In January 2011, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua was in the middle of her book tour for Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in her hotel room in Seattle, when an email came in from a first-year law student who had a question about his upcoming exam in her Contracts class:
Three hours later, probably after a beer, he writes me another email, and he’s like, ‘You know what? I should be studying, but I’m so curious about all this furor, so I went to Barnes & Noble, and I read it,’” she said, referring to her book. “He’s like, ‘I do not know why this is controversial.’”
Then, he told her, “You remind me of Mamaw” — Vance’s grandmother, who raised him with the same tough love that courses through Tiger Mother.
Vance added that he “felt a little bit bad” for giving her the impression that he came from an intact family, saying things were “more complicated” back home. He attached a document to the email, “and it’s the opening of Hillbilly Elegy,” Chua said, “and even though I was in trauma about my own situation, I read this thing, and I said, ‘J.D., you have to write your own book.’?”
Which, of course, he did.
Chua connected Vance with her agent, and in June 2016 — just over four months before Donald Trump was elected to the White House for the first time — the book was published. Progressive America loved it. They thought of Vance as their in-house anthropologist, the man who could explain these sad, strange people who had just voted for The Great Satan.
“She helped create the origin story for the person who’s the future vice president of the United States,” a former student, who is now an attorney in New York, told me. “That’s classic Amy Chua.”
MM also explained it to them, several times and in great detail. But the circus fans simply don’t want to hear anything close enough to reality to be less than flattering, and even Moldbug’s «hypochondriacs» is way too much.
What’s even the point?
As was observed back in XIX century (on the ineffectual flailing of reactionaries in Russia), the problem with a “sober word” is that even IF you have one that’s actually sober, and IF you can make a drunk listen to it… he is still going to understand it in a drunken way.