Who'd a Thunk It?

Coping, loss of innocence & incongruity. Yep.

It says here in the Houston paper that Clear Lake, in promotional sloganeering aimed at a trusting public, has been portrayed as a little slice o' heaven while the whole time the NASA-area community has been beset by a horrid spate of of ghastly crimes.

That's why you need to be careful about what you read before you buy a home somewhere.

Some Clear Lake residents were duped after reading the Web site of a local Realtor, which stated the place was, and we quote: "the American dream brought to life."

Never, never trust a Realtor.

The recent crimes, the paper reported, were "incongruous" with the Realtor's portrayal of Clear Lake, the story said.

You can say that again.

The recent spate of shocking crimes were "incongruous" with the Realtor's portrayal of Clear Lake.

The Houston sociologist, Stephen Klineberg, whose pager number we suspect is in the Rolodex of every journalist in Houston, explains it all, saying the crimes, which include an unsolved quadruple murder as well as Andrea Yates' slaying of her five children 2 years ago, don't comport with the real estate advertising.

Yep.

The murders "speak to the fact that there is no such thing as a haven," he told the newspaper. "These communities sell themselves as havens of safety and instant community, and when bad things happen they become more salient because they go against our expectations and assumptions."

Never, ever trust a Realtor.

If you do, don't be surprised if a sociologist ends up talking about you in the paper.

The offending Realtor, we hope, feels real bad about fooling thousands of Clear Lake home buyers, who are angry that their promised "American dream" includes coping with a "loss of innocence."

But, what're you gonna do?

Is there a lesson here?

The answer is Yes!

It's full-disclosure.

Realtors who work the River Oaks market in Houston, for instance, provide prospective home buyers with a 30-minute Powerpoint presentation that gives them an overview of crimes that can happen, AND HAVE HAPPENED, in that exclusive enclave, beginning with the "Blood and Money" killings and continuing on to the celebrated case of James Angleton, the HPD informant/bookie who is charged with murdering his wife, who grew up in Lake Jackson.

No one in River Oaks, therefore, has to struggle through the coping with the loss of innocence phase that follows a spate of bizzare violent crimes. There is no Monday morning quarterbackin' in River Oaks, no whining about "the Realtor didn't tell us about THAT." It's all on the table. There is no incongruity, in other words.

Clear Lakers, clearly, are not so fortunate and are now stuck with the aforementioned coping thing.

Clear Lake Realtors by now surely have rewritten their Web site verbiage, or least added lawyerly disclaimers. If not, the newspaper-reading public should expect nothing less than a full-blown investigative follow-up to the original

story.

Right?