Vegas: America's last honest city

I spent last week in Las Vegas, and the weekend vacationing with M. First Vegas, then other notes.

There are good people here. Most of them want to leave. Organizing here is unpleasant. Each person who walks through the door is beaten at the end of a long string of bad luck; no-one cares here about any greater good around the campaign. Even our director here is a pretty serious partisan hack; it’s all she can do to pay lipservice to the need to have a more representative democracy, because to her it’s all about the candidate.

Coalition partners here don’t even make a symbolic show of respect; they are emblematic of the city itself, zoned in hard on their own grift with no room for others. We are told to stay away from any sites that they might be at or be shown ‘shock and awe’ organizing.

I offered a longterm job to the one good person I worked with here, in Austin. She was excited about the opportunity to leave, and excepted on the spot.

Vegas has been caricatured and written about ad nauseum, it seems there is little left to say. So, ideas on the intrinsic nature of Vegas then.

The city itself is perpetually in the process of being built. There is no coherency or theme to what one is presented with, but the idolatry itself is uniform. Everything within viewing distance, wherever you go, is a come on. The city wants your money or your sex. All venues are laid out as vulnerable, ripe for the taking.

The casinos advertise themselves as the loosest slots, or the most fun; indeed, from the promotion it is hard to see how anyone makes any money from Vegas whatsoever. All and sundry advertise the best of whatever they have to offer: the comedian that I have never heard of is the best of the year, the show is the best this season, etc. There are few laws stopping the adverts from lauding themselves in words that might come as a surprise should they ever be read by their purported sources; the LA Times may not have known that they’re calling ‘Bite’ the best show of the year, but there it is up in lights for all to see.

Women are on display and for sale in this city. It is a male fantasy, meant to appeal to the base brain with little interference from the cortex.

None of which avers to Vegas’s largest inherent truth: it is a gigantic disappointment. Nothing is or can be as good as it is advertised. The slots are not ‘loose’, the women aren’t as lithe as promised, nor are they even interested in puerilie desires. The casino interiors are nothing as compared to the exteriors, all cheap veneer, tired barkers, garish stained ultrasuede. The accomodations are cramped, and everything costs an arm and a leg.

The main stage show really isn’t very good at all.

The whole city seems to be set up to engage living breathing adults of all ages to behave as though they are the children the night before Christmas, keyed up on advertising, sugar, and booze to believe that tomorrow, through the offices of some unknown and unseen benefactor, all of their wishes are going to be met. They are surrendering their vulnerability, allowing themselves to believe in the possibility of the good, despite their best instincts.

Everywhere you go you see the adults losing whatever cohesion they possess, but without the familial bonding to hold it all together. Spouses turn on each other, people yell at their kids, the aura of both disappointment in particular, and in general disabusement with the whole thing are on clear display. This is why the whole shebang has to be relentlessly sold. The purveyors of Vegas must continually overcome that disappointment and disabusement, to draw the people back in to the process of being relieved of their ready cash and their vulnerability.

To hear the people around you in the midst of being fleeced, you’d believe that everyone is having the best time of their life. Those in mid process are selling the thing to themselves, coming down from the sugar rush as they watch the fake money spill through their fingers but believing still that all they need is one last catch. They make jokes with each other that are desperate and unfunny as they throw away whatever they’ve brought with them. The hardest are those beyond humor, who no longer believe, but cannot conceive of another way. They are peopled throughout each of the lower level casinos, the human detritus.

And now imagine a whole city of people who have come here with dreams to have the vulnerability beaten out of them. Who no longer trust themselves to tell a good thing from a bad thing, let alone trust anyone else. They people the city and their hard carapace decends over everything. They are indifferent to a fault, desperate to the hilt, and each and the other grinding away at whatever the last angle is they can come up with.

Outside of the Strip, the city looks like a rundown suburb of one of the less affluent California cities, a San Jose, or a Sacramento. Few buildings are higher then a single story, the paint chips off their walls in the 105 degree heat. There is a general feeling of shabbiness, and disrepair. Everywhere are strip malls, and even here a more dressed down version of the dream is being sold, “Our slots are loosest, 264 ways to take advantage of us!” screams the casino across the way from the office.

City planning appears to be based mostly around sprawl and resource allocation for the well off; lawns are status symbols here.

The winners are brazen, the moreso because every way they turn there is clear evidence for what loss looks like, a crazy clown mirror image of themselves at the other end of the wrong roll of the dice. They strut and spend opulently, continuing to sell the process to the rubes because they have to believe in it too, believe that they are somehow chosen by Lady Luck, Chance, God, to be the winners they are, to believe that they are somehow better and different from those on the outside of the wrong bet.