A long-running show at the Hilton here is "Menopause: The Musical." While the number of Americans over 65 has increased 20 percent since 1990, in Nevada the number has increased more than 100 percent. Poet Philip Larkin once said he would like to go to China if he could be home for dinner. Adelson and other makers of modern Las Vegas have obliged people like Larkin, sort of.

The Venetian has gondolas plying indoor canals that, unlike Venice's, do not smell: "Score one for the Americans -- when they rebuild Europe," Paul Cantor of the University of Virginia writes, "they correct it, they improve it, they get it right." Las Vegas' hotel casinos also include Paris, and New York New York. Las Vegas, says Cantor, "fulfills a deep-seated American dream -- to be able to pack the whole family into the station wagon and drive to Europe."

Frommer's guidebook suggests that there should be a Hoover Dam Hotel and Casino -- why drive 30 miles when you can see a replica on the Strip? This, says Cantor, is democracy -- giving the masses access to the world, albeit radically reduced.

Thanks to Adelson, Macao has its Venetian -- a replica of a replica of a city. So China has passed into postmodernism's erasure of distinctions between high and low culture, and between originals and copies, without yet achieving modernity. Buffett and Gates may still be richer, for now, but Adelson's achievements astonish and multiply.