Viva Las Vegas

In a way, I found Vegas refreshing. In almost every other city we have visited, we have seen sites that claim this lofty dedication to preserving history and memory, and in the midst of that, everywhere we go, we see commercialism sneaking up to take advantage of that opportunity, where it’s the gift shops on Beale Street, in the Little Rock Nine museum, the Alamo, or the entire town of Roswell. This was the first town to be upfront from the very beginning about what they are and what they are trying to sell you. It’s a town of business, of consumerism, where everyone tries to be flashier than the next person or place. We began our day by meeting with Hugh Sinnock, the Director of Consumer Experience at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor’s Authority. It was a really interesting way to begin our day because it really did put the city in perspective, that everything on the Strip must be carefully crafted for the consumer (tourists) in order to maximize profit, because tourism is the number one industry in town. It was interesting to hear how Vegas has fared since the recession. Mr. Sinnock told us that right after Obama declared that America was officially in a recession, over 400 corporate business events booked in Vegas canceled. The Convention and Visitor’s Authority has had to raise the room tax to be able to make their budget work. Most of the rooms are currently at a discount price to encourage business, and he told us this has created an interesting dynamic with people of lower income levels all of a sudden being able to afford a room at some of the nicer hotels, mixing with the traditional upper-class customers. However, the 10 largest hotels in the world (I believe in terms of number of rooms) are still in Vegas and the convention center has been the busiest convention center for the past 15 years, holding some of the world’s largest corporate conventions. Mr. Sinnock gave us a great overview of what Vegas is all about, its history and its current goals.

For lunch, we went to a delicious new vegetarian café called the Red Velvet Café, where strangely enough, we happened to run into a sociologist eating her lunch there who stopped us when she overheard us talking about our trip. She had some really interesting insights about actually living in Las Vegas. She said that they had an appallingly low voter registration rate, an extremely poor public education system and a general lack of a community identity. All these problems arise from the nature of a town like Vegas that is solely based in the tourism trade. The people who live in Vegas do not usually think of themselves as being from Vegas, they still think of themselves as people from, say, Brooklyn, who happen to have lived in Vegas for a few years. Because people never embrace the community identity of Vegas, the actual residents of the city, involved in the tourism industry or not, have trouble accomplishing community improvement. I was really grateful that we got to see beyond the Vegas that is portrayed by the corporations in charge of the Strip, and hear a local’s perspective about the town. When we asked her one of our standard questions- what unites us as Americans- she had an interesting answer that I had not yet heard in our travels. She says that what unites Americans is the desire to be the greatest country in the world and the general consensus that no matter how the ideas are actually executed, the idea behind America of freedoms of speech, press, religion, expression, etc. is a good idea that almost anyone can get behind.

We spent the rest of our day in Vegas walking around the Strip and surrounding areas. It was interesting to actually begin our walk around the city in a poorer area- it was still a street with casinos, bars, strip clubs, etc. but this was (literally) a poor man’s version of the Strip. It was a completely desolate part of town that you could tell had once seen a fairly good business. I don’t know if the changing market of Vegas or the poor economy was responsible but it was bizarre to travel from this section of town where we were literally the only people outside walking around aside from a couple of homeless men to go a few blocks over and fight enormous crowds through some of the nicest buildings I’ve ever set foot in. We drove over to a couple of wedding chapels and got tours, which was actually pretty interesting.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around these ridiculously nice hotels, strolling through the confusing walkways that line the upscale shops that I am sure few Vegas patrons can actually afford to shop in and ended our day on the Strip seeing the pirate show outside of the Treasure Island hotel. I’d actually seen this pirate show last summer when I was in Vegas for a wedding, and warned people in the group who seemed to remember this event as family-friendly theater that is was definitely not that anymore. I was proven right - it was a raunchy, completely inappropriate debacle that was just a little shy of a strip show.

In our group discussions about Vegas, most people seem to be at least somewhat put off, even repulsed, by the entire town. I was trying to figure out why exactly I, unlike the rest of our group, did not have this initial reaction. I guess part of it is that even though I know it’s exactly what they are trying to sell me, I do not find anything inherently wrong with the idea of a town crafted for the sole purpose of allowing adults an escape from reality (or even an alternate reality, such as hotels like the Venetian and the Parisian provide). Someone in the group compared it to Disneyland, but for grown-ups- an adult’s playground. We certainly did see some of the trashier sides of Vegas in the constant objectification of women’s bodies and commodification of sex, but honestly, this occurs in every metropolitan area- it’s just the Vegas is way more open about it. But other parts of Vegas- the truly lavish decorations of some of the upscale hotels, the silliness of the idea of an Eiffel tower in the middle of the Nevada desert, the chance of striking it big- I can understand how that would appeal to your average hardworking adult. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” definitely allows you a certain freedom to be someone else for the short time you are there. Although as both a 20 year old and a part of a student group of a Christian university, Vegas did not have a lot to offer me, I can see myself perhaps enjoying it as a possible getaway weekend destination for some time in the future. Sure, it’s all about an escape from reality, and sure, some parts of the reality certain Vegas businesses have capitalized on are less than respectable, I still can understand the desire for that escape, no matter how flashy, tacky and short-lived it may be.