Unironic America
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Unironic America It voted for Bush and vacations in Vegas. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Las Vegas "Some people say, 'Danny, he's not president any more, you should let up on him . . ." To which the...
...More than a million people live in Vegas and its suburbs, and another 35 million Americans visit every year...
...And they love Danny Gans, who is by contemporary standards a most peculiar performer...
...They wear shades of green found nowhere in nature woven into patterns found nowhere in nature made of material found nowhere in nature...
...the men are devoted to broadcasts of NASCAR races and pro wrestling, the women to Dr...
...Al Gore's states, all (with the exception of New Mexico) on the West Coast, in the Northeast and the industrial Midwest, were colored blue...
...If the salade niçoise is the signature dish of the other capitals, the endless buffets loaded with high-carb, high-fat, heavy foodstuffs offered at low prices in all Vegas hotels comprise a joyous cornucopia for these 21st-century lotus eaters...
...What's most immediately striking about Vegas visitors is the unassailable proof they provide of the warnings we've heard for years about the growing obesity of Americans— which you do not really believe is happening when your frame of reference is K Street or Melrose Avenue or Broadway, where the women are sylph-like, the men wiry, and both have visible muscle tone...
...Gambling is as basic a pleasure as the indulgence that leads to obesity...
...We see the absurdity in everything, and we struggle to believe...
...The difference is indicative of the yawning cultural gap that has developed in the United States in the past 35 years...
...Gans really is the representative performer for the teeming hordes visiting Las Vegas...
...Las Vegas was Bush Red...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Las Vegas "Some people say, 'Danny, he's not president any more, you should let up on him . . ." To which the thousand-strong audience attending impressionist Danny Gans's Sunday-night show at the Mirage hotel, having just laughed riotously at Gans's extremely mild and obvious riff on Bill and Hillary and Monica and cigars, responds in one voice: "Nooooo...
...The breakdown of all 3,309 counties in the United States made the point even clearer, with Bush winning the more rural areas in landslide numbers while Gore was comparably dominant in the cities and large suburbs...
...He reproduces word for word Al Pacino's concluding monologue in Scent of a Woman and stitches together passages of Tom Hanks's narration of Forrest Gump, attempting only to evoke the experience his audience members originally had at these tearjerkers...
...He has a $100 million contract with the super luxurious Mirage, whose owners built an eponymous theater for him there...
...And yet Gans will probably never get an HBO special or a one-man show on Broadway, despite his undeniable talent, because his act doesn't have any kind of edge...
...It may seem, well, ironic that the capital of unironic America should be a mecca for gambling, but it isn't, really...
...Laura...
...They do not like it when the institutions they respect, like the presidency under Bill Clinton, are brought low...
...Both can cause worlds of trouble for those who grow addicted...
...Gans performs an imaginary duet in heaven between James Stewart and Kermit the Frog that leaves many of the audience members in tears...
...If anything, Gans is anti-edge...
...There isn't even the faintest whiff of ironic distance or satire in his show...
...Bush is seemingly a simpler man than Gore, and Bush Red is a simpler place than Gore Blue...
...vision actor with an album currently racing up the contemporary Christian music charts, is the hottest act in Las Vegas right now—and it is telling that you have probably never heard of him...
...Those of us who live in Gore Blue cannot dispense with our filter of distance...
...Las Vegas, the fastest-growing city in the United States, is not even the capital of Nevada, yet in a very real sense, it has become one of the nation's cultural capitals...
...They reject the conservative worldview but have no confidence in the restorative powers of their own belief system...
...They cry for Earnhardt, root for their teams lustily, eat fatty foods because they taste good, and wear nylon because it feels more comfortable on their overstretched skin...
...His audience, already eating out of the palm of Gans's hand, erupts in raucous cheers and thunderous applause...
...What could be simpler than the quick fix of fast food or the hope for an easy score...
...Those of us in the Gore cities do...
...George W. Bush's South and Southwest and Plains states were all in red...
...A moment later, Gans morphs into Ronald Reagan: "I'll cut your taxes," he says, "and this"—meaning America—"is the Promised Land...
...Its citizens love their country and its institutions without finding it necessary to enter the kinds of objections routinely offered in Gore Blue—about the nation's history of racism, its treatment of native Americans, the difficulties of suburban sprawl, the discontents of unbridled capitalism...
...That confusion makes it possible to, say, support a president who commits perjury in a videotaped deposition, because the perjury is seen as part of a complex sexual and marital dynamic—and because it can be understood in this way, it is therefore excusable...
...More recently, Washington has been afire with talk about the map we all watched change colors on Election Night...
...And what Gans's act suggests is that the real division in the United States is not ideological or racial, but rather what might be called "an affect gap...
...The other American capitals were all Gore Blue...
...Indeed, we make a fetish out of that struggle, believing that our confusion is actually a mark of sympathetic engagement with the complications of American life...
...The Americans populating the Las Vegas Strip, if only for a few days, are almost unknown to New Yorkers, Washingtonians, or Ange-lenos...
...And those cities reciprocate the indifference and disrespect...
...They are the sort of people whose weekend revolves around the Friday high-school football game...
...They are no better than the people of Gore Blue—they break as many of the Ten Commandments, even though they want to post the Ten Commandments on schoolroom walls—but they do not struggle with their core beliefs...
...while black may be the uniform in the other capitals, in Las Vegas it's still exclusively the color of mourning...
...This is, at least in part, the result of the existential crisis that has beset American liberalism since the failure of its utopian promise to eradicate poverty and racial disharmony through government action...
...But the simple pleasure taken by Danny Gans's audience in his anodyne entertainment is just as real a pleasure as the delighted relish taken by the residents of Gore Blue in their supposed intellectual superiority to the current occupant of the Oval Office...
...If Washington is the political capital, New York the business and media capital, and Los Angeles the capital of entertainment, Las Vegas has become the capital of that scattered sector of the United States that does not gravitate to, or have much respect for, any of the other capitals...
...They appreciate his respectful treatment of entertainers and movies they adore, and find the lack of irony in his act refreshing—while the pooh-bahs in the other capitals would consider him drippy and anachronistic...
...It has become a contemporary cliché to say that America has become two nations—black and white (according to the 1968 Kerner Commission report) or rich and poor (Arianna Huffington and Peter Edel-man...
...He is wildly popular and successful, doing something like 100 superb impressions in 90 minutes, many of them in song (the most impressive on the night I saw him were of singers Sarah Vaughan and Anita Baker...
...They were saddened by the death of Dale Earnhardt, a man whom few residents of the other capitals had heard of...
...That failure has left the residents of Gore Blue in a state of perpetual cynicism...
...Al Gore really was the appropriate representative of this mood in the year 2000, with the mocking sighs and eye-rolling contempt in which he indulged during the debates on the one hand—and his search for meaning in metaphor, in millenarian environmentalism, and in the psychoanalyst Alice Miller's blame-your-parents tome, The Drama of the Gifted Child...
...Gans, a one-time minor-league baseball player and third-rank teleContributing editor John Podhoretz writes a twice-weekly column for the New York Post, from which this piece is adapted...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 27
