Popping Charles Murray’s bubble 1: NASCAR and pickup trucks

My Real Murkin driveway the day after I win the lottery. (Photo courtesy Ford Motor Company.)

You’ve taken the quiz, right? 

You haven’t.  Don’t worry.  You can take it now.  I’ll wait.

Done?  You don’t have to report your score.  Your score isn’t the point of the quiz anyway.  The point of the quiz is to drum up publicity for Charles Murray’s book, Coming Apart.  It doesn’t measure anything.  What it’s pretending to measure isn’t your relative Real Murkin-ness but how much contact you have or have had with Real Murka.

Notice the wording of the question under Jimmie Johnson’s picture.  It doesn’t ask if you follow NASCAR. It asks if you happen to recognize a particular a sports celebrity.  You are allowed to congratulate yourself on your lack of elitism by virtue of having remembered seeing the guy on Letterman or in a magazine or online, not on your having actually spent a hot afternoon breathing in the smells of burning rubber and motor oil and rubbing bare, sunburned shoulders with the drunken motorheads in the crowd around you.

Or, if you fall for the trap, you are encouraged to congratulate yourself on not recognizing him.

So the quiz isn’t about you or me.  It’s about appealing to our offending our vanities.  Which means it’s not really worth thinking about.  Except that it is.  What’s worth thinking about is the assumptions about what the Real Murka is, where it is, and who the Real Murkins who live there are and want and like and do.

If you accept the assumptions behind the quiz, then Real Murkins are Southern and Midwestern, probably live in the suburbs, not young, mostly male, almost certainly white, just as certainly Christian, middle to lower middle class, and if not not blue collar workers themselves, no more than a generation removed from the assembly line.

Notice anything about this demographic?

It’s a pretty close match to the Republican base.

Now, it’s easy to see why conservatives like Charles Murray want the definition of Real Murkinness to be Republican voter and it’s dismaying and infuriating to watch as one Republican politician after another mounts the stump to tell Republican crowds that they are the only Real Murkins and the not real Murkins are in the process of stealing Murka away from them.

But it’s also dismaying and infuriating to realize that most of the National Press Corps accepts this as their idea of Real Murka and proceeds to report on politics as if the rest of us Americans either don’t exist or somehow don’t count even when our candidates win.

This is why I think it’s worthwhile to look at the questions here and take them apart. 

But I’m actually going to leave that issue for someone else.  I’m interested in how reductive the questions and how elitist they are.

The reductions are deliberate because the quiz wasn’t designed to define Real Murka as a place unto itself.  It was designed to prove that Charles Murray’s liberal colleagues at Harvard don’t live there.  The elitism is there because Murray forgot that having colleagues at Harvard means that he works there too.

The main thing is that in the process of advancing a political agenda, Murray has managed to define Real Murka as a place where most Americans don’t live.

So, what I’m planning to do is spend a few posts looking at the questions, a few at a time, identifying the wrongheaded or half-baked assumptions behind them and then suggesting ways they could have been written to make them more inclusive.

My hope is that in the process I will draw a sketch of what I think life is like in these United States for a lot of Americans.

There isn’t a real America but there is something like a mainstream America, a place where most people share a common experience, where they work and play and think and hope and dream in very similar ways.  There are things we do that bind us together.  And some of those things are actually identifiable within the questions on the quiz, you just have to push aside the political agenda.

I’m not going to tackle the questions in order.  Today I’m starting with questions 4 and 10.  Just cuz. 

4. Can you name this NASCAR champion?

Ok, I’d have thought that the quintessential American sporting experience was high school football and that a better question for measuring your involvement with mainstream American culture would have been Since you graduated, have you regularly stood and cheered under the lights on a Friday night?  I’m guessing that the reason that isn’t the question is that it can be answered with a resounding Yes by the families of these guys.

I don’t know when and why NASCAR fandom became a defining characteristic of Real Murkinhood.  Probably when some Republican operative noticed that there are more fans per capita in red states than in blue and in the red parts of blue states.  Still.  It’s the one pure spectator sport in that it’s the only one of the major moneymakers that the vast majority of fans have never participated in at any level.  Oh sure, we’ve all driven a car fast, but the only off-track driving experience that comes close involves cop cars on your tail and jugs of moonshine in the trunk.  Otherwise, nobody organizes a stockcar race at the company picnic.

On the other hand, sitting on your ass and drinking beer while watching younger, stronger, more talented people do the actual work may be a quintessential American past time.

10. Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck?

No, but not because I’ve had any say in the matter.

But the day after we hit the lottery, I’m driving a brand spanking new F-150 off the lot!

I don’t care if we don’t need a pickup.

But that’s the real question or what ought to have been the real question: Have you ever bought a pickup truck because you needed to own a pickup truck?

And I mean need it need it not need it to tow the trailer carrying your hobby.  I mean need it as you need it to haul or carry things as part of doing your job.  This is one of the few questions on the quiz that answering yes to increases the probability you work on a farm.  But a yes answer can also mean you have extra money to spend on a toy and the gas to keep it running so you can play around with it.  It may mean you live somewhere where four-wheel drive comes in handy and you think SUVs are a waste of pavement.  It may mean that now and then you need to haul stuff that won’t fit in the trunk of your Lexus or Chevy Volt.

Owning a pick-up can be as culturally non-signifying as owning a hammer or putting in a backyard pool.  It’s simply an announcement that you have work to do or expect to have work to do that you need a pick-up for or that you have a backyard, which in itself is simply an announcement that you live in a suburb.   On the other hand, it may be a declaration of personality, like having season tickets to your local professional or college sports team---you’re showing the world that you’re willing to spend a certain amount of your income on indulging a hobby.  It could be as economically and status identifying as yearly skiing vacations in Aspen.  The revealing question is what’s in the back of your pick-up?  A gun rack?  A tool chest?  A bale of hay?  A dog crate?  A surf board?  Scientific equipment and jars and tanks full of specimens?  If you’re towing something what is it?  A boat?  A camper?  A horse trailer?  Snowmobiles?  Somebody else’s broken down car?  In other words, is yours a working pick-up and what kind of work does it do?

Comments

[Katherine]

i inherited a 1969 Ford Pickup from my uncle who lived in the Mojave Desert / it was 1988 and the truck had not a speck of rust, in perfect condition / The Guz (he did guzzle gas) had a V-8 engine and Armstrong Steering / i got so strong driving that truck / i made several cross country trips / moving all my important stuff from California to Vermont one time plus a dog and two cats / smile / i loved that truck / Charles Murray / whew / what does he know / i liked having a truck so much that when The Guz needed to be replaced i bought another Ford pickup / a six / btw i also have a 1965 Dodge Dart station wagon / yep her name is DreamBoat and she runs too

Katherine

[El Jefe]

Katherine,

That's grand. And I have to say there are plenty of trucks here in hippie western Oregon, many driven by those very same hippies. Surprisingly democratic thing, a flatbed.

Lance,

Another one of the things Murray's approach does -- which GOP elites are just fine with -- is make "Real Murkins" into one lumpen mass. I grew up in a few places but most of all in North Carolina, where Jimmie came from and where that "Thunder Road" bootlegging culture had very deep and very localist roots. Even where his bit of (formerly) industrial Western NC butted up against the South Carolina upcountry, people made real clear about where Johnson and his gone-legit protege (Johnson kept bootlegging even into the early stages of NASCAR) Richard Petty were from. My dad knew Petty to talk to, because his daughter had made it into the school wehre my folks worked on a legitimate academic ride, of which the scrawny and scraggly old boy was immensely proud, something which would give Murray's narrative the vapors. It's nice when life curbstomps lizard-brain simplicity.

Oh, and Happy Dickens Bicentennial!

[Doug K]

here in Denver most of the pickups are driven by businessmen in suits and cowboy boots.. so the bed is usually pristine. That's my marker for whether it's a working truck or a toy truck - working trucks have dents, scratches, and dirt in the bed, even once the haybales have been offloaded.

If we won the lottery I'd have a nice new F-150 too.. maybe not the load of gravel though.

[El Jefe]

Doug K,

What you said about working trucks or toy trucks. My mother and her brothers -- Southerners from a family whose matriarch had friends at Highlander Folk School, another vapors-inducer -- had an International Harvester back in the early Fifties whose under-the-hood "adventures" they still like talking about. And cleaning the bed after they shipped the non-layers from the coop off to market, oy. Last truck they had on the farm still smelled of it when I was a boy in the Seventies ....

[Linkmeister]

Thing I noticed in college: if you owned a truck you were perpetually asked by friends to help them move from one fleabag apartment to another.

I'll help paint interiors, but I don't want to help move people. Thus no truck for me.

[Earl Bockenfeld]

The Charles Murray "white real Murkin" thesis is about the ideal of an American way of life that is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. "This population is less committed to the workforce than its parents and grandparents were."

I would note that it was the "workforce" that has no commitment to this population rather than the other way around. It's wasn't the working class that send the jobs overseas. It wasn't the working class that destroyed the idea of a full career with one company, that would train it's own and promote from within. It wasn't the working class that decided to use layoffs as a way to boost stock prices. The jobs abandoned the workers, is it any wonder that they don't show any more fervor to commit to that work relationship?

It's amazing how a tax rate increase is supposed to destroy the incentives of the wealthy to invest, innovate, and build, while decreasing compensation for labor is supposed to have no effect whatsoever on the work ethic of an individual worker. You know the old saying, if you want the rich to work harder, pay them more, "Right-to-Work Laws" say if you want the poor to work harder, then pay them less.

More than a third of the workforce was unionized in the 1950s, now its less than 10%. I'm not a big fan of unions, but there's no question they get their workers a fair share of life's pie, and then some. Of course if Murray makes points like this, he too might be diagnosed with "Terminal Laziness".

I wonder about Charles Murray's reaction to the Arizona's Senator Ash's Proposal for a "Special Holiday for White People". Senator Ash is serious that Caucasian-Americans should have their own celebration once they're outnumbered. I guess Presidents Day and the countless lesser holidays celebrating the accomplishments of white people just aren't enough for him.

[loretta]

Just finished watching all 7 seasons of "The West Wing" and there is an episode where Abby Bartlet is going to a NASCAR race, and she's completely ignorant of NASCAR. She's shown some "hottie" NASCAR drivers by the character played by little Kristin Chenoweth, and Abbie perks up a bit. When Abbie goes to NASCAR, she's surrounded by hottie drivers and kissed by one. This, in sharp relief to how our first lady Michelle Obama was treated at NASCAR. I can't help but wonder if "real Americans" are rude bigots who treat the office of the First Lady like an unwelcome slattern.

Incidentally, in the real test (and not the pop quiz Lance linked), there is no picture of the NASCAR driver, only his name, which makes it possible that people who read the sports page and have never seen a NASCAR race in person may recognize the name. I'm sure lots of ELITES read the sports page.

[Ken Muldrew]

For the last year and a half I've been driving a pickup for work, but the company supplies the trucks. I drive a small car when I'm home. The company trucks are a mix of Dodge, Ford, and Chevy. I'd probably buy a Toyota for myself but everyone in the oilpatch seems to think they are a bad joke. In the back of the pickup are usually a pile of tools and wiring supplies; maybe some hockey bags full of filthy clothes when we're moving to a new site. I am the only person in all of Western Canada who turns the truck engine off when not actually driving. The men laugh at me for my weakness in this curious habit, "It's a fleet card, man, what the fuck do you care?" Still, as low as they are, not one of them has sunk to the depths of Nascar fandom.

I'm not even going to look at that quiz.

[mac macgillicuddy]

Alternet's take on Murray's book:

http://www.alternet.org/economy/154063/charles_murray%27s_new_book_%27coming_apart%27_shamelessly_blames_the_victims_of_our_economic_collapse/