Having spent maybe 18 hours of my life in Las Vegas, at least eight of which I spent sleeping, I have to say I can hardly disagree with much of what is said of it in the second of those links, but that I kind of like it regardless.

Maybe “like” is wrong. Am fascinated and pleased by the existence of.

In my (very little) exposure, it seems about like what Islamic fundamentalists must think America is. And they’re maybe kinda right but also totally, totally wrong. It’s at once a perfect slice and distillation of America and Americanness, and totally irrefutably unique, different in every respect from America and also (I must imagine) every other place on earth.

Apparently totally amoral, capitalism gone nuts, bigger better faster more!, every appetite seduced and marketed and gluttonously catered to, everything the wildest most ostentatious wealth can create flaunted, vulgarly accessible and exotically out-of-reach, tacky poor white trash virtually side-by-side and in essentially the same activity with the most extravagantly wealthy in the world, packed to the brim, totally nutso. I think it’s an insightful window into what humans are and can be, and it can be fascinating and horrifying.

I don’t think I’d like to stay for very long and I might be afraid of what might happen if I did, but I was totally enthralled and I have to say pleased that even in the smallness of this modern world there can still be a Babylon.

You make an eloquent defense, Robbie. But wouldn’t one get the same understanding and appreciation just from hearing the place described, or from reading the description of the democratic man in the Republic? At least then one wouldn’t have to live with the effects that place has on the rest of the country, never mind the Colorado river.

For the record, I’ve never been to Las Vegas and hope never to go. Carson City (with casinos across the street from the state capitol) was enough for me.

To be clear: I’m asking this sincerely, not flippantly. Robbie, you said that you delighted in knowing that Las Vegas existed, and it seemed like you meant that statement precisely. I know I’ve received similar pleasure from knowledge that a thing existed, or had existed, although a specific example escapes me at the moment. I’m mostly interested in why you find it pleasurable for there to exist a Babylon today. I have my suspicions, but I’m curious to hear your take.

Just a week or so ago I saw the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie (and maybe this allusion should suggest something of the spirit in which I express my sentiment). I can’t remember why I ever saw the first one, but I don’t think I had heard much about it yet and I can hardly imagine that I went willingly to a movie based on an amusement park ride. I must have been with people, or otherwise unusually compelled, but I was shocked by how actually not terrible at all it was, and I credited Johnny Depp’s performance — and his really interpreting a familiar archetype in such a novel and interesting way — almost entirely for that. I saw the second one only somewhat recently, doubting that my somewhat raised expectations would be met, and nothing impressed me enough to be remembered in the least detail a week later. The third one, though, (benefiting from re-lowered expectations?) impressed me more than I remember the original doing; it seemed, first of all, surprisingly strange, and perhaps daringly strange for a movie marketed to the kind of massive audience that tends to be unforgiving of strangeness. It also seemed surprisingly aware of itself. I suppose the whole franchise is tongue-in-cheeky, which is a kind of self-awareness, but maybe I mean it seemed surprisingly aware of the nature and appeal of the pirate trope (which it perhaps had to be aware of or “in tune” with on some level all along, even if only accidentally) and of its being situated within a kind of mythos that it can manipulate (and how!) but is also bound by.

The Coming End is ever-present, as the movie faces the close of the trilogy and a future that we all know doesn’t include pirates (uh, or Pirates!, or what have you — leaving aside for the moment any question of just how they ever were). There’s a moment when Cap’n Jack and a fellow rapscallion, I think literally in Davey Jones’ Locker, reflect on the changing times, and the other fellow opines that the world is getting smaller. Depp corrects him, with an inward stare and some regret, saying something like: “Same size, mate. Just less in it.”

I do try to be a decent and moral person, and do hope for others to be the same, but I do not feel at all compelled to perfect the world in a more expansive moral or theological sense. Perhaps that does make me somewhat wicked, and though I can’t say that I am sure of that neither can I say I’m terribly unhappy about it if it’s so. I sure do think Paradise is pretty bleak and inhuman until the Light Bearer starts poking around and mussing it up — Whitman (I think Whitman) said it was written so because Milton was a true poet and thus of the Devil’s party. And what a party! Wouldn’t want to live there, but…

It’s not all about the Devil and Babylon, of course. I am absolutely tickled by the prospect of a few Louisiana backwoods (backwaters?) where some few folks still talk honest-to-God Cajun French, or of the Northern New Mexicans with no connection to Mexico since Santa Fe was one of its provincial capitals who use what are elsewhere understood as archaic Spanish forms — and that in the year two-thousand-fucking-eight there actually remain some (mostly hostile, apparently) uncontacted peoples speaking unknown tongues in the Amazon. I guess I’m even pleased to know there are missionaries fighting to do their Godly duty of civilizing them, or at least translating the scriptures for them, but also that there are folks fighting not to allow it. (Maybe even that every now and then somebody of either stripe disappears into the damn jungle.)

I know this can be dangerous territory for celebration. It’s a tendency that can fall on harmless appreciation, or even fetishization of diversity, or a suspect and unfair exoticizing (or orientalizing, to adopt a particular usage) of the other, or a permissiveness toward some kinds of tangible harm. I do try to be careful about it, especially where there may be innocent and unwilling victims, but in such an increasingly globalized and homogenized world, I can’t help but appreciate that it’s not (yet) all helmets and safety belts and righteous folks doin’ what the Good Book says. I do very much want to live in a big world full of strange and fascinating things, with some dangers and adventures yet — with, yeah it’s silly, Mos Eisley Cantinas and unscrupulous but decent Han Solos — and I don’t very much at all want to live in the Virtuous Republic.

I do understand that you can see Las Vegas as typical, as American moral corruption writ large — but you could just as well see a quixotic and puritanical crusade against Babylon as more typical still. Maybe it’s really the conflict that’s typical.

I don’t think I want to cast my lot with the Devil, of course, but I guess what I’ve been trying to say is that I don’t really want to take up arms against him, either. All the comedies and tragedies — the poetry, I guess, if I can be so indulged — are to me preferable to the sort of Good they’d have to be traded in to get.

Beautifully said, Robbie. I’m in your camp.

My problem with Vegas is that at it’s center it’s a swindle. If they broke even on the gambling and made it all up on drinks, I wouldn’t be so bothered. (Of course, it wouldn’t exist, either) The rest of the things I don’t much like about Vegas follow on sort of logically from letting giant corporations defraud the populace, it’s just marketing, selling the illusion of wealth to fools. Vegas isn’t any worse than the convenience store selling numbers, it’s just that it’s more dangerous, because it’s bigger and shinier, so the greed and desperation aren’t as obvious.

There are fairly compelling arguments we have to let this sort of thing happen, that it’s unavoidable. But I can’t really be happy about the glories built upon it, anymore than I can admire the majesty of the Pyramids properly, knowing what they were for and who built them.

But then, I believe in the laws about pasteurizing milk, too.

Here’s another way of thinking of it: if Las Vegas was it’s own entity, that could survive on it’s own, I wouldn’t mind. But it isn’t, it’s a parasite on the world, that sucks in and destroys the silly, the greedy and the desperate. It isn’t a self-sustaining, apocolyptic, exotic world. It’s a fake, a fraud, all the way down. A mirage.

and I can hardly imagine that I went willingly to a movie based on an amusement park ride.

Although it is a really excellent amusement park ride.

Moss: It really is. And changing — as of this summer, they had inserted several animatronic Johnny Depps, and the voice of Davey Jones. (In Anaheim at any rate. I’ve never been to Orlando.)

Tim: I understand what you’re saying, and am not without sympathy. I think I would vote against permitting Nevada-style casinos in my own state. The world would surely be a little bit safer without Las Vegas. It would also be a bit less strange and interesting, though. That’s all I mean to say.

One more small point, Tim:

I don’t think Vegas really defrauds much of the public, or sells them the illusion of wealth, or however else you phrased it. I do expect that to some extent it attempts to seduce sick and addictive people, and to that extent it is evil and needs to be policed however strictly it can be. But I don’t think most people walk up to a slot machine to get rich — they walk up to blow their fifty bucks on the negligibly small (but not actually infinitesimal) chance of getting rich, or the somewhat more probable but still not likely chance of paying for that buffet dinner. And I think probably the great majority of people who decide to spend their $x on a weekend in Vegas instead of a weekend in Hawaii (or wherever) spend about as much as they expected to and do about what they expected to and have a good time with their friends seeing Tom Jones and some white tigers and magic tricks, or whatever.