All What Is Delicious to Man
We're ten years away from a world of perfect abundance, and that's where we'll always be.
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
He said to me, "You must not ask for so much."
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
She cried to me, "Hey, why not ask for more?"
–Leonard Cohen
The American dream of abundance was born of the American reality of abundance. All that land “vaguely realizing westward” offered the promise of untold riches just waiting to be excavated, literally or figuratively. The nineteenth-century engineer and inventor John Etzler, a German emigrant to Pennsylvania, heralded the arrival of what he termed “superabundance” in his lavishly titled 1833 opus The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men, in Two Parts.
Americans! you are offered things which you could not buy by mountains of gold, and if they were offered as large as your rocky mountains. You are offered to live henceforth in magnificent, beautiful, and brilliant palaces, which the m…