Something touches every free man deep inside when he reads a line of Hunter Thompson. Some make a career of biting him, although some wind up simply biting the drug-frenzy culture that sprang up around him, aping his carriage or his sense of adventure. That is not what that is. Neither one is. This is just a response.

Thompson cut to the heart of what made Vegas as a business, but like many others he swept in heading east from San Fran, thundered through the high desert and parachuted in. In Fear and Loathing he can barely tell if he is in Boulder City. Someone coming in from any direction but California way could never mistake the two. They lie on opposite sides of an invisible border, one of a dozen identical borders that define life between Kansas City and Yreka.

Reno used to be much the way we were, but we got more high-octane and weird after the decision to sink a major dam into the Colorado on the Nevada-Arizona border became a reality. All of a sudden there was another big wave of spicks and micks and Jocks and polocks and every type of God’s own wop, and once the work was done the mob saw in us the last place in this awful state that labor was a buyer’s market. It was a little vision of Paradise for the thing that would become America after our industry died screaming, a monetarist American Dream. Thompson was looking at it in its hideous caul, back when the Mob still ran things and the casinos had a stake in a good crop of tourists raising real hell.

Reno, though, Reno was sitting on top of Carson City, part of the giant pre-auto cluster-fuck that evolved from Virginia and her sister lodes. It grew out of services provided to silver miners, and you can’t fob off men who work with dynamite and quicksilver with pussy and poker alone. The Biggest Little City On Earth, they call themselves - a sort of vile Moral Majority taunt, a formal craven-call treaty between the Valley Baptists and the Mormon tide. We never got the way that you got in California or Oregon or Washington, even British Columbia and Alaska, the big isolated cities serving a cross-section of humanity and the local religious nuts seething in the wilderness. They got into one of them big cities of ours good and early.

The Biggest Little City On Earth. I mean, listen to that shit. The fix was in, wasn’t nobody lying about it. Johnny Cash could only barely tell, on his clearest days, that you could kill a man there without winding up in Sacramento or Salt Lake.

—

Anyone who has lived here has gone to a casino not just without gambling, but without even the faintest interest in gambling. Until you have, you’re a tourist. It’s where the shows happen, it’s where you find the closest we have to good food, it’s where the theatres and auditoria are. You have to walk through two floors of casino to see a movie in the whitest burb of this Goddamn town. For legal reasons, they have to mark off what is Casino and what isn’t, but the carpet and walls are the same - driving your feet and body inexorably towards video poker. (You see, with the Colorado emptying into the Mexican dirt, we don’t drain to the sea any more. It’s ecologically irresponsible to throw human trash out just anywhere. Thus: video poker.)  You are always either in a cozy little womb or a vast domed arch, and the wombs are falling out of fashion. Caesar’s Palace even has its own meticulously-maintained, obviously false sky - and you shop there. The smoky haze lifts year by year, to the point that this day you could spend all week in even the shittiest purpose-built casino withut getting cancer. You drink to pass the time paying to play a shitty video game; the tables are for Aryans of good pedigree. That hokey Don’t Gamble With Marijuana sign is hardly necessary any more.

—

It’s a common misunderstanding among tourists that the people they see represent part-timers or working stiffs. The ones manning the pulpits are no common monasts but little lords in the making. From the very beginning, the casinos have done all they can to create a class of well-off private eunuchs born into the maroon, grab ‘em out of high school with too much money to know what to do with. The visibles, they’re well-off. They might not like their jobs - God, who does? - but they pay fantastic, and they have no cross-applicable skills; nobody but another casino can poach your lumpenbourgeois. The only other human beings who ain’t in there to play carnival are the help; Eastern Europeans, these days, the predictable casualties of our exported supply-side revolution, but it takes all kinds. Brown a plus. English not required. The American eye is trained to politely ignore them for everyone’s convenience.

The lower-middle-class stiffs are similarly out of sight. They work in support industries, catering and keeping up our Potemkin shops, but that’s the glamor of Vegas. Get Mickey while he’s young, keep him lily-white, and put up with a little labor expense for his glove-wearing ass and everyone will believe you’re the happiest place on Earth. An endless succession of unnecessaries, bellhops and valets and doormen and retainers, taking tips they don’t need to make the clients they’re not doing anything substantial for feel like some kind of decadent Southern patriarch, but with a heart of gold. We’re a town of scraggle-moustachioed Mormon pimps and fresh-faced young idiots with welcoming mouths. No wonder Penn and Teller set up shop here.

—

There are two types of house of worship: the inspiringly oppressive and the sleepily comforting. Cathedrals and chapels. Chapels have gone out of fashion - every church a megachurch, there to remind you that God is bigger and more important than you, and come with top-of-the-line remote-controlled presentation scrollsheets to convince the faithful that He needs your money. That represents a leap of logic it used to be vaguely obscene to even suggest, and it’s one we pioneered out West: business and faith, together at last. Denver worked on the faith, we worked on the business, both animated to new heights in actual depravity by a shared terror Mormonica. We were the last, best hope of what was becoming America.
In Vegas, Disneyland crowded out the mob and cozy, welcoming obscenity of the circus, and unlike those Denver quitters, we never let the side benefits to cancerous growth get in our way. A couple of dudes strung out on speed was all it took to knock Denver out of the good grace of their capitalist God; it only made our Capitalism-God stronger. Family Values muscled out the Family and the figurative circus replaced the real one, and tits sprouted on billboards like mushrooms in rainy weather as the town’s strip clubs and whore houses went moribund. No country for dick suckers here - nobody even notices any more that prostitution is illegal in Clark County, even the ones who spent their entire trip at the Bellagio.

That poor fool Thompson! Still obsessing over a man quaint enough to bug his opponent as our friends in Iran coronated Saint Reagan, still chasing big winners in an era of strutting, regal losers. He never had any damn idea.

—

These days only a few vestiges remain of Vegas as the nerve center of the Man, the place your bosses went on vacation to abandon their puritanical lives. When our mayor, a vaguely corrupt mob lawyer who shilled a specific gin to children, a man who embodies all that the Clark Containment Pact stands against - a drunken old mobby Jew with an irrepressible decadence - inevitably descends from power, he will be replaced almost without fail by some service-industrial laborite or functionaire, either way another moderate Democrat without opinions about developers. A land-developer or one of their white serfs; the way it’s always been in Reno, where all it takes is flipping a truck stop and being a good Temple and Party man to qualify you as Il Duce.

—

The casinos are laying off their wealthy catamites, a seeming first, and everyone has grown proper spooked. The Bush era was good for us, because we’ve become a sort of embodiment of American collective delusion, the kind it doesn’t take drugs or depravity to produce. Our business model has de-evolved exclusively to middle-managers coming back from an illegal hand-job thinking of themselves as pagan chieftains of Turquery, and you can only shine up being a member of the bad luck crowd so far. When the bloom wears off, we’re just another bullshit tourist town.

—

Washoe County used to be one of the country’s more Republican urban counties, and this year it went for Obama by margins typical of the rest of the left coast. This threatens a break, or perhaps represents a cleavage already in progress, in the accepted agreement in Republican politics in Nevada - Reno gets funding and political power under Republican administrations out of proportion to usual rural-resentment patterns as long as they help keep a lid on Clark. In my optimism in the wake of the election, I saw this as a sign that Reno had welched; and so after did the lame-duck Republican government pull UNR funds and other spillover perqs with an unreserved furor. But the reality is that the pact is obsolete. Our civic genius these days is Wynn, representing all the filthy white Dubaihis who banked on the bullshit economy lasting forever. The mayor, not the Governor, is the walking dead.

Goodbye Raoul Duke! Goodbye “Las Vegas”!