I think I found the worst place in America.

[Indy Texas]

Oh God, not rich people!

I don't care if they're rich or not.

But I hope someone who managed to "arrive" in the world isn't really stupid/uncultured enough to think this can be accurately described as an "English Country estate."


Anyway, Southlake is full of petit bourgeois strivers who probably bought all the paintings in their house from the Thomas Kinkade store at the mall.

The Park Cities are where the real rich people in DFW live.

[Indy Texas]

LA (Homby Hills, Bel Air, parts of Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, some of Sunset Park above Sunset Blvd above West Hollywood, Hancock Park, San Marino, parts of Pasadena and La Canada-Flintridge) has quite a huge swath of these kinds of hoods (excluding beach houses, which while hideously expensive, are less grandiose), but they have the mitigating element of the patina of age and history, and the presentations in general tend to be more tasteful (but going downhill now, as mansions are torn down to build something even more ostentatious). The AC bills in those homes in Texas must be horrific I might note.

They are. My parents' house runs up electricity bills that have reached $1,000 a month in the summer at times.

Part of the problem is that people in Houston want to forget that they live in such an oppressively hot place by building houses with steeply pitched roofs and dark brick exteriors that look like something more appropriate to New England or the Upper Midwest. The result is a lot of heat being attracted to the house and rising up into the attics.

[Indy Texas]

I would never live there, but the liberal disdain for people who are successful is fascinating.

When I was growing up, I went to school with a girl whose mother did interior decorating and home staging for the high end homes in the part of town where we lived. She once told us that one of the repeated requests she had was for fake books for libraries and studies. As in, she would special order what essentially amounted to cardboard boxes with what looked like the spines of leatherbound books glued on one side. She would place these on the shelves and arrange them so that it looked like the shelves were full of books. Every now and then someone would demand more authenticity and she would buy actual leatherbound books from used bookstores (no one ever cared what kind of books they were as long as the size and color was aesthetically pleasing).

From her account, it was rare for there to be very many books in these houses; the only ones she ever saw were "beach trash" of the sort written by Danielle Steele (read by the wife), Bibles and related Christian motivational books, or some really useless business book of the sort you buy at Franklin Covey. In other words, people who actually have the time and the resources to obtain and acquire knowledge and culture make a conscious decision not to do so. We've gone from the historical norm when the wealthy were not merely expected but, to a certain extent, heavily obliged to consume or even produce literature, art and science, to one where people would rather spend $5,000 on a flat-screen TV to hang above their fireplace rather than some sort of artwork and where they spend their vacations sitting on beaches doing absolutely nothing rather than visiting museums and historical sites in Europe and Asia.