J D Vance: just the ticket

In his acceptance speech for vice-presidential candidate, J D Vance spoke of his home town of Middletown in Ohio. The picture he painted was of a good-living, neighbourly, supportive community –  straight out of the Walt Disney presentation of life. None of us wants to do down our old home town, but most of us accept that it wasn’t all cheerful neighbours, cosy homes and the smell of apple pie coming from the kitchen.

But that’s OK – Vance made up for that in  his Hillbilly Elegy account of the place. Quite the opposite to what he suggested in his acceptance speech  –in Hillbilly Elegy  it’s more a place that has lost hope and has turned to drugs and drink to make life bearable.

Obviously, one of these pictures, both painted by the same man, is untrue. Which maybe is why Trump chose him in the first place, or part of the reason: this man, like Trump himself, has no problem manipulating the past and reality itself, without blushing.

Some writers, talking about him, use the word ‘chameleon’. A useful word. Vance had three different names. He started as James Donald Bowman (stop, Virginia!). When his mother married her third husband Bob Hamel, his new stepfather adopted him and gave him the name James David Hamel. When he got married in 2014, he changed his name to Vance. As the psychiatrist couple in Fawlty Towers said after watching Basil for a few minutes, there’s enough material  there for at least two conferences.

But I must admit to a certain admiration for Bowman/Hamel/Vance:  he seems to have been very smart, seeing to it that he got a good education and made seriously good money.  He’s also a convert to Catholicism, and, apparently, an admirer of St Augustine.

You might wonder how he then can bring himself to pair up with a man for whom truth is only useful when it can be twisted into a lie, who has boasted of being so popular, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it (Please, Virginia – no more sniggering) and whose approach to women appears to be based on the notion of humiliating and degrading them. (Yes, Virginia, I’m referring to the grab-them-by-the-pussy philosophy of inter-gender relations.)  It’d be fair to describe Vance as a self-made man, while his immediate boss was born into riches.

J D Vance is a man who bears watching. He has that same clever contempt that Spiro Agnew had for all and any who disagreed with him. We can only hope that he doesn’t adopt Augustine’s prayer “Lord, make me pure – but not yet’.