Not viva Las Vegas. Death to Vegas! If I ruled the world that city would be no more and the lions in the MGM casino would be freed. I will get back to the lions.
Could be a Vegas motto
I spent two nights in Las Vegas as part of a road trip and though I am glad to have experienced the place I am even more glad to be out of there and I doubt I will ever go back. There are two atrocities about the city (which to a lesser extent are true about societies globally): It is wholly fake and it is all about the money.
The two characteristics are of course connected but I will take them one at a time. Fakeness first.
Though cities and societies in general are manmade culture rather than untouched nature, they are mostly so to fulfill practical human needs and wants. In Vegas everything is unnecessary, everything looks and feels like a movie set, things are like props and people are like extras.
The Venetian
Fountains at the Bellagio
In order to stand out the casinos have different themes. One Casino is a pyramid (Luxor), one is a fairy tale castle (Excalibur), some are twisted miniatures of other cities (New York New York, Paris Las Vegas, The Venetian), one has huge water fountains (Bellagio) and one has live lions (MGM).
This gives you the surreal feeling of being trapped in huge movie set or in a Lynch-like dream. We arrived at night and partied and when we woke up and went out the next day, the sun was shining and there was daylight. And this was strange. It felt wrong for Vegas, like the place was supposed to be only neon-lit.
The feeling of being trapped in a maze of glitter and greed is made stronger by the way Vegas subtly hunts your money. One thing is how people try to get money from you for eveything.
Capitalism in the bathroom: The Piss Off
For me this was most vividly exemplified by a toilet visit where I realized while pissing that I could put a quarter in a machine – The Piss Off – by the urinal which would then tell me how much piss I produced, if I could piss more than the fictitious “Uncle Billy Bob”, how long it would take me to fill a swimming pool etc.. And by a booth on the sidewalk where you paid to get to sit on a motorcycle which was then projected onto a screen so it looked – a little bit – like you were driving through town. And by the dvd of you singing you could buy by the Karaoke bar. And other things.
Why would any adult pay for this?
The most exhausting annoying aspect, however, is how the whole city is constructed to constantly send you on detours through the casinos and other options to use money.
For example, the public train (the Monorail) runs along the Casino center of Vegas (known as The Strip) and stops at the back of seven Casinos in stead of at the front. This means that you have to go all the way through the casinos – and that is an unimaginably long way – to get to the street. Similarly, casinos will advertize cheap drinks or food on their Strip-side fronts and make you go all the way through the slots to some puny bar in the back to get the drinks.
It is like a grotesquely enlarged, surreal version of supermarkets that place dairy and other essentials in the back of the store to make sure costumors are tempted by all the other merchandize on the way. The scale of this is extreme. Walking continuously from The Strip through the MGM Casino to its Monorail Station, for example, takes more than 15 minutes.
The Stratosphere
At The Stratosphere – a Casino and restaurant which stands out by being really tall – we (me and three exchange student friends) went up to get the view of the city. First, of course, we had to go to the ticket office through a slot yard and then (after being loured into also paying for one of the three trill rides at the top of the building) from the ticket office to the elevators following signs which lead us on a winding carpet road through the whole casino.
When we finally arrived at the elevators our picture was taken on a green-screen background so we could buy our selves put on a Vegas sky-line background when we came down again. After an elevator ride we were able to enjoy the admittedly remarkable view of the city from an inside observation deck on the 108th floor without any further manipulation but to go outside and to get our thrill rides (see video below) we had to use another elevator to get to 109th and this elevator was located inside the gift shop. More pictures were taken on the thrill rides and offered for us to buy.
As we descended we found out that we could walk almost straight out of the casino – the signs were only there to send people around the maze of slots and stores.
To keep your thoughts off anything but spending, there are no windows or clocks inside the casinos. And to keep your money loose they have an artificially high oxygen level in the air and many places provide free drinks so long as you are gambling.
Altogether it made me nautious after a day. And not because of the cheap margaritas we found in the back of Bill’s Gambling Hall but because of everything this city encapsuled. It takes the worst features of human culture to their purest form.
Like one of my friends, Swedish Thesa, said after getting the feel of Las vegas:
- Bring your money but leave your soul.
Because if you have some empathy with you, Vegas is really deeply sad. The lions in the MGM Casino broke my heart.
Who are we to do this?
Caught in a glass cage with fake rocks and plastic leaves in the dark casino, probably drugged to calmness, they spend their days looking at drunken tourists taking pictures of them. Something so wild turned into paper. And why? For the money, is the simple answer but I still cannot understand how someone could get that idea and actually carry it out.
Can animals feel sorrow, frustration, despair? Watching these lions, it felt that way
To some extent zoos are the same way, caging wildlife, but again this was grotesque. At least in most zoos, animals are outside in pretty good conditions, zoos cooperate to save endangered species etc. This was just appalling, it made me physically nautious and brought tears to my eyes. Both for the lions and for us humans.
Outside on the sidewalk, we were once again offered cards with pleasure girls from poor and probably illegal immigrants on the streets who completely gave up their dignity to muddle through life in Vegas.
Get young wild Vicky for only $25. You can also buy Hope or Faith
They stand on the sidewalk along The Strip in flashy t-shirts, sometimes with huge cardboard signs attached to their backs, dealing pictures of silicone pumped girls to gamblers.
And even on the sadness of Las Vegas money is made. In one gift shop I saw a t-shirt with the silhouette of a pole dancing stripper where the text read: “Supporting single moms in Vegas”.
