Is My Book Hillbilly Hymn Populist Propaganda?
I'm not a populist, y'all, just a weirdo novelist who believes in Bigfoot
I’m guessing very few of you have read my debut novel Hillbilly Hymn, which is totally fine — you don’t have to be among the sliver of humans who have purchased my ridiculous little novella about Bigfoot and jackalopes (both are totally real, by the way) to appreciate some commentary on the project in lieu of our cultural moment.
I’ve seen this book making the rounds called White Rural Rage. The subtitle suggests that the rural folk threaten our democracy. We’d better start building bunkers, y’all. (Shoot, did I just give myself away?)
I don’t want to unfairly bash a book I haven’t read but feel like there is enough in the “discourse” at the moment to say with confidence that elitist distaste, and misunderstanding, of the millions of rural Americans is pervasive. It’s not a fiction invented by Trump supporters — coastal and wealthy folks who represent government, academia, and the media often do look down on poor whites (or the poor and uneducated at large) as walking jokes. Hillary Clinton’s “bag of deplorables” comment might have been a Freudian slip, but nonetheless revealed a widespread sentiment among the people who have never met a rural person in their lives: these small towners are obvious threats to democracy.
Hillbilly Hymn is a fantasy novel, and not for one second do I want to claim that the story is in any way supposed to represent the realities of rural life, which are often brutal and tragic. One doesn’t have to read the data for long to encounter the opioid crisis, poverty, and rates of incarceration among the poor and rural demographics in our country. I also don’t pretend that rural life is a haven of virtue and flourishing. I simply propose that rural Americans are many and multifaceted, and their critics should get to know them a little bit first.
Hillbilly Hymn is about a chicken farmer in a little village called “Jimmytown” who sets out on a quest to discover who the heck is stealing everyone’s livestock and tractors. He lives a happy, domestic life, has a mentor, Old Tate, who consistently sets him on the right path, and is an all-around “upstandin’ feller.” However, I admittedly do wade into the clash of elitism and ruralism in the book through the appearance of a teacher, Mr. Ham, who hails from New York and vows to save the children of Jimmytown from their own superstitions and blind prejudices against “science.” Mr. Ham is not satisfied with being an armchair commentator; his idealism propels him to the laboratory. He is an activist scholar. One day, Arnie Tuck visits one of Mr. Ham’s class sessions, and, to his horror, sits through a pseudointellectual defense of materialistic naturalism. Because we know the fossil record, says Mr. Ham, we know that no creature like Bigfoot exists. The world is material, so shoot for the stars! We are mud. Become gods through a Nietzschean force of the will!
This is after Arnie and Old Tate see Bigfoot personally and report their findings to the whole village. Mr. Ham, he discovers, is not there to understand the people of Jimmytown, but to proselytize — to herald a materialistic, humanistic model of salvation that will relieve these hillbillies from their narrowmindedness. He never considers that his own biases might be cancelling out whole swathes of the truth and be crippling his own capacity to espouse the liberality he preaches.
Again, the book is a fairy tale and a parody. I’ve never seen Bigfoot, but I do believe in angels and demons, and know that the dominant voices in the many elite circles would dismiss my convictions as poppycock. Even Christians in America often seem allergic to the obvious supernaturalism of the New Testament. They’re the Mr. Hams of the world, more interested in being an insider and playing by the rules of respectability than in searching for truth. (I take it on integrity that I need to remain open to the very real possibility that I might be misguided in my own conclusions about what is true.) But I can’t sin against the “elites” the same way they’ve dismissed the rural masses — we all need the grace and correction to see each other rightly — as fallen human beings made in God’s image, glorious and wicked, brilliant and blind. A big part of Hillbilly Hymn is how such rivers of separation between people are bridged. How to overcome various forms of fear and prejudice. But to find that out, I guess you’ll have to read the book yourself: Hillbilly Hymn: A Faerie Tale.
Good piece. Thanks for the perspective on we folk who live in rural America.