Following the 2016 election, some readers have accused me of being out of touch with the Real America — that mythic locale inhabited by people who vote like them and watch the same TV shows they do.

“Duck Dynasty,” for example, a program I watched on an assignment that bears about as close a resemblance to the rural South as “Gomer Pyle” did to the U.S. Marines. Real Americans supposedly love that show, a cornball sitcom about a family of heavily bearded children who get into harmless scrapes involving guns and explosives.

No thanks. My own children are grown.

So in an effort to measure my Real America quotient, I recently took a year-end celebrity quiz in the morning newspaper. You know, which celebrities got married, divorced, won awards, had children, got canceled, excommunicated or pistol-whipped during 2016?

My score on the quiz was a big fat zero. My Real America score is zip, zero, nada. Nothing.

Many celebrities I’d never heard of at all. Others, well, I recognized their names, but knew only that I had no ambition to know more.

Kanye West. Enough said.

I’ve evidently disappeared completely over the celebrity event horizon. I fear there’s no coming back. Indeed, I cherish the memory of a long-ago faculty party where a woman indignantly accused me of being “the kind of man who watches ‘Charlie’s Angels.’”

“Never seen it,” I said.

I must have offended by indicating an appreciation of female beauty. She expressed incredulity. My wife rescued me. “I don’t believe he ever has seen it,” she said. It’s of such moments that enduring love is made.

Not that I’m above popular culture. If challenged, I’m sure I could have named the entire Chicago Cubs roster. The Rolling Stones haven’t made an album I didn’t own. We rarely missed an episode of “Mary Tyler Moore.” My sons called “All in the Family” “the man like grandpa show,” based upon Carroll O’Connor’s uncanny impersonation of my New Jersey father.

But “Charlie’s Angels” was too vapid by half. To put it another way, Mary Tyler Moore, yes. Helen Mirren, definitely. Kim Kardashian? An airhead famous for being shameless. There’s an awful lot of that going around these days.

Even so, as a Facebook friend recently reminded me, even the most vapid of celebrities have their role. “Nothing new under the sun,” she wrote. “These stories of celebs function as an overlay on reality, like Norse or Greek mythology. All the posturing, quarreling demiurges and hamadryads are channeling our primal need for storytelling and making sense of the woeful world.”

I’m sure that’s right. Living as I do in Arkansas, I have always felt that Bill and Hillary Clinton — life-size figures in Little Rock — were transmogrified by fame in the popular imagination, like figures in classical myth hurled into the stars by some petulant god. It’s been a fascinating process to observe.

As for Real America, maybe if I’d ever seen a single episode of “The Apprentice” or “Celebrity Apprentice,” I might have seen the preposterous figure of Donald J. Trump coming.

But I surely did not. Did you?

© 2017, Universal