The Pakistani glitterati turned out in force for this fashion show featuring daring outfits by local designers.

At one level, you have to wish them well.  People and especially women-people should have the right to wear what they want, and encouraging local designers is a good way to help Pakistan’s textile industry move higher up the food chain, producing better goods that can sell for higher prices and provide more jobs for more people.

But there’s also something creepy about this flaunting of community values and mores.  Pakistan is an economically polarized society; a tiny, mostly westernized minority lives very well and prides itself on its cultural and moral superiority to the great unwashed masses.

In Roman times, local rulers like King Herod used to observe those tiresome Jewish laws in public, but in private modeled their lifestyles on the rich and the decadent of Rome.  Was that really a good thing?

Americans often get fooled.  In a lot of the world, tiny and wealthy elites clinging to privilege and power often adopt American styles and, at least verbally, American-sounding values as a badge of class privilege and social prestige.  They look like us and they sound like us, but their agenda could not be more different from the profoundly democratic approach to life that informs American society in so many ways.

Unfortunately, we aren’t the only people who get confused.  Millions of people in Pakistan despise this cultivated, internationalized elite as a gang of corrupt and oppressive tyrants.  That their oppressors wrap themselves in American values and American fashions doesn’t do us any good at all.