Articles by Tim Carlson

Las Vegas is Everyman’s cut-rate Babylon, wrote Alistair Cooke. Vegas—you must know in your bones even if you don’t think about it—is the most wickedly efficient, deviously designed and advanced engine to prime the capitalist pump ever devised.

Billionaire hotelier Steve Wynn gave everyone the blasphemous half-truth when he said: “Vegas is sort of how God would do it if he had money.” Rather, Vegas is how men who would be gods do it in order to get more money.

Vegas is a man-made mirage built in the land of natural mirages. As Norman Mailer wrote in The American Dream, “The night before I left Las Vegas, I walked out into the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising into the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.”

Famed architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote a revolutionary treatise called Learning From Las Vegas 40 years ago praising the way the practical architecture of the casinos on the Strip played in perfect audacious tune to the blue collar id, the everyman dreams of fortune with neon signs three times taller than the low-slung boxes housing the money machines—the casinos chock a block with one armed bandits and baccarat tables. Elitist east coast architects harrumphed and lifted their pinkies in dismay, but soon enough the Yale School of Architecture and the rest of the design elite were studying the place and applying the lessons to buildings around the world.

Vegas is the Capital of Overreaching. It’s where a young, avenging Muhammad Ali punished a fading Floyd Patterson for perceived slights by raining down painful but non-knockout blows late into their heavyweight fight. It’s where Evel Knievel crashed out in 1968 trying to jump Caesars fountains on a big fat Harley with no suspension. It’s where Mike Tyson bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear trying to get DQ’d when he could not stand the humiliation of a resounding defeat. It’s where Hunter Thompson was drawn to mourn the death of the Sixties in a drug-crazed spree. It’s where unhinged personas like Britney Spears go to get married and divorced in a night

And it’s the home of casinos where entertainers that nobody knows are still alive can go out every night and find a nostalgic older audience seeking the reassurance of 40-year-old tunes. Perhaps the casino stages are the entertainment industry’s way of realizing Howard Hughes’ dream of cryogenically preserving bodies until a cure can be found.

And for those Cassandras looking for an augury of imminent ecological disaster, just go to nearby Lake Mead. Its water level down by 65 feet – half full with 5 trillion gallons of water to go — just as Vegas has virtually doubled to 1.9 million population in the past 20 years. Omnivorous Vegas has hatched plans for a $1 billion water pipeline to snatch water from not-so-nearby rivers and underground springs. All to keep the Bellagio’s 100-foot-high synchronized fountains reaching to the sky like rockets at timed intervals to the tune of Strauss waltzes.

Just as it appropriates water to keep all the world’s amenities flowing in “a habitat that won’t grow a tomato,” as Jason Love said, current Las Vegas appropriates the world’s greatest landmarks with its simulacrums of the Seven Wonders of the World. While environmentalists may damn Vegas for its insatiable appetite for energy and water, this Emerald City plunked down in the middle of a dead sea can counter: We make it up in saved jet fuel for tourists who might spend their life savings traveling to New York, Paris, Egypt, Venice and Rome.

It’s just according to plan that Vegas leaves most visitors knocked off their bearings and counting their shekels to make sure they have enough to catch a cab to McCarran on the final day.