Jerry is a flooring-company owner with a beard, glasses, a baseball cap, and an ornery, Billy Bob Thornton demeanor. He squints, talks slowly, and tells a recurring, oddly dark joke about sneaking into neighbors’ homes to take treats to feed his sugar addiction, which is a lot more badass when you remember that the neighbors all have weapons. Unlike everyone else on this porch, Jerry lacks an easy smile, glaring at me when I talk. He’s the only person I’ve met in Miami who is even the slightest bit unfriendly to me.
As we sit on the porch not drinking, Jerry asks if I thought everyone in Miami would be racist. I pause for a while before answering, trying to figure out the nicest way to say yes. I eventually decide upon no, which is indeed nice, but doesn’t get across the “yes” part. I say something about how I think racism isn’t binary but a continuum and that I figured their views on race wouldn’t be as progressive as those held by my friends. I become more certain that this is accurate when several of the people use the word colored.
Harold Stone, a handsome, bespectacled, gray-haired retired telephone systems installer with the vocal cadence of Mr. Rogers, tells me an odd story that several other people in the group corroborate:
One summer in the late 1960s a black family bought a house in town. They did this for a practical reason: they were hired as spies by the NAACP to see if the people of Miami were racist. The people of Miami discovered this secret mission because the real estate agent saw that the NAACP wrote the check for the family’s down payment. By the end of the summer, before school started, the black family had sold their house, having determined that the people of Miami were fine, non-racist people.
I proffer a different interpretation of these events, one in which a black family bought a house with their own money, felt uncomfortable, and moved out. My story is not deemed believable. I will later email the NAACP to verify Harold’s version of the story, and they will not respond because it is insane.
When Dee Ann explains that I’m a Time magazine reporter, Jerry says, “I know who he is.” Then there’s a long pause before he adds, “I’ve read your columns.” Humans generally add a compliment when they observe something about another human. For example, they usually say, “Nice shoes” instead of just “Shoes.” After saying that he’s read my columns, Jerry adds that he recently canceled his subscription to Time because it’s too liberal.
Harold changes the topic to relieve the tension and prevent me from launching into a long-winded speech defending the fourth estate—which I’m glad about because whenever I finish that lecture, someone always asks what the other three estates are and I can never remember. Harold eases us into a less heated topic: presidential politics. My new friends offer facts about liberal elite politicians that I did not know. Obama, I am told, made beer inside the White House with taxpayer money. I thought home brewing would be viewed as a good, populist, American, Sam Adams–y activity, but these Baptists do not drink and feel that Obama set a bad example with his White House Honey Ale. Also, Hillary Clinton didn’t talk about the greatness of the troops or the police enough. I am surprised to hear that the Clintons have killed people. Jerry says the media is purposely not comparing Trump to John F. Kennedy even though Trump was handling Kim Jong-un of North Korea with the same tough-talk strategy Kennedy used on Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Two weeks earlier Trump warned that North Korea “will be met by fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Jerry says that threat stopped Kim from launching any more test missiles. This seems like a weak argument because only two weeks have passed without testing. We wouldn’t be able to prove causation over correlation at this point if Trump had warned Kim not to wash his bedsheets. To make his point clearer, Jerry tells me a story:
One of Jerry’s flooring customers wasn’t paying his bills. I thought for a moment that the customer in the story was going to be Donald Trump, but the allegory was less direct. Eventually one of Jerry’s coworkers called the deadbeat and told him he kept a gun in his office and was an expert marksman. The check arrived shortly thereafter.
Though international diplomacy and quasi-legal debt-collection have many similarities, I did not believe this was one of them. Besides, this was not what Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. During that horrifying event, American and Soviet diplomats negotiated with each other behind the scenes while their heads of state acted tough publicly to quell domestic objections to compromising with the enemy. Trump’s public tough talk, on the other hand, helps Kim, who is dependent upon American threats of war to scare his oppressed citizens so much they’re afraid to topple him and endanger the enormous military he leads.
After I spit all of this out, Jerry says, “Sometimes you can overthink.”
“Sometimes you can underthink,” I say in an elitist way I instantly regret. Yet not so much that I stop. I say that I don’t care what either of us thinks. What matters is that the experts on North Korea, from the left and the right, thought Trump’s belligerence was counterproductive. Jerry replies that the experts hadn’t done much good in stopping North Korea for two decades, so maybe it is time to stop listening to them.
This is exactly what Trump argued. At a Wisconsin rally in April 2016, he said, “I’ve always wanted to say this: The experts are terrible.…They say, ‘Donald Trump needs a foreign policy adviser.’ Supposing I didn’t have one.…Would it be worse than what we’re doing now?” In a 2017 Freakonomics podcast interview, libertarian billionaire Charles Koch similarly said, “If you believe, as for example Hillary does, that those in power are so much smarter and have better information than those of us in the great unwashed out here have—that we’re either too evil or too stupid to run our own lives, and those in power are much better—you have what Hayek called the fatal conceit and William Easterly called the tyranny of experts.”
It’s challenging to make an argument for homespun wisdom over educated expertise while speed-referencing economics professors, but Koch’s point is that the elites always screw up. When Trump denigrated intelligence reports that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, he cited that they couldn’t be trusted because they were wrong about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction fourteen years earlier. Similarly, populists argue that banks can’t be trusted because their mortgage derivatives collapsed in 2008. It’s an argument that is tricky to refute unless you’ve ever dealt with a child. Their first method of challenging adults is to say that you were wrong this one time about that one obscure fact, so you’re probably wrong about humans needing to go to sleep at night.
I call this reasoning error the Meteorologist Fallacy™. When the forecast calls for rain but it’s sunny, some people conclude that weather reports are useless. This is dunderheaded thinking. Meteorologists know that predictions are imperfect. That’s why they use those percentage symbols and try to distract you by giving themselves sexy names and dressing like they’re going to a suburban hotel ballroom for a swinger party. On any given night, it looks like there’s a 40 percent chance KTLA Los Angeles meteorologist Dallas Raines is going to deliver a televised marriage proposal to his tanning bed. Meteorologists are getting better at predictions, making the Meteorologist Fallacy™ even more ridiculous: three-day forecasts of high temperatures are now as accurate as one-day forecasts were in 2005, making a huge difference to people involved in aviation, commercial fishing, and last-minute three-day vacations. The Meteorologist Fallacy™ is used to dismiss scientists for doing their job, which is discovering new information by questioning previous assumptions. Sure, a few months ago a study said that chocolate was good for you and now another one says it isn’t, but people who want to lose thirty pounds shouldn’t base their diet on cutting-edge nutritional research. They should eat fruits and vegetables and stop thinking so much about chocolate.
Even when experts are wrong, it doesn’t mean non-experts are right. A well-constructed experiment would compare how many screwups experts have made with how many non-experts would have made. While we can never know the counterfactual, we do know that expert economists bailed us out from a meltdown in 2008. Diplomatic experts have avoided a nuclear holocaust. Experts in statistics improved the method for evaluating professional baseball players, according to what I understood of Moneyball.
It’s always been appealing to venerate common sense over expertise. In the 1920s Will Rogers mocked politicians by saying that “common sense ain’t common.” In his 1926 book, The Klan’s Fight for Americanism, KKK imperial wizard Hiram W. Evans wrote:
The Klan does not believe that the fact that it is emotional and instinctive, rather than coldly intellectual, is a weakness. All action comes from emotion, rather than from ratiocination. Our emotions and the instincts on which they are based have been bred into us for thousands of years; far longer than reason has had a place in the human brain. They are the many-times distilled product of experience; they still operate much more surely and promptly than reason can. For centuries those who obeyed them have lived and carried on the race; those in whom they were weak, or who failed to obey, have died. They are the foundations of our American civilization, even more than our great historic documents; they can be trusted where the fine-haired reasoning of the denatured intellectuals cannot.
By exalting instinct over education our brains have atrophied over one hundred years to the point where we cannot believe racists used to argue against intellectualism by using the word ratiocination. In 2005, in his first episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert mocked this religion of instinct:
Folks, we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats and Republicans or conservatives and liberals or tops and bottoms. No, we are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.…Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen: the gut.
People are so eager to delegitimize expertise that they seize on predictions that turned out to be wrong, which is one of the two most likely outcomes of predictions. Failed predictions don’t mean that experts are also incorrect about measurable data. Yet people such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones love to conflate the two. “Climate change is real? Yeah, so was Hillary’s lead!…They said Hillary was a lock. She lost. The experts are dead. No belief is certain. All is permitted. Go with your gut,” he said. This is epistemological nihilism, which is a phrase you don’t learn from your gut.
The gut is faulty exactly because it’s inside of us. Common sense is individual sense, one tiny perspective, a single guess as to how many jelly beans are in the jar. As David Foster Wallace said in his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon:
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
Emotions are so unreliable that therapists heal people of post-traumatic stress disorder by telling them to ignore their strongest instincts. Not reacting to our gut instincts is why people meditate. It’s the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy. Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman scanned subjects’ brains while they looked at photos of a needle pricking hands labeled with the names of different religions. People got way more upset when hands that belonged to their own religion were attacked. I got in the MRI machine, and his test revealed that I’m about average in racism. My job is not to act on those feelings. Our awful instincts are why the Ten Commandments are so important to these Baptists whose hands I apparently am itching to stab. Instinct leads us to lie, steal, cheat, covet, and ignore a phone call if it’s from thy mother and thy father.
I do not say any of these things to Jerry. Partly because you don’t want to push an argument too far with a vigilante who advocates death threats for late payments, but mostly because there’s no way I could have thought of all this stuff on the spot. Also, the genteel Harold once again interrupts to break the tension, this time by inviting me to the Baptist gang’s weekly Saturday breakfast at the Rafter B Café, which I happily accept. I like my new Baptist friends. They’re smart, thoughtful, and, except for Jerry, friendly. I haven’t felt this sense of summer slow since I was a kid on my own back porch, where my grandparents, uncle, aunt, and cousins would visit on weekends. Not one person here has once looked at their phone. They’re happy to be with the same people every day. Elitists seek bursts of community at Burning Man, Davos, and a thousand other weekend conferences and clubs. These Baptists commune every night.
I wish Cassandra and Laszlo had come. He’d love it here, with the Ford Model A, the pasturing animals, and the unhurried pace. I tell myself that I’m giving him a better life with museums, concerts, ceramics classes, diversity, and a school carefully selected for his needs, but I’m pretty sure he’d prefer running around this town.
Without alcohol it is difficult to discern when a large gathering is ending. We are not about to run out of water, and no one is going to say anything so horrible they are forced to leave. So instead, a few people talk about being tired, and we disperse.
I drive a few blocks back to Snob Hill, double-checking the address before entering the Cowboys and Roses, nervous about setting off one of Miami’s tricky unlocked door/loaded gun security systems. I pull out my laptop to go online to find out exactly where the “separation of church and state” is in the Constitution, and damn if Bill isn’t technically correct, which is the elite reductive qualification for “correct.” The phrase is not in the Constitution and exists, as Bill said, only in a letter President Thomas Jefferson wrote to a Baptist church in Danbury, Connecticut. The Baptists, ironically, were super into the separation of church and state back then, and worried that the competing Congregational church was going to become the official state religion of Connecticut.
I wasn’t just a jerk about debating that point tonight. I was a jerk in lots of ways. Worse yet, I was smug, which is precisely what people accuse elitists of being. My dad always warned me of mistaking a lack of educational opportunity for a lack of intelligence, and that’s exactly what I did. I chastise myself as I head to the Cowboy room, stepping over a small piece of rope on the thick carpet that some previous cowboy must have left while practicing lasso tricks. I sleep with the front door unlocked, which makes me feel safer than I do at home in Los Angeles, protected by bolts, a door chain, and an alarm system, each implying that I can’t trust the people who live near me.
When I wake up the next morning, I see a text sent at 6:48 a.m. from Mayor Breeding inviting me to his ranch to “check some cows.” It’s stupid to turn down an invitation from the person I’ve had so much difficulty reaching, but it seems rudely elitist to bail on breakfast with my Baptist friends because a politician texted. Luckily, the mayor also invited me to the “33 Party” on Saturday night, an annual picnic celebrating the beginning of the NFL season. It’s on the same night as the boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, which they’re going to show on a huge TV outside. Like many events since the election, this fight has has become a proxy for Trump supporters versus Trump fearers. McGregor, a white star of mixed martial arts, which has a lot of white fans, is taking on Mayweather, a black star of boxing, which has a lot of black and Latino fans. Besides being a mini race war, the fight also has resonance for elitists: one of the most skilled boxers of all time is boxing someone without boxing experience. McGregor is a martial artist who believes that heart, instinct, and attitude count more than expertise. I do not know if there will be gambling at the party, but I am guessing I could get good odds if I take Mayweather.
My Baptist friends in the back dining room of the Rafter B act so happy to see me I mistakenly think we’ve spent at least one meal apart. When our food starts to arrive, we link hands, bow our heads, and Harold, the deacon at the church, leads us in grace. This time, I’m not mentioned in the prayer, which makes me feel great because it means I’ve already fit in, though it doesn’t make me feel as great as being namechecked to God. After we eat, I take the check for my eggs and biscuit to the register, where Susan tells me that Harold and his wife D’Ann have already paid for me. I cannot believe how nice the people of Miami are and how many spellings there are for “Deeann.”
Harold wants to take me to the only store in Miami, which is only open Saturday mornings, and not every Saturday. He calls the owner of The Whatever Store and announces that we’re in luck. Despite its name, the store has a very specific theme: proprietor Rick Tennant only sells items owned by his father, who died four years ago and was a hoarder. Still, the “Whatever” descriptor is accurate. The store’s wares include a container to keep waffles warm, eight-track tapes and VCR cassettes with labels reading “Quilting (only)” and “Quilting.” I am tempted to buy “Quilting” to see what nonquilting footage it might contain, and whether it can be used to blackmail the entire town of Miami.
The Whatever Store has great prices despite its huge competitive advantage in being the only store in Miami, and both Harold and Larry buy some furniture. As I’m helping Harold load a table onto his flatbed truck, he asks, “Are you familiar with crafting?” I tell him that I am indeed familiar with the concept of making crafts, having spent my first year out of college in the employ of Martha Stewart, who remade frugal, do-it-yourself Americanism into an elite hobby. A few hours later, I drive to Harold’s house on Baptist Row. As I’m parking on the street, I see Jerry and his wife sitting on their front porch in the house right next to Harold’s, waving me over.
Jerry seems to have softened to me, so I don’t mention that North Korea launched a test missile today, indicating that Trump’s tough talk wasn’t as effective as he thought. Instead, I take a tour of their gorgeous log cabin. They’ve got two cast-iron clawfoot tubs, a six-burner Viking stove, and a set of $1,200 copper pots that hang over their kitchen. They keep a thirty-two-foot RV, which has an electric fireplace inside it, inside their barn. They tell me that to supplement their flooring income, they own forty-three houses in the area, which they rent out. They are Panhandle tycoons.
They walk me next door, where Harold, D’Ann, and their daughter, Cheyenne, who has driven down from Oklahoma, are crafting in their gigantic shed. Harold reaches into a box and shows me something that shocks me more than anything I will see in Miami. More than the story about the family who were spies for the NAACP. More than the plaque celebrating the Confederacy. And I have no idea how to handle it.