And of course New York City and the surrounding tony metropolitan area is the ultimate bobo's playground, being both incredibly bourgeois in its offerings for the rich who can afford the best, and bohemian in that there are an unlimited number of things to do for free from concerts to the library to museums and so on. Millions of young folks flock here each year, as they have for generations, to get a taste of the boho culture and pursue, at least temporarily, a "career" in the arts — musician, painter, writer — while sharing cramped quarters in a Manhattan apartment or moving to lower rent boroughs such as Queens or the Bronx.
The book jacket for Bobos in Paradise supplies some bullet points analogous with the "you may be a redneck if you..." sound bites, which include the belief that spending a large amount on a media center is "vulgar," but "spending $15,000 on a slate show still is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature;" your kitchen looks like "an aircraft hangar with plumbing" and you selected "your new refrigerator on the grounds that mere freezing cold is not enough;" you'd "spend a little more for socially conscious toothpaste - the kind that doesn't actually kill germs, it just asks them to leave;" you work for a "hip, visionary software" company where folks come to work in "hiking boots and glacier glasses" (or perhaps just torn jeans and a slightly dirty Pogues t-shirt); and you think your alma mater is just as good "as those of the shimmering couples on the New York Times wedding page."
The conclusion, in a nutshell, is that today's ruling, upper class is intellectual, environmentally conscious, and politically correct. They spend a lot, but their purchases are always "practical" and utilitarian but also state of the art and aesthetically luxurious.
As a baby boomer, born in 1957, my precocious, brainy self became fascinated with hippie countercultural phenomena at a tender age. By age six, I was an ardent Beatles fan. In the summer of '69, when I was 12, I read avidly about the summer of love and longed to be a teenager. I wore bell bottoms, and in high school wouldn't let a guy pay for a date. I embraced the women's liberation movement, rooted for Mike and Gloria on All in the Family, worshiped Mary Tyler Moore as the ultimate cool single working woman, watched foreign films on PBS, and listened to the cool FM stations playing the latest music on the cutting edge, like Procol Harum and the Who. I read the Village Voice and Rolling Stone along with Cosmopolitan with equal voraciousness.
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