Friday, October 08, 2004
America's Last Honest Place
by Marc Cooper
Las Vegas
This city is often described as one of dreams and fantasy, of tinselish
make-believe. But this is getting it backward. Vegas is instead the
American
market ethic stripped bare, a mini-world totally free of the pretenses
and
protocols of modern consumer capitalism. As one local gambling
researcher
says gleefully: "What other city in America puts up giant roadside
billboards promoting 97 percent guaranteed payback on slot play? In
other
words, you give us a buck and we'll give you back 97 cents. That's why
I
love my hometown."
Even that stomach-churning instant when the last chip is swept away can
be
charged with an existential frisson. Maybe that's why they say that the
difference between praying here and praying anywhere else is that here
you
really mean it. All the previous hours of over-the-table chitchat, of
know-it-all exchanges between the ice-cool dealer and the cynical
writer
from the big city, the kibitzing with the T-shirted rubes and the
open-shirted sharpies to my right and left, the false promises of the
coins
clanging into the trays behind me, the little stories I tell myself
while my
stack of chips shrinks and swells and then shrivels some more--all of
this
comes to an abrupt, crashing halt when the last chip goes back in the
dealer's tray. "No seats for the onlookers, sir." And the other players
at
the table--the dealer who a moment ago was my buddy, the solicitous pit
boss, the guy from Iowa in short khakis and topsiders peering over my
shoulder--no longer give a fuck whether I live or die. And while
winning is
always better, it's even in moments of loss like this that I feel a
certain
perverse thrill. It's one of the few totally honest interludes you can
have
in modern America. All the pretense, all the sentimentality, the
euphemisms,
hypocrisies, come-ons, loss leaders, warranties and guarantees, all the
fairy tales are out the window. You're out of money? OK, good--now get
lost.
In a city where the only currency is currency, there is a table-level
democracy of luck. Las Vegas is perhaps the most color-blind,
class-free
place in America. As long as your cash or credit line holds out, no one
gives a damn about your race, gender, national origin, sexual
orientation,
address, family lineage, voter registration or even your criminal
arrest
record. As long as you have chips on the table, Vegas deftly casts you
as
the star in an around-the-clock extravaganza. For all of America's
manifold
unfulfilled promises of upward mobility, Vegas is the only place
guaranteed
to come through--even if it's for a fleeting weekend. You may never, in
fact, surpass the Joneses, but with the two-night, three-day special at
the
Sahara, buffet and show included, free valet parking and maybe a comped
breakfast at the coffee shop, you can certainly live like them for
seventy-two hours--while never having to as much as change out of your
flip-flops, tank top or NASCAR cap.
"Las Vegas as America, America as Las Vegas. It's like what came first?
The
chicken or the egg?" says Vegas historian Michael Green. "Fresno,
California, doesn't have a row of casinos, but you can be sure it has
some
part of town where you can go for vice even though it's supposed to be
illegal. Here it's not necessarily vice in the first place, but it's
certainly not illegal. We have the same sort of stuff and more. Except
that
unlike in most places, here it's just out in the open." What
extraordinary
prescience social critic Neil Postman displayed when he wrote in his
1985
book Amusing Ourselves to Death that Las Vegas--where Wall Street
corporations had replaced mafias and mobs--should be considered the
"symbolic capital" of America. "At different times in our history,"
Postman
wrote, "different cities have been the focal point of a radiating
American
spirit." In the era of the Revolutionary War, Boston embodied the
ideals of
freedom; in the mid-nineteenth century, "New York became the symbol of
a
melting-pot America." In the early twentieth century, the brawn and
inventiveness of American industry and culture were captured in the
energy
of Chicago. "Today," Postman concluded, "we must look to the city of
Las
Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration,
its
symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a
chorus
girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of
entertainment,
and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public
discourse
increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our
religion,
news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into
congenial
adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular
notice."
When Postman penned these words, little could he imagine that the Vegas
he
was writing about was the "old" Las Vegas and that Sin City was just a
few
years away from a radical makeover. Nor could Postman fully fathom that
America itself was in the throes of a cataclysmic transformation. The
more
both places changed, the more they mirrored each other. In 1989 Steve
Wynn--with junk-bond financing from Michael Milken--stunned the Strip
with
his $700 million Mirage Hotel and Casino and touched off a revolution.
One
after another, the old Rat Pack-era hotels were dynamited and in their
place
rose staggering Leviathans of modern, market-based entertainment: the
biggest casino in the world, then the biggest hotel in the world, then
the
most expensive hotel in the world, the biggest man-made hotel lake in
the
world, the hotel with the biggest rooms in the world, and so on.
If economist Joseph Schumpeter was correct in theorizing that "creative
destruction is the essential fact about capitalism," then capitalism as
practiced in Las Vegas is the purest strain. The erection of the Vegas
mega-resorts was not only heralded by the televised dynamiting of their
predecessors but also accompanied by the concurrent collapse of much of
the
rest of America's urban, industrial and employment infrastructure.
Isn't it
logical or at least fitting that Las Vegas, the City of the Eternal
Now, the
town that every few years seems to slather yet one more layer of
pavement
and glitz over its own scant history, tradition and roots, would expand
just
as long-entrenched communities from Southeast Los Angeles to Lima,
Ohio,
evaporated into the deindustrialized dust of globalization?
Indeed, just as quickly as Las Vegas consumes and erases the past and
scrambles the present, it now shines to many as an attractive beacon of
the
future. Unlike almost any other place in America, Las Vegas is one city
where unskilled labor can still--thanks to vibrant unions and wealthy
and
efficient employers--earn middle-class wages. Vegas food servers, car
parkers, cashiers, even maids, can still buy into the new American
dream,
purchasing a house and putting their kids through school. A high school
grad
can become a professional dealer for three hundred bucks' worth of
tuition
and a few weeks of practice pitching cards--and most likely get a job.
Where
else in America can you regularly find 60-year-old, bouffant-coiffed
cocktail waitresses proudly wearing union buttons (those of the mighty
Culinary Workers Local 226) and going home to peruse the statements of
their
fattening pension accounts?
Even though the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center slowed
(slightly) what has traditionally been the recession-proof Vegas
economy, a
steady stream of 5,000-6,000 domestic economic refugees a month still
pour
into and around the city. Only 6 percent of adults living in Vegas's
Clark
County were born here--the lowest such figure anywhere in America. And
although water supplies are drying up, schools are strained and suicide
and
domestic violence rates are among the highest in the nation, they keep
pouring in. Purchasers of new houses--at prices far below those of the
two
coasts--are wait-listed. Vegas's population doubled during the 1980s,
and
doubled again in the '90s. Vegas continues to be the fastest-growing
metropolitan area in America.
This generation of immigrants, however, is different in many ways from
the
grifters, hustlers and outcasts who huddled here over the past century.
Sure, there will always be a certain batch of trimmers, fugitives and
shakedown artists looking to launder themselves in the Vegas sun. But
most
of those now crowding into Las Vegas are fleeing from an America where
everyday life has become too much of a gamble--where either the Reagan
recession of 1981, the Bush slump of 1990 or the burst bubble of a
decade
later has left them as devastated as a blackjack player who bet it all
only
to have his pair of tens get trounced by the dealer's Ace-King. The
only
risk they are interested in now is the off chance that Vegas can
provide the
normalcy, the security, the certainty, that once underpinned their
lives, or
at least their dreams.
What a turnaround it has been for once lowly Las Vegas--and for the
nation
around it. Barely fifteen years ago, the august Citicorp was queasy
about
publicly admitting that its major credit-card processing center had
been
relocated to an unincorporated suburb of Las Vegas. A deal with state
authorities allowed the banking corporation to postmark and camouflage
its
mail as coming from "The Lakes, Nevada" instead of from sinful Vegas.
Today,
that same neighborhood sports several high-end casinos and luxury
hotels.
And Citicorp's own credibility, in the aftermath of the great Wall
Street
accounting scandals, ranks somewhere below that of a midtown
three-card-monte hustler.
Nor could Neil Postman have known back in 1985 that casino gambling was
about to be fully destigmatized within a decade--and delicately renamed
"gaming." The resulting shift in public attitudes would not only
definitively cleanse Vegas's image but also net it a growing bonanza.
As
recently as 1988, casino gambling was legal only in Nevada and in
Atlantic
City. But as American industry continued to wash up offshore and the
commercial tax base atrophied, one strapped state and municipality
after
another turned its forlorn eyes toward the gaming tables and slot
machines.
Impoverished Indian tribes were more than willing to sign gambling
compacts
with state governments. The result: Now twenty-seven states have
Nevada-style casinos, and forty-eight states have at least some form of
legal gambling. With local budgets again being squeezed by burgeoning
deficits, government itself is thinking about going into the casino
business. In the spring of 2003, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley said he'd
like
to open a municipal casino. Before the 1989 opening of the Mirage
unleashed
the New Vegas revolution, only 15 percent of Americans had ever visited
the
city. By mid-decade that number had doubled. In its 1996 annual report,
Circus Circus celebrated the news: "In an era when social attitudes
toward
play, and the means to afford it, have dramatically changed, so has the
role
of the casino."
The past seven years have shown an ever more dramatic shift toward the
mainstreaming of gambling. A gambling-industry poll claimed that in the
single year of 2001, 51 million Americans--more than a quarter of the
population over age 21--visited a casino, chalking up a national total
of
almost 300 million visits. More than 430 commercial casinos nationwide
brought in $26.5 billon in revenue--two and a half times what Americans
spent on movie tickets, $5 billion more than they spent on DVDs and
videos,
and $3 billion more than on cosmetics and toiletries. The explosion of
legalized gambling nationwide has had little but positive impact on Las
Vegas. "All it did was increase the average Joe's appetite for
gambling,"
says a veteran Vegas Strip pit boss. "You know, it's like baseball. We
see
all those local Indian casinos and riverboat casinos and local slot
parlors
as our farm teams. They suck in a lot of average American types who
never
thought about gambling before. But once you play on the farm team, who
doesn't want to play in the majors? And Las Vegas is the friggin' World
Series. It's kind of like, You build the casinos out there and they'll
come.
But eventually they'll come here."
The difference between the marketing of Vegas a half-century ago and
today
is precisely the difference in mainstream American attitudes. "Fifty
years
ago, Lucille Ball was pregnant, and they couldn't say that word on I
Love
Lucy,'' says historian Green. "Today we have lesbian kisses on TV. We
have
the word 'bullshit' on prime time, not to talk about cable programming.
As
the culture has become more open, Las Vegas can market itself more
honestly." And, Green might add, there's a whole new line of
Lucy-themed
slot machines now out on casino floors.
In a time when Martha Stewart gets busted, Mark McGwire is on chemicals
and
Sammy Sosa gets caught with a corker; when everyday economic life in
America
has become a breathtaking risk and it's an all-out crapshoot whether
you'll
still have a job next month or your HMO will cover your spinal tap or
you
can hock the house for enough to pay for your kid's college tuition,
who can
say whether it would have really been that stupid to let it all ride on
18
Red? Was it smarter to invest ten years of savings in an Enron-backed
401(k)
or to spend your time studying the probability charts for single-deck
blackjack? Is the integrity of the roulette wheels at the Bellagio more
tainted than the quarterly corporate reports coming out of WorldCom?
Both
are iffy propositions, but at least in Vegas the rules of the game are
clear-cut, the industry tightly regulated and the unfavorable odds
publicly
posted. There are no multimillion-dollar-a-year cable TV touts telling
you
that red or black or double-zero green is the next best thing or that
life
somehow owes you an eternal double-digit annual return. Haven't we, in
fact,
reached a point in our culture where the button-down bankers and
arbitrageurs have become the reckless "casino capitalists," while those
who
actually run the casinos can get away with labeling themselves
responsible
and conservative "entertainment visionaries"? Even if they are,
increasingly, often the same people?
A couple of years back at a gambling industry convention in Las Vegas,
the
chief financial officers of three major casinos sat on a public panel.
When
someone from the floor asked if investment in the casino business was a
good
bet, one of the CFOs answered, essentially: The difference between us
and
Enron is that at least our money is real. That globally recognized icon
of
Las Vegas, the neon-lit, hand-waving cowboy Vegas Vic, unveiled in 1947
and
still presiding over downtown's Fremont Street, used to regularly and
electronically call out "Howdy, pardner" until the complaints of
card-groggy
hotel guests got him permanently muted. But if Vic could speak today,
he
might well be saying, "Welcome to Las Vegas, pardner. The last honest
place
in America."
by Marc Cooper
Las Vegas
This city is often described as one of dreams and fantasy, of tinselish
make-believe. But this is getting it backward. Vegas is instead the
American
market ethic stripped bare, a mini-world totally free of the pretenses
and
protocols of modern consumer capitalism. As one local gambling
researcher
says gleefully: "What other city in America puts up giant roadside
billboards promoting 97 percent guaranteed payback on slot play? In
other
words, you give us a buck and we'll give you back 97 cents. That's why
I
love my hometown."
Even that stomach-churning instant when the last chip is swept away can
be
charged with an existential frisson. Maybe that's why they say that the
difference between praying here and praying anywhere else is that here
you
really mean it. All the previous hours of over-the-table chitchat, of
know-it-all exchanges between the ice-cool dealer and the cynical
writer
from the big city, the kibitzing with the T-shirted rubes and the
open-shirted sharpies to my right and left, the false promises of the
coins
clanging into the trays behind me, the little stories I tell myself
while my
stack of chips shrinks and swells and then shrivels some more--all of
this
comes to an abrupt, crashing halt when the last chip goes back in the
dealer's tray. "No seats for the onlookers, sir." And the other players
at
the table--the dealer who a moment ago was my buddy, the solicitous pit
boss, the guy from Iowa in short khakis and topsiders peering over my
shoulder--no longer give a fuck whether I live or die. And while
winning is
always better, it's even in moments of loss like this that I feel a
certain
perverse thrill. It's one of the few totally honest interludes you can
have
in modern America. All the pretense, all the sentimentality, the
euphemisms,
hypocrisies, come-ons, loss leaders, warranties and guarantees, all the
fairy tales are out the window. You're out of money? OK, good--now get
lost.
In a city where the only currency is currency, there is a table-level
democracy of luck. Las Vegas is perhaps the most color-blind,
class-free
place in America. As long as your cash or credit line holds out, no one
gives a damn about your race, gender, national origin, sexual
orientation,
address, family lineage, voter registration or even your criminal
arrest
record. As long as you have chips on the table, Vegas deftly casts you
as
the star in an around-the-clock extravaganza. For all of America's
manifold
unfulfilled promises of upward mobility, Vegas is the only place
guaranteed
to come through--even if it's for a fleeting weekend. You may never, in
fact, surpass the Joneses, but with the two-night, three-day special at
the
Sahara, buffet and show included, free valet parking and maybe a comped
breakfast at the coffee shop, you can certainly live like them for
seventy-two hours--while never having to as much as change out of your
flip-flops, tank top or NASCAR cap.
"Las Vegas as America, America as Las Vegas. It's like what came first?
The
chicken or the egg?" says Vegas historian Michael Green. "Fresno,
California, doesn't have a row of casinos, but you can be sure it has
some
part of town where you can go for vice even though it's supposed to be
illegal. Here it's not necessarily vice in the first place, but it's
certainly not illegal. We have the same sort of stuff and more. Except
that
unlike in most places, here it's just out in the open." What
extraordinary
prescience social critic Neil Postman displayed when he wrote in his
1985
book Amusing Ourselves to Death that Las Vegas--where Wall Street
corporations had replaced mafias and mobs--should be considered the
"symbolic capital" of America. "At different times in our history,"
Postman
wrote, "different cities have been the focal point of a radiating
American
spirit." In the era of the Revolutionary War, Boston embodied the
ideals of
freedom; in the mid-nineteenth century, "New York became the symbol of
a
melting-pot America." In the early twentieth century, the brawn and
inventiveness of American industry and culture were captured in the
energy
of Chicago. "Today," Postman concluded, "we must look to the city of
Las
Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration,
its
symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a
chorus
girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of
entertainment,
and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public
discourse
increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our
religion,
news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into
congenial
adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular
notice."
When Postman penned these words, little could he imagine that the Vegas
he
was writing about was the "old" Las Vegas and that Sin City was just a
few
years away from a radical makeover. Nor could Postman fully fathom that
America itself was in the throes of a cataclysmic transformation. The
more
both places changed, the more they mirrored each other. In 1989 Steve
Wynn--with junk-bond financing from Michael Milken--stunned the Strip
with
his $700 million Mirage Hotel and Casino and touched off a revolution.
One
after another, the old Rat Pack-era hotels were dynamited and in their
place
rose staggering Leviathans of modern, market-based entertainment: the
biggest casino in the world, then the biggest hotel in the world, then
the
most expensive hotel in the world, the biggest man-made hotel lake in
the
world, the hotel with the biggest rooms in the world, and so on.
If economist Joseph Schumpeter was correct in theorizing that "creative
destruction is the essential fact about capitalism," then capitalism as
practiced in Las Vegas is the purest strain. The erection of the Vegas
mega-resorts was not only heralded by the televised dynamiting of their
predecessors but also accompanied by the concurrent collapse of much of
the
rest of America's urban, industrial and employment infrastructure.
Isn't it
logical or at least fitting that Las Vegas, the City of the Eternal
Now, the
town that every few years seems to slather yet one more layer of
pavement
and glitz over its own scant history, tradition and roots, would expand
just
as long-entrenched communities from Southeast Los Angeles to Lima,
Ohio,
evaporated into the deindustrialized dust of globalization?
Indeed, just as quickly as Las Vegas consumes and erases the past and
scrambles the present, it now shines to many as an attractive beacon of
the
future. Unlike almost any other place in America, Las Vegas is one city
where unskilled labor can still--thanks to vibrant unions and wealthy
and
efficient employers--earn middle-class wages. Vegas food servers, car
parkers, cashiers, even maids, can still buy into the new American
dream,
purchasing a house and putting their kids through school. A high school
grad
can become a professional dealer for three hundred bucks' worth of
tuition
and a few weeks of practice pitching cards--and most likely get a job.
Where
else in America can you regularly find 60-year-old, bouffant-coiffed
cocktail waitresses proudly wearing union buttons (those of the mighty
Culinary Workers Local 226) and going home to peruse the statements of
their
fattening pension accounts?
Even though the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center slowed
(slightly) what has traditionally been the recession-proof Vegas
economy, a
steady stream of 5,000-6,000 domestic economic refugees a month still
pour
into and around the city. Only 6 percent of adults living in Vegas's
Clark
County were born here--the lowest such figure anywhere in America. And
although water supplies are drying up, schools are strained and suicide
and
domestic violence rates are among the highest in the nation, they keep
pouring in. Purchasers of new houses--at prices far below those of the
two
coasts--are wait-listed. Vegas's population doubled during the 1980s,
and
doubled again in the '90s. Vegas continues to be the fastest-growing
metropolitan area in America.
This generation of immigrants, however, is different in many ways from
the
grifters, hustlers and outcasts who huddled here over the past century.
Sure, there will always be a certain batch of trimmers, fugitives and
shakedown artists looking to launder themselves in the Vegas sun. But
most
of those now crowding into Las Vegas are fleeing from an America where
everyday life has become too much of a gamble--where either the Reagan
recession of 1981, the Bush slump of 1990 or the burst bubble of a
decade
later has left them as devastated as a blackjack player who bet it all
only
to have his pair of tens get trounced by the dealer's Ace-King. The
only
risk they are interested in now is the off chance that Vegas can
provide the
normalcy, the security, the certainty, that once underpinned their
lives, or
at least their dreams.
What a turnaround it has been for once lowly Las Vegas--and for the
nation
around it. Barely fifteen years ago, the august Citicorp was queasy
about
publicly admitting that its major credit-card processing center had
been
relocated to an unincorporated suburb of Las Vegas. A deal with state
authorities allowed the banking corporation to postmark and camouflage
its
mail as coming from "The Lakes, Nevada" instead of from sinful Vegas.
Today,
that same neighborhood sports several high-end casinos and luxury
hotels.
And Citicorp's own credibility, in the aftermath of the great Wall
Street
accounting scandals, ranks somewhere below that of a midtown
three-card-monte hustler.
Nor could Neil Postman have known back in 1985 that casino gambling was
about to be fully destigmatized within a decade--and delicately renamed
"gaming." The resulting shift in public attitudes would not only
definitively cleanse Vegas's image but also net it a growing bonanza.
As
recently as 1988, casino gambling was legal only in Nevada and in
Atlantic
City. But as American industry continued to wash up offshore and the
commercial tax base atrophied, one strapped state and municipality
after
another turned its forlorn eyes toward the gaming tables and slot
machines.
Impoverished Indian tribes were more than willing to sign gambling
compacts
with state governments. The result: Now twenty-seven states have
Nevada-style casinos, and forty-eight states have at least some form of
legal gambling. With local budgets again being squeezed by burgeoning
deficits, government itself is thinking about going into the casino
business. In the spring of 2003, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley said he'd
like
to open a municipal casino. Before the 1989 opening of the Mirage
unleashed
the New Vegas revolution, only 15 percent of Americans had ever visited
the
city. By mid-decade that number had doubled. In its 1996 annual report,
Circus Circus celebrated the news: "In an era when social attitudes
toward
play, and the means to afford it, have dramatically changed, so has the
role
of the casino."
The past seven years have shown an ever more dramatic shift toward the
mainstreaming of gambling. A gambling-industry poll claimed that in the
single year of 2001, 51 million Americans--more than a quarter of the
population over age 21--visited a casino, chalking up a national total
of
almost 300 million visits. More than 430 commercial casinos nationwide
brought in $26.5 billon in revenue--two and a half times what Americans
spent on movie tickets, $5 billion more than they spent on DVDs and
videos,
and $3 billion more than on cosmetics and toiletries. The explosion of
legalized gambling nationwide has had little but positive impact on Las
Vegas. "All it did was increase the average Joe's appetite for
gambling,"
says a veteran Vegas Strip pit boss. "You know, it's like baseball. We
see
all those local Indian casinos and riverboat casinos and local slot
parlors
as our farm teams. They suck in a lot of average American types who
never
thought about gambling before. But once you play on the farm team, who
doesn't want to play in the majors? And Las Vegas is the friggin' World
Series. It's kind of like, You build the casinos out there and they'll
come.
But eventually they'll come here."
The difference between the marketing of Vegas a half-century ago and
today
is precisely the difference in mainstream American attitudes. "Fifty
years
ago, Lucille Ball was pregnant, and they couldn't say that word on I
Love
Lucy,'' says historian Green. "Today we have lesbian kisses on TV. We
have
the word 'bullshit' on prime time, not to talk about cable programming.
As
the culture has become more open, Las Vegas can market itself more
honestly." And, Green might add, there's a whole new line of
Lucy-themed
slot machines now out on casino floors.
In a time when Martha Stewart gets busted, Mark McGwire is on chemicals
and
Sammy Sosa gets caught with a corker; when everyday economic life in
America
has become a breathtaking risk and it's an all-out crapshoot whether
you'll
still have a job next month or your HMO will cover your spinal tap or
you
can hock the house for enough to pay for your kid's college tuition,
who can
say whether it would have really been that stupid to let it all ride on
18
Red? Was it smarter to invest ten years of savings in an Enron-backed
401(k)
or to spend your time studying the probability charts for single-deck
blackjack? Is the integrity of the roulette wheels at the Bellagio more
tainted than the quarterly corporate reports coming out of WorldCom?
Both
are iffy propositions, but at least in Vegas the rules of the game are
clear-cut, the industry tightly regulated and the unfavorable odds
publicly
posted. There are no multimillion-dollar-a-year cable TV touts telling
you
that red or black or double-zero green is the next best thing or that
life
somehow owes you an eternal double-digit annual return. Haven't we, in
fact,
reached a point in our culture where the button-down bankers and
arbitrageurs have become the reckless "casino capitalists," while those
who
actually run the casinos can get away with labeling themselves
responsible
and conservative "entertainment visionaries"? Even if they are,
increasingly, often the same people?
A couple of years back at a gambling industry convention in Las Vegas,
the
chief financial officers of three major casinos sat on a public panel.
When
someone from the floor asked if investment in the casino business was a
good
bet, one of the CFOs answered, essentially: The difference between us
and
Enron is that at least our money is real. That globally recognized icon
of
Las Vegas, the neon-lit, hand-waving cowboy Vegas Vic, unveiled in 1947
and
still presiding over downtown's Fremont Street, used to regularly and
electronically call out "Howdy, pardner" until the complaints of
card-groggy
hotel guests got him permanently muted. But if Vic could speak today,
he
might well be saying, "Welcome to Las Vegas, pardner. The last honest
place
in America."
