Taking the Great American Roadtrip
- - Smithsonian Magazine
- - September of 2009
Link:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/trav...-41615038/?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
The entire article is worth reading, but one of the best passages is about Las Vegas:
"I had never seen Las Vegas before. I was driving down the Strip, which was like the midway of the largest imaginable carnival—a free-for-all, with masks and bingeing. Passing me were slow-moving trucks, pulling mobile billboards that advertised girls for hire and restaurants, magicians, singers, shows. The hotels and casinos were shaped like Oriental palaces, with turrets and waterfalls, and familiarly, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Sphinx guarding a glassy pyramid, the Arc de Triomphe that had the texture of stale cake.
The city of fun houses dazzled me for a day, until my eyes became habituated to the scene, and then I was depressed. Yet Las Vegas is in its way as American as a lobster pot, a lighthouse, a field of corn, a red barn; but it is more. Unlike those iconic images, Las Vegas represents the fulfillment of childish fantasies—easy money, entertainment, sex, risk, elbowroom, self-indulgence. As a city without limits, it can go on spreading into the desert that surrounds it, reinventing itself as long as the water holds out.
No one can satirize Las Vegas; it satirizes itself much more effectively, thriving on self-mockery.
"I was so drunk last night I puked all over myself," a man said to me at breakfast, sounding delighted. "Like I was really drunk. It was great. I didn't know where I was. I just fell down. I don't even know how I got back to my room!"
A manic eagerness penetrated the place, like forced laughter; the object was to have a good time, no matter the cost. I loitered, I nosed in the casinos, I saw the "Love." This show, Beatles songs brought to life on bungee cords and trapezes and high wires, was appropriate to Las Vegas, which is, for good and ill, a circus, but an interactive one, where the visitors are also participants—part-time clowns, floozies, risk-takers. But on a visit to the Liberace Museum on East Tropicana, lured by the lovely hills, I kept going."
GL
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