I had to laugh at the post that said jello salad was popular in CO. My mom made it all the time in my upstate NY childhood, but can’t recall having it or hearing about it during our 20+ years in CO.
Does anybody know why the name Complexion Salad? It always seemed odd to me.
http://www.cooks.com/recipe/ks17a2rl/complexion-salad.html
If you web search for “Charles Murray bubble quiz”, you will find it on a fairly large number of web sites (and it has been around for a few years).
Here is the quiz from Murray’s book Coming Apart, The State of White America, 1960-2010 with the scoring key (so you do not have to click through several pages):
https://www.scribd.com/document/77349055/Coming-Apart-by-Charles-Murray-Quiz
@1Dreamer - my Southern grandmother made chicken and dumplings that sound very similar to yours. We had them year-round, whenever we visited her, and they were AWESOME. I have never had anything like them and I miss eating them so much.
My grandmother tried to teach me how to make her dumplings, but the recipe was crazy (“a pinch of this” “a smidge of pepper”) and I’ve never been able to replicate the taste. Maybe it’s just the taste of my childhood, and therefore nothing will ever come close.
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Grew up in a small blue collar town in the far upper mid-west, which hit its prime in 1950 and has been slowly dying ever since. There were two high schools, public and Catholic, so everyone grew up with everyone. No moving to a better neighborhood for the schools. My father was a physician who hunted, fished, and also was a member of the local country club. My neighborhood growing up was a mix of college graduates and factory workers (walking distance from a paper mill). Schools closed for three days during deer season. Some people counted on their deer meat to feed their families.
I’m married to a physician who took a military scholarship to pay for med school and stayed in as a career path.
We have lived all over the country. I liked my neighbors when we lived in Oklahoma, where every single neighbor owned a pick up truck and would have scored very high on this quiz. . I liked my neighbors when we lived in Southern California. I like my neighbors now, living in one of the wealthiest, most educated, liberal areas of the country, where most of my neighbors would score very low on this quiz. I can not imagine what would happen if we brought all the people I know together in one place.
My high school friends who never left town have a decidedly different view of life compared to those who left for college and never moved back, or those who left for college and returned.
Article in NYT about what different ethnic cultures prepare for Thanksgiving dinner.
@scout59 – finally, someone who knows what I’m talking about, and yes, awesome would be the best word to describe them. Never had them with chicken, though. I wish someone had passed down the recipe, but I don’t remember my grandmother ever using a recipe book. Like your grandmother, she’d just throw in some of this, a dash of that, etc. My mother inherited that style of cooking. If I asked for a recipe, they’d just look at me like . . . . are you serious? Ha!
Part of the problem is that Murray is associating ‘white working class’ with rural small town America, when white working class people don’t all live in small town America, and the values are not going to be uniform. Guy across the street from me is a corrections officer, guy across from him works for verizon as a tech, both blue collar jobs, guy down the street who is the fire chief is a carpenter, and this is in a county that is one of the more well off ones in the country…
I think it should more have been about rural/urban as Donna pointed out, rural areas for the most part are more blue collar, and more importantly, are often on the lower end of blue collar (a unionized corrections officer in NJ makes money that is likely well above the median salary in the country; a carpenter or a plumber in my area makes pretty good money, and so forth) whereas in rural areas the blue collar workers are often well below the median…and the views of blue collar white workers in my area on things like social issues are going to be more liberal/libertarian than someone in a small town likely (on the whole).
The real problem with any such survey is the limited nature of the questions. Kind of reminds me of a ‘gender quiz’ I saw, that to determine someone’s gender identity had questions like “would you rather watch a football game or go to an opera?”…ie rife with questions that show the stupidity of the person who wrote it, about biases and such.While I haven’t lived in a small town, I have met and known a number of people who live in those areas who grew up there, and I think they might laugh at the questions, too, like “yeah, I eat all my meals at Dennys or cracker barrel and I watch 10 hours of tv a day and love Nascar and think that cheez whiz is fine food”…if they didn’t get pissed that is:)
I am pretty sure that income has little to do with his quiz – remember that Murray’s “elite” or “overclass” is based on intelligence. He seems to have disdain for white, working class society. From the New York Times article describing his book “Coming Apart”:
Without getting into the deep politics, one of the issues is that the white working class is now experiencing what we have seen among minorities going back. 40 years ago, if you asked someone in the white working class (and other classes, too, don’t get me wrong) about the problems facing the inner city, you would hear about drug use, about men who ‘didn’t want to work’, about kids born out of wedlock and mothers dependent on public assistance, and how there was ‘something wrong with those people’…and the problem is now the white working class we are talking about, whose jobs have disappeared, communities economically ravaged, are now ‘those people’ too (and not surprisingly, many people who today are still doing okay economically or who have thrived, when talking about the white working class and their problems, will say “well, what do you expect, they didn’t bother getting an education, they couldn’t adapt”, basically blaming them (and in that, the white working class anger is not unjustified, in the sense that few cared about them the way very few truly cared about the plight of minorities in the same boat back when). The white working class is experiencing epidemics of drug use, things like meth and heroin, they are seeing the dissolution of families, dependence on public assistance, kids born out of wedlock, crime to pay for drugs, domestic abuse, and so forth…50 years ago when cities burned, people wondered where the anger came from, I think we are now seeing the same anger among the white working class that drove those riots 50 years ago.
That is not quite correct.
Because of the huge backlash against The Bell Curve regarding differences in measured IQ among different racial groups, in Coming Apart he specifically sought to try to make similar points without regards to race by looking at differences among two somewhat fictionalized mostly white communities (Fishtown, PA & Belmont, MA).
As I said earlier, it has been a few years since I have read this book. He uses data to point out that the outcomes for families is quite different in each city. To me that is valuable work of a social scientist, but does not mean disdain. Another part of the book provides his suggestions on how to improve outcomes in places like Fishtown, and to me this is where he is less effective.
@scout59 & @1Dreamer - I grew up in the south as well and every year my grandmother made chicken and dumplings. I make them every year for Thanksgiving too. Never use a recipe and add a bit of this and a bit of that. Most of the time the chicken and dumplings come out superb but never taste as good as my grandmothers.
Well perhaps “disdain” misses the mark – but not by much. Murray sees the real problem as the upper classes refusal to “insist” or teach the working class about how to best live their lives. This is where the more controversial (uglier?) parts of Murray is revealed. When speaking of the intellectual elite he says:
But then he says this:
“Using a statistical construct he calls Fishtown — inspired by an actual white, blue-collar neighborhood of the same name in Philadelphia”
Not sure how much Fishtown has changed in the 4 years since that article was written, but its become pretty hip/hipster. Sounds like any changes to Fishtown will be through gentrification.
Well then, count me as one of his supporters. The data shows that the outcomes for children raised in a loving two parent household is better than that for a one parent household. And among one parent households, the best outcomes are where one of the parents has died, and the worst is where the other parent is unknown to the children. Society should do what it can to encourage caring two parent households.
I am sure that there are plenty of cases where there are valid reasons why a one parent household is better (e.g. physical abuse, or drug use). That doesn’t invalidate the point though.
I think the issues arise with** how** the “intellectual elite” would “insist” that the rest of America follow their lifestyle. And that lifestyle goes beyond having a 2 parent household.
Boy, talk about “bubbles.” One of the first responsibilities of a social scientist is to avoid judging, avoid bearing down with his own preconceived notions and perspective.
It may be true some superficials run better when the family includes 2 parents. But that ignores other issues, what sort of parent(s) they are, what they encourage or not, even how those parents get along, how the immediate community supports.
A good social scientist can identify his own prejudices and try to step away from them.
@TessR, I started to get excited thinking someone had a good recipe for “grandma’s homemade southern dumplings” until I got to this line.
Big help you are. 
Of course you could send us your address. Then @scout59 and I could just show up at your door on TG day with a bag of rolls and score some extra points as @jym626 suggested for @doschicos ’ TG survey. Ha!
Too funny. 
I don’t agree with many of Murray’s prescriptions. However I disagree with the attitude of “We should not judge anyone else”.
Many of us on CC are fortunate. Often the reason we are fortunate is because, in addition to good luck, the people who provided us with unconditional love also taught us thousands of little lessons in terms of how to live our life and how to treat others. This contributes to our success in education, in work, and in relationships.
That doesn’t mean we can be callous in our judgment of those less fortunate. Instead it should mean exactly the opposite. How can we help people who did not benefit from the thousands of little lessons we received? Doesn’t some of it involve re-teaching the lessons we have learned?
“Doesn’t some of it involve re-teaching the lessons we have learned?”
Okay, I’m game in re-teaching from my elitist perspective. I’d teach them to stop reading slanted blogs and to give up believing in conspiracy theories. 