How can a large-spirited American not like Las Vegas, or at least smile at the notion of it? On the other hand, how can any civilized person not loathe Las Vegas, or at least recoil at its relentlessness?
How can you not love and hate a city so crazily go-go that three different, colossally theme-park-like casino-hotels (the $375 million Luxor, Steve Wynn's $475 million Treasure Island and now the $1 billion MGM Grand, the largest hotel on earth and the venue last weekend for Barbra Streisand's multimillion- dollar return to live, paid performing) have opened on the Strip in just the past three months? How can you not love and hate a city so freakishly democratic that at a hotel called the Mirage, futuristic-looking infomercial star Susan Powter and a premodern Mennonite family can pass in a corridor, neither taking note of the other? How can you not love and hate a city where the $100,000 paintings for sale at an art gallery appended to Caesars Palace (Patron: "He's a genius." Gallery employee: "Yes, he's so creative." Patron: "It gives me goose bumps") are the work of Anthony Quinn?
In no other peacetime locale are the metaphors and ironies so impossibly juicy, so ripe for the plucking. And there are always new crops of redolent, suggestive Vegas facts, of which any several -- for instance: the Mirage has a $500-a-pull slot-machine salon; the lung-cancer death rate here is the second highest in the country; the suicide rate and cellular-phone usage are the highest -- constitute a vivid, up-to-date sketch of the place.
But it used to be that while Las Vegas was unfailingly piquant and over the top, it was sui generis, its own highly peculiar self. Vegas in none of its various phases (ersatz Old West outpost in the 1930s and '40s, gangsters-meet- Hollywood high-life oasis in the '50s and '60s, uncool polyester dump in the '70s and early '80s) was really an accurate prism through which to regard the nation as a whole.
Now, however, as the city ricochets through its biggest boom since the Frank-and-Dino Rat Pack days of the '50s and '60s -- the tourist inflow has nearly doubled over the past decade, and the area remains among America's fastest growing -- the hypereclectic 24-hour-a-day fantasy-themed party machine no longer seems so very exotic or extreme. High-tech spectacle, convenience, classlessness, loose money, a Nikes-and-T-shirt dress code: that's why immigrants flock to the U.S.; that's why some 20 million Americans (and 2 million foreigners) went to Vegas in 1992. "Las Vegas exists because it is a perfect reflection of America," says Steve Wynn, the city's most important and interesting resident. "You say 'Las Vegas' in Osaka or Johannesburg, anywhere in the world, and people smile, they understand. It represents all the things people in every city in America like. Here they can get it in one gulp." There is a Jorge Luis Borges story called The Aleph that describes the magical point where all places are seen from every angle. Las Vegas has become that place in America, less because of its own transformation in the past decade than because of the transformation of the nation. Las Vegas has become Americanized, and, even more, America has become Las Vegasized.