Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 127

Las Vegas, Las Vegas

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they change for their public. Vegas is, perhaps, the extreme case. It is a city where
the skyline mutates every year, where renovations begin on major hotels before
they’are two years old, where an historic property indicates anything from theb
previous decade. And Vegas moves in violent ways, too. Never content simply to
add, the city delights in blowing up the past — literally explodi ng whatever wasn’t
working, erasing it and beginning again. Andres Martinez argues that it is Las
Vegas’ penchant for blowing up buildings that makes it the quintessential Ameri
can city. This is American, I take it, because it is less than subtle, less than nuanced. It offers no pretense of caring about history (how can a nation with so little
history of its own care about history in general?). It is violent and decisive. It
springs from a culture of waste (if it breaks — or goes out of style — don’t fix it;
throw it away and buy another one). And it appeals to a culture spoiled enough
to remain childlike: this, in the end, is why we like watching the Dunes imploded
or David Lettennan dropping melons off the roof of his building — it’s cool when
stuff ‘splodes. Add to this the perverse pleasure we take in destroying the very
goods and way of life that we worship, and you have the struggle in the American
heart. Letterman’s flaunting of excess (e.g., his obsessive tendency to destroy food)
and smashing of perfectly good consumer goods (televisions and other electronics
being his favorites) is as much (and at once) a celebration of these items as it is
a cathartic enactment of our shared dirty secret: we are unfulfilled with this life.
Imploding the Dunes and blowing up the Sands say the same thing on a larger
scale. There is a moment of release and possibility when parts of Vegas explode —
as if the revolution might be starting, as if the proletariat is finally rising up, even
when we know that the event is itself a packaged product and we can’t wait to
book a room in the new Phoenix hotel soon to rise from the ashes.
In the early 1980s — aeons ago in Vegas-years — President Reagan
suggested that increased tourism could solve every American city’s problems.
Of course not every city had a positive, marketable identity; but in a nice postmodern
twist, such a fact has become the very selling point for some (Flint, Michigan, for
example, turned its depressingly bad image, made nationally well-known after
Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me,” into the basis of its self-promotion in the tourist
trade). As a result, “minor” cities began promoting tourism and dedicating larger
sections of their budget for tourist sites and advertising; and larger cities increased
their spending by millions. In 1990-91 Atlanta spent $8 million and San Francisco
spent $9 million on attracting tourist. But such figures didn’t approach the Las Vegas
budget of $81 million — an amount that has grown every year hence. The budget
is high due in part to the gambling revenue tourists bring, but it is also high due to
Las Vegas’ tendencies to blow things up. When Vegas shifts its identity it does so
in an explosive way, moving from a mobsters’ paradise to an adult Disneyland to a
family vacation spot and, most recently, back to an adult playground. The move