Glitzy New Vegas: A Portrait Of Our Mentality?

American Voyages decided to take a break for a while, as the intoxication of late summer overwhelmed the blogger with much to plant, care for, journey to, plant some more, and then think about more planting.  A lot has happened on the continent since then, and much of it is very problematic, to say the least.  When I started this blog, I wanted to make it all about what things look like in the natural world in different places on our diverse continent.  The focus of American Voyages was to share with people the details and realities of what the corners of our land look like.  Owing to botanical fascinations, and because plants are pretty much the most ubiquitous things on the landscape, the blog focused a lot on what emerges from the ground.  Very quickly, however, it turned to history and her mean half-sister politics, because, well, we are a very integral part of our landscape these days.  Opinions, of course, come with the discussion of such topics.  In the coming weeks, I plan to visit the issues which are knocking on our doors day in and day out.  I start this potential ideological rampage by making a very bold statement:

The United States of America is teetering on the verge of a new Civil War.

This time, however, the sides will not be down to mere blues and grays.  Even while the political structure of the nation has been ravaged by a seeming encampment of two main forces against one another, the way that our entire continent works is national evolution through a lovely, albeit somewhat reckless, individuality.

Yeah, yeah, that's all well and good, you say.  What about that article on modern Las Vegas you promised?

Why, this ties right into that.  You see, Vegas is everything that we are rolled into one.  Vegas is the glittering allure of free-market potential.  Vegas is a place where everyone has a choice on how they want to find pleasure or pain.  Vegas offers gluttony and indulgence for the tourist while it also offers temperance in the name of making it happen for the local.  Vegas is surrounded by one of the most amazing, simultaneously fragile and dangerous deserts in the world, offering amazing opportunities for experiments in conservation and Eco-tourism, while also tapping out so many of the local natural resources to keep a 120 degree day feeling like 65 beside artificial watercourses.  Vegas can be a lot of fun.  Vegas can also be a lot of regret.  Vegas was founded by Mormon missionaries bent on promoting a very specific cultural supremacy and has since become a place to find almost as much diversity of cultures than London or New York. 

Is Vegas a bad place?  It most assuredly can be.  Prostitutes might be swept off the streets these days, and gambling shares the stage with even bolder offerings of sheer indulgence from the spa to the buffet, but people come here to accelerate what they might otherwise do at home: vacation, or morally bankrupt themselves. So what can you do here, for good or for ill?

The options are many.  As noted, one of the most incredible features of Las Vegas is its location, pretty much dead right center in the Mojave Desert.

I-15 Northbound, about 1 mile north of the turn of for US 93. 

As most people arrive in Vegas in the relatively safe and isolated environment of a commercial jet plane, then get whisked to frigidly cooled hotel lobbies in slightly less cooled taxis or limousines with tinted windows, they really don't notice that they are in the middle of one of the hottest and driest places on the planet.  Granted, the winter can sometimes be chilly and the place can get both rain and snow, but the fact is that by and large Las Vegas should by all rights not be where it is at all.  It has since sprawled over whatever was left of a slightly more verdant part of a dusty valley.  It uses millions of gallons of water a day to not only provide for the needs of over a million people who live and work and play in the metropolitan area, but also to allow for spectacular fountains and pools to dazzle its visitors, in broad daylight, what they normally expect to be more impressed by at night.

In fact, I have very few pictures of Las Vegas at night.  Most of my shots are of the, well, palatial splendor that lines the modern Strip.  Granted, much of the splendor is better classified as "tacky", but some places such as the Bellagio, Caesar's Palace, and even the MGM Grand manage to dance a fancy line between the two concepts:

And for all the spectacles that the modern democratization of pleasure and pleasure-driven civil engineering have accomplished here, much of the attraction is themed around a romantic view of the past, rather than the present:

What could be more American?  Here we have an artificial oasis that has striven to outdo its natural predecessor, in bold defiance of both nature and scale.  What could be more North American, then too, than a place where success still feels some sort of reverence for things older than it, even while such a history is bent and exploited (which to be fair is nothing new and not unique to this part of the world, but brother, do we ever do it well).  Is this not a fitting portrait for the current political and cultural battles we as a nation, indeed as a continent in many ways, find ourselves in?  Everyone claims an Evangelical's devotion to the Constitution while otherwise maintaining a Greek and Roman Christian devotion to the iconic Founding Fathers, all to just try and back up that they are the place to come find life and gamble in. 

Well, New Vegas, at any rate, is a heck of lot more fun than what it might serve as a portrait for.  The place certainly is more exciting, having the effect of the downtown theater district expanded a dozen times over and existing in purpose to be a city that is an entire entertainment district. 

The more mundane aspects try to live up to the hype that this is a different sort of city, a place where a fast food restaurant or a pharmacy even tries to put on a show to be more than what it is.

More than just something normal, to be sure, but then something that needs to put on a show just to exist here.  Just around the corner are little reminders that tastes are fickle and passing.  For a city that erects giant pyramids, castles, and fake world monuments even from the contemporary age, it is also one that forgets things quickly.

Of course, that is what this place is built on, memory directed to pleasant places and forgetful of reality, even in the recent past.  Little has changed here in that regard; this is no longer the city built by mobsters to cater to greed and lust over an oasis in a bone dry desert which served as a stopping place for an army of religious settlers bent on creating a paradise out of it.  This is now the city where whole families with kids in tow come to see a show, splash around in an exotic looking pool that they had to walk through a shark tank or past a habitat scene full of rare white tigers to get to.  This is a place of dreams which mirrors the dreaming we do as a wider society. 

Its fun, it can be sad, and its definitely much more than meets the eye.  Las Vegas is definitely worth at least one trip, if only to see what it means to you and you mean in it. 

Welcome back, readers!  I did notice that the traffic never really stopped, but rest assured that things are moving again.