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The Bubble and the Pickup Truck
John Ekdahl asked a simple question Tuesday night:
The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?
— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) January 4, 2017
This not at all complicated query should generate one of two answers: yes or no. Instead, Ekdahl got hours of contempt, confusion, and rage.
This is very silly question. To wit: The top 3 population centers in America are liberal strongholds. DO YOU PERSONALLY KNOW SOMEONE THERE? https://t.co/UJMccGjg40
— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) January 4, 2017
@JohnEkdahl Q: How many of those truck owners use them for the intended purpose? A: Not many unless you count immigrant laborers.
— Bob (@lytestreet) January 4, 2017
@JohnEkdahl I live in a city. I wouldn’t want to know people who felt they needed to own a pick up in the city (unless they haul bricks)
— John Corbett (@CorComm) January 4, 2017
Today in McCarthyism for Idiots: If you don’t know someone who owns a truck, you’re not a real ‘Murican! Bonus freedom points for TruckNutz! https://t.co/Jm3fQNjH79
— Desdakon (@Desdakon) January 4, 2017
Can we please move off the idea that truck-owning, country music-listening, gun enthusiasts are the “real” Americans https://t.co/R601jNKWvi
— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) January 4, 2017
1) this is wrong, 2) many of these are fleet vehicles, 3) they’re geographically concentrated bc duh, 4) this is a dumb question for stupids https://t.co/6kulkdzStO
— Danny Concannon (@Danny_Concannon) January 4, 2017
Owning a pickup makes you more Real American than taking the subway and two buses to your job?
Pffft. https://t.co/RUKNElbmXF
— Donna Gratehouse (@DonnaDiva) January 4, 2017
.@JohnEkdahl plenty of heartlanders are opioid addicts. Does that mean to report on real Amerikkka you need an oxy habit?
— Jonathan Gitlin (@drgitlin) January 4, 2017
reporters continually signalling to cons that theyre “real americans and not those awful liberals” produces a lot of the ‘both sides” bs https://t.co/6Y2tiPWV92
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) January 4, 2017
It was a bad faith, rhetorical question that retrenchs disillusionment, suspicion and obscures the truth https://t.co/LQKwXn2B3j
— Matt Heimiller (@MattHeimiller) January 4, 2017
Ekdahl never mentioned guns, immigration, country music, race, or “real Americans,” yet a flurry of journalists and other progressives tried to shame him with each for daring to ask this non-political question. All because they didn’t want to admit that they live in a bubble.
Many Americans, left and right, live in monochrome cultural enclaves. Many of my friends at DC think tanks and my relatives on the farm don’t interact with many people who live different lives than themselves. Admitting this isn’t a black mark on either group; it merely helps us understand our limited perspective.
Since I live in the Phoenix suburbs, I know plenty of people in both groups. The economist PhDs make me feel dumb and the ranchers make me feel wimpy, so I learn a lot from both. Humility is a requirement if you want to learn or write about the many subjects outside your ken. Journalism would be a lot better if our media accepted this truth.
A longer version of Ekdahl’s question was posed by Charles Murray in his now-famous Bubble Quiz (which includes a question about pickup trucks, natch). I was in the middle of the pack with a score of 58 out of 100. Let me know what you get in the comments.
Published in General
Got a 70 with no truck or beer, but we do watch one of the TV shows and know who Jimmie Johnson is.
I want extra credit for the Jimmie Johnson question. I said, which one?
I can only imagine the reactions to this question:
“There are 253 million cars and trucks on America’s roads. Question to reporters: have you ever changed a tire?”
I think I represent the one point on the Venn diagram where the two sets touch: I used to be a columnist for the New York Times and I drive a pick-up truck (GMC crew cab, 190,000 miles). In Silicon Valley. I use it all the time to take stuff to the dump — and to go to meetings with venture capitalists, and teach among the Jesuits at Santa Clara U. I put my Oxford U sticker on the tailgate just to create as much cognitive dissonance as possible. There’s nothing like pulling up fast behind a Prius going 60 in the fast lane on the freeway and watch their terror when all they can see is a radiator grill. . .
Just proving that I am so average. 47
I took Murray’s quiz and got a very low score of 22. However, I feel it’s unfair, since I’m not a typical middle-class suburbanite at all, being a hassidic Jew, an immigrant, and a bit of a traveler. The questions didn’t ask whether I’ve worked in a kitchen with Chinese peasants (have), learned for years from teachers with no college degrees (yes), or been to a demolition derby (indeed). It didn’t ask whether I’ve lived on sandwiches for weeks at a time (true story), prayed among the literally unwashed, or gone for goulash at 3am with the freaks and geeks.
I don’t claim to understand the average American, but I do claim to have a worldview and perspective that is unusual and valuable.
I also claim that the entire “average american” debate is pointless.
Last point: Just as real as the tendency of the coastal elites to think middle americans are stupid, there seems to be an undeniable tendency in the narrative of the heartland to resent the “nerdy” forms of intelligence. Not in truth — there are plenty of doctors and engineers and computer scientists in Omaha and Des Moines, I’m certain — but out there they seem far too quick to agree to the standard story of nerds and geeks as domineering and somehow lesser. This is just as real as the coastals looking down on the rest of us.
I am not enough of a Jock, therefore I am the elite. The Elite don’t like me either.
But then again, nerds are never welcome anywhere.
31. Hurt by tv and movies.
Well said. It would make a great thread topic as well. If and when the much despised “elite” becomes synonymous with “someone who has the education and experience to know what they’re talking about,” we have a problem.
I think that’s probably one of the more revealing questions in the quiz. I know who the driver is, though I’ve never watched a race he was in. Which is also what I think the quiz is really about; it’s not so much that you do X, it’s that you’re aware of it.
Me neither, but that’s just because I think there are better options in that price range.
Me, too. 46—but I don’t watch TV or movies either, really.
Got a 58.
I think the idea isn’t so much to suggest that you lack diversity of experience per se, but simply that many people lack direct and intimate contact with the white, working class people who (still) make up a big chunk of the country/electorate.
That’s why the quiz doesn’t ask “have you lived overseas?” or “do you speak a second language?” There are lots of cool, illuminating and educational experiences to be had amongst the wide variety of human being now accessible to Americans…but hanging out with Chinese peasants won’t help you understand Trump voters. This doesn’t matter a whole lot if you’re an ordinary schlub… but if you are a political reporter or a politician…it’s a problem.
Although I have helped my husband change out transmissions, and once, replaced a generator all by myself, I have managed to reach my sixth decade without EVER changing a tire.
1) For many years, I was cute enough that some guy would always stop and help me.
2) For many other years, I was pregnant, or/and had a car full of tiny children.
3)When I was no longer young enough, but not quite old enough to attract random helper guys, I joined AAA.
I know who both Jimmy/ie Johnsons are, but I never noticed that they spelled their names differently.
Yes, it doesn’t matter if you like or even watch NASCAR, as long as it penetrates your bubble.
If Dr. McCoy doesn’t qualify as white working class then I’m not a green blooded half human you know what.
53, and his description of who he thinks I am is totally wrong.
If a mouse depended on what I spend annually for movies and television, it would starve.
McCoy is a professional, you pointed-ear freak!
Workers of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your chains! Soon we can create a workers party. But why stop the unity of the working man at the borders created by the capitalist class for the exploitation of the working man. No. We need a universal workers party. Raise the Red Flag! The Revolution will spread.
Didn’t the Dem’s have that party which you speak of? That didn’t hold up for very long.
How can he be working class he was born into a workerless utopia without money or class and is a doctor?
I think it is not about self-righteousness, but about the fact that Mr. Ekdahl wrote that tweet because he himself was peeved about an article in the New York Times. He thought the writer of the article was looking down on people who own trucks.
The people who replied to his tweet thought that he looked down on people who don’t own trucks. And I must admit that I think that’s what he intended.
However, if Epictetus were right, Mr. Ekdahl would have been wrong to feel provoked by the NYT article in the first place.
Here is the question, is knowing a person who owns a pick-up a goal to aspire to? The way going to college was for many generations? If I recall Murray’s book, his finding was that the working class America wasn’t working very well on a cultural level. So maybe the further away you are from them the better your life actually is. So what are people actually proud of then when they talk about their high scores?
I actually wonder how this breaks down by generations. Do people with children and grand children old enough to take this test see their kids number decreasing? Isn’t that the actual goal in a sense? Or is the new American Dream to live at poverty rate in a small town watching day time TV (since those were like half the questions on the quiz)?
My son’s answer is to have two trucks – his primary one, and then a second (old) one for loaning out. When someone asks him to help move things, he cheerfully loans them the old truck, and then feels no guilt about not personally helping them.
It is if you intend to write about them.
The other thing my uncle told me is “never let your woman drive your truck — you’ll never get it back.” And my aunt did drive that truck a lot.
When we first moved to this fly-in community, an older guy friend of my husband’s took him on a golf cart tour around the airport and the taxiways. One residential hangar they passed had its doors open and it was crammed full of almost everything but a plane. The boxes and “stuff” were piled and sandwiched around their plane. The guy said to Andrew, “She got hold of the hangar.”
Andrew took that as a warning not to let me appropriate any storage space in the hangar. He thought it was pretty funny. And he reminds me of it from time to time as I am putting up the Christmas decorations in the hangar loft.
I think Ace of Spades will be right on this one:
Accidentally flagged and don’t know how to unflag. Apologies Quietpi!