Who, exactly, lives in a bubble?
William “Buffalo Bill” Cody was slick at the con game — his theatrical wild-West life based on a string of tall tales and hefty embellishments — so I imagine he would’ve admired the Myth of the Bubble.
That’s the idea that Donald Trump became president in part because big-city liberals like me refused to step outside our urban bubbles and understand “real America.” It was a staggeringly successful ruse, one that remains potent, and it was funny to think about as I sat well outside my bubble, in the Wyoming city Buffalo Bill founded, watching a rodeo alongside non-bubble-dwelling Americans that Trump and his supporters would call “real.”
Real, of course, means white. The stands at the Cody Nite Rodeo were only half full, but it was all white people. Much like the city itself, which is about 96 percent white. And the state, which is 93 percent white.
On my trip through four solidly red states — Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota — I was, at least in skin tone, walking among my people. Compared to Chicago’s diversity, it was striking. Restaurants and diners full of only white people. Grocery stores full of white people. Gas stations and coffee shops and bars and Main Streets teeming with Caucasians.
I couldn’t shake the lack of black and brown faces, the scarcity of hijabs or yarmulkes, the rarity of same-sex couples. People we met were kind, helpful and welcoming. And I don’t have reason to questions anyone’s character, but I never lost sight of the fact that they were kind, helpful and welcoming to a white, Catholic guy and his equally white family.
How would that dynamic have changed if we were Muslim? Or black?
And that’s what makes the bubble — the us vs. them battle Trump has fomented between large swaths of white America and the so-called elites of diverse urban areas — such a nonsensical myth.
I sat in the stands at that rodeo, watching a massive, muscular bull quickly dispatch the guy in a cowboy hat who had deigned it a good idea to climb on his back, and thought: “Where does anyone get off telling me I live in a bubble? I ride to work in one train car that’s more diverse than half the state of Wyoming, and I’m the one in a bubble? Chicago may not mirror what some call ‘real America,’ but it does mirror the real world, and that’s a bit more important these days.”
Then I imagined Buffalo Bill laughing appreciatively at the con Trump and many right-wing media pundits pulled off, sowing just enough uncertainty to keep big-city folks wondering if there might be something out there in the made-up land of real America that they missed.
Buffalo Bill became famous thanks to dime-novel fictionalizations of him that created a character he was happy to play. William Cody was a frontiersman, a hunter and a tracker and a good shot, but much of his backstory — including his time as a famed Pony Express rider — was made up.
Louis Warren, a professor of western U.S. history at the University of California at Davis and author of “Buffalo Bill’s America,” wrote: “Whether he was real or a sham was the most common question to swirl around the man even before he appeared in the public eye, and he managed to make a career out of walking the line between truth and fiction.”
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Sounds a bit like someone we know today, doesn’t it? Yes, Trump is a businessman and a billionaire. But he’s also a self-promoter, a fabulist and, in many aspects of his life, a failure.
But he managed to become president, just as Buffalo Bill managed to become one the most famous people in the world during his time.
What Trump does and what the wild-west showman did is build mythologies that let people believe what they want to believe.
Like the Myth of the Bubble.
I have no issue with those who live in predominantly white swaths of this country. The demographics you’re born into don’t make you a better or worse person; they just are what they are.
But the idea that living among people of different races and faiths and politics and belief systems puts us in a bubble that blocks out any understanding of America? That’s a straight-up con job meant to make white America feel superior.
It’s deeply manipulative. It’s slick.
And I’d bet Buffalo Bill and the other tall-tale-telling showmen of his day would get a laugh out of it, knowing us city folks will still fall for damn near anything.
Rex Huppke is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. You can email him at rhuppke@tribune.com or follow him on Twitter at @RexHuppke.