In Naples, Florida

I have never been to Naples, Italy, but for the past 20 or so years I've made an annual visit to Naples, Florida, where my mother spends the winters.

It might as well be a foreign country.

Downtown Naples is one of the wealthiest communities in the nation, a place where brand-new beachfront mansions worth millions are routinely torn down to be replaced by even newer ones worth slightly more.

Outside of the city core are miles and miles of walled communities with condos, artificial lakes, and golf courses, interspersed with miles and miles of construction sites for even more such walled communities -- even though the low-end condo market is completely gutted and older condos languish on the market for years. Churches are huge, with buildings and parking lots that look more like community colleges. Shopping centers, eerily identical, abound. Cars are predominantly white, American and very, very large.

I worry that the flat landscape will encourage alien space ships to land here and that, if they do, an analysis of the local culture will result in annihilation of our planet on the grounds of total vapidity.