A bobo is a bourgeois bohemian. These are the people who are thriving in the information age. They're the people, you go into their homes and they've got these renovated kitchens that are the size of aircraft hangars, with plumbing. You know, you see the big sub- zero refrigerators and you open the door and you think, they could stick an in-law suite in the side. So these are the people who are really making a lot of money, and I spent the last few years going across upscale America looking at the people who are really thriving in the information age. And one of the things, the chief characteristic I noticed, was that they've smashed the old categories.
It used to be easy to tell a bourgeois from a bohemian. And the bourgeois were the straight-laced suburban types, went to church, worked in corporations. And the bohemians were the arty free spirits, the rebels. But if you look at upscale culture, at the upper middle classes, the people in Silicon Valley, you find they've smashed all the categories together.
Some people seem half yuppie-bourgeois and half hippie- bohemian. And so if you take bourgeois and bohemian and you smash them together, you get the ugly phrase "bobo."
Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks, NY Times columnist.
I thought it followed up my entry on Bozeman nicely. Maybe Bozeman should consider a name change to Bobozeman. Once in Bobozeman I met a guy whose job was to build custom doors. . . at $30K a pop.
Althought I like to laugh at bobos, I do so because I don't have a kitchen the size of an airplane hanger. Youch!
2 comments:
Don't you hate it when you think of something totally hilarious AFTER you are done posting? Yes.
Here is what I should have added.
Happy Tuesday my friends, or in Portugese, Bobo Zao!
I like this. this is a good thing. we need a derogatory term for yuppie-hippie-bohemian-motherfuckers. every other ethnic group has them, even religious and gender groups have them. now if only there was some way to roll them in a carpet, throw the carpet in a river and hurl that river into the sun...just thiking outside the box here.
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