His job was to stand with customers in their back yards, suntanned and smiling, and look beyond the problems of the past several years to see the opportunities in every suburban cul-de-sac. How about a pool and a sauna next to the patio? Or a custom waterfall near the property line?

“The possibilities here are as big as you can dream them,” he liked to tell customers, gesturing at their yards.

In a country built on optimism, Frank Firetti was the most optimistic character of all: the American salesman — if not the architect of the American dream then at least its most time-honored promoter. He believed that you could envision something and then own it, that what you had now was never as good as what you would have next. Since the country was founded, it had climbed ever upward on the spirit of people like him, on their vision, on their willpower, on their capitalism. But now, when he traveled from house to house to sell his monuments to American success, he sensed that spirit waning....

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • History • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • The Credit Freeze Crisis of Fall 2008/The Recession of 2007--

1. Teatime2 wrote: Well, there’s the rub. If the ‘‘dream’’ of a country’s inhabitants is owning a bunch of stuff and continuing to buy bigger and more, then it seems to me that the citizens and said country have gotten it quite wrong. October 7, 1:57 pm | [comment link]

2. Scatcatpdx wrote: I thought the American dream was work hard, thrift, and sober living and enjoy the fruits of your own labor, now it is how much stuff one can get or worst entitlements by using a debt or demand government force others to pay for your “American dream”. October 9, 11:55 am | [comment link]

Registered members must log in to comment.