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| The Making of the Vice President: Owen Asztalos in Hillbilly Elegy. |
Each nation, including our own, must cultivate a version of its history that it can live with. That means emphasizing certain facts, eliminating others, and just generally stretching and augmenting reality whenever necessary. The reconstituted origin story becomes a shared and beloved legend, a comforting fable we tell ourselves over and over again until it becomes truer than the truth.
Not only do we do this myth-making for our country, we do this for certain individuals who are important in our history: prominent politicians, inventors, businessmen, war heroes, etc. These folks are just as messy and flawed and contradictory as anyone else, but we somehow need them to be better than the rest of us, to be more, to rise above the foibles and follies that keep most of us down. So we essentially turn them into superheroes. And we all know every good superhero has a compelling origin story.
But what if you can't wait for others to turn your story into an inspiring myth? Well, then, you do it yourself. That's how we get books like 2016's Hillbilly Elegy, in which Ohio-born venture capitalist and Magic: The Gathering aficionado JD Vance tells us about how he overcame adversity to become the great man he is today. The bestselling book became Vance's springboard to a fast-rising political career, one that has taken him in short order from the Senate to the Vice Presidency and may one day make him Executive in Chief and Leader of the Free World.
Along the way, there was also a less-celebrated Hillbilly Elegy movie in 2020. Since that movie was directed by Happy Days alumnus Ron Howard, that makes it fair game for our podcast. This week, my co-host and I spend some quality time discussing Hillbilly Elegy and the politician who inspired it. If you'd like, you may join us by clicking the play button below.
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