Extravagant insolence

Everything is subordinated to external appearances here. Being polite means never contradicting anyone; being amiable means babbling anything that comes into your mind—here are the two rules you have to follow in order to be un home charmant. Thinking over everything I have seen here I can say without being mistaken that the people here are not really living, that they are not really tasting of true happiness, and that they do not even have any comprehension of it. An empty brilliance and extravagant insolence in the men, a shameless indecency in the women—apart from these truly I see nothing else. You can imagine how we found all this to our great displeasure.
Denis Fonvizin, Paris 1778

And what would Fonvizin say about Paris 2006? Or for that matter any other city 2006?

Fit to size

'The Frenchman has no common sense and would indeed consider it the greatest misfortune to have it.' Fonvizin wrote this sentence in the last century [18th], and, my God, what pleasure he must have taken in writing it! I bet his heart was tickled with delight when he composed it. And, who knows, perhaps all of us since Fonvizin, for three or four generations have read it not without certain relish. Even now wherever they are encountered, all sentences like this, cutting foreigners down to size, contain something irresitibly pleasant for us Russians. Only on a profoundly secret level, of course, sometimes secret even from ourselves.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

I think it is feasible to replace "Russians" with every other nationality on earth, except of course the Humbles of Humbleton...they have no such problem.

The human imagination cannot conceive...

how, in the light of so many different ways of becoming enlightened, the land here is just filled with ignoramuses.
Denis Fonvizin