Las Vegas Illusion and Reality

Las Vegas Illusion and Reality Entering and Leaving Las Vegas: Illusion and Expectation vs.

Reality and Experience According to Walker Percy, the late 20th century American Southern novelist / philosopher whose work quite often explored "the dislocation of man in the modern age" (Kimball, 1985); for a person nowadays to actually experience the true essence of, say, a popular tourist destination, or any other new and personally unfamiliar place, in ways entirely uninflected with informational or interpretative input from various educational; cultural, economic, or social classification systems, is enormously difficult if not impossible.

When it comes to using and reaping the benefits from glossy brochures; television, magazine, and billboard hype; iconic images; or plain word-of-mouth, no place benefits more than Las Vegas, Nevada, known also colloquially as "Sin City." New arrivals to this gambling Mecca generally come with preconceived notions of the place. Therefore they arrive already heavily-invested in seeing what they expect they will; ready to confirm what they think they already know.

Now it is merely a question of pleasurably verifying it all, first hand, in order to know for sure what is already known by hundreds of millions everywhere.

Further, unless the grittier realities of that "other," huge, unsung part of Las Vegas, where folks just like themselves live, work, celebrate, and suffer, just as they do at home, intrude unpleasantly enough (for instance, if one becomes a crime victim or is roughed up and kicked out by casino personnel) tourists will (and will wish to) continue believing in the illusions that Las Vegas shrewd marketers have carefully constructed for them in particular, merely in order to have the "real" Las Vegas tourist experience they came here expecting to have.

Within today's world, Walker Percy's general observations about modern-day human "dislocation" as typical seem truer than ever, given early 21st century increased (and ever-increasing) information overload from myriad corporate, educational, cultural, and personal sources. Corporate and other advertising angles and approaches -old and new, hit Las Vegas tourists in the face even at the airport. Hotel greeters with signs and drivers with big hotel limos waiting out front know (they have been told this) what tourists will see, or be told they are seeing.

They and many others will make it impossible to seriously challenge the integrity or authenticity of the standard pre-packaged Las Vegas experience. Besides, so many others have already either been here; claim to have been here; or insist they know so much about it they might as well have been here.

Who would want to argue, much less venture to truly disbelieve something so well-known? Las Vegas was first built up, very modestly by today's standards, as a result of the early efforts of transplanted New York mobster Bugsy Siegel and a few others. Back then, in the 1940's, and even still today, the now-huge city's expansive tendrils twist and turn outward in all directions as if springing from Medusa's head.

For those who truly know Las Vegas, the only true experience of the place is continuous change and re-invention, often just for newness's own sake. But whatever is new today, advertisers, TV, and therefore the world will know all about it (and want to come see it) tomorrow.

Just as an average tourist, to neighboring Arizona would experience that state's biggest, most famous, and by far most astounding natural feature, the Grand Canyon, in terms of what he or she similarly expects to find there based on brochures; pictures; others' experiences, etc., a tourist experiences Las Vegas thus - both because of and in spite of how the city actually is.

Las Vegas has long been described as a hedonist's getaway, a place to (for example) enjoy a discreet out-of-town tryst [consider for instance the brilliantly-conceived, much repeated advertising slogan "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" worldwide advertising campaign of recent years). From the outside Las Vegas is the place to gamble, drink, shop endlessly and expensively, feel glamorous and experience the night-time ambiance of glamour, eat until stuffed at all-you-can-eat feasts, party, and be entertained anywhere one desires, including within one's own hotel bed, 24/7.

Another equally popular (as "Sin City") nickname for Las Vegas is "the Disneyland for Adults." Whatever one calls it, one comes to Las Vegas to be dazzled, courtesy of a helpful concierge, maitre d'; tour guide; or cocktail waitress, and (if a big enough gambler) a friendly and generous slot host, into fantasy land for awhile.

Anything and everything here becomes "all about you" (that is, the fun uninhibited "you"; or the wild and crazy you others back home know nothing of and that you may even be discovering for the first time here). It is not just that one sees Las Vegas differently than it really is; helping with that illusion is that the tourist is subtly, in fact imperceptibly encouraged by the people and the surroundings alike not see himself or herself objectively.

One might not think, in everyday life, of actually buying the overpriced Versace outfit displayed in one of Caesar's Palace's Forum Shops; but one is here, not anywhere in real life.

So what is so awful, really, one will reason here if nowhere else, about maxing out the family credit card for a few months, even a year, or longer? Temporary personal illusions of non-existing financial wherewithal while in the thrall of this pricey Never-Never Land of the American West, lead easily on to other illusions about one's gambling or drinking capacity, etc. Las Vegas casinos are carefully and skillfully designed so as to be easy to enter but extremely labyrinthine to leave, especially for brand new tourists.

Clocks are to casinos as prickly cactus is to ski resorts: one will not find them there. And one comes, stays, returns, believes [in] Las Vegas because one wants to do so, based not so much on experience as preconceived ideas, even sometimes when contrary realities present themselves to visitors. In fact, no tourist destination anywhere better or more thoroughly obscures a visitor's ability to "gaze directly" at this place.

For one thing, the neon lights of the Las Vegas Strip (where a majority of tourists head and stay in Las Vegas, therefore seeing nothing else except (perhaps) Hoover Dam or (in a helicopter flyover) the Grand Canyon, are much to blinding: literally and metaphorically, alike.

The famous neon-lit Las Vegas Strip in particular has been custom-designed (and re-invented again and again, every decade) in order to lure, support, and sustain huge amounts and all monetary and material levels of betting, drinking, and partying, based on slogans and images marketing and advertising illusionists dream up, churn out, and dream up anew.

The ubiquitous, naughty-sounding popular Las Vegas marketing slogan "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" is but one more recent example of how Las Vegas advertising continually lures and tricks visitors, at once, into believing, and wanting to believe, that what takes place within Las Vegas is somehow not quite real and therefore need not be accounted for.

But in reality, Las Vegas, like any city of 1.9 million and counting (as of May 2007), once one leaves the Strip (or even ventures beyond one's luxury hotel named for (and a kitschy-but-costly imitation of) some other appealing "destination": the ruins of Rome; downtown Manhattan; Monte Carlo [James Bond's version]; Pyramid Egypt; Venice [Othello's]; Arthurian England; the Italian Riviera, etc.) is quite plainly and visibly filled with big city American life's typical downsides.

These negatives include, as in all large cities, car theft; poverty; dust and dirt; homelessness, traffic jams and fatalities; air pollution; and (perhaps most unromantically of all) hard-working, underpaid, average Joes punching a clock, trying to make ends meet, and leading distinctly un-glamorous lives, just like people back in Omaha or Pittsburgh.

Further, Las Vegas casinos' happy-faced slot hosts; perky half-dressed cocktail waitresses, beaming buffet-line omelet flippers; and numerous other hard-working casino personnel that make this fantasy land such a delight for tourists, for example (and it is for jobs like these, that pay a living wage without requiring college degrees, that tens of thousands from elsewhere still move to Las Vegas for each year), once they punch out for the days, become once again their real selves.

One thing that has meant, recently, that even members of the city's powerful culinary union feared losing their basic medical coverage, courtesy of their cost-cutting casino employers, enough to strike. Earlier, members of the Las Vegas Musicians' Union (who make the city's shows, concerts, and lounge acts happen at all) were also forced to strike.

and, for a decade before it was finally sold to a new investor, and then re-named the New Frontier, casino workers struck daily outside the Frontier Casino/Hotel, an original, long-standing Las Vegas destination, in protest of the equally long-term unfair working conditions inside. When and if tourists visiting Las Vegas see the city's dark underbelly, it is most likely this particular part of it, casino workers and other "locals" on strike.

Knowing that, though, the image-conscious and profit-savvy owners and managers of casinos and other public entities with persistent picketers outside, whenever able, work around this unseemly nuisance by directing tourist traffic to alternative entrances and exits to their businesses in order to best mask the unhappiness of workers they employ from their much-wanted out-of-town guests. From time to time, however, Las Vegas illusion and Las Vegas reality do intersect (uneasily).

When ugly newsworthy incidents occur, e.g., when a dozen tourists are killed by a drugged-out schizophrenic speeding in his car toward them on a Strip sidewalk; when.