Vegas and the End of History

There is an interesting debate in American Interest between Francis Fukayama and Bernard-Henri Levy “over American virtues and vices, neoconservatives, religion, the future of American muscular internationalism, and the role of intellectuals in a free society.” Interesting, it starts in Las Vegas but, as the title suggests, goes pretty far afield.

In this first couple paragaphs, they swap misconceptions about Vegas. Here’s a few examples:

Fukayama: The best piece explaining the ethos of Las Vegas (and the American West more generally,) is a short essay by Joan Didion entitled “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles.” In it, she explains that Howard Hughes founded modern Las Vegas in 1967 because he, a reclusive insomniac, couldn’t find a place to buy a cheeseburger in L.A. at three o’clock in the morning—so he created a whole city to cater to that need. It had nothing to do with sin or sex, but rather the perpetual American desire to reinvent oneself in a place where conventional expectations don’t apply. Hughes’ transformation of Las Vegas cleaned the city up: Mob influence was eliminated, and the Nevada Gaming Commission put the whole casino industry under tight regulatory controls (not necessarily tighter, of course, than the way prostitution is regulated in Amsterdam or Hamburg). Today the Bellagio, the Luxor and the MGM Grand are more like family-friendly theme parks than gambling halls.

Levy: There is the more general fact, second, that I arrived in the city with my head full of conventional wisdom about the City of Crime, Sex and Sin and found—what a disappointment!—a mundane capital of merely low-brow mass entertainment. That, too, I am willing to accept. I did everything I could to resist the stereotypes that for a writer constitute the first “given facts” he or she deals with when showing interest in a foreign country. But as you know, the attempt to liquidate, demolish and question the cliché is itself the most arduous and interminable challenge we face. And so I’m willing to admit that I failed, as Sartre put it, to “break the bones in my head.” I’m willing to admit, somewhat, that I fell into the classic trap of the Frenchman on the lookout for the shadows of Bugsy Siegel and Georges Bataille, but finding instead only some lower middle-class people simply out for a good time.

It Doesn’t Stay in Vegas

I don’t think that the simplistic notion that Howard Hughes single-handedly created “modern Las Vegas” stands up to scrutiny very well. Las Vegas had been a 24-hour town for more than 20 years before his arrival, and, what’s more, he wasn’t known for going around buying cheeseburgers at 3 AM. I’m sure Fukayama hasn’t been spending his hours reading social histories of Las Vegas, but simple common sense should suggest that he’s used too broad a brush here.

As for Levy, I’m amazed that anyone would think that Las Vegas is anything but a place where people are out for a safe, good time. It’s as if, when I go to London for the first time (whenever that happens), I write an essay expressing my violent disappointment that there isn’t a Ministry of Silly Walks, because I’ve seen it on Monty Python.

Fukayama also makes a curious statement that I’m still trying to unravel:

Of course you are not required to love everything about the United States, and certainly not those grossly overweight Americans on the Las Vegas buffet lines.

So thin Americans are worthy of respect, but heavy ones aren’t? Making fun of fat people in line at the buffet is so cliche–unless you see actual fisticuffs break out over the last piece of salisbury steak, I don’t want to hear about it. Side note: is it “on line” or “in line?” I usually use the latter, but I’ve heard both. This bit doesn’t help much.

I’m most perplexed by Levy’s argument that “I had misperceptions before I got to Las Vegas, and that’s Vegas’s fault.” There’s a growing corpus of academic work on Las Vegas’s history, so there’s really no excuse to accept something you’ve seen in a movie as the last word.

Still, I think that the LVCVA might want to hire Levy for its next promotional campaign. Can you imagine it? “Las Vegas: a mundane captial of merely low-brown mass entertainment.”