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March 15, 2006
Las Vegas and America
The best piece explaining the ethos of Las Vegas (and the American West more generally,) is a short essay by Joan Didion entitled "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles." In it, she explains that Howard Hughes founded modern Las Vegas in 1967 because he, a reclusive insomniac, couldn't find a place to buy a cheeseburger in L.A. at three o'clock in the morning—so he created a whole city to cater to that need. It had nothing to do with sin or sex, but rather the perpetual American desire to reinvent oneself in a place where conventional expectations don't apply. Hughes' transformation of Las Vegas cleaned the city up: Mob influence was eliminated, and the Nevada Gaming Commission put the whole casino industry under tight regulatory controls (not necessarily tighter, of course, than the way prostitution is regulated in Amsterdam or Hamburg). Today the Bellagio, the Luxor and the MGM Grand are more like family-friendly theme parks than gambling halls. So it's ersatz and safe, but it hasn't pretended to be anything else for many years now. The Mormons, after all, are the religious group with the deepest roots throughout Nevada.What you see when you stand in a buffet line in a Las Vegas casino is the real America: ordinary working- and middle-class Americans, with kids in tow, who want to be entertained. (You remark that you had a hard time finding America's "fat epidemic"; try a buffet.) Many sophisticates from the East look upon all of this with horror, but it's not Las Vegas they're reacting to. What they find distasteful is the American demos itself, with all of its excess and energy.
"It Doesn't Stay in Vegas," a discussion between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Francis Fukuyama, The American Interest
It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.
Joan Didion, U.S. essayist. “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Posted at March 15, 2006 06:17 AM | Categories: America
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