weekend in vegas

Below are two journal pieces that I meant to post last month about Vegas; they are just food for thought about Vegas and U.S. culture. Bear in mind that it was the first and only time I have ever been to Las Vegas unless you count the hour I spent in the airport transferring from one Southwest flight to another.

10.01.05

Well, here I am on the 17^th floor of a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, NV. I have an ideal view of I-15 and the towering glitz of the Vegas strip – Paris, New York, the Luxor, the Excalibur castle, all to my right, the coliseum of Caesar’s Palace in my direct line of sight. And below me, a fake tropical beach, four pools, two with waterfalls, one that looks like a fish from above.

Nowhere is like Vegas as far as I can tell. My first night here, I was completely overwhelmed; nothing can prepare you for the mix of revealingly-dressed young women, elderly couples, scantily clad women and men dancing atop bars to bad 90s music, and all the bells and whistles that haunt the lobby of the hotel/casino. All the noise, all the people. And this is as true at 10 am, even if less crowded, as it is at 11 pm. At night there are just more drunk people wandering around. Last night my aunt and I walked the strip. We saw brandy snifters and abandoned hurricane glasses, streets littered with the calling cards of legalized prostitution, young Latin American men and women handing these cards out to drunk men wandering past, 21-year old kids running around drunk and tightly dressed, a girl playing a television script on her boyfriend for talking to one of the attractive scantily clad hustling women.

I won $56 this morning. I think I have gotten all I need out of Vegas.

It is a beautiful area of the country. A stunning desert mountain region with this oasis of lush watered trees. The Bellagio has water works displays out front in the day. Yesterday one of them was played to the tune of “Proud to Be an American.” Because where else but the United States of America could you have such water displays in the desert.

And the desert – is that why the Ancient Near East is so played upon by so many of the casinos – the Luxor, the MGM Grand to a certain extent, Aladdin’s, the Mirage, the Sahara. Something about the ancient near eastern world bespeaks such opulence to the amnesiac American mind. Somewhere perhaps such desire for possession of this forgotten association launches the Bush family to seek more than just crude oil. Perhaps the Bible is not all the motivation – perhaps Babylon still rests as a center of wealth, of excess, of riches and personal freedoms beyond imagination, and perhaps that is why it occupies an imaginative space of desire.

Yet that is what makes Vegas so complex; it is here where all of the Hollywood-admitted-yet- “good-girl"- repressed desires of our Puritan capitalist selves are born out. We have watt after watt of electricity pumping at all hours where men’s and women’s bodies can be purchased and watched and videorecorded and where we can even get married or divorced in a rapid fashion; where thought is something to be done later. It is time to live on impulse now. Where we have all been trained to go and deposit coins since going to Showbiz Pizza or Chuck E. Cheese’s for our seventh birthdays. If they only had skee-ball, we would all be gamblers crashing before the casino giants.

At the same time Vegas is so refreshingly open and unabashed about its roles in the world. The Disney version of ancient Egypt, of New York, Paris, Venice, ancient Rome stands before us all to tour around, to imagine we live lives other than the ones we do. Vegas openly promises the escape and openly bears the falsity of it in the plastic statues. We all play scripts to excess here, just like the girl pushing her boyfriend for talking to the woman in red. We can relinquish all need to think our moments through, that is both the relief and the punishment of Vegas.

Yet, as I said, there is something so honest in such scriptedness. All of American life has become scripted of late. Very few moments happen in anyone’s life where they do not have the appropriate movie-popsong-television-realitytelevision script for the moment. Here it is an admittable fact of life.

And there are churches too. Nonpushy evangelicals standing on street-corners with “God Is…” pamphlets and priests standing quietly in the shade of the strip, collecting money for homeless shelters. Because Vegas has more homeless people too.

I cannot tell you what Vegas is. I can only tell you what happened to me. But it is 1:45 pm on Saturday now, and I sit in my room reading Orlando Patterson’s Freedom, doing homework, typing away at my computer.

10.02.05

Today, I had wanted to write about Penn and Teller. I saw them Friday night, and I wanted to discuss postmodern culture and my generation. What does it say that you can have magicians performing in Vegas for whom a large part of their act is showing how they do the “magic” they do, convincing you not to believe them or anyone who claims to be doing magic of all sorts, and more than that, convincing you to recognize the falsity of the entertainer-entertained exchange. Penn said point blank that “I am a liar.” They also did a little flag burning magic trick (without actually burning the flag) just to point out how meaningless the flag is next to the meaningful “freedom” of the bill of rights.

That is what I had wanted to write about today, so I felt an obligation to mention it. All I can think about though is what happened just before 2:30 am this morning.

Before starting this act of re-membering, I do want to question exactly what we value in capitalist freedom. Fresh from reading Orlando Patterson, I am forced to ask about the costs of “sovereignal” capitalist freedom – the desire to pursue your own freedom even beyond the point where you severely hinder the freedoms of others.

Early this morning, my family found itself the victim of a uniquely capitalist crime, and perhaps Vegas is home to all the sorrows of capitalism. The Marxian adage we might all want to think about is how capitalism makes people rich in needs. In Vegas, the need for more money is evident amidst all the flashing dollar amounts on every casino floor, even in the airport slot machines.

It is perhaps not surprising then that sleeping in a Vegas hotel, I woke up to find my aunt screaming at an intruder, an intruder who entered while we slept and had just enough time to steal all my aunt’s cash before bolting out of the room. Luckily nothing worse happened to any of us, even though my aunt chased the woman and her male partner down the hallway.

I feel, however, that this incident was not the only aspect of capitalist sorrows to haunt my family in the early morning hours. The hotel in its greed to protect itself either from culpability (and thus a possible lawsuit) or from some sort of financial scam was patronizing in handling my distraught aunt, my mother, and myself. At first, security tried to tell us not to call the police, that the police would not care about a crime of this minor magnitude. When my mother expressed her legal certainty that this was not the case, the police were called, and a wonderful policeman did a much better job of talking the morning’s events through with my distraught aunt. The hotel, who had no security cameras on the floors or in the stairwells offered us no support other than to give us a new room.

There is no solution, no simple justice equation, no answer to mistakes that were made, whether they be not bolting a door, not having security cameras, or being desperate enough for money to break into someone else's room and take it. I write this not to provide answers or even to expect their appearance; I write in the hope to share my own query about costs the deepest longing for capitalistically construed sovereignal freedom with others and to seek opinions in response.