Travelogue  

Viva Las Vegas!

by Richard Kostelanetz

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Like those millions of other so-called human beings who find relief for their woes, each and every year, at Coney Island, [this writer] occupies these miraculous premises with purely personal intentions — or, more explicitly, in order to have a good time. And a good time he has. Only when his last spendable dime has irretrievably disappeared and his face sadly turned toward his dilatory domicile, does it so much as occur to your humble servant to plumb the significances of his recent experiences. — E. E. Cummings, "Coney Island" (1926)

It is common to speak of Las Vegas as a one-industry town, but that industry is not just legalized gambling, which is part of the whole. Nor is the principal industry tourism, though the airport that is remarkably close to the city reportedly ranks tenth in the world in gross passenger traffic. No, the principal business of Las Vegas is simply, shamelessly, and amicably separating outsiders from their money. Enter the airport terminal, as we did, and the first thing you notice right in front of you is a bank of slot machines; the next thing you notice is that many people are actually playing them, even though everyone knows — not thinks, but knows — that the one-armed bandits, as they are correctly called, are calibrated to favor not the bettors but the machine's owners. The truth, acknowledged with your first steps, is that people come to Vegas expecting to lose money, lots of it.

Some of the costs of visiting Vegas are low, as "loss leaders," to use the American merchandising term. America West charged me only $307.50 per person for a "package" that included a round-trip, five-hour flight from New York, two nights in the architecturally spectacular Luxor Hotel, and transportation from the airport and back. Since I could have purchased the same package at a lesser hotel for much less money (and other airlines offered competitive bargains), my suspicion is that the airline was being subsidized for delivering live customers. The airport-hotel transport was probably a pure promotion, given free to the airline in exchange for getting us tourists to use those services, because, in fact, the transport company had a flier offering tours of the Grand Canyon.

You cannot possibly believe Las Vegas architecture until you experience it close up. Photographs are simply inadequate for conveying essentially sculptural qualities and thus visceral experience, not to mention their proximity to one another. (The same limitation applies to photographs of the Grand Canyon.) The Luxor resembles an Egyptian pyramid, down to mammoth cats at the entranceway and an awesomely huge interior space. Next to it is the Excalibur, which resembles a medieval English castle; on the other side of a street is New York, New York, whose entire ground floor is a witty collage of bits and pieces of my hometown. The entrance to Bally's at night is a sequence of colored neon loops over a pathway so long it has a moving floor for those in a hurry to get inside. At one hotel, I'm told, the ceiling changes color from time to time. The staff's costumes at some hotels reflect their architectural theme, so that those working at Caesar's Palace, for instance, look like they've walked out of ancient Rome, or at least out of an MGM movie about ancient Rome. My favorite is the Venetian, which has a replica of Venice's Grand Canal, down to gondolas and uniformed gondoliers, on the second floor (because the ground floor is wholly a casino). At the end of the ersatz Grand Canal is a palazzo whose ceiling looks so much like the sky that for a moment I felt like I was outdoors.

Nowhere in the world known to me are so many people simply walking up and down the main drag during the evenings — the sidewalk isn't wide enough to accommodate the crowds — because the initial exhilaration of Las Vegas comes from being there. There's no need for the walkers to worry about relieving themselves, because all the casino-hotel doors are open to strangers.

Some hotels offer street displays that are free for all. Directly on the main drag, the fountains in front of the Mirage hotel explode every 15 minutes to resemble a volcano, with red smoke billowing in the air and fire burning on the water; at Treasure Island next door, a battle between a pirate ship and a British frigate is reenacted every 90 minutes throughout the evening. After the pirates' boat takes a hit that sets it afire (with flames that can be smelled), the British ship is sunk, its sailors jumping into the water, its captain going down with his ship, to the cheers of the spectators. Like so much else in Las Vegas, this is a fake that knows itself fake. So thick is the self-conscious deception, as well as your experience of deception, that if you drive four hours to visit the Grand Canyon, as we did, your first thought is that the scene before you might be elaborate papier-mâché.

Walk or ride along the four-mile "Strip," as Las Vegas Boulevard is commonly called, and you see the most intricate flashing signs ever, dwarfing those at Times Square, each kinetic message machine offering entertainment or gambling attractions unavailable elsewhere. This is corporate folk art at its best, each participant trying as hard as possible to top everyone else. Within the hotels are restaurants, whose food is either remarkably cheap (as in all-you-can-eat buffets for less than $15 — another loss leader), or very expensive, and shops offering things that can be stuffed easily into suitcases, such as clothes and trinkets but not, say, hardbound books or home appliances. You can't move anywhere in Las Vegas without confronting some enticement to spend your money.

Between the Mirage and Treasure Island, both owned by the same company, is a monorail, free of course, whose loudspeakers broadcast for the duration of the ride the chief executive's pitch for, if I understood it correctly, photographs of yourself against a variety of computer-generated background scenes. In the mammoth gambling halls that dwarf those I'd seen before in Puerto Rico are not only banks of slot machines but formally dressed croupiers offering to take bets. Many are Asian, there to cater to Japanese and Chinese bettors in their own language — eliminating linguistic alienation. At least one hotel offers free gaming lessons in Japanese.

Few Las Vegas laws get in the way of its primary business. The casinos need not close. Indeed, most lack visible clocks, so that you needn't feel the pressure of time. No one prohibits smoking, not even of cigars, not even in elevators. Even though municipalities in the U.S.A. (and indeed the world), not to mention Native American reservations, have casinos nowadays, they finally can't compete, lacking many of the elements contributing to Las Vegas' success. For instance, most of the Las Vegas hotels have gigantic self-park buildings, which are free, in addition to "valet parking," for which the attendant should be tipped. This means that in going from one venue to another no one needs to waste much time between gambling and spending sprees.

Precisely by making gambling legal (or refusing to make it illegal), the state of Nevada created economic opportunity, incidentally epitomizing the American genius for mass-merchandising something that Europeans thought strictly for the very rich — the pleasure of casino gambling. Through this egalitarian openness, Las Vegas has become a thousand times larger than Monte Carlo. Some of the original Las Vegas entrepreneurs were criminals who had previously fulfilled the American appetite for alcohol during Prohibition and later became experienced at running illegal games of chance. As Las Vegas expanded, they were replaced by businessmen with clean records — initially Howard Hughes, then the executives of public corporations — an interesting case of honest people taking over a mob business, rather than vice versa. The best line in Robert Lacey's biography of Meyer Lansky has Lucky Luciano just before his 1962 death telling a reporter, "These days, you apply for a license to steal from the public. If I had my time again, I'd make sure I got that license first." In Las Vegas, such a license is easy to get.

One result of such libertarian freedom is a continually expanding economy and low crime (which is surprising or unnecessary, given all the amicable fleecing). Migrants continue to come to work in Las Vegas. One statistic tallies 10,000 newcomers every month versus 4,000 emigrants, which means a net growth of 72,000 per year — or an increase of Las Vegas' 1.25 million population by 7 percent every year.

In the garden of the Hilton Flamingo is a small statue remembering Benjamin "Bugsy" Segal, who, opening an early hotel in the 1940s, realized the possibilities of a resort in a place so dry it was bare of trees. Since some of the recent hotels have thousands of rooms (the MGM Grand has 5,005), it is amusing to read that Segal's original Flamingo had only 77 rooms! Segal knew what could be done here, but did not see big enough. It is scarcely surprising that the largest trade shows, such as Comdex, which attracts 250,000 visitors, are held in Las Vegas.

Vegas amply supports the art of live performers who you've seen on television: musicians, boxers, comedians, magicians, even dancers as sophisticated as the Cirque du Soleil. Vegas offers everyone familiar names that are better live than on television, just as Vegas is better than real life. Las Vegas offers kinds of experience not available back home, whether because the comedians are raunchier or the acrobats perform with a depth that can be felt. Some of these acts, like the continuous show at Circus Circus, are free, while others, such as the Cirque du Soleil creation, "O", cost more than $100. The companies that own casino corporations have become modern Medicis in keeping alive certain arts that might otherwise disappear.

My favorite is Cirque du Soleil — a remarkably sophisticated Canadian dance troupe that bills itself as a circus and adds some clowning. Very much in the high modern choreographic tradition of using props as resistance, the performers put their bodies through a skeletal cube, large metal triangles, upright poles, trapeze bars, bungee chords, trampolines, on see-saws, and much more. They perform twice each night in a theater built especially for them, with remarkably good sight lines for each of the 1,400 spectators. I'd love to see the same show again; that desire is always the simplest measure of excellence. Though the tickets cost each of us $80, I did not feel ripped off, accepting my fate in Las Vegas, though I might have felt differently if a theater anywhere else charged me so much.

Given all the 99¢ shrimp cocktails, free drinks, and bargain hotel rooms, it is hard to believe that all of them turn a profit and that all the hotels fill enough beds during the year. But new hotels are rising and old ones are being refurbished or spectacularly demolished to make space for yet more new ones, so someone must believe it is possible to sell yet more of the same here. (The haze on the otherwise clear horizon is blamed upon "construction dust.")

Some speak of Las Vegas as a sexy town, but I had just the opposite impression. I didn't see single people picking one another up. Instead of the attractive young women normally dominant in deluxe hotel lobbies, I saw plenty of middle-aged, ill-looking, poorly dressed, frumpy, and overweight people, most of them Americans. What the city offers is not sex but its substitute in the form of orgasmic euphoria that can come from the surprise of winning more money than expected. A secondary business is the generation of quick cash, beginning with more pawn shops than I've ever seen in one place anywhere else. One sign offered cash against a credit card, without the need for a secret "pin" number, again illustrating an ease in separating people from their money.

I assume that most who live in Vegas are inured to the constant sales pitching — they must if they are to remain solvent. Our Grand Canyon guide confided that everyone walking on the Strip must be a tourist. Locals never go there. The truth is that no one is forcing anyone to spend his money; it's all done voluntarily. My assumption is that people surviving here must assume that they're superior to the hoi polloi, much as, say, bosses assume they are different from employees (or vice versa) and college-educated people assume they differ from those who aren't. After all, if you can survive on only one buffet a day and $4.95 prime rib dinners, staying at a casino might be cheaper than staying at a Motel 6 and eating at McDonald's.

What Las Vegas represents is the redistribution of American wealth — away from an aging middle-class to corporations on one hand and hospitality employees on the other — all without coercion from either a six-gun or any state. The benefits are as two-sided as capitalism itself. For the visitor who knows not to gamble (in my case, I lost $1.75 at the slots), Las Vegas is an extraordinary adult playground, the Coney Island that my predecessor Cummings never imagined, and that I look forward to visiting again.

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

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