can paris rival this?

This is the first sight that greeted me upon returning to Barra de Navidad from San Miguel de Allende.

Well, not really. Following our discussion yesterday about beach people and city folk (all the world's a stage), no one is going to believe this Hopperesque trio is hanging out at the beach. Unless that beach has a Palm modifying it.

My beach crowd would consider the attire overdressed -- even for dinner, let alone afternoon drinks.

You have probably already guessed the provenance of the photograph. It is in San Miguel de Allende. At a trendy bar on the jardin where one can sit right in the window as if auditioning for the job of a mannequin in a I. Magnin display.

When I shot the photograph all sorts of snarky paragraphs started forming in my head. Until I realized I was doing exactly what my college New Left friends did in the 1960s. They would have labeled the revelers as representatives of the petit bourgeoisie. The "petit" was required to round out the insult. The type of people who supported the Establishment by trading away their integrity.

The irony is that the trio enjoying a sunny day in the highlands of Mexico may very well have been the same type of critics back then. Politics has a wondrous way of transforming revolutionaries into the elite.

You will probably not be surprised that I was not a member of the New Left when I was in college. On most days, I wore a three-piece suit. Because I helped work my way through college, I went directly to work after classes.

But I was always baffled by the petit bourgeoisie slur. On the first day of my US history class, our professor asked us to raise our hands if we were upper class, middle class, or lower class. Everyone, with one exception, professed to be middle class. (The exception was a friend who was the son of a federal judge and had led a very privileged life. Clad in his blue working man shirt, he claimed to be a member of the "working class." My guffaw was not subtle.)

And, of course, petit bourgeoisie is just a fancy French word used by revolutionaries for the middle class. If being middle class was such a bad thing, why did we all identify with it?

The reason is simple. Because the middle class is not a bad thing. In fact, it is middle class values that helped mould the country where I was born. Values like Ambition. Self-discipline. Thrift. Hard work. Honesty. Aspiration. Fidelity.

They were the values I was taught when I was young. And they were not exclusive to the middle class. They were the Horatio Alger milestones that promised people of all social levels a better existence.

Did the middle class always live up to those values? Of course not. But they were the ideals we wanted to live by even when we failed to follow through consistently.

When I look at that photograph, I do not see people of the petit bourgeoisie. I see flawed souls who have done their best to make their way through life with a set of values that have at least given them the reward of sipping wine in one of the quaintest towns in the highlands of Mexico.

May they and their values thrive.