Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [35]
Las Vegas is the city of spectacle. The Treasure Island Casino has an hourly pirate battle with two clipper ships, smoke-filled cannons, and scantily clad female pirates in a fake lagoon. Tourists can visit the New York-New York Hotel & Casino and take in a replica of the city’s skyline. They can go to the Venetian, board gondolas, and be poled down indoor copies of the Venice canals by aspiring opera singers. They can watch the pathetic eruption of the belching man-made volcano and the rubberized trees in the “rain forest” of the lobby of the Mirage. They can eat in a replica of a French bistro called Mon Ami Gabi, under the shadow of a half-size copy of the Eiffel Tower.
Mon Ami Gabi, where I went one day for lunch in the forlorn hope of escaping the ugliness and noise of the Strip, has waiters in black vests, white shirts, black bow ties, and long, white aprons. But, like the rest of Las Vegas, the exotic is only a veneer. The menu offers hamburgers, sandwiches, waffles, and, in what I suppose is a concession to France, French toast. Diners at the bistro look out on Caesars Palace, where Roman statues speak, although not in Latin, in Caesar’s Forum. It is a short walk to diminished copies of the Giza pyramids at the Luxor.
Las Vegas sells a cartoon version of other cultures and other lands. It is a monument to pseudo-events. It is a place where stereotypes can be experienced as reality. The guts and sinews of every theme-park hotel and casino, however, hold the same, mind-numbing slot machines, roulette wheels, and blackjack tables. A trip to Las Vegas is a visit to a sanitized, cutout version of foreign countries without the intrusion of foreign people, the hassle of unintelligible languages, strange habits, different ideas and traditions, or bizarre food. Here everyone speaks English. Here you are surrounded by Americans. Here, once you get past the façade, it is all the same. There is always beer on tap and hamburgers. The chaos of the real world, of other cultures and ways of being, is purged and made tidy, easy, and accessible. But it is all a game. New York-New York will part you from your money as efficiently as the Luxor. And that is the point. It is all about taking your money, and when the money runs out, you might as well not exist. Las Vegas, unlike the rest of the culture, is brutally honest about its exploitation.
Las Vegas speaks in the comforting epistemology of television. Many of the slot machines have movie and television themes with audio voices of characters from the Austin Powers movies, I Love Lucy, or The Price is Right cheering on the slack-jawed, glazed-eyed customers who repeatedly pull the lever, or, increasingly, push a button, to set off the whirl of icons. In Las Vegas the illusion of the exotic overlies the banal comfort of the safe and familiar. In a nation where less than 10 percent of the population has a passport, how many Americans can tell the difference between the illusion of France and the reality of France? How many can differentiate between Egypt and the illusion of Egypt? How many care?
Las Vegas should, as Neil Postman observed in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, be considered the “symbolic capital” of America. “At different times in our history,” Postman wrote, “different cities have been the focal point of a radiating American spirit. In the late eighteenth century, for example, Boston was the center of a political radicalism that ignited a shot heard round the world—a shot that could not have been fired any other place but the suburbs of Boston.” In the mid-nineteenth century, “New York became the symbol of a melting pot America.” In the early twentieth century, Chicago, “the city of big shoulders and heavy winds, came to symbolize