(Roughly) Daily

Isaac Ariail Reed muses on Las Vegas and what it can tell us about ourselves…

It comes buzzing into my mind like a hazy half dream, the kind that arrives when you’ve had too much espresso and need to close your eyes in the dark of your hotel room for a moment. I’m in two places at once: One is the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, where I am wandering around the sandy two-acre lot amid the retired signs of dynamited casinos, hotels, and other businesses on the Strip, listening to old Elvis live shows on my headphones; the other is the recently opened poker room in the Venetian Casino, where I find myself sitting next to Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual who once saw, with a clarity that remains difficult to reckon with today, the end of an epoch.

As Benjamin wrote in 1928, in his sprawling and unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, “if, sometime in the mid-nineties, we had asked for a prediction, surely it would have been: the decline of a culture.” He meant the 1890s, the European fin-de-siècle and the coming descent into fascism, but I could say the same thing about the 1990s today. Benjamin was writing about the arcades, those iron-and-glass canopied commercial passageways that he took as emblematic of Paris when it was the epicenter of the glory and fragility of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. What Benjamin saw in the persistence of the remaining arcades in early-twentieth-century Paris (after the urban-renewal efforts of Baron Haussmann leveled many) is what I see in the persistently glitzy architecture and tightly time-constrained nightly shows of Las Vegas today: a culture attempting to grasp its own passing…

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… What I did not quite realize viscerally before this year, though, is something that the great art critic Dave Hickey was always on about. Las Vegas, despite its similarities to Macau, is in its history, culture, and politics deeply American. Hence, de Tocqueville: “Those who live in the midst of democratic fluctuations have always before their eyes the image of chance; and they end by liking all undertakings in which chance plays a part.” In Hickey’s 1997 classic, Air Guitar, he wrote, “America…is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.” He continued:

What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility. So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say, Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in your vision. They become breathtakingly perceptible, and, as a consequence, there is no better place than Las Vegas for a traveler to feel at home. The town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize—and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social differences rather than their exacerbation. The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication.

Hickey was luminously perspicacious in his ability to recognize, amid the vast and disturbing inequalities of Las Vegas, the horizontality of its cultural politics, which are not so much lowbrow as they are open to weirdness and conformity in equal measure such that the sheer humanity of the equally but differently weird (or conformist) is suddenly public and undeniable. Hickey also argued that there was something about the American experiment wrapped up in his “home in the neon.” The secret of Vegas is that there are no secrets, he explained, and, furthermore, “there are only two rules: (1) Post the odds, and (2) Treat everybody the same. Just as one might in a democracy (What a concept!)” Hickey thus found in Liberace’s rhinestones the key to a democratic politics of honest fakery as a defense against the subtle tyranny—recently become much less subtle—of a politics of authenticity and its handmaiden, the deep hatred of art, freedom, and changing your mind dressed up as love of family, morality, nation, and the supposed liberty of guns and tariffs. The emphasis, for Hickey, is on the honest and the different human commmunities of desire that are the root of pluralism in aesthetics: Liberace’s rhinestones is not a real diamond, but union wages, sexual freedom, and aesthetic ambition are honestly held commitments. In Hickey’s version of Las Vegas, no one asks who is a “real” American, because the reality of the USA is not something that has to be performed into existence by duplicitous electoral promises and unpaid contractors; it’s right there in the posted gambling odds, the midnight steak and eggs, and the civilizational ambition of the Hoover Dam. 

This, then, is the problem we have inherited from Hickey: Can the bare and brutal honest fakery of Las Vegas, and the deeply American, weirdly libertarian, outsider-art-loving union democracy that Hickey found inside that honest fakery sustain itself as part of a free society? Or will the crushing inequality, insane techno-oligarchy, and battling moralisms of toxic masculinity and therapeutic bureaucracy be, in the end, too much for Vegas and thus too much for the United States as well?…

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… There was in Hickey’s writing a deep suspicion of both the aesthetics and the politics of authenticity, and that suspicion, one might hazard, is the connection between Las Vegas and the kernel of freedom held in common that has, on occasion, here and there, made itself present in American life, and which has sustained American intellectuals as distinct as John Dewey and Joan Didion. What, then, does Las Vegas do for us when it reminds us that libido is a fact of life and building a culture on its suppression is a little like taking a political stand against gravity? Here I found my way to a different kind of theorizing, once I realized that far from any simulacrum, Las Vegas is in fact the place where American modernity articulates the eternal problems of being human.

On the one hand, Las Vegas is the culmination of the historically specific phenomenon of the American modern, bringing together the technological sublime, movable capital, representative democracy, and libertarian culture in the first postindustrial metropolis. Yet on the other hand, Vegas is about the inescapable aspects of human existence from time immemorial: desire as multiple, the importance of creature comforts to a sense of well-being, the philosophy of uncertainty and the problem of fate, embodiment as both wonderful and unbearable, and the irrepressible need to create new art and build new buildings. In this regard, we can say that Vegas is the place where the American project’s complex and conflictual relationship to the more immovable aspects of human life together was thrown into stark relief. 

And then there are the binaries. In Vegas, it becomes quite clear that the towering economic power that drives American politics has, in the end, cultural sources and cultural consequences. The USA is about sin and salvation, filth and cleanliness, God and the Devil, believer and atheist, winners and losers. All societies have such binaries. The sociologist Émile Durkheim mapped them all as versions of sacred versus profane, while the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used them to read stories as clues to the structure of the mind itself. But in the United States, with its Calvinist inheritance and infamously strict racial hierarchy, the binaries have a special importance. They have always resisted middle grounds and gray areas, preferring the intense clash of purified poles to ambiguous endings and existential despair. This is why American movies are melodramatic to the point of absurdity and why the harshness of the American moral climate, when combined with the filth of American politics, created a political culture that can be unbearably self-righteous. Vegas puts on display the harsh feel and gleaming strangeness, bordering on surreality, of the American binaries, but it also breaks them down, which is the deep effect of its honest fakery. Vegas is not there to make you feel your job back home is unavoidable. It is there to make you ask whether the difference between good and evil is really what your pastor says it is. 

For a long time, it sure looked as though Hickey was right to find a home in Las Vegas, and to find his version of America there too, because of the way Vegas both displayed the binaries and embraced the gray areas in between. It happens in two steps. First, the town cuts through pretense. One night in Vegas will remind you that in America, the most famous cultural critic in the world, past or present, is about as important as the current special-teams coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers (and probably less). Second, it liberates you from the defensiveness that constantly infects the American intellectual trying to justify his existence. Why? Because Vegas is an intellectual’s paradise in so far as it is the place that knows, better than anywhere else in the United States, that we are all creatures addicted to symbols, entranced by our illusions, and in need of a lucky roll. In Vegas, as Dean Martin and Katy Perry have both attested, the desirous body, the strategic mind, and the neon sign are bound together in a cosmic swirl, and the result is the Frankenstein’s monster of American modernity. What could be more intellectual than that?

Back when American modernity was more than the latest tweet from the Department of Homeland Security, its intellectuals navigated the harsh binaries of American culture via innovation in thinking and generosity of spirit, making some kind of room, some of the time, for the next immigrant culture to arrive and do the two most American things of all: make a buck and do whatever you want with religion and culture. This is the spirit we have lost; we increasingly just want to double down on the same binaries that every other preacher in this godforsaken land does, calling endlessly for the return of the cultural artifacts of an earlier era. But the two great philosophies of culture to emerge in America—pragmatism and jazz—are, among many other things, attempts to solve the problem of the excluded middle between the purest Good and the worst Evil, and to find in the very confrontation of contradiction an improvised way for humans to live together a little better tomorrow than they did yesterday. This is the American promise: that beyond the binaries lies not transcendent meaning or nihilism but a little bit of democracy, a little bit of freedom, and a whole lot of practicality. 

But navigating the binaries to subvert and reinvent them takes energy, and it is that energy one still finds in Las Vegas. Even if in enervated form, it is there, and this is the part of the city—the Strip, yes, but also the Arts District and downtown—that some foreign visitors grasp intuitively and immediately and others will never, ever understand: Vegas as the intensity of American hustle. On that winter-vacation visit, I was set straight about it by my bartender. I had just had a quite unpleasant interaction at the craps table with an overstimulated and sleep-deficient fellow in town for the rodeo. His truculent attitude had turned very dark, even threatening, in response to my friendly overtures. I was getting ready to bitch about it to the young man from Los Angeles who had just served my whiskey and had all the signs of being a safe political harbor. He cut me off right away: “Shit, I’m glad they’re here. Otherwise, we’d have no money to make these two weeks in December.” 

There, in that moment, I saw the tiniest glimpse of possibility for a new, but nonetheless recognizable, American culture, and I realized everything I was, in my academic bubble, missing. Vegas is much cheaper to live in than LA; for the first time in its history all major casinos on the Strip are unionized; my bartender, like me and the poker pros, was hustling most weeks of the year but was also going to take a real vacation with his girlfriend; I might be able to write and teach, but who cares about my opinions on the cultural politics of the rodeo? And that’s the deal that Las Vegas has offered: Make the wages fair and the housing affordable, post the damn odds, and let people make their own judgments about what kind of clothes, art, sex, and sports they want. That’s the project, if we want our country back in a new and better form. But the artists in Vegas are here to tell you: The odds are very long…

What does it mean to “think Las Vegas”? “Mourning and Melancholia in Las Vegas,” from @hedgehogreview.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.

Pair with “Lost Vegas,” from @lukewinkie.bsky.social in @slate.com: “Everyone inside America’s most flailing destination city has a theory for what’s wrong. Now I have my own.”

* Hunter S. Thompson

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As we check the odds, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that Las Vegas strip fixture The Aladdin hotel and casino closed. The site of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s wedding in 1967, its final show was a preformance by Mötley Crüe.

The building was demolished the following March (in front of 20,000 spectators, 1,000 of whom paid $250 each to watch the implosion from inside a “ringside” tent). In 2000 a new Aladdin resort, three times larger than the original, opened on the site, but quickly went broke. It was purchased out of bankruptcy to become “The Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino.”

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