10:55 AM CDT on Tuesday, August 16, 2005

The most talked-about item in Monday's paper seems to have been a single paragraph buried innocuously toward the bottom of Page 13A. It was a comment made by a Collin County man interviewed for a series about well-to-do suburbanites living beyond their means.

The man, identified only as Jeffrey, went bankrupt last year and has had a rough ride: Even after he was downsized out of his telecom job, he and his wife kept spending until they were drowning in debt. Chapter 7 made their backbreaking credit card debts evaporate, but they have had to scale back on their expenses.

Jeffrey says he is ashamed. Not, as you might expect, to have bought things he couldn't pay for, but because of the car he now drives.

He called it the "embarrassment factor":

"I don't care about driving a Volvo instead of a Mercedes," he told my colleague Paula Lavigne. "I care that other people notice I'm not driving a Mercedes and now I'm in a Volvo."

Is he kidding?

I guess not, because this series (which focused on Collin County but could have been reported in hundreds of places) is replete with people whose lives are utterly engorged with stuff –cars and furniture, big houses with spas and wine closets and media rooms, Louis Vuitton purses, golf club memberships and thousand-dollar pedicure parties for 11-year-old girls.

Now that he's driving that shameful Volvo, Jeffrey has no choice but to face up to his problems.

Still, he says, "It wouldn't be hard to slip back into it. I still look at expensive cars and think, 'Wow, that would be kind of cool.' "

Somebody send this man to AA! No, wait – tie him to a chair and make him watch It's a Wonderful Life 10 times, start to finish. He evidently still has some issues to work through.

Jeffrey's sad remarks summed up the awful emptiness that seems to be reflected in these stories about people whose joy isn't so much in having possessions but in showing them off, in believing that they tell the world what it needs to know about them.

I felt kind of sorry for the guy, but a lot of readers were just plain mad:

"I don't have too much sympathy for people forced to drop from a Mercedes to a Volvo," one writer e-mailed The Dallas Morning News. "Why don't you do some stories on 'normal people' and how they manage to survive on considerably less?"

Well, it's all relative, of course. I can't begin to imagine attending high school in a place where teenagers drive their own BMWs and Hummers. At some schools, everybody drives an old Chevy or a pickup; at others, everybody rides the bus. If people earn their own money, it's their business how they spend it.

After all, I would be remiss in failing to disclose that I like shopping a lot myself. I can turn a two-minute stop for bread at the store into an hour of browsing.

Some readers thought we unfairly stereotyped suburbanites as greedy, irresponsible and materialistic.

"Nice hatchet job on Plano," one exasperated reader wrote. "If you wanted to show Plano in the worst possible light, you did a good job."

Collin County, with its fast growth and retail explosion, offered plenty of examples of people spending more than their incomes can handle.

But there are people in every neighborhood in the nation who are in money trouble, who spend more than they should, who can't break the crack habit of acquiring costly new stuff.

Honestly, are you really that preoccupied with your neighbor's car, stereo system or patio furniture? Being the kind of person who takes a vulgar pride in finding pants for $5 at Target, I can't honestly say I worry about what the people across the street think of my car. I assume that they don't think about it at all and never will, unless I accidentally drive it over their flowerbed.

What good does it do to wheeze on to our kids about "character" and "personal responsibility" if we behave like it's our clothes, cars and houses that define us?

And if Jeffrey tootles by in his humble Volvo, wave and give him a thumbs-up. He could use some positive reinforcement.

E-mail jfloyd@dallasnews.com