The self-indulgent ramblings of a maudlin wank-a-day.
A.M. Gittlitz, the New Inquiry / Salon:
Punk’s cultural revolution: Pussy Riot’s masked women have become icons of Russia’s anti-Putin movement — and turned the genre on its head
Maybe if we all pray hard enough to the 80s we’ll have another shot at replacing Russians with East Coast bourgeois.
Every time someone embarks on a literary project, there is a certain amount of by-product. Presented for your approval is this, some of the industrial effluent of my upcoming fabulist project; while it passed quality control, it’s too irregularly-shaped and prosaic to fit with the other material and it would have caused stacking problems with its round edges and its glimmer of human dignity. Thus, it is suitable only for you, our undiscriminating readers.
Please to enjoy this blogging, a true but fictional story of Willard “Mitt” Romney / Wilford “Dick” Hopper / Wilhelm “Brick” Manley / Pendejo “Jellybean” Brighamyoung Junior.
1. While campaigning, Wilhelm Carringford Manley officially went by his nickname “Brick”. In all future references – no less than once per public apperance – he referred to himself as “The Adversary”. Is there anything sadder than trying to choose your own nickname – and failing?
2. When “Brick” destroyed his wife Wilhelmina with a long sledge hammer in front of a helpless joint session of Congress, she did not cry or grimace or even laugh in pain, but looked forward into the middle distance with a strange haunting smile the entire time.
3. His insane decision to boast about scouring Kansas City from the Earth with nuclear fire; his claque of dystrophic eunuchs applauding, as if nothing was wrong with this.
4. What motivated “Brick” to have all American citizens of Indian ancestry interned in camps is still beyond us, even after years of constant vague propaganda. It’s not like they could vote.
5. When duly defeated in an unconstitutional race for a third term, “Brick” had his opponent Bowie Wilkes Brown (D-LA) shot by a Dallas mobster on national television.
6. “Brick” ran unconstitutionally for a third term. On what seems to have been his behalf, every expert asked repeated that the time for law was over and only “Brick” could lead America to the fate she deserved.
7. “One White, One Vote” campaign – obviously illegal. How did he even get away with that?
8. Whistleblowing on his own administration.
9. After #8, his still-baffling decision to relieve his press secretary and mock and torture reporters on live TV.
10. “I am proud to announce I have destroyed all life in Kansas City, Missouri with a nucular barrage” – nucular!! What is this, 2003???
11. “Brick” launching twenty-four warheads totalling 35-50 mT payload at Kansas City, Missouri, killing or grievously injuring ten million people in three states and completely derailing the Super Bowl halftime show.
12. The notorious “I am now imperbious to vullets” gaffe. When even the dystrophic eunuchs crack up, you know you’ve laid one.
13. “Brick” casting an audience that dared to laugh at his “all sixty-two states” mistake into slavery, then forcing the Supreme Court to overturn not only the amendments rendering this illegal but all Amendments.
14. Opening the yawning abyss of Stygia on the shores of Lake Erie – did he not get the memo on his bad PA poll numbers?
15. “The Your Loved Ones Raped Forever In Hell As You Watch Program” – two words: “creative accounting”. Can this administration do anything right?
16. Seizing the crown of Canada from Camerlengo Nordicus Harper’s hands at the big ceremony last year. After all the nice things he had to say about “Brick”, can’t we all agree that was just rude?
17. And enslaving Harper’s entire race in the Flaying Pits – talk about adding insult to injury!
Let me get this out of the way: I am here to talk about art.
As far as I’m concerned, art is the glorious act of transmigration from one mind to another: the movement of statements from the artist to the audience. Art, seen in this way, is the main thing distinguishing the heterogenous family of thinking animals from the universe; it is ever-present in human life, and the most important thing in the world. It is what keeps understanding from being a burden, and what makes the solitude of consciousness bearable. And as far as I’m concerned, criticism counts as art.
Criticism is art: the art not just of judgement in a vacuum, but the art of adversarial judgements. In its most basic form it is a firm and reasoned answer – suitable for conveying the fruit of one person’s critical mind to anther – to the question. “Is A or B better?” It grows more complex as the ground multiplies in comparison to the figures:
“Is A better than B?”
“Is A worthy of inclusion in the canon of C, D, E, and F?”
“Is A better than the average of all the 200-some films in genre G?”
“Is A as good as all the 800-some films made this year?”
“Is A better than all of the several thousand films ever made?”
“What can A tell us about the several million surviving works of art in our culture?”
“What can A tell us about all human endeavors?”
Not all criticism aspires to compare the figure of some solitary work with the ground of the whole creative universe, but successful criticism can and has. It need not even focus on the figure at all; the orientation of the ground can tell its own story.
I am a critic, and not a fantastic or a gifted one; I can still read a good line of criticism, and am equipped to be awestruck at its lonely glory. This equipment comes from wading my whole life through a kind of art – critical discussion. One of my hobbies might properly even be called metacritique. I’ve endeavored some years now to understand criticism and make sense of its practice and standards.
If criticism as an artistic discipline needs a defense – and can be defended to people who admit to the existence of verbal arts at all – the best defense I can offer are these ending lines, which I consider to speak for themselves:
~
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
~
~
~
And finally, in their own right some of the finest sentences ever set down in English, and part of an essay which can generally be described in the same terms:
~
Further notes are to follow on the nature, practice, and deficiencies of criticism in its present form.
Sick sick sick I am sick unto death of flash mobs. They are the literal worst.
Let’s all live in High School Musical.
Let’s all be cheery and express that cheer and our general exuberance to be white and have jobs in the form of camera-friendly dancing.
Let’s push the critical spirit away from our sacred blood and soil with jazz hands.
Let’s call our white cop friends if we see drugged-out hoodie lumpens destroying the property value of our flash mob.
Let’s exult in theatrical fealty to our beloved corporate masters, all under the still gaze of the benign Super-Spectator, Steve Jobs.
Let’s be thin, healthy pre-teens forever and ever and ever.
Oh wow oh wow oh wow
Shantih shantih shantih
etc etc etc
(Title via.)
Like all men of quality / knights of the realm / etc etc I was right pleased to hear that Angus King, America’s next Maine, plans to never caucus for as long as he lives, cross his heart and hope to die, no homo forever usw.
Certainly he’s going to win: everyone loves this beautiful man and his manful moustaches. I have received reliable intelligences that some in the Maine press have loved his moustache as often as thrice a day, which to man of my advancing age just seems like so much commotion.
I have yet to hear word of Thom Friedman on this potential rival, but I am here to announce with some excitement that I do not need to; having come into several luxurious moustaches and hundreds cash myself, I have taken the liberty of seizing the creative rights he seduced out of the doting old widow de Tocqueville, but a restless ghost these past hundred-some years. By this means he wrote the (bestselling? remaindered? do basic research) That Used To Be Us, a hard-hitting text which brilliantly examines conventional wisdom by putting English words in order such that it appears, in print, and then signing his name on a paycheck.
In this book, which can only be called a scholarly tome, Friedman employs – along with ink, wood pulp, and his devastatingly furry lip – the latter-day words of Alexis de Tocqueville, famous to every high school student as that Frenchman who had something presumably important to say about America from that time they skipped the paragraph in their history textbooks quoting him. I, too, now have the moral right and indeed the journalistic duty to offer up the opinions of Alexis de Tocqueville – the man, I mean, the very count himself. These are not my words but his; this is evinced in their being italics, to suggest their original French character, and by how evident it is that – though we share handsome and in the words of our past lovers “deceptively Jewish” faces – he is not, and I am, enormously fat.
Without further ado, here at last are the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, liberal, scientist, and count of ancient and noble blood, on the subject of Angus King, a select American.
I have been told of this senator and I confess that the main thing on my mind is an intense hunger for a Reuben sandwich. I suffer from what doctors in my country refer to as «need a Reuben now syndrome». By happy chance the saucissier Arby’s offers a «sandwich au Reuben Super» for five dollars and ninety-nine cents cash money. I advise you eat at Arby’s today. It’s good mood food.
What an honor!
(N.B.: I wrote this whenever ‘a recent post’ was recent. The film itself is no longer even remotely relevant, but Alec told me [probably a year ago, christ] that the review was worth posting. So: here.)
After I saw Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, I spent some time trying to concentrate my thoughts on the film enough for a post here. I was never able to do so to my satisfaction, and eventually the film stopped being timely. Luckily, a recent post at Alicublog brought up Anthony Lane’s review of the film. Instead of making an overlong and off-topic comment there, I’ll make you all suffer. (Here be spoilers for both film and comic.) Lane pans the film as an inhumane celebration of thuggery, and he repeatedly states that the comic and the movie are philosophically similar. I mostly agree with Lane’s assessment of Watchmen the film, but couldn’t agree less with his association of Snyder’s love of thuggery with Alan Moore himself. The film is an eviscerated parody of the comic I read. On its own, the superhero story is not particularly notable –it’s the kind of “dark” inverted hero story that Frank Miller might have written. What I find appealing about Watchmen that both Snyder and Lane missed are simple human stories, cut short by Veidt’s scheme.
The emotional peak of the comic is the execution of Veidt’s plan. A half-dozen small plots with decidedly non-superheroic characters – a cabbie’s fight with her girlfriend, a newspaper vendor talking to an uninterested youth reading a pirate comic, the paranoia- and drug-fueled murder of Hollis Mason, the eventual disgrace of the cop who captures Rorschach, and Rorschach’s psychiatrist spiralling into despair and alienating his wife — begin to be drawn together. At that moment, Veidt’s plan to murder half of New York takes effect, and all of these lives are obliterated in a series of panels which still makes me tear up even after dozens of readings.
Watchmen does briefly reference the iconic scene with the newspaper vendor and youth in silhouette before everything goes white. You’d just about miss it. And it symbolized exactly what was wrong with the film — I had no emotional response, because I had no reason to care about these characters.
Quite a lot of the film is spent slavishly recreating the hero arc of the comic, to the expense of just about everything else. The resulting plot arc, with the characters as written, would have been pretty strongly biased in favor of Veidt. Moore’s Adrian Veidt is a fascinating character, one of the best villains ever written — because he is strong, and handsome, and charming, and makes a fairly convincing argument that he had to murder millions of people to save the world. Furthermore, Moore never explicitly rebukes Veidt’s actions. The comic’s protagonists come around at the end, agree to stay quiet, and return to their lives — except one, the psychotic (and ultimately suicidal) serial killer Rorschach. Beyond that, the only person really questioning Veidt at the end is Veidt himself.
Snyder realized this, although he didn’t seem to recognize the value of the excised plots (the part he’s restoring in his director’s cut, apparently, is the well-done but marginal Black Freighter story). So he turns Veidt into a weaselly, snivelling Eurofag (with a directory labelled BOYS on his computer, natch), makes Dan and Laurie stronger and more appealing, and does everything he can to make a psycho killer like Rorschach an antihero.
This is what Lane saw in the film. I agree with him on that. The dehumanized script of the film had to increase the severity of Veidt’s crime by a tremendous magnitude, replacing “half of New York” with the complete obliteration of a handful of the world’s biggest cities. The comic’s Dan Dreiberg is shocked and appalled at Veidt’s murders at first, but ultimately agrees to go along with Veidt’s plan. In the movie, the same scene ends with an absurd sequence where Dreiberg beats the shit out of Veidt and accuses him of “deforming humanity.” It’s fitting that a film directed by the guy who did 300 replaced half the plot with a burly man repeatedly punching a homosexual in the face.
(An aside — I’m aware Snyder didn’t write the script, and I’m being lazy in attributing all of these decisions to him. I apologize. However, I suspect that Snyder was satisfied with the script he filmed, and his previous work on 300 as well as his obvious love of filming scenes of merciless violence reinforce this. Oh, and before I forget: the comic depicts the pre-Keene Act rioters as middle-aged, pudgy working people. The film depicts them as bomb-throwing hippies. It all adds up.)
In general, the film’s script slashes out any scene that doesn’t feature a superhero but dedicates minutes on end to loving expansions of sex and fight scenes (Dan & Laurie on the airship, the Comedian’s death, the thugs in the alley) which were dispensed with fairly quickly in the comic. I know the entire book comic would have been impossible to film, but when you expand a scene just so you can show more of Malin Akerman getting a deep dicking you open yourself up to questions about priorities.
Apres Levitt et Dubner, et à cher frère Cadre.
When America had industry we were in the unique position of being so big that you could feasibly dump a thousand miles away without creating an international incident. This is why we invented the biggest smokestacks, pumping waste into the air to fall dozens, hundreds, a thousand miles away. Our foundries poured poison into the heartland, and for a time as the Europeans looked at their own pollution problems and extrapolated to our scale, there was a real catastrophe on our hands.
Technology saved us, as it always does. The official history gives credit for smaller stacks and scrubber rims to the market, but the state and its scientist pals got what was needed done, and there was much rejoicing. And in time, as Reagan and the finance industry broke the industrial heartland and auctioned it off piece by piece, the need to throw poison into the air slacked off and the Yellow Sea took the acrid burden from Lake Erie. We could at last throw away Silent Spring, which sympathized with mosquitos; everything was all right again.
But Pandora’s box was stuck open wide, and three generations of growth and stagnation made China and ourselves coke and gas junkies. No matter how clean we cleaned our act, our looms and drive-trains were as ominous in their silence as unattended infants. The carbon flowed as the carbon must flow.
The Europeans again looked at their own pollution problems, the summer storm and winter drought and the rising of the sea, and they looked with alarm to us and to China, to Russia and to the second world, and we realized there was a catastrophe on our hands. We had stopped the destruction of the ozone long before we stopped the poisonous haze of sulfur, but the carbon was different, we were told: an integral part of who we were, and if that was to change we would need to gather electricity different ways. The wind, the sea, the sun, the atom – some source of free energy other than the earth’s ancient biomass would be needed.
But the people who survived the American economy had bottom lines to protect, and they saw denial as a better investment than cooptation. For a time there was a crisis as the bearded men who knew why we had seen the hurricanes from Hell were denied by billionaires in baseball caps. Wind farms are an eyesore, said they, and solar power is for fags. What we need is a way to keep on burning ancient carbon forever (for God will always furnish us with more).
Economists saved us, as they always do. To save our cities from the rising sea and the buffeting sky would require India and China to have nice things; what we needed instead was a pump, a giant pump, a big old hose as long as the biggest skygouging smoke stacks ever planned, so big you could pump poison into the air and it’d never come back. But what magical poison would save us from the carbon dioxide? How could we undo the greenhouse flux that had been a part of the Earth’s climate since life began to metabolize oxygen?
Sulfur dioxide, said they. We remembered the name but we couldn’t recall where from; the oil and coal men assured us it was from their pitiable complaints that they had to spend all this money throwing it away – when it could save us from ourselves! The market had finally come through for us, and the economists and their corporate pals got what was needed done, and there was much rejoicing. We could at last throw away Michael Moore and Al Gore, who were fat and had beards and sympathized with ecoterrorists. Everything was all right again.
The hose was delivered by the lowest bidder, not really a hose but a massive spire of a fine modern resin. They did a serviceable job, but they didn’t overbuild it; it wasn’t that expensive and we would just build more when this one started to degrade. A mainframe, for now inert, would work out how much sulfur needed to be in the air to maintain a permanent volcanic-style haze, to cool the Earth back down a degree and a half.
At the appointed date the sulfur levels were off by no less than ten percent, but that would be solved in time. There was concern in areas outside the thirty-mile circle in a near-abandoned rez no one could enter without permission that the hose was leaking; the contractors given the job of maintaining it affirmed that emissions were within parameters. The gas we had lost in the sky, said they, must have undergone a chemical change or floated into the sky. More plausible, surely, than some kind of conspiracy to cover up the poor construction of the pump.
Whatever its problems, the sulfur plan had given us back our freedoms – our lives, our liberty, our pursuit of carbon dioxide. We had not silenced the beardos but they no longer mattered; the plan had worked, and if it stopped working we could just build another plant.
Some time later they explained that the pump facility was old, and because of alarmists and nimby-pimbies it was hard to site them where we would have liked; because the sites we got weren’t ideal, didn’t have the access to refineries and strong security we had in Arizona, they were smaller and weaker. It was a sign of the concept’s strength, we understood, that what would work with one twenty-mile hose would work with five or ten. We had a site in Turkey; we had a site in Hawaii; we had a site in Tibet, in Rhodesia and Patagonia, two in the Northern Territory and one in Finnish waters north of the Arctic Circle. They weren’t as efficient as the older site, but they got the job done.
Our greatest fear, that terrorists or Russians or some other monsters would destroy our last hope because they resented the carbon scam being over, never came to pass, and even though dropping Earth’s temperature below its prior levels took until the 60s, the worst of the crisis was over.
The beardos would never be happy about our clever plan, and in their resentful anger they made the inefficient coral and plankton species dying out to be the sulfur-plan’s fault. A well-known blogger with a Harvard bachelor’s told a TV host that the ocean being more acrid than lakes was a big deal, and we laughed and laughed, because it always has been.
When the Arizona stack fell it hadn’t been our primary pump for decades, but that didn’t stop a lot of misguided concern about the carbon production of the Sinobanana’s trucks or new paracoal plants in unihabited Congolese desert. And there were calls for pump regulation by statists, and there were ignorant claims that no living thing had inhabited the Sea of Cortes since before the disaster. But we ignored their foolishness, and when the carbon dioxide production that buoyed our economy rebounded, we replaced the old Arizona pump with cheaper, less heavy stacks in Belarus, Saudi Iraq, and the islands the US had given Cuba in the 30s.
Communism’s corrosive effects linger on, as we all know, and the new plants had a few minor incidents – but those piled up, and before anyone (the beardos’ babbling aside) knew what was happening, we had random tides of dead fish and crop failures. Those failures got bad enough that instigators in Africa readily started riots, producing a real scare as the sulfur production slacked off. In the time it took us to build reserve facilities, the haze dropped badly enough that air passengers reportedly saw the ground at night and the Earth’s temperature had risen again.
Automation had saved us, as it always does. We threw away the local laborers and building inspectors and kept them out with drones and lasers, and we were at last free of their sympathizing with food-moochers and wobblies. The pumps would last a hundred years.
Mammals and bridges lasted fifty, and the Hoover Dam two hundred and twenty. Whether anything else from what we called Earth would write its names on the cosmos before the Sun erased Nixon’s and Gandhi’s I couldn’t tell you.
1) It was a dark and stormy night, and Pat Boone was depressed about the poor fortunes of his close personal and professional friend Bob Dole. As he prepared to cross the Canadian border and leave this undeserving nation forever, around the corner appeared the surviving Sex Pistols, each erect.
2) 1965: low Earth orbit. Edward White, doomed son of Texas, stepped out of his capsule, his tether carefully spooling him out into the void. While he knew that he could see less this way than he had in the capsule, and that in the grand scheme of things he was still just a high-flying sky-man, his eyes were filled with glory and a hope we know to be forlorn. Today would not be as planned, though: in the corner of his restrained, space-drunk vision he could make out a flash of the different, more beige gray his superiors had warned him of. He mentally reminded himself of his space revolver. He was ready for Leonov. He was ready to kill in orbit, or die in it. What he was not ready for was love.
3)Retirement had been good to President Bush. Nobody made him hang around horses any more, and he got to hang around in Kennebunkport as his station in life demanded instead of slumming it with those lazy-eyed Texan fuckers. He didn’t even have to sit down and shut up when Cheney had something foul to say any more. It had been a good day even before his manservant Sowadjec announced the arrival of today’s guest. Cybernetic boy-jockey in tow, Crown Prince Abdul-Aziz entered the room with a warm greeting, still gloriously toned beneath his assless robes after these long seven years. “Tonight you are the House of Saud’s camel,” continued the conservative heir, offering his hand and a greased velvet glove to his New England colleague.
4) Once again, Lee and John were eager with anticipation, sporting a boner and bonah respectively as the limo streamed into view of the warehouse. But today John’s wife and her Greek lover knew how to keep the safe-word unsaid. Little did either know that they had already begun their last tango in Dallas.
[5] “And thanks to my guests, Ollie North and Bay Buchanan. America salutes you. God bless all of you at home.” Another day, another Hannity’s America, another hundred thousand dollars. But as the swarthy hive took down the set for the night, Sean noticed Colonel North wasn’t leaving — and, as Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch swaggered in with a gleam in their old, wet eyes, Sean realized his endless fidelity was about to be repaid, his love for the GOP consummated. Tonight the Republican Party would make an honest woman of him.
(6) In a sinister dacha in the Crimea, a man in a particularly cruisy wheelchair snickered openly at his own perfidy with his friends Alger Hiss – codename ALES – and Josef Stalin. “Oy,” said Rosenfeldt, “always with the betraying of America’s doughty Aryan allies.” He squealed with girlish delight as he noticed that Stalin’s balls also had tiny, angry moustaches, and then took out his big queer cigarette holder in order to slosh them around in his stupid mouth.
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.
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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”!