In fact, if I really cared about making money I would buy stock in companies like Wynn, Bally’s, Harrah’s and the like, because the return on investment is more likely to be positive on that side of the table.
I’ve been told by a number of people that Las Vegas isn’t only about gambling. It’s about entertainment! There are so many things to do up and down the strip that you can go to Vegas and not gamble at all. It didn’t seem likely to me, but I had been to Vegas a couple of years ago and didn’t gamble. So, I knew that a gambling free Las Vegas vacation was possible.
Last time I was in Las Vegas I brought the kids. My daughter was dancing in a dance competition that occupied a large portion of our time. The extent of our time on the “Strip” consisted of driving up and down the strip, going to see a show, and walking around a casino or two. We didn’t really “do” Vegas.
This time was different. My wife and I left the kids at home and we ventured off on our first childless vacation since our oldest was born. Our vacation wasn’t about destination, it was about re-connection. It didn’t really matter where we went; it mattered that we went together and to share the experience no matter what else happened.
We decided to take an offer from a time-share company who would put us up for a week on the “Strip.” A free hotel no matter where it was located was all that we needed. We had never listened to a time-share spiel, so we even looked at that as an experience to share and talk about. The point of the vacation was not about “location,” it was about “destination.” How bad could listening to a two-hour spiel be? We had the rest of the time to ourselves.
Well, we arrived in Vegas Monday evening and realized that the trip might not be as easy as we had imagined. The first floor of our Hotel was a smoke fill dungeon of a casino. The smell of cigarette smoke filled every nook and cranny of this hotel making life miserable at first. The smell brought back memories of times when smoke filled many more aspects of my life. But, since California had made cigarette smoke illegal in so many locations, it was rare for me to even smell it at all for years at a time. My wife had it even worse than I did. Her sinus cavities had swollen shut and she had a massive headache that drugs couldn’t cure. Monday night was miserable as we tried to sleep with the smoke from seven floors down making its way up into our non-smoking room.
The next morning we couldn’t wait to get out of the room. We thought that we might benefit from a little run down the Las Vegas Strip. We figured that the distance from Circus Circus down to Mandalay Bay was about four miles. So, an early morning run of eight miles seemed to be a good way to get the day started.
At about 6:15 AM the strip was a different place than the night before. Most of the people outside at this time of the morning were fellow joggers and a few people looking for a breakfast buffet. A run up and down the strip is an excellent way to see it for the first time, in person and up close. Running early in the morning also enables you to miss the crowds in the streets that block your way later in the day or even late at night.
As we started our run we quickly saw that jogging the Las Vegas Strip was a quite popular thing to do. We passed quite a few people, as quite a few people passed us. Joggers of all sorts came toward us a well. We easily saw over a hundred, and surely there were many more running on the street that we didn’t see. As I saw all of these joggers running the Las Vegas Strip I started to think about Las Vegas in a different way.
What is Las Vegas all about? It is more than gambling, even though gambling has given Las Vegas its power and influence in American culture. But it is a mirror to American culture. But, that mirror isn’t flat. A curved mirror focuses the light, and Las Vegas is a curved mirror that focuses American culture.
There are two questions that I’d like to try to answer here. The first is how does Las Vegas focus American Culture? And, the second is why does Las Vegas focus American culture? The how and the why questions actually tell us a little about American culture itself, and more.
When you run or even walk down the Las Vegas strip you see every aspect of American culture that you can imagine. Actually, “culture” might be modified by the adjective “popular.” The strip contains every aspect of American popular culture. The appeal is to the masses, exaggeration abounds and truth is hard to find. And, it is impossible to find a bookstore or other form of culture that might be associated with something other than popular American culture. Las Vegas mirrors the world as Americans believe that it is, not as it is in reality.
One example of what I am describing is seen at the Venetian. In St. Marks square in Venice, Venezia Santa Lucia in Italian, there is a famous clock. By American culture the clock is strange, because it is a 24-hour clock instead of a 12 hour clock. The clock is reproduced at the Venetian is numbered with twenty four roman numerals, like it’s cousin in Venice. But, the hands on the clock assume the imaginary 12 hours of traditional American clocks. American culture has forced a false reality on the reproduction of this clock. Why? I can only assume that it is because Las Vegas is about encouraging American fantasy, rather than teaching reality to those who would like to learn about other cultures.
The reality of Las Vegas is that it is created for Americans to see the world the way that they believe that the world is. American’s love the circus, and Circus Circus focuses on the activities and entertainment found at a circus. Americans love New York City, and New York, New York focuses on what America culture assumes what New York City is like. American popular culture views Paris, Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt, and Venice in a distorted way in which the Paris, Luxor, Caesar’s Palace and the Venetian Casinos do.
Las Vegas is what happens when capitalism rules without a check on its power. People want to see it, then Las Vegas offers it for the masses to view the way that the masses expect to see it. This is because the masses are willing to spend their money in places that represent what the masses expect to see. People are attracted to the casinos by what they expect to see. Americans want to see a fake replica of the Eiffel Tower, the Paris offers it to the masses. The people expect the people in Paris to be aloof, speak with French accents and charge a lot of money for French type food, then the Paris once again fits the bill. And, all up and down the Las Vegas Strip it is the same.
How did Las Vegas get trapped into this facade of a world reflection that Americans want to see? I would guess that it must have to do with what attracts people. Obviously sex, food and money attract people. Comfort and familiarity also attract people. And, if you own a casino they are the elements one must use to attract the largest number of people to their casino as opposed to every other casino on the strip. So, the Las Vegas business mantra is “give the people what they want and take their money in return.”
The only thing that Las Vegas doesn’t give people is money. But, instead of keeping money out of the equation, Las Vegas offers the chance, the hope, and the possibility that you might win some free money. The truth is that the casinos exist because the casinos take much more money than they give away. So, the casinos take money off of the free give away table and offer hope instead. That is what gambling is all about.
So, in an effort to offer everything else and in order to take the money of the masses Las Vegas has learned to appeal to the sense of expectation, comfort and familiarity. But not all people know what they should want or desire. And, that doesn’t matter, because Las Vegas tells everyone what he or she should want and expect. It is an enormous feedback loop that tells everyone what American popular culture believes is the most important thing today.
So, by capitalizing on popularity Las Vegas attracts people who are attracted to what the culture has proclaimed to be popular. And, as we know, marketing has jumped in front of this line in order to both proclaim what is popular, then they do everything in their power to convince us that they are right. And, Las Vegas is the center of the universe in the grand scheme of things.
But, as I ran down the Las Vegas strip I began to wonder again. If Las Vegas uses all of this marketing, declamation and appeal to our basic desires, how do all the joggers fit in? No one in Las Vegas is going to claim to insight these people to run up and down the strip. The joggers don’t bring money to the casinos when they probably don’t even have money on them while they are running.
I believe that there is one additional aspect to Las Vegas. That is the addictive nature of gambling. Most people have addictive behaviors. Some people are more compulsive and have more natural tendency toward addictions. Gamble in Las Vegas is the ultimate goal for a person with a gambling addiction. But having one addictive behavior means that one is also likely to have an addictive personality. And, it is clear that all those smokers in the casino of my hotel had another addiction. And, the percentage of smoking gamblers in that casino was much higher than what I perceive to be the national average of smokers among the general population. And, I began to think about other addictions. And, I couldn’t believe how many obese people that there were riding their little scooters up and down the strip, and how obese people moving slowly along the strip.
So, Las Vegas is American pop culture in a nutshell. This is initialized by the casinos use of whatever they can to attract the mainstream popular masses to the city, so that they can take as much of their money as they can. The addicted gamblers come back again and again and bring their addictive behaviors with them. And the people attracted to the pop icons bring some of their own habits and popular culture with them, and the addictive behaviors fill the open space, like smoking, over eating, and even jogging.
All I can say after all that is my Las Vegas Vacation was certainly a learning experience. - Source: From Dr. Forbush Thinks Blog
