How thick is your bubble? Quite thick, I suspect, as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart quiz should demonstrate:
5. Have you ever walked on a factory floor?
6. Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?
7. Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?
I actually have walked on a factory floor, although I haven’t truly worked on one, and I have held a job that caused physical pain by the end of the day, but only as a teenager, and I do have strongly Christian friends, at least since I started shooting regularly.
Readers of this blog almost certainly score points for having friends with whom they disagree politically.
But, really, laugh at the SWPLs all we like, we’re in the upper-middle-class bubble.
(Hat tip à mon père.)
43 points.
77.
34 points. Thank goodness I worked summers in a machine shop and did 8 years in the Navy or I’d be just like one of these northeast a-holes.
That test is way too involved, and I have kids to shower and cows to feed. After hitting 15 straight yeses and doing a reasonable hash on the US military ranks (Australian ones would be easier) you can estimate the final number would be somewhere around Buckethead above.
There were a few years in that bubble, but before I was a factory worker or farmer, and after I’m a farmer, so it was only a vacation, albeit one that paid stupendously well.
46. Don’t fit Murray’s category for 46 at all. That he’d even have categories for scores of 2 and 9, “typical,” says a lot about his readership. What, one might ask, is a typical score for albino hog farmers from north north western Arkansas?
I threw down the gauntlet, so I was expecting some high scores in response, but 77, Buckethead? Wow. I almost choked on my fair-trade coffee.
Take a deep breath, Isegoria, you’ll feel better in a minute.
The scores are interesting — but they really do what they say. It doesn’t indicate what you are or are thinking, necessarily — it just shows how isolated you are (or not, in my case) from mainstream America.
I am a reactionary libertarian extropian technophile monarchist. I am certainly not in line with mainstream thinking. But I am in it if not of it.
Why my score was high — while my dad is a historian, he was not the primary breadwinner for my family after the divorce. Mom worked in a bakery, which is blue-collar equivalent, when I was little, despite her college degree. That resulted in poverty. Poverty again in my twenties, though largely by choice. Lots of blue-collar jobs then, too, in between stints in college. I’ve lived in small and very small towns by choice as an adult, and a smallish town growing up. Lower-income, blue-collar neighborhood as a child, a lot of my friends there were (charitably speaking) not college-bound, and neither had their parents been. When I lived in urban areas as an adult, they weren’t the nice parts of town.
I scored on the Budweiser question, though I will cop to having bought it ironically.
The closest I came to being in the bubble was the years right after I got married, when I lived in the DC suburbs. Hated it and most of the people in it; and as quickly as I could moved an hour and half away. The commute sucks, but I find my neighbors more congenial. Going into DC one day a week for work is always a bit of mental shock.
Strangely, perhaps, I’ve found a fair number of people who are also ex-bubble living out here. They share some of the tastes of bubbleites, like organic food, etc., but not the attitudes. It seems like that sort of community might be trending larger, and I am certainly a part of it.
21. Most of that (12) came from where I grew up, which was an anomalous place anyway. Then I got for having libertarian politics therefore putting me at odds with essentially everyone I know. 5 other points from slightly prole cultural tastes. Really I am, as Murray puts it, a “second- generation (or more) upper-middle-class person with the tele- vision and moviegoing habits of the upper middle class.”
Can’t really get a score, because it’s too US-specific, but the summer before university that I spent working a nightshift in a factory remains one of the more important experiences of my life. Mostly that’s because it’s my first experience of being treated as an adult, rather than the class thing, but there’s an overlap: in many ways the bubble lifestyle is a child’s lifestyle. A 22-year-old programming at an investment bank is treated as a child in the way an 18-year-old putting handles on buckets on a production line isn’t.
Optimistically, I score 48.
Pessimistically, 23.
So let’s say 36 +/- 33%.
I scored 47. Yet, I didn’t fit with his characterizations very well at all. Because he assumed an “upwardly mobile” arrow, while mine was the other direction. I came from rather solidly “middle class” roots, but have never been there since being on my own. Some of that is by choice, and some not.