I wish David Brooks would make up his mind which club he wants to use to bash upscale coast-dwellers (i.e., the people who make up the vast majority of his readership). In yesterday's New York Times Magazine, he told us that regular Americans don't like it when rich people flash the cash:

[Horatio] Alger would have insulted the democratic sensibilities of his readers if he had concluded his books with his heroes sitting around in grand palaces, employing servants. In most parts of the country, this suspicion of aristocracy still lingers. Lincolnesque plow horses [i.e., ordinary hard-working Americans] are suspicious of quick wealth just as they are suspicious of great wealth.

But back in January, also in the Times Magazine, he told us just the opposite:

Americans read magazines for people more affluent than they are (W, Cigar Aficionado, The New Yorker, Robb Report, Town and Country) because they think that someday they could be that guy with the tastefully appointed horse farm....

Income resentment is not a strong emotion in much of America....

Many Americans admire the rich.

They don't see society as a conflict zone between the rich and poor. It's taboo to say in a democratic culture, but do you think a nation that watches Katie Couric in the morning, Tom Hanks in the evening and Michael Jordan on weekends harbors deep animosity toward the affluent? ...

Most Americans do not have Marxian categories in their heads.

It's odd that Brooks said in January that ordinary folks dream of horse farms, because in yesterday's column he told us that millionaires (at least the ones who don't live in -- ick! -- big cities) earn the respect of ordinary citizens by being jes’ folks:

According to research that Thomas J. Stanley did for his book ''The Millionaire Next Door,'' written with William D. Danko, 70 percent of millionaires have their shoes resoled and repaired rather than replaced, and the average millionaire spends about $140 on a pair of shoes, which doesn't get you Guccis. After Visa and MasterCard, the most common credit cards in the millionaire's wallets are charge cards for Sears and J.C. Penney. In that 1996 study, Stanley and Danko reported that the typical millionaire paid $399 for his most expensive suit and $24,800 for his or her most recent car or truck, which is only $3,800 more than what the average American spent.

In other words, they shop the way most Americans shop, in that confused hierarchy-busting manner the market researchers now call rocketing. They spend lots of money on a few items they really care about -- their barbecue grills or their lawnmowers -- and then they go downmarket to Wal-Mart to buy most of the other stuff they don't care about. This isn't upper-class consumption or even relentlessly middle-class consumption. It's mixed-up no-class consumption.

In this, as in so many respects, people who live in Manhattan or Los Angeles or San Francisco or even Dallas have to keep reminding themselves that their experience is not typical. In most places in America, there are no massive concentrations of rich people and hence no Madison Avenue boutiques, no fine art galleries, no personal shoppers. There is just the country club, and certain social pressures to be just this affluent, to prove you are a success, and no more so.

In January, by contrast, he quoted a big-city pop diva and told us that we admire her even when (or especially when) she waves precious stones under our noses (and struts around in shoes we can safely assume cost more than $140):

As the sociologist Jennifer Lopez has observed: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got, I'm just, I'm just Jenny from the block." As long as rich people "stay real," in Ms. Lopez's formulation, they are admired.

So, David, which is it -- do you have to buy at Wal-Mart to be liked by ordinary Americans if you're rich, or can you just say you're the salt of the earth in $10,000 shoes?