It comes buzzing into my mind like a hazy half dream, the kind that arrives when you’ve had too much espresso and need to close your eyes in the dark of your hotel room for a moment. I’m in two places at once: One is the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, where I am wandering around the sandy two-acre lot amid the retired signs of dynamited casinos, hotels, and other businesses on the Strip, listening to old Elvis live shows on my headphones; the other is the recently opened poker room in the Venetian Casino, where I find myself sitting next to Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual who once saw, with a clarity that remains difficult to reckon with today, the end of an epoch.
As Benjamin wrote in 1928, in his sprawling and unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, “if, sometime in the mid-nineties, we had asked for a prediction, surely it would have been: the decline of a culture.” He meant the 1890s, the European fin-de-siècle and the coming descent into fascism, but I could say the same thing about the 1990s today. Benjamin was writing about the arcades, those iron-and-glass canopied commercial passageways that he took as emblematic of Paris when it was the epicenter of the glory and fragility of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. What Benjamin saw in the persistence of the remaining arcades in early-twentieth-century Paris (after the urban-renewal efforts of Baron Haussmann leveled many) is what I see in the persistently glitzy architecture and tightly time-constrained nightly shows of Las Vegas today: a culture attempting to grasp its own passing.
A Vacation Disrupted
Playing poker (or chess) with Walter Benjamin will always remain a fantasy. But the Neon Museum is real enough, and it was there, about a year ago, that I started thinking seriously about Las Vegas. I was on vacation with my wife, and, as empty nesters, we were taken by the city as a rambunctiously energetic site of aesthetic engagement, good food, and desert sun—plus poker tables and spas. Nevertheless, our visit began as it should for any semiotician—with a fully sober nighttime visit to that museum north of downtown that is sometimes called the Neon Boneyard because of the way it suggests a well-kept automobile cemetery, though featuring an assortment of beautifully designed signs instead of classic Cadillacs or Thunderbirds. There you can see many of the signs made famous in countless Vegas-set films: Sahara, Stardust, Riviera, and on and on. A subset of those signs appears in an installation called Brilliant! Jackpot, a work of projection art set to a Vegas-themed soundtrack, while an eight-hundred-square-foot mural on one of the outer walls of the museum features assorted Vegas luminaries, including Liberace, Sammy Davis Jr., and Denise Scott Brown, the last of whom was coauthor, with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour, of that now-standard work of architectural theory, Learning From Las Vegas, copies of which are prominently displayed in the museum gift shop. This was my kind of place: hyper-nerdy about (supposedly) lowbrow culture, aficionado-friendly, and piping out just enough twentieth-century pop music to warm you up on a cold desert night.
Adding to our pleasure was the enthusiasm of the museum staff, who welcomed us and narrated the city’s history with vivid and telling details of aesthetic ambition and the rise and fall of various business ventures, all of which were enthusiastically received by the artists and Hollywood types who had bought tickets for this guided tour of pop art. We learned about the craftsmanship of the sign makers, especially the indomitable Betty Willis, who designed the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign (and was featured, naturally, in the museum’s mural). We were told the history of the Moulin Rouge Hotel-Casino and given an account of the Cold War insanity of witnessing atomic-bomb tests as a draw for the rooftop bars. We also heard tales about strikes, labor victories, and the first black Vegas dancing star, Delcenia Boyd Jones.
These tour guides, I gradually realized, were what the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci would call organic intellectuals—symbol-pushers tied to a specific location in the social structure, producing culture in, of, and for their milieu rather than attempting to map it all from the ivory tower. As befits such producers of adroit cultural and historical interpretation, the guides were not screwing around, not mailing it in, and that was what caught me off-guard—their earnest narration. These were Americans, in 2024, offering their interpretations non-ironically! As a product of late-modern academic culture, I was accustomed not only to irony but also to supreme cynicism as the dominant mode of discourse, especially of the kind on display at those gatherings of semi-strangers called academic conferences, where to suggest for even half a second that one enjoyed art for art’s sake or liked commerce because buying things you are attracted to is fun would guarantee social ostracism.
The guides, on the other hand, were engaged in a multilayered discourse that began to activate certain long-held, but never fully voiced, suspicions of my own about those grand theorists of postmodernism who insisted on maligning Las Vegas as the apotheosis of constructed desire, pernicious in the extreme. If the literary critic Fredric Jameson was right about the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles—that, like Vegas itself, its glimmering, reflective windows and over-articulated elevator design were signifiers of everything anti-human about the new capitalism—how come I was enjoying my time with these artists and tour guides remembering Vegas before it switched from neon to LED?
Human, All Too Human
You have to be careful when going down this road of thinking Las Vegas. It can easily lead annoying East Coast intellectuals to the careless projection of their own pet ideas on the place. I am one of those intellectuals. In addition, I am self-serious enough to imagine that by spending time in the desert glitter I can get to know myself and the world better—as though I were not one of those pleasure-seeking hedonists flocking to the Strip like everyone else. But that is the thing about Vegas—it proves that we are all, in fact, equal in constitution, if not in taste or station.
I like its strange honesty. What matters on a visit to Vegas is how much money you have, how much more you want, and how much you are willing to set on fire. What is more, no one is pretending that whatever he or she is doing is enjoyable because it is restrained, well-kept, or rectitudinous. In the tourist spaces of Las Vegas, informality of dress (because no one is putting on airs) meets the constant desire for sex, money, drugs, laughter, and cheer (though never in any particular order). Some locals lament this decline in sartorial formality, but then again, the casual dress is predominant without being normative. I’ve sat at low-stakes poker tables with men in suit jackets that cost about two months of my salary. One Vegas resident explained to me that when people ask her how to dress for a visit, she tells them they should dress however they want but know that when they do they will not be the most anything—sexy, trashy, classy, ostentatious, or corporate-conference-attired. You can’t even be sure you’ll have the most nerdy fanny pack.
The honesty runs even deeper. Las Vegas, for all the intensity of its erotic industries, its endless ability to ply booze and weed, and its clear connection to all kinds of addictive behavior, is pleasing to the eye, ear, and taste (OK…my eye, ear, and taste) because it has somehow escaped the architecture of restraint, the language of medicalization, and the ambition for the therapeutic that has been degrading American culture since…well, at least since I was in college, and almost certainly before. This has been true about Vegas through every postwar era: The town has never submitted to the norms of respectable American culture, regardless of whether they manifested the neo-Victorian prudishness of the 1940s and 1950s or the carefully ordered liberal bromides of the 2010s. In Vegas, all the standard explanations for behavior that derive from the New York Times’s bastardization of good social science into a reductive and pretentious language the wealthy use to show their education continually fall short. But it’s not what you think. What drives this lack of politesse is not the fact that people in Vegas are obsessed with sex and money. (Who isn’t?) In fact, it is (almost) the opposite. In the Nevada desert—on the Strip, downtown, in the Arts District—there is an open acknowledgment that the libido is only secondarily sexual.
In other words, when you get off the plane in Las Vegas—the nearby city looming like a shimmering mirage of wild architectural bricolage—you are forced to openly confront something that is true elsewhere but disavowed: libido as life energy, equal parts attractive and repulsive, and unbearably, resplendently human in its flaws and ambitions. The libido lives in the drive for recognition, the drive for pleasure, and the drive on the I-15 freeway. And in Vegas all three drives are always on display. Vegas knows that 1) libido is impossible to eliminate, and 2) it sure as hell can be diverted, and indeed diverted for profit.
Most societies in the post-Calvinist West spend a lot of time, money, and classroom instruction disavowing this basic truth while keeping the economic machine chugging—witness the Whole Foods in every self-respecting college town. But Vegas reminds us that this wild experiment called the American project has always been about the cultural struggle between puritan fastidiousness and the pagan imaginaries that, unleashed in the desert, operate ferociously in the pursuit of happiness and freedom with a significant risk of self-destruction.
Down With Your Simulacrum Nonsense
The notion that Vegas is déclassé is probably behind us, given the dedicated cultural omnivorousness of the members of the American upper classes under the age of forty. But what is not behind us is the more pernicious version of that same pretense, which continues to find expression across various spaces of theory. Here, the older interpretation somehow still holds: Vegas as—depending on your European theorist of choice—ideology, hegemony, simulacrum, or fetish.
All these arguments have the same core: They suggest that Vegas, like Disneyland, is so outlandish in the ways it caters to our fantasies that it convinces tourists that the places that are not Las Vegas (or Disneyland) are both real and inevitable. In other words, Vegas is there to keep us in line, back at work, and following orders when we return to Cleveland. In this sense, the ridiculous slogan “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas”—adopted and introduced in 2003 by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to project a sense of “adult freedom” going beyond gambling—was a capitulation of the city’s government to the bizarro imperatives of fetishized and deeply misunderstood French theory as it was then being packaged, advertised, and sold in American college classrooms, as well as to the misguided idea that Vegas is anything like “Disneyland for adults.” (If that were true, the art in Disneyland would be better.) The slogan was always already wrong in so far as it suggested Vegas was not a place connected to other places, and what it really did was render populaire the old left-academic chestnut that the sense of exhilaration felt by millions in Las Vegas was fundamentally false and largely designed by the captains of capitalist exploitation to reconcile worker drones to the necessity of returning to serve whatever version of capitalism was being explicated in the seminar rooms of Columbia, Yale, or Duke.
But someone forgot to tell the people who live and work in Las Vegas that they are merely part of an ideological mechanism. We might do well to acknowledge that the service workers who organized themselves there, and who won several major strikes (including in 1984–1985 amid the great wave of anti-union sentiment that began when Reagan fired 12,000 PATCO workers in 1981), defied the high theorists of late capitalism and neoliberalism. In fact, you only have to spend a little time talking to people in Las Vegas—restaurant workers, art gallery purveyors, taxi drivers, hotel concierges, blackjack dealers, archivists—to realize the classic interpretation of Vegas as postmodern simulacrum just does not fly. First and foremost, Vegas as a space for living and working surely has more than its share of pain and grit. Second, Vegas is real in a very naive sense: The artists make art, the dealers deal cards, the capitalists make money, and the LED glows its glow, theory be damned. And if you spend just a little bit of time around town, you will quickly realize that: 1) businesses offer stunningly steep discounts to locals, creating a sense, at least for the visitor, of hometown solidarity that is both serious and strikingly unusual for a major American city in 2025; 2) the ecology of the place, and the very intertwining of the tourist economy with how people who live there eat and work, is the subject of intense and complex conversation among locals that is hard for tourists, and perhaps especially hard for visiting intellectuals, to hear; and 3) Las Vegas is a great place to see art, a fact that the locals appreciate far more than do most tourists and professors.
On this trip, on our way to see some of that art, our Uber driver set forth in just ten minutes a theory of art and commerce that would rival, if not eclipse, those of most university lecturers. He also added a few personal notes for our further edification:
• We should not go into the art installation too drunk or too high, because he had done so once and then had a Kierkegaardian crisis about his own existence.
• He had once driven a city official to where the art was installed and suggested to her that Vegas make entry free for local middle-school and high-school students. And it happened.
• The site of the installation now ran a shuttle to a marijuana dispensary, a cross-promotional idea that, even though it cut into some of his own business, he admired—he wished he had had it himself.
In other words, Las Vegas is not a simulacrum; it is a place that makes clear the unavoidable reality of, and conflict over, culture. The basic philosophical significance of the Las Vegas Strip is that the whole damn apparatus—of casino chips and taxis, billboards advertising shows and sushi, downmarket clothing and upmarket massage, art openings and football betting—is about being human in the most varied and elemental ways. If you must have a famous French theorist to interpret Las Vegas for you, pick the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. But what you should really do is talk to your bartender.
All of which is to say that you can hold tight to your late-modern “critical” interpretations of Vegas—and many visiting intellectuals to Las Vegas do—but at some point, after enough time in town, Plato’s model of the human psyche will come crashing into view like a pack of teenagers jumping into the hotel pool: Appetite! Spirit! Calculating reason! The chances of denying or canceling any one of them as components of the soul—or of building a good society on just two out of three—are about as likely as a Vegas casino giving even odds for the night or selling you orange juice at a reasonable price. For my part, the utter reality of the Platonic model usually hits me at about one in the morning on my second night there. It goes like this: I arrive in Vegas, stone-cold sober, confidently overeducated, and full of literary irony. But at a certain point (usually while eating an expensive steak after being out late making or losing money at poker), I end up thinking that there is something elementally human driving the person who has had eleven drinks, spent eleven hours at the poker table, or is putting in eleven extra hours of rideshare driving this weekend to fund her art show. Vegas is a place of work, of hustle, of satisfaction distracted, delayed, or destroyed. It’s a test of whether you are willing to be intellectually serious enough to believe Sigmund Freud when he says that all culture is sublimation—not just your culture.
American Town and Postindustrial Metropolis
What I did not quite realize viscerally before this year, though, is something that the great art critic Dave Hickey was always on about. Las Vegas, despite its similarities to Macau, is in its history, culture, and politics deeply American. Hence, de Tocqueville: “Those who live in the midst of democratic fluctuations have always before their eyes the image of chance; and they end by liking all undertakings in which chance plays a part.” In Hickey’s 1997 classic, Air Guitar, he wrote, “America…is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.” He continued:
What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility. So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say, Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in your vision. They become breathtakingly perceptible, and, as a consequence, there is no better place than Las Vegas for a traveler to feel at home. The town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize—and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social differences rather than their exacerbation. The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication.
Hickey was luminously perspicacious in his ability to recognize, amid the vast and disturbing inequalities of Las Vegas, the horizontality of its cultural politics, which are not so much lowbrow as they are open to weirdness and conformity in equal measure such that the sheer humanity of the equally but differently weird (or conformist) is suddenly public and undeniable. Hickey also argued that there was something about the American experiment wrapped up in his “home in the neon.” The secret of Vegas is that there are no secrets, he explained, and, furthermore, “there are only two rules: (1) Post the odds, and (2) Treat everybody the same. Just as one might in a democracy (What a concept!)” Hickey thus found in Liberace’s rhinestones the key to a democratic politics of honest fakery as a defense against the subtle tyranny—recently become much less subtle—of a politics of authenticity and its handmaiden, the deep hatred of art, freedom, and changing your mind dressed up as love of family, morality, nation, and the supposed liberty of guns and tariffs. The emphasis, for Hickey, is on the honest and the different human commmunities of desire that are the root of pluralism in aesthetics: Liberace’s rhinestones is not a real diamond, but union wages, sexual freedom, and aesthetic ambition are honestly held commitments. In Hickey’s version of Las Vegas, no one asks who is a “real” American, because the reality of the USA is not something that has to be performed into existence by duplicitous electoral promises and unpaid contractors; it’s right there in the posted gambling odds, the midnight steak and eggs, and the civilizational ambition of the Hoover Dam.
This, then, is the problem we have inherited from Hickey: Can the bare and brutal honest fakery of Las Vegas, and the deeply American, weirdly libertarian, outsider-art-loving union democracy that Hickey found inside that honest fakery sustain itself as part of a free society? Or will the crushing inequality, insane techno-oligarchy, and battling moralisms of toxic masculinity and therapeutic bureaucracy be, in the end, too much for Vegas and thus too much for the United States as well?
The signs are not good, and Daniel Oppenheimer’s recent book on Dave Hickey, Far From Respectable, notes how the great critic’s optimism about art as a civic counterweight to authoritarian tendencies faded near the end of his life. But notice how Hickey’s interpretation of Vegas—over against that of Jameson or other dismissive and disparaging thinkers of the late-modern or postmodern age—creates a problem of time and memory that brings us right back to Walter Benjamin. There are two different timelines at work in the two different interpretations of Las Vegas, and they are in a deep intellectual contestation worthy of a great poker showdown. The critic who already thinks that Vegas is postmodern nonsense doesn’t need the Neon Museum, because there is nothing in Vegas to remember, recover, or mourn—it is all before the revolution or the sign of the inevitable catastrophe anyway. This is the Vegas of left-wing Hegelianism (or the nihilism that beckons when said Hegelianism fails), according to which those who thought they found some sort of semi-freedom out there in the desert should have been subsumed into the great world-historical motion of the dialectic and judged for how they articulated with it.
By contrast, for those inclined to Hickey’s interpretation, a thorny, difficult, and urgent problem emerges in 2025: How should the next democratic culture relate to the one that is being profaned and attacked? How should we remember Hickey’s adopted hometown? Appropriately enough, the answer to this question is currently being debated in the theaters on the Strip.
Remembering Vegas, Remembering America
To understand what is going on down at the Glitterloft inside the LINQ Hotel + Experience, where DiscoShow has been running since August 2024, or at the Saxe Theater inside Planet Hollywood, where the now-classic Vegas! The Show has been running since 2010, we may return once more to Walter Benjamin (and to Sigmund Freud) to set the stakes: Will we properly mourn a moribund version of the American democratic project, or will our melancholic attachment to it prevent us from inventing something new and better?
The two options are perfectly pictured in these two musical spectacles, which you can see for about fifty bucks each. I highly recommend both; their artistic execution and vibrant love of life exceed that of the jukebox musicals currently showing in midtown Manhattan. However, the conceptual distinction between them could not be clearer, and I sense that the choice between them will be thematized in various ways by various American intellectuals who are currently living through the destruction of freedom.
Vegas! The Show begins with its male lead, dressed as a janitor, sweeping the floor in front of a set whose background imitates the Neon Museum I described earlier in this essay. He mocks contemporary Vegas as ruined by the importation of Cirque du Soleil and invites the audience into the Vegas past. What follows emphasizes Frank, Dino, Sammy, Italian American kitsch, and, most of all, the overwhelming importance of twentieth-century black music to the very idea of art in this country. The Elvis rendition and the Tom Jones number faded quickly from my memory, because they were absorbed by the general vibe of the show, which I would describe as “R & B, but for everybody.” This, come to think of it, is not an unreasonable way to describe American artists’ contribution to world culture.
So by the time the show got to its dead-to-rights rendition of Tina Turner’s cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” I thought I had a grip on what was going on here. In the background, African American creativity; in the foreground, nostalgia for a Las Vegas that had once been a capacious space for American art as enjoyment. This is a version of Vegas that I do love: desire and spirit expressed through that version of pop music that is conventional in its standards, catholic in its reach, and yet still fizzy enough to stimulate the body.
The show’s finale both exemplified and served up a twist on these themes. It has undeniable, almost overwhelming, emotional power. A piano rolls out with one of the male leads dressed as Elton John. (John is British, not American, but his music was also “R & B, but for everybody” and his two extended Vegas residencies marked the beginning of the twenty-first century for the city.) Then a sheet comes down in front of the curtain. To the tune of “Rocket Man”—John’s most wistful and perhaps best song—a series of projected video clips shows the dynamiting of the classic old Vegas casinos: the Stardust, the Sands, and so on. The effect is absolutely devastating. It’s a brilliant piece of art. But it is also undoubtedly an exercise in melancholia—this show offers the America we cannot let go of. It leaves you with an extraordinarily passive sense of being. After it was over, I felt a strong urge to lie around my hotel room bemoaning the fact that I wasn’t part of the generation who saw Sinatra at the Sands.
By contrast, DiscoShow is about the flow of activity, and especially bodily movement, from the performers to the audience and back to the performers again. By placing its audience in the center of the show, literally on the dance floor, it asks them to participate much more directly in the fantasy construction of, first, a New York City bar from the 1970s and, second, a disco club from the same era. The arc of the show is a series of set pieces done from above (on the catwalk surrounding the dance floor) and also in the middle of (through a series of wheeled-out mini-stages) the audience. It is all fantastic fun and brilliantly interactive, walking the fine line between shows that offer something to their audiences that they will never do (“Get up and dance if you want!”) and shows that, in compelling something from their audiences, become annoyingly pedantic (“Now I need everyone to…”). Despite my deepest trepidations, DiscoShow turned out to be neither of these. Feeling neither bothered nor harangued, we were induced into the groove, as was the older couple from Houston standing next to us, whose dance moves were surprisingly charming. Interestingly, this aspect of the show’s form—hybridizing Broadway show with participant theater with dance class for beginners—expresses the show’s democratic content. DiscoShow is a celebration of 1970s American dance music (also rooted in the African American musical tradition). But it is also, in a much more metaphorical register, a show about how we might begin to move again.
The narrative of the show is of a collective aesthetic and emotional response to predation and destitution, specifically, the near bankruptcy of New York City in 1975. The central conceit of the show is a series of mundane characters turned extraordinary dancers—including a nerdy fellow turned sex machine and a maltreated secretary and wife turned liberated woman—who find, through their engagement with disco, a sense of freedom and a home away from home in the club. Crucial to the entire audience experience is the use of four full-wall videos behind every dance number. They re-create the streets and interiors of New York during the seventies and lend to the various gags of the show (including a gloriously flamboyant Finnish disco teacher) a gravitas that I was not expecting. So, when DiscoShow reaches its finale and projects the disco-destruction-night riot at Comiskey Park on all four walls, the effect is not melancholia but mourning, not nostalgia but a challenge to become more creative: What will we do, collectively, to deal with this disaster and keep living together? This, it seems to me, is the right question for our age.
All of which brings us, for better and for worse, to the question of political culture. (I can feel my Vegas pals grumbling, and I have the overwhelming sense that maybe I should shut up and go back to the poker table, but here goes.…) If you want a liberal narrative of hope in America, go to Vegas! The Show. You will hear the right words, the good stories of integration, and a variety of noble lies about Las Vegas as a progressive place. And you can take great satisfaction in irritating the alt-right adherents who are there in the audience with you. (At the staging I went to, several of them started conspicuously whispering to each other when the story of integrating the casinos was being told. Too woke for them, I guess!) But know that you will be engaging in an addiction to a world loved and lost and loved again. You will be tempted to imagine yourself a hero, staging some kind of last stand. However, as the finale of the show both regrets and reveals, last stands are no match for the material force of dynamite. But hell, it’s Vegas. It won’t be the first or last time you indulge the addiction to nostalgia there—this is the place of Elvis’s decline and the path to retirement for countless rock and pop acts whose fans got old, got jobs, and got money.
If you want to ask how to build an aesthetics of solidarity out of the wreckage of police violence and financial exploitation, go to DiscoShow. There, you will be forced to be a little creative yourself, to move around, and to watch performers on roller skates take some serious risks and contort themselves in remarkable ways. The contortions they perform with their bodies are no match for the contortions of culture that will be required in the next two decades. At DiscoShow, no one will directly narrate for you what the significance of disco was; you’ll have to feel it for yourself, and, in the movement of those near you, you will have to intuit what they think it was. Most of all, you will have to confront a very simple fact: that disco is gone, and so are the particular highs and lows of American political culture that those of us old enough to remember (some of) the twentieth century took for granted. What will we put in its place?
The Ancient and the Modern
Walter Benjamin famously doubted Freud’s evaluation of the difference between (healthy) mourning and (pathological) melancholia, asking whether there were aspects of melancholic attachment to lost pasts that could somehow become part of a creative project for the future. One might similarly ask whether there is something about the twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century experience of Las Vegas that could be salvaged for a new version—and vision—of American democratic modernity. Is there some kind of productive melancholia to be had in Las Vegas these days? If there is, I think it is to be found through the aesthetic appreciation of the Las Vegas skyline that Hickey expressed in the following way:
The balcony of my apartment faces west toward the mountains, overlooking the Las Vegas Strip; so, every evening when the sky is not overcast, a few minutes after the sun has gone down, the mountains turn black, the sky above them turns this radical plum/rouge, and the neon logos of The Desert Inn, The Stardust, Circus Circus, The Riviera, The Las Vegas Hilton, and Vegas World blaze forth against the black mountains—and every night I find myself struck by the fact that, while The Strip always glitters with a reckless and undeniable specificity against the darkness, the sunset, smoldering out above the mountains, every night and without exception, looks bogus as hell. It’s spectacular, of course, and even, occasionally, sublime (if you like sublime), but to my eyes that sunset is always fake—as flat and gaudy as a Barnett Newman and just as pretentious.
There was in Hickey’s writing a deep suspicion of both the aesthetics and the politics of authenticity, and that suspicion, one might hazard, is the connection between Las Vegas and the kernel of freedom held in common that has, on occasion, here and there, made itself present in American life, and which has sustained American intellectuals as distinct as John Dewey and Joan Didion. What, then, does Las Vegas do for us when it reminds us that libido is a fact of life and building a culture on its suppression is a little like taking a political stand against gravity? Here I found my way to a different kind of theorizing, once I realized that far from any simulacrum, Las Vegas is in fact the place where American modernity articulates the eternal problems of being human.
On the one hand, Las Vegas is the culmination of the historically specific phenomenon of the American modern, bringing together the technological sublime, movable capital, representative democracy, and libertarian culture in the first postindustrial metropolis. Yet on the other hand, Vegas is about the inescapable aspects of human existence from time immemorial: desire as multiple, the importance of creature comforts to a sense of well-being, the philosophy of uncertainty and the problem of fate, embodiment as both wonderful and unbearable, and the irrepressible need to create new art and build new buildings. In this regard, we can say that Vegas is the place where the American project’s complex and conflictual relationship to the more immovable aspects of human life together was thrown into stark relief.
And then there are the binaries. In Vegas, it becomes quite clear that the towering economic power that drives American politics has, in the end, cultural sources and cultural consequences. The USA is about sin and salvation, filth and cleanliness, God and the Devil, believer and atheist, winners and losers. All societies have such binaries. The sociologist Émile Durkheim mapped them all as versions of sacred versus profane, while the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used them to read stories as clues to the structure of the mind itself. But in the United States, with its Calvinist inheritance and infamously strict racial hierarchy, the binaries have a special importance. They have always resisted middle grounds and gray areas, preferring the intense clash of purified poles to ambiguous endings and existential despair. This is why American movies are melodramatic to the point of absurdity and why the harshness of the American moral climate, when combined with the filth of American politics, created a political culture that can be unbearably self-righteous. Vegas puts on display the harsh feel and gleaming strangeness, bordering on surreality, of the American binaries, but it also breaks them down, which is the deep effect of its honest fakery. Vegas is not there to make you feel your job back home is unavoidable. It is there to make you ask whether the difference between good and evil is really what your pastor says it is.
For a long time, it sure looked as though Hickey was right to find a home in Las Vegas, and to find his version of America there too, because of the way Vegas both displayed the binaries and embraced the gray areas in between. It happens in two steps. First, the town cuts through pretense. One night in Vegas will remind you that in America, the most famous cultural critic in the world, past or present, is about as important as the current special-teams coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers (and probably less). Second, it liberates you from the defensiveness that constantly infects the American intellectual trying to justify his existence. Why? Because Vegas is an intellectual’s paradise in so far as it is the place that knows, better than anywhere else in the United States, that we are all creatures addicted to symbols, entranced by our illusions, and in need of a lucky roll. In Vegas, as Dean Martin and Katy Perry have both attested, the desirous body, the strategic mind, and the neon sign are bound together in a cosmic swirl, and the result is the Frankenstein’s monster of American modernity. What could be more intellectual than that?
Back when American modernity was more than the latest tweet from the Department of Homeland Security, its intellectuals navigated the harsh binaries of American culture via innovation in thinking and generosity of spirit, making some kind of room, some of the time, for the next immigrant culture to arrive and do the two most American things of all: make a buck and do whatever you want with religion and culture. This is the spirit we have lost; we increasingly just want to double down on the same binaries that every other preacher in this godforsaken land does, calling endlessly for the return of the cultural artifacts of an earlier era. But the two great philosophies of culture to emerge in America—pragmatism and jazz—are, among many other things, attempts to solve the problem of the excluded middle between the purest Good and the worst Evil, and to find in the very confrontation of contradiction an improvised way for humans to live together a little better tomorrow than they did yesterday. This is the American promise: that beyond the binaries lies not transcendent meaning or nihilism but a little bit of democracy, a little bit of freedom, and a whole lot of practicality.
But navigating the binaries to subvert and reinvent them takes energy, and it is that energy one still finds in Las Vegas. Even if in enervated form, it is there, and this is the part of the city—the Strip, yes, but also the Arts District and downtown—that some foreign visitors grasp intuitively and immediately and others will never, ever understand: Vegas as the intensity of American hustle. On that winter-vacation visit, I was set straight about it by my bartender. I had just had a quite unpleasant interaction at the craps table with an overstimulated and sleep-deficient fellow in town for the rodeo. His truculent attitude had turned very dark, even threatening, in response to my friendly overtures. I was getting ready to bitch about it to the young man from Los Angeles who had just served my whiskey and had all the signs of being a safe political harbor. He cut me off right away: “Shit, I’m glad they’re here. Otherwise, we’d have no money to make these two weeks in December.”
There, in that moment, I saw the tiniest glimpse of possibility for a new, but nonetheless recognizable, American culture, and I realized everything I was, in my academic bubble, missing. Vegas is much cheaper to live in than LA; for the first time in its history all major casinos on the Strip are unionized; my bartender, like me and the poker pros, was hustling most weeks of the year but was also going to take a real vacation with his girlfriend; I might be able to write and teach, but who cares about my opinions on the cultural politics of the rodeo? And that’s the deal that Las Vegas has offered: Make the wages fair and the housing affordable, post the damn odds, and let people make their own judgments about what kind of clothes, art, sex, and sports they want. That’s the project, if we want our country back in a new and better form. But the artists in Vegas are here to tell you: The odds are very long.