Epilogue - How Las Vegas Started the Twenty First Century

The week Paris Las Vegas opened in Fall 1999, we ventured into the Eiffel Tower restaurant on the eleventh floor of the faux tower. The restaurant was an elegant place, entered only by elevator and with a reservation. A bouncer at the elevator doors on the first floor checked against the reservation list before permitting us to enter. The elevator lifted us, its doors opened, and a stylish bar lay in front, the entre to a well appointed room.

We sat at the bar as the sun went down and the lights of the New Strip came up. From our vantage in the only days-old Paris, the newest Las Vegas, the epitome of postindustrial chic, unfolded. The Bellagio was directly across the street, its choreographed fountains shooting jets of water into the sky to the sounds of opera amid colored lights reflecting the water as if it were a dance. At Caesars to the north, the new tower reflected the lights of the Strip, solidifying the leading casino brand. To the south stood the Monte Carlo, a $300 million spillover casino hotel, and New York, New York, middle class iconography painted on the most American of canvases. In the distance, the golden glow thrown by the thirty-eight story tower of Mandalay Bay completed the futurescape of postmodern entertainment and service.

Eerie and exhilarating, the view from the Eiffel Tower didn't exist a decade before. From my window seat, approximately the view on the cover of this book, I couldn't see anything that had been on the Strip in 1990. None of the past was there; no Sands nor Dunes, two mainstays of the old Strip; no low-cut motel or beach club Strip casinos on the street of the 1950s or 1960s and especially no wise guys. Instead walkways crammed with tourists, mom and pop from everywhere with kids who sought to make the new Las Vegas their own. Here was the new atop the old, the single alchemy Las Vegas does best, maintaining illusion atop each newest facade. This Las Vegas was worth billions. It had all the right signs, symbols, and brands and could endlessly titillate. The script was perfect . . .if you like that sort of thing. From the window the view was equally late Rome, the self adorned. In a decade, Las Vegas distilled what the public wanted, even begged for . . . . as always, long as the public was willing to pay.

When McCarran Airport expanded in 1963 to provide the city an opening to a market beyond California drivers, not everyone embraced the idea. Some of the Strip hotel owners feared that the new Paradise Road exit, which carried traffic about one mile east of the Strip, might encourage visitors to bypass the Strip for downtown Las Vegas, where the trains still brought plenty of visitors to spill out into the night. Bypassing the Strip, they were certain, would kill it, leave it “dark,” and forlorn, a relic of an idea in the desert, desiccating by the moment. Even after the Rat Pack made the Strip home, after Frank and Sammy brought a kind of attention none of the legion of skilled publicity men and women who labored for Las Vegas could buy, the owners were afraid that the attractions they'd worked so hard to build were simply not enough, too flimsy to withstand the diversion of traffic to a nearby street. They knew not what they'd accomplished, how permanent were even their first attempts to create pleasure space, how successful their translation of vice into recreation had already become.

The new Las Vegas has no such fear. Glenn Schaeffer, Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Paul Pusateri, the late Arthur Goldberg and the others who built the new face of Las Vegas willingly sink billions into the Strip even though casino gambling is legal in thirty-seven states, even though California passed Proposition 1A in 1998, which permitted Native Americans to operate Las Vegas-style casinos in the state, even though forty-eight states offer a lottery. They take for granted something their predecessors could not bring themselves to believe. They've made Las Vegas into entertainment, brought it to a place where it stands on its own, where the sum of the city's parts is, if possible, greater than the whole. In 1963, Las Vegas was a gamblers' town run by gamblers. In 2000, it had become a town devoted to entertaining, to providing everyone with any experience they want.

If it sounds like Disneyland, it is. To call Las Vegas “Disneyland for adults,” is trite; to regard it as a place that provides adults with the feelings we expect children to have at Disneyland makes more sense. Las Vegas encourages you to become selfish and petulant. You can stomp your figurative feet to get attention, and if you'll pay, you'll get what you want all day and all night. Here is Las Vegas's genius: in a self-indulgent, self-centered society what could be better than attention for a fee - that didn't feel like you were paying for it.

Las Vegas has become the rhythm of America. The day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2001, I sat with photographer Virgil Hancock in the bar at Red Square in Mandalay Bay. “Las Vegas looks like its going through a little downturn,” he observed as he looked around the half-empty bar. He'd missed the rhythm, hit the one day of shoulder season, a Tuesday, after New Year's and the Consumer Electronics Show, the King Day three-day weekend, and before the madness that is Super Bowl begins. With 36 million visitors annually, the shoulder season is short. Las Vegas mirrors the pace of American life, combining holidays, rituals, and ceremonials: King Day, Super Bowl, Presidents' Day weekend, the NCAA Tournament and especially the Final Four, Memorial Day, the NBA Finals, 4^th of July, Labor Day, the NFL season, the World Series, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Eve. Anybody's holiday or event will do. Every night can be New Year's Eve if you want it to and instead of seeing it as decadence, as Americans once perceived such behavior, the never-ending party is what American culture espouses in the age of the self.

Entertainment and the self have become two of the important pillars of the age of Nobrow world culture. In a time when everyone wants to be a consumer, when entertainment is culture and the cult of the self dominates, Las Vegas has preeminence. The desert city has been providing precisely this experience for better than one-half century, first to a society that disdained it and thought it at best a deviant release, then to a descendant culture that embraced the willing deception. From Eminem to Donald Trump, American life is all about the self and that doesn't seem to be changing. As our attention spans become shorter and our desires become more parochial and maybe even perverse, what will stop Las Vegas from continuing? Not water, maybe air quality, but short of a revolution of the scale of George Orwell's 1984, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaiden's Tale, Las Vegas is likely to remain at the pinnacle of a peculiar realm, one that people crave but that they simultaneously have to see as dissolute to guard themselves from the very weaknesses Las Vegas exploits.

In postmodern America, there are only two truly egalitarian events left: the casino and the traffic jam. The traffic jam is egalitarian because helicopters have yet to become the daily toy of choice of the superrich; your Mercedes and my Ford get stuck the same, and all the CD players, cell phones, and leather upholstery in the world don't change that much. In the casino, who you are makes little difference. Everybody's happy when you win - white, black, brown, yellow, red, pink, green, or blue, they stand at rapt attention when the bells go off and the coins clank in the metal trays with their unmistakable ring. The joy is palpable; everyone smiles, pats you on the back, gets close to share in the glow. They think they're next; you've only done what they're going to do.

This faux conviviality is indicative of the transformation of American society and the ways that historical ties have unraveled. In theory, we were once more involved with each other and less enamored of devices. Television and the technological revolution of the last twenty years, especially personal computers, the Internet, and cel phones, allowed us to redefine communication. In the process, we cut out many of the older patterns of interaction. Shopping on the Internet may save time but it has few of the familiarities of going downtown and none of the social dimensions. Private space that seems public, where we think we're secure, helps assuage the transition and shared activities that are intensely personal and fundamentally competitive like pull slot machine levers cross a series of boundaries that transcend old and new forms of interaction. If your machine hits, you're the only winner; when it hits, you're instantly part of a community of aspirants. In this respect, Las Vegas once again finds itself measuring the pulse of the nation.

The doomsayers and the morose all predict the demise of Las Vegas, arguing that the appetite for what it offers will diminish or that so many places will offer Las Vegas-style amenities that the city will lose its luster. Maybe they're right, but I doubt it. It's easy to predict the end of anything; as local columnist John L. Smith says: “if you predict the end of the world long enough, sooner or later you're going to be right.” But if Las Vegas' history is any guide, the city's ability to respond to changes in culture can not be underestimated. Since the legalization of gambling in 1931, Las Vegas has been able to provide Americans with what they weren't supposed to have at home . . . and make whatever it was permissible if not flat-out okay. This sleight of hand was a neat trick, accomplished by the city's fundamental malleability, its lack of commitment to any version of its past or present.

There are dangers to the stability of prosperity to be sure. Las Vegas works for locals because the cost of living and the wage scale bear close relationship to one another. Wages alone don't do the trick; the combination of the toke, tipping, and the low cost of housing make life easy. Anything that disrupts the parity is a threat, and in 1999 and 2000, the spate of high-end housing construction aimed at newcomers, especially Californians, began to drive the cost of homes up for the first time in a decade. There was no parallel increase in wages and a tug at the fabric of prosperity resulted. At the same time, WalMart sought to open enormous superstores with non-union labor in the grocery section, long a unionized activity in Las Vegas' chains and another of the places where high-wage limited-skill work created middle-class families. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union challenged this move, and even though the county commission passed an anti-superstore ordinance in 1999, WalMart was able to build, presenting another challenge to working class prosperity. Idiosyncratic entrepreneurs also pose a potential threat. As construction neared its end at the Venetian, Sheldon Adelson claimed he had been overcharged, sued his general contractor, and refused to pay the subcontractors. The decision confirmed his reputation for venality - even if most in town knew full well he had a point; rumor had it that considerable material delivered to the site and billed to Adelson was diverted for other purposes - and nearly tipped the local construction trades into a mini-recession. Las Vegas' prosperity isn't in peril nor is it inherently perilous. It does stand on a number of pillars and each has to support its weight for the mix to work.

Rather than a string of carcasses in the desert, Las Vegas in 2050 will likely be the center of its own universe. Surely by then it will be a megalopolis that stretches to the California border and beyond, encompassing Boulder City and even Hoover Dam to the southeast. It will reach north and west far beyond today. The mountains around town will be covered with homes, hospitals and health care facilities will be ever present, and the roads will be so crowded that today's complaints about traffic will elicit fond memories of a simpler time. Las Vegas will host its own major league sports teams and maybe the NCAA championship football game. By then it will truly create entertainment as well as consume it.

There are obstacles to this rosy picture. Global warming could make the desert entirely unhabitable - it's close as it is - the U.S. Department of Energy could in the end site all the nuclear waste from every nuclear power plant in the country about 100 miles away at Yucca Mountain, and Americans and the people of the world could embrace a culture of self-denial, could react with puritan fervor against entertainment, pleasure, and self-indulgence. Any or all of these could make Las Vegas an anachronism, a version of the mining ghost towns scattered throughout Nevada and the rest of the interior West.

These externalities are real, but they don't define the trajectory of Las Vegas. Capitalism is a warrior culture, a hierarchical mode, and Las Vegas is its epitome. “Every single casino host in Las Vegas would rush to the airport to pick up Saddam Hussein and offer him a stay in their hotel,” said one casino insider, and he nailed the essential feature of capitalism in all its forms: greed. In Las Vegas, ordinary people feel special; people who feel that they are special can be catered to in a manner that suits their self-indulgence. Las Vegas anticipated the transformation of American culture not out of innate savvy but as a result of a lack of other options for the city. The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice - a sometimes ambiguous choice that many in American society from the privileged to the ordinary couldn't handle, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.