Disdaining rural life, they try to create simulations of it. In the city itself gentrification means two tubs of geraniums outside the front door of a town house that has been prettified to look like a country cottage. The homes, restaurants, and even offices of city dwellers are planted thick with vegetation. Commercials on television, aimed primarily at city dwellers, have more themes of the countryside than of urban life. Cars are never seen in a traffic jam, but whiz through bucolic scenery.
Lovers are never in tenements, but drift through sylvan glades.
Cigarettes come from Marlboro Country. Merrill Lynch is a bull. Coors is not manufactured in a computerized brewery, but taken from mountain streams. The professional people buy second homes in the country as soon as they can afford them, and as early as possible on Friday head out of the city they have created. City dwellers take the city with them to the country, for they will not live without its pamperings.