The XX Factor: What women really think.

Why We Believed the Obama Bling Thing

Sometimes I feel like I am the last sane person to insist on not believing the worst about everyone. I never believed Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country or faked her pregnancy to cover up Bristol's. I don't believe our economic crisis can be blamed on greedy jobless people who signed onto mortgages they knew they wouldn't be able to afford. I don't even believe it can be blamed entirely on evil rich bankers like Dick Fuld and Joseph Cassano or their evil deregulation-happy allies in the federal government. I don't believe Angelina Jolie is an evil tyrant who forces Brad Pitt to fill a vial with his own plasma and promise to adopt three more impoverished children every time she finds a text from Jen on his iPhone. And so yeah, I did not believe Michelle Obama demanded—in the grand tradition of … well, at least two neglected spouses of high-achieving but invariably tragically flawed black men I can think of (if Sasha Fierce counts as Jay-Z's wife)—a $30,000 blood diamond in exchange for her campaign trail toil.

It's not that I necessarily want believe the best about people. It's just that there is obviously a lot more money in making people look like assholes. Sometimes they truly are assholes, of course. The other night I was watching the (seriously highbrow) competition reality program Stylista in the company of one of its two "judges," Elle editor Anne Slowey. Again and again, I found myself glancing over at her wide-eyed, pleading for her to assure us of the contestants: They can't truly be this despicable, right? Ha! Wrong. They were indeed just that horrible and more! Because they'd learned how existence works from reality shows!

Most people behave badly—or vulgarly, or selfishly, or materialistically—because they believe they must, that that is how it is, that it's a cruel world out there and they've got to get what's theirs, etc. I'm entirely too constitutionally lazy to have ever adopted this philosophy myself, but I'm always gratified when someone more motivated than me recognizes it to be a lot more trouble than it's worth. Which brings me back to Michelle Obama, or more specifically an anecdote I read once about her brother Craig:

Her brother would have the same epiphany while working on Wall Street. He had earned an MBA from the University of Chicago and gone to work first for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and then as a partner in a boutique investment firm. For a while, he enjoyed his wealth, then realized that the job wasn't making him happy.

"I'm so embarrassed to admit it," Craig told a New York Times sports reporter in 2007. "I had a Porsche 944 Turbo. I had a BMW station wagon. Who gets a BMW station wagon? It's the dumbest car in the world. Why would you buy a $75,000 station wagon?" Concluding that "I've got all this stuff, and it hasn't made my life any better," Craig, in his late 30s, left investment banking for a job he loves: coaching basketball.

Now, I don't want to entirely condemn buying useless crap. I am not trying to start the Great Depression here. I'm just pointing out that there are more affirming ways of going about one's life than, say, stampeding to the front of the Black Friday line to get the cool new thing, especially if it's just because you assume that everyone else is doing the same thing, too.