I absolutely detest Nouveau Riche, the culture, the mentality, the attitudes, the thinking, the lifestyle, the way they dress, the way they drink, the way they eat...I detest EVERYTHING about the Nouveau Riche.
It's not the person as such but the box in which they put themselves in, and since nouveau riche have zero culture, the box shapes them. When I say culture, I need to define what I mean by it in this context. A mix of education, behavior, ethics, outlook, etc...by education I don't mean a formal education either, because the nouveau riche send their kids to the best schools, by education I mean an effort to process knowledge. Nouveau riche have none of it. Nouveau riche content themselves with their money and their new found status conferred to them by this money.
The nouveau riche lives center around appearances, name dropping, what kind of cars they ride, what kind of clothes they wear, impressing others with material things, I know the nouveau riche so well that I can actually paint their portraits one by one.
From the actual background, to the family, to the father, to the mother, to the kids, to the kind of house they live in, to the minutest details of their private lives...I smell a nouveau riche miles away...
A nouveau riche is someone who made his fortune fairly quickly, through fast business deals, during times of economic boom, sometimes during times of war - a war profiteer, sometimes from very shady transactions, a nouveau riche is usually a "smart entrepreneur" who is ambitious and who tries to make it by any means possible...not always unethical means but almost always obscure deals...
I have a particular obsession with the females nouveau riche, because the men are fairly straightforward in being spotted, the females on the other hand try very hard to project a sophisticated classy attitude that is quickly belied by little details that one perceives either in the way they speak, their house decor, their clothes, their jewelry, the way they talk in private and you catch them unguarded, their airs, the way the move their bodies, their hands, the expressions on their faces....many little details that are a give away...
Contrary to their husbands or fathers, because they are almost always a wife or daughter of someone, it is rare to find a self made nouveau riche woman in this part of the world, these nouveau riche women suffer from a chronic feeling of never being up to some illusory standard of what richness/wealth is. Behind this chronic feeling of inferiority lies another layer of chronic inferiority that of an empty vessel - basically lack of knowledge. Nouveau riche hardly ever read in particular their women. Reading is limited to women's magazines, celebrity gossip, and if really pushed to the extreme, the shortest article in a Time magazine, just so they can say they read an article in the Time magazine. These women are almost always intellectually vacuous i.e a permanent state of vacancy inhabits their minds, and thus filled with the most mundane of pettiness that is reflected on a daily basis in their worthless lives...
Since I consider myself somewhat of an expert on the Middle East, I can safely say that the worst kind of female nouveau riche are to be found in the following countries - Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt. I haven't mentioned the Gulf, because to me the whole of the Gulf is nouveau riche but I will not go into the reasons for that right now.
Of course and for the sake of fairness, I must also add that I have come across nouveau riche people from other cultures, they all more or less share common traits, with slight "cultural" variations. I can tell you heaps about the nouveau riche from Russia, about the English, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Australians, the Latin Americans...I observe so I notice and register...
And of course not to forget the Israeli nouveau riche, anyone who has been to Israel can tell you the endemic tackiness of Israeli society, that is kind of expected since Israel is a nouveau riche country par excellence, being built by profiteering from murder and theft...
I really could go on and on about this rot called the nouveau riche, but I would rather keep the minute details for characters in a novel...they would surely enrich it.
