[null and void]

Notably absent?

Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe since 1980.

[DariusBane]

Whoa, that is really hideous!

“money can buy stuff, but stuff ain’t classy”, thats what my momma always said.

[B-Chan]

Les nouveaux riches equate glitz with luxury. Criminals, chiselers, and similar low-class types who suddenly come into money yearn to displaytheir wealth to their neighbors; as with most pimps, Mugabe's taste runs to Modern Whorehouse.

It takes years of careful education (or centuries of careful breeding) to produce a mind capable of recognizing elegance — the idea that less = more. Lacking that education in esthetics, taste is likewise absent; to the vulgar, more = more. This fact of human behavior explains not only those dictatorial palaces decorated à la mode Saddam, but the decal-covered "race cars" and brick-veneer mini-mansions that Americans buy as well. Every owner of one of those Celotex crapboxes one sees in suburbia would decorate just like Mugabe if they had his money; like Tevye, they would prefer to live in a house with "one long staircase just going up, one even longer going down, and one more leading nowhere just for show".

Those with true class know better. The richest people I know (and I know a few) live in circumstances that the average person might consider plain, or even shabby. Few drive new cars; few wear trendy clothes. Instead, they buy expensive, super-reliable cars, and drive them for years; they buy (or have made) the best clothes money can buy, then wear them until threadbare. Those with true class show their superiority through humility. The superior man lives humbly, and is a servant to all.

Only losers need to brag.