Casual
Casual Vegas Needs Hookers Everybody knows by now that Las Vegas has transformed itself into a "family entertainment center." The city once notorious for its hookers, gangsters, and drunks has...
...This is your lucky day...
...There is no way to get from point A to point B in a casino, no evident path even to the bathroom...
...Imagine an electronic scoreboard at a baseball stadium one-sixth of a mile long, 40 feet overhead...
...In The Sting, the man being bilked was a gangster who (gasp...
...I stayed at the pyramid-shaped Luxor...
...Four city blocks of Fremont Street have been covered, umbrella-like, by an archway made of lightbulbs...
...It can be summed up in two words: You lose...
...There are no clocks, no music, just the hypnotic, constant tintinnabulation of the slot machines as they pay off a few quarters (or, more likely, ding to indicate that someone has just put a $20 bill into them...
...They don't bother to gussy things up...
...the memory of winning stays with you...
...Vegas aims to make it as easy as possible for people to impoverish themselves in the elusive quest for the one thing that really doesn't exist in America or elsewhere: easy money...
...They reek of bad conscience or nihilistic cynicism...
...Even along the city's distinctly seedy Fremont Street, down which Elvis famously drove in a T-bird convertible singing "Viva Las Vegas," a stunning transformation has taken place...
...The Luxor, three-quarters of a billion...
...The monstrous new luxury hotels on the "Strip" resemble theme-park rides...
...The memory of losing fades...
...The Mirage Hotel, which began the mad rush of new construction on the Strip at the end of the 1980s, cost $600 million...
...It's called the "Fremont Street Experience," and the guidebooks proudly inform you that it cost $70 million...
...These days, from Las Vegas to Atlantic City down to the daily state-sponsored lottery, the people being bilked are . . . the American people...
...But there is one important difference between the older casinos and the new...
...Because, of course, the rides and the shows (I saw Jay Leno, much better in person than on TV) and the electronic light displays are all a sham, a Potemkin village of the spirit...
...The "big con" is the one where the person being bilked never, ever finds out he has been conned...
...Las Vegas capitalists talk about the jaw-dropping amounts they have spent on things with deep pride...
...cheated at cards...
...Each has the same games as the others, the same slot machines, and the same disorienting design...
...The goal is to distract, then tempt, then entice you, and always with the same seduction: You're due...
...The MGM Grand, a billion two...
...They are populated by elderly employees who have seen thousands of poor, deluded suckers ruin their lives in the space of a few hours or a few days because they forgot, or never learned, the real truth of gambling...
...It would be better if the Luxor and the Mirage were filled to the brim with prostitutes and pimps and hoodlums, because that would remind tourists where they really are...
...Instead, they can kid themselves that they are at Disney World, and can come back again and again, ostensibly to entertain the kids, but really to feel that crazed rush that comes when you hit a blackjack or get three bars in a row on a slot machine...
...Las Vegas has perfected what the characters in that great 1973 movie The Sting called "the big con...
...None of this "family entertainment" has anything whatever to do with the real purpose of Las Vegas, which is to serve as a pimp for a deep and dangerous human weakness...
...The city once notorious for its hookers, gangsters, and drunks has infantilized itself...
...But only on the surface, because everything in Vegas is only on the surface...
...John Podhoretz...
...it has a full-scale replica of King Tut's tomb in the basement, a riverboat that travels around the first level, and, at each corner, a bank of elevators (the hotel calls them "inclinators") that rise to the pyramid's apex at a literally nauseating 30-degree angle...
...The city is a tribute to untram-meled capitalism and, on the surface, is an object lesson in the virtues of allowing the market to make decisions leading to general prosperity without the interference of meddling bureaucrats and zoning crazies...
...Every hour on the hour, after dusk, all other illumination along the street is turned off and, from above, there comes a light show bright as day-a 10-minute-long explosion of colors and images dancing in time to country music...
...The city is actually about its casinos, and they're all the same...
...But otherwise, a casino is a casino is a casino...
...By their shabbiness and lack of gentility, the older ones are a more honest expression of the essential tawdriness at the heart of this vice-peddling...
...Oh, the new ones are bright and high-ceilinged, the old ones darker and more claustrophobic-patterns that conform to generational changes in American taste...
...no matter where you are, you are forced to dead-end into a blackjack pit, a bank of slots, a roulette table...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 30
