Columnist John Sheirer: First-Person American

John Sheirer

John Sheirer

By JOHN SHEIRER

Published: 08-11-2024 5:01 PM

Here’s a true/false question from my introductory literature midterm exam: “The use of first-person narration means there can be only one character in a story.” The answer is, of course, false, an easy question for anyone who has paid attention in class.

A first-person narrator conveys a work of literature through the pronouns I/me or we/us. My columns, for example, are written in first-person. I connect my experiences with current events in a sort of “first-person American” style, crafting personal essays about our nation’s public issues.

Another contemporary author who writes in first-person is Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. His 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” was promoted as an insider’s view of living in Appalachia.

Because I grew up on a small farm in the Appalachian area of southern Pennsylvania, I had high hopes for “Hillbilly Elegy.” But I quickly realized that Vance wrote in a specific literary voice known as an “unreliable narrator.” Vance spent some summers with relatives in Kentucky, but he actually grew up in a part of Ohio that’s considered the Midwest, not Appalachia. Many critics have accurately labeled him a “fake hillbilly.”

I quickly realized that Vance focused much of the book on putting down the people around him. “Full of himself,” we would say where I grew up. A better title might have been Hillbilly Effigy for the way he burned his kith and kin, depicting these working-class Americans as lazy. I know from growing up in Appalachia that we are hard-working people who were all too often crushed by the Regan/Bush trickle-down economics that Vance supports.

Vance also claims that Appalachian people hated Barack Obama because they envied him. Vance isn’t old enough to remember that the Appalachian generation before him generally didn’t hate or envy national figures who were different from themselves. My parents admired and respected John Kennedy and Walter Cronkite, for example.

Back then, today’s widespread right-wing media didn’t exist to tell my parents that they should brand Kennedy as anti-American or view Cronkite as fake news. During Vance’s upbringing, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and countless others dishonestly told Americans that Obama was foreign, socialist, and anti-American. People in Vance’s Appalachia disliked Obama because they were taught by unreliable narrators that such dislike was their patriotic duty as true Americans.

That same right-wing media now tells the Appalachian people that real Americans have to hate Kamala Harris and deify Donald Trump. Of course, Vance was recently a “Never Trumper” who speculated that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” But he saw that no Republican could oppose the MAGA machine, so now he’s just another fawning Trump worshipper.

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Vance is the latest in a long line of unreliable narrators among conservative politicians: Joe McCarthy’s McCarthyism, George Wallace’s racism, Richard Nixon’s criminal behavior, Ronald Reagan’s “government is the enemy” mantra, Newt Gingrich’s demonizing of Democrats, and Trump’s mash-up all the proceeding unreliable narratives to create a toxic stew of paranoia, outrage, and scapegoating.

Vance’s specific brand of outrage is denigrating people without biological children as somehow not invested in America’s future. He has called people without children “psychotic,” “sociopathic,” and “childless cat ladies” (misogyny much?) and said they should have reduced voting power. Of course, he’s targeting Democratic leaders, such as Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. But Harris is a stepparent, and Buttigieg has adopted children. Does Vance think they love their kids less than other parents love biological children? Can he really be that tiny-minded and devoid of empathy? I’m a stepparent and step-grandparent, so I’d have some stern Appalachian cuss words for J.D. if we ever met behind the barn.

Vance, a supposed family-values Republican, doesn’t support paid family leave, medical leave, or extending the child tax credit. In contrast, Democrats (with and without kids) want to build a better world for Vance’s children than the one their father envisions for everyone else.

Unreliable narrators strive to create “naïve narrators”: everyday people who spread right-wing lies without fact-checking them. They’re promoting a form of trickle-down dishonesty that involves the richly compensated unreliable narrators of Fox News and Trumpworld grooming countless naïve narrators to jump on social media and spread those lies for free.

Unreliable narrators will try to convince us of many falsehoods this election season: Kamala Harris is unqualified (and somehow not really Black!), inflation is Biden’s fault, tax cuts for the wealthy help everyone, Trump knows nothing about Project 2025, God saved Trump from a liberal assassination plot, Democrats kill babies, immigrants are invading, elections are being stolen, authoritarianism enhances freedom, guns keep people safe, Trump’s convictions/indictments are persecution, the Olympics mocked Christianity, and on and on. We can’t let their lies turn us into naïve narrators.

In the classroom, we don’t study literature as some abstract concept unconnected to reality. Literature is about real life. When we develop critical thinking skills to recognize unreliable narrators in literature, we also have a better chance of recognizing these liars in politics and the media.

I’m happy to note that the vast majority of students answer that exam question correctly. I hope we all do as well in the upcoming election. After all, the stakes are much higher in November than just a single question on a relatively inconsequential exam. Please choose our nation’s narrator-in-chief wisely.

John Sheirer’s new book, “First-Person American: Personal Essays About Our Nation’s Public Issues,” collects his Gazette columns from October 2020 to the present.