Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 132

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Popular Culture Review

living in “America: The Experience” — but the problem was not essentially that
some poor individual could no longer walk down the sidewalk and pass out smutty
flyers promising a male or female (or sometimes something else) escort with a
beeper who can be in your hotel room fifteen minutes after you make the call. The
problem was that it was our street. Our rights were violated long before his rights
were violated. But communities, in the end, have no rights. They are ephemeral
and metaphysically suspect in this culture; but the truth is that they are more basic
than you or I. And so we seek them out.
The number one reason people come to Las Vegas and gamble is not
to win. That comes second. The number one reason is to socialize — “with the dealer
and the other patrons in the casino,” so says a study commissioned by Harrah’s.14
Alone, nothing would be possible. We couldn’t gamble or win or lose or socialize
or even think about such things.
George Herbert Mead realized that mind is not a thing, but “a process
that arises out of the relationship of man to society....The mind is anchored in
society.”15 The Self, then, is always only a Self in tenns of its relation to the Other;
and, interestingly, it is playing games that helps one’s sense of Self to emerge.
Games, argued Mead, force us to adopt the role of the Other — we think about the
chess board from the strategic and visual vantage point of the Other, we mentally
play each position in a baseball game simultaneously. In such proto-Self displace
ments the true Self emerges as one that is “progressively understood in its
relationship to the roles of others.” 1'1
Perhaps this is, in part, what we search out in Vegas. At the craps table we
are all in it together -real, live, flesh and blood people smelling like perfume and
cigarettes and...casino, yes! casino...making one intercorporeal body molded
against the low table, our muscles extending into the muscles of the shooter,
our hearts beating in unison with the rhythm o f the game. And 'Bg&