Vegas, Baby

Ah, Vegas! The greatest towering, glittering monument to extraction there ever was. The entire city exists for it. Its palacial halls and casinos can be quite beautiful, with its artfully lighted landscapes and dazzling decorations, all juiced with resources vigorously squeezed from its visitors like lemons. The patrons wander the halls like empty husks, their ghostly faces showing vague dashes of hope for regaining what it was they lost. The city takes and takes. It takes everything from the symbolic power in money as its hotels mark up cheap rum and coke mixed drinks thousands of percents to the water and energy squeezed from the surrounding region to power this wasteful monstrosity in the center of the desert. HST was right to obsess over the horrors pervading the Vegas night: this truly is the epicenter of the distinct American drive to grow endlessly and dominate; this showcases the voracious, cancerous appetite for senseless expansion and the bottomless need to trade pleasure for pain, a bottomless need that results in the powerful building tottering, topheavy towers of pleasure upon the compressed foundations of the powerless in pain. If New York is the symbolic concentration of the American man’s material ambition to create and impose order on chaos, Vegas is the underslung id, the dark animal struggle for pleasure and power prettied up with dazzling light and awe-inspiring crystallizations of wealth. Wall Street tries to hide such impulses in endlessly baroque structures of symbolic deceit, and the largest corporations try to hide such impulses underneath obfuscating brands, imagery, and propaganda, but Las Vegas extracts openly and proudly, rewarding the lucky with riches and pleasure and spreading a false morality by condemning the loser (those who lose by chance no less) as weak and lacking of self-control. 

This is the distinct American hydra, cutting itself off of all History in its quest for self-definition, but in the end cycling through a series of false faceplates borrowed from other times and cultures. Witness the rich pulling their expensive cars up to the Palazzo, which is nothing but a great faceplate emulating some vague European style, which is merely fixed like a mask to yet another chain of casinos, over-expensive restaurants and bars, and shopping malls. But I bet those patrons feel oh so European! Walk on down the street and oh my goodness more casinos, restaurants, and stores! Here you can feel like a pirate, or an ancient Egyptian, or a circus-goer, or the hypermodern man, without comprehending in the least what any of it means!

Yes, extraction, extraction by symbol, by monetary transfer. And this is all administered and mediated through an apparatus composed of those simply trying to get by. The numerous attendants and receptionists and tellers and doorman all stand there statuesque, administering this system of extraction and domination and attempting to distance themselves from the endless waves of patrons they see built up by spectacle and ground down slowly (or quickly) by mechanisms carefully, statistically tuned to rob.

I witnessed the apparatus firsthand during my first and last visit to a strip club. The club was tucked carefully behind the main strip, out of view but easily accessible with a wink and a nod to anyone who just asked. That’s how it works, you see. First walking into the place, one realizes one is doomed. Completely empty, a row of girls sitting in the back in chairs waiting for someone to walk in, their disinterested faces buried in their cellphones. And they descended on us as soon as we sat down, offering us water that mysteriously disappeared after they isolated us and took us separately off to the back rooms to pressure us into asking for pleasures wildly priced. They understood that most men are far more vulnerable to a pouting, beautiful woman than a thug with a baseball bat. But one is struck with all sorts of conflicting thoughts in such a place. These poor women were starved. Do we accept a service? Will it help these girls? How much money will they get? But isn’t this debasement? What were we even doing here? I told a pair of girls in the back room that I simply couldn’t afford for one of them to get naked and dance in front of me. They cooed that I was much more honest than most guys, and one of them offered me a cheaper lap dance, which I reluctantly agreed to. We even talked a bit of politics. She was a sweet girl and seemed genuine at moments. I actually felt awful when she told me she was going to start the dance, and then awkwardly grinded her ass on my lap, perhaps dimly taking note of my whiskey-and-despair-flaccid member. She showed me her shaved pelvis and I felt nothing. I smiled at her and thanked her and dragged myself miserably to the stage, putting a few bills in the g-string of a dancer and then trying to strain and sit there and watch her take it off and dance naked. Another hungry girl approached me as I sat down, perhaps failing to notice I just got done with a lapdance. I had to turn her down and after that I simply left to wait outside for a cab. An ugly place. This is reminiscent of various anthropological studies across cultures and time. Often when a community disintegrates and social life degenerates into mere market logic, women tend to become objectified and traded amongst men for various uses just like this. And then this provokes a paternalistic backlash with reactionary men repressing their women in order to avoid this. So it seems women get the shaft either way. Good enough reason to be a feminist as any.  

Outside, the doorman has his face buried in his phone as well. In front of me loomed Trump tower, a staggeringly ugly monument to gross incompetence. Brilliant rewards for the most daringly corrupt and defiantly useless. Such is the society we enjoy! Yes, these are the snapshots of Vegas.

Of course anyone would wonder why people do it. Why would they flock here in droves to be dazzled and then battered about and robbed? Well, one would have to acknowledge that Vegas does give something back after all: it entertains. The patterns of superficial gains and resulting loss it induces takes one through an emotional rollercoaster, instilling hope and dashing all that away, perhaps to make room for fresh naïve hope once again. It can be quite thrilling. And one must credit the excitement of the sheer multitude of spectacle: of all the competing imagery and diversity of performance. There are brilliant shows playing all week, and much thought goes into much of the landscaping and some of the architecture. Such luxuries could once be enjoyed by a middle class with a bit extra in disposable income perhaps, but we know how that’s going now. No, this place is mainly a playground of the wealthy now, or a killing ground for those willing to part with what little they have left.

I do have to express thanks for Vegas. It never ceases to be a muse. It gets the creative juices flowing with its sheer display of contradictions. Such a beautiful, blazing, sparkling place built and crystallized on such monstrous human forces. Vegas has never ceased to fascinate me. I despise it (perhaps one despises it more the more one learns) just as much as I am bedazzled by it. So thank you, Vegas. You got me writing again.

And all this here in the middle of such a beautiful desert. The painted rock glows in the setting sun and the features of the surrounding mountains make it appear beautifully alien and earthly at the same time. One could do much worse than simply taking a bag of shrooms and some firewood and camping gear with some friends and simply leave the road and wander into the desert before one even arrives at Vegas. One could definitely have a more meaningful and rewarding experience. For hundreds or even thousands of dollars less. Hah! Such is the true value of money!

Well, the Buddha had it right. Desire generates suffering because one will either always desire more or have their desires frustrated. His teachings resonate now because he too was living in a particularly violent stage in history when various empires were vying for domination. So it goes: as the objects of desire increasingly become concentrated at the top of a given power structure (as empire calcifies and a ruling elite insulates itself against the rest of the population, securing more desires and desiring yet more), one has to either be frustrated in their pursuits of desire, or fight their way to the top, inflicting more suffering. Unless of course one is a sociopath, and then such an environment would seem just right. Buddha’s suggestion was simply to stop desiring. And Jesus’ was along the same lines. What these religious prophets had in common was that they advocated a departure from the existing constellation of affairs in order to generate a new one. Perhaps to generate a new constellation of desires that is this time fulfillable (of course one would have to stretch the definition of “desire”)? Political revolutionaries generally advocate this as well, just in secular terms. Religious prophets advocate an escape from the existing reality by generating a new ideological reality, while the revolutionaries call for the generation of a new material reality, which is itself based on another ideological framework of course. But is either option any longer available? Is existing in an alternate ideological reality desirable? Is a complete material revolution possible, considering today's decentralization of power? Or should one learn to grow just as one is through the cracks?

In the end, everything is highly interconnected and multi-faceted. Vegas can be an engine for extraction and weird epicenter of various forces where genuine people can meet and have fun. One's own experience can be radically different from another's, and inform one's opinion of the place. I'm just reading into my own experience of the place. Projecting my own melancholy. My own ideology. I'm satisfied.

I'm disappointed with my visit and grateful. Such conflicting emotions can exist at the same time. We are strange creatures. And so is Vegas.