I confess: My form of pornography is houses. The first pages I look at in the Sunday Times are the exclusive apartments and country estates section in the back of the Magazine. The first feature I look at in Friday's Wall Street Journal is the real estate pages highlighting domiciles in venues I'd never go to, let alone live in. If I'm driving around the Berkshires or upstate New York or Santa Barbara, I always pick up those brochures full of houses, mansions, condos, ranches, raw land, et cetera. So I do understand the romance of property. But, in my own life, I keep it relatively under control. Which is not the case with some other folk. One of the stark facts I've come to grasp is that many of the people who seem so successful--indeed, even some who just seem rich--are very much in debt. In real estate debt, that is, in mortgages. Not all, of course. The upper-class politicians in my home state of Massachusetts probably are not burdened with mortgages. Neither John F. Kerry nor Ted Kennedy, neither Mitt Romney nor his lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, who is campaigning to succeed him. They're all very wealthy. So, even if they had mortgages, they would hardly be burdened. That's not exactly the case with Deval Patrick and his wife, certainly a well-paid partner at the elite law firm of Ropes and Gray, who, according to Tuesday's Boston Globe, have a mortgage tab of fully $5.9 million at SunTrust Bank (not a local institution, mind you, but based in Atlanta, where Patrick was general counsel for Coca-Cola.) OK, this nearly six mill is not for one house but for two. I don't know what their house in Milton is like. But their summer cottage in the Berkshires--that's what enormous houses are called in the Berkshires, ever since Edith Wharton built her cottage, The Mount, in the century before the last--has 18 rooms and roughly 10,000 square feet. Truly enormous. And, as the Globe reported, the couple's mortgage bill for interest alone comes to roughly $325,000. If he's elected governor, as he is likely to be (I am voting for him), he will be earning exactly $135,000. McMansions are a trifle obscene in my eyes ... for anyone. Is that a harsh judgment? Maybe. Sorry. Now, I know that, in the generations immediately younger than mine, McMansions seem to be more psychologically reassuring, more comfortable, than a cozy house. Everybody to his own. But don't you wonder about people who need so very much house to feel good about themselves?