith–The Talented Mr. Vance:

J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America’s social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump’s first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J.D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion.

According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition…

Both versions suggest the protagonist of a 19th-­century novel—­Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Lucien in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. A novelist who set out to narrate the decline of the American empire in the 21st century might invent a protagonist like J. D. Vance. He turns up in all the key places, embodying every important theme. He’s the product of an insular subculture (the Scots-Irish of Appalachian Kentucky) and grows up amid the ills (poverty, addiction, family collapse) of a dying Ohio steel town ravaged by deindustrialization. He escapes into the Marine Corps in time for the Iraq War, and then into the dubious embrace of the cognitive meritocracy (Yale Law School, West Coast venture capital, East Coast media). At a turning point in his life and the country’s—in 2016, with the surprise success of Hillbilly Elegy and then the surprise victory of Trump—Vance becomes a celebrity, the anointed spokesman for the 40 percent of the country that comprises the white working class, which has sudden political power and cultural interest. He’s tasked with explaining the world he came from to the world he recently joined.

With his gifts of intellect and rhetoric, Vance might have brought the country’s conflicting strands together. They had combined to make him, and he knew them deeply—their flaws, their possibilities, their entwined fate. Instead, he took a path of extreme divisiveness to the peak of power, becoming a hard-line convert to the Catholic Church, post-liberal populism, and the scorched-earth cause of Donald Trump. Vance became a scourge of the elites among whom he’d found refuge, a kingpin of a new elite, avenging wrongs done to his native tribe.

At every step the reader wonders: Is our hero motivated by conviction, or is he the creature of a corrupt society? Does he deserve our admiration, our sympathy, or our contempt?

You’ll just have to read this excellent (and lengthy) think-piece and, um, think for yourselves.  I have nothing to add, save–I read Hillbilly Elegy, thought it sucked.

‘Win With Class, Lose With Dignity’.  My (phony) Words To Live By.  Which, of course, was how the Philadelphia Iggles and their myriad fans are celebrating the failure of the NFL owners to ban the ‘Tush Push’.  OK, the NFL (spoilsports) won’t let me embed the 26-minute video of tush pushes down through the ages, but you can view it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUHhB1C-5ZY.  I just can’t link it.  This, though, you can see.  I love to revel in my classlessness, makes me feel so Philly.

Just hit play.  I dare you to not dance to this:

“More Cowbell”–With A Playlist:

Ran-kan-kan: Long before I could name the source of my excitement, my body responded to the strident signature of Latin dance music. The cowbell strikes like a drum but rings like a horn, the high pitch piercing through salsa’s dense thicket of overlapping patterns. Just when I feel myself drifting from the dance-floor herd, the cowbell summons me back to the rhythm’s raw nerve. Musicians call this function el amarre, from the Spanish amarrar — to fasten, to moor, to seal the deal. A paradox, maybe, that the instrument that brings all the others in line should incite the most euphoric feelings of freedom. I’m already sweating through my silk, so why resist the cowbell’s erotic revelation? When the fever reaches a certain pitch, complexity must give way to relentless repetition — one just-right note, catechized precisely like a prayer. Eso es. Just like that.

Prayer, I learned recently, might be the right metaphor: The cowbell we know today is a direct descendant of instruments that spread through West Africa with the early iron-making technology of the Bantu migrations, and that continue to structure the diaspora’s ritual music, from the double-mouthed agogô of Yoruba bembé ceremonies to the triangular ekón of the secret brotherhood known as Abakuá. Like a god, the bell lays down our shared timeline. The sharp attack puts you in your place — enter here, act now — amid the din of drums and dancers. The job of the bell, I’ve been told, is to stay steady.