I could tell from the way he decorated the inside of his sedan that the Uber driver was a fan of professional basketball. So, as is my habit, I struck up a conversation. I found the driver congenial, talkative and informative. He got me up to date on the National Basketball Association playoffs. He spoke loudly enough to be heard over the car radio, which was tuned to a commercial music station and set at high volume throughout the ride. 

After filling me in on the NBA conference finals, we talked about the National Hockey League playoffs and the sorry state of the Baltimore Orioles. The driver was obviously up to speed on the world of professional sports, and I appreciated his reporting. (I didn’t know, for instance, that the Boston Celtics had choked so badly in the NBA playoffs, blowing two 20-point leads.)

The conversation then took a sharp turn.

“Mr. Dan,” the driver asked while we were stopped at a light, “do you want to know what is the biggest lie of all time?”

“Something Trump said?” I asked.

“No,” the driver said, then proceeded to tell me the following: The Earth is flat. The sky above us is a massive dome. The moon, stars and sun are below the dome’s ceiling, moving from one end to the other. Everything we’ve been told is a lie — history is a lie, geography is a lie. Antarctica is not at the bottom of the Earth, but a wall around the flat Earth. Man has never gone to the Moon, and both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first men to set foot on the lunar surface, refused to swear on a Bible that such a thing had happened.

I listened to everything and intermittently added the following comments:

Really?

Uh huh.

Never heard that before.

Hmmm.

Wow. I never thought of that possibility.

I’ll have to look that up.

I never once challenged the fellow, as is my habit when someone tries to lay a conspiracy theory on me or tell me how great Trump is. He was a pleasant guy and I had no desire for an argument. He reminded me of many people I met over the years — or heard from during the MAGA era — who are convinced of things that are not true. They seem completely content in their beliefs and fully confident they know something the rest of us don’t. 

The driver’s lectures ended with something about the king of Morocco, European explorers and native Americans.

Later, at home, I Googled the driver’s Buzz Aldrin-Neil Armstrong claim. Neither astronaut ever said the Moon landing had been faked.

My Googling stopped there, however. I had exhausted my curiosity in what the driver had to say. I was confident that what I had learned long ago about the solar system and the conquest of the Americas was still true. These days, the world often seems upside down. But it’s not; the Earth is round, Antarctica is still at the bottom, and Trump is still the worst president in American history.

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Published by Dan Rodricks

Dan Rodricks is a former long-time columnist for The Baltimore Sun, winner of numerous national and regional journalism awards, a radio and TV personality, podcaster and fly angler. His narrative memoir, "Father's Day Creek," was published in May 2019 by Apprentice House at Loyola University Maryland.

20 thoughts on “Strange interlude: What I heard on the ride home”

  3. you should watch the Friday nite NBC television series Paradise which just finished about U.S. inhabitants livung in an underground city which included a president

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  7. Dan: sometimes very crazy people seem very sane. Let me know if you’d like to read (hear) the story about “pancakes in my attic”. It’s similar.

    But on a tangential vein, imagine the push back when it was discovered that the earth was round by the ancient Greeks. But, at times I feel the earth is flat and I am barely hanging on.

    — Carol Allen

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  10. Missed opportunity Dan. You could have had him drive you to the edge of the earth. I understand however if you didn’t have the time.

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  11. Dan, your eurocentric bias is showing. Antarctica is at one of the earth’s poles, there is no bottom or top in space.

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      1. One time I saw globes and maps that had no lines of latitude or longitude, and the countries weren’t labeled the way we are used to seeing them. It was a revelation to me about the ways we are taught to see the world. You are someone that also helps us to see things in different ways.

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  12. In Charlie Pierce’s seminal Idiot America, he advances the notion that fully a quarter of our population are basically morons and have been since the inception of the Republic. Given the present popularity of certain political figures, I have no doubts concerning the veracity of that generalization…

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  13. The reply by Rusty Gardner reminded me of a comment by one of the astronauts as he gazed at the earth from space: no line, no borders, no labels as to what he was seeing. The maps I see these days usually have, in addition to lines, colors identifying various preferences: Republican and Democratic are two seen most often; however, because of a recent search, this one came up with four identifiers: “Educational segregation in the US prior to Brown.” We spend a lot of time disagreeing and not enough agreeing.

    Sometimes, maybe it’s better to believe the earth is flat. In my travels, I would have fallen off the edge many times. Then I would have seen even more!

    Thanks, as usual, for a delightful story.

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  14. Interesting take on the people with off-the-reality charts way of looking at the world. So this guy’s world is that we live in a snow ball?

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