What value can there be to yet another article about Las Vegas and in particular the “Strip”? Thousands of writers have brought their analytic tools to the Present Arms! position and marched along the Strip through the searing light that can dull lasers and the oxygen-less exhaust heat from Hell that roils in from the Nevada Desert. Hundreds of Hollywood films, show tunes, probably even poems, have been written about the place and yet it is because of all that staring attention, the stare of a rabbit caught in a headlight, that the place is beyond description.
It took a couple of hours for me to realize that the Las Vegas Strip does not exist. It is a place that is so far from existentialist reality it might as well be located in Narnia or Erewhon, or Middle Earth. It is cloaked in so much 
deliberately fabricated myth and illusion that it exists as a hallucinogenic bubble perched just outside our normal time and space. But the sheer crushing pressure of its images and myths, by the cloaks of expectations wrapped around its reputation, it has forced a warp in the universe and the only way to experience it is to leave the wheat fields of Kansas behind, to creep like a country mouse into its blaze, to surrender all self and even then you will never be sure that you experienced anything, that you may in fact have been fed the experience through a tube inserted in your spine as you float in a nutrient bath in the midst of the Matrix.
Those first couple of hours in Vegas (one must say Vegas and not Las Vegas if you want to be taken as a Strip insider) hit me like a replayed Deja Vu that simply won’t stop playing out. Everywhere that I looked as we drove up the lower intestine of the Strip from McCarran Airport looked like a painted backdrop propped up in a Potemkin Village at the heart of a child’s imaginary country. I was detached from my sense of place, my Cartesian locked in and geo-coordinated place in the universe. I was nowhere and everywhere.
Now, had I been feeling this after burrowing deep into the teachings of the Buddha and meditating on the probable and not so probable existence of the Quark I might have been deeply pleased to shuck off the ego. But this was no eight fold way, this was the Las Vegas Strip and philosophical meaning here had never progressed from “Let it ride!” and “Come on Baby!” so the very concept of transcendence on the Strip could only be thought of as an obscenity.
But that’s just another label that doesn’t work.
Labels are supposed to be just that for all of us — labels. They are signposts of meaning to guide us through the chaos of a reality that in itself can have no meaning.
Vegas is so outside reality, so at the edge of acceptability, so divorced from anything that could ever be considered normal that the rituals and processionals of New Guinea tribesmen, Papal aristocrats, and the Shamans of the High Arctic are clean, simple, honest purveyors of human guidance by comparison.
Because the place has been so much a part of our cultural life through the entertainment media, and yes even books, no one can come to it new and fresh the way one can breast a ridgeline in the Hundu Kush and gasp at the wonder of a valley that could only be Shangri La, or sail into the Coral Sea to watch the flying fishes play, and know the wonder of it all. There can be no wonder in Las Vegas because we have all seen and heard it all before at many removes. We have been there before – not quite like a past life but perhaps more like a made up life to be.
Still, there were some startling sights and experiences during the four night and five days I spent there.
In no particular order (How can there be order to absurdity?)
The numbers, the swarms, the seething masses of people. Like screaming gulls at a garbage dump, and about as smelly, they drifted and jostled in fact waves of walking protoplasm. They waddled and chirped and talked and smoked and moaned and complained and drifted about like zombies in search of fresh eating brains. It was like the Strip was one over heated and poorly ventilated Petri dish full of slightly damaged RNA molecules churning out malformed DNA to become slightly putrescent mounds of meat that met none of the Darwinian principles of species survivability.
In a nation where today even the Puritan Fathers would be castigated on national television for immoral behavior, where Martin Luther would be sent to Guantanamo Bay as a terrorist, where Torquemada’s torturers would be elected to high office, where the slightest imagined moral impropriety can ruin a politician’s life, the Las Vegas Strip stands tall with a ramrod backbone of hypocrisy.
Where else can you be pestered for blocks by strung out drug addicts trying to press the calling cards of whores on you, where large trucks cruise up and down past the thousands of slack jawed tourists bearing huge signs advertising “Girls in Your Room in 20 Minutes!”. Where the very existence of the Strip is designed to claw as much money out of a person’s life using every vice it can get away with, chief of which is gambling of a magnitude that even the most rapacious of governments would be ashamed at the amounts they could collect.
And then there is what the Strip does to the Poor Bloody Planet. Christ – people should be lined up in the front of the Bellagio fountains and shot for what they have been doing to the environment.
In a state where the dwindling supply of fresh water is now a major political player, where Lake Mead, the main source of water for all the surrounding states is draining faster than an alcoholics last bottle, we have a place that goes out of its way to waste water.
The Bellagio fountains spew their incredible displays more than two hundred feet into air off and on for twelve hours a day.
Do you know how much of that sprayed water evaporates in the more than one hundred degree heat? I don’t either but I will bet you that entire towns could live of that water every day.
Even more of the stuff gets spewed into the face of what has to be an even more chagrined earth god everyday from miles of tubing and nozzles lining stalls, shops, casinos hotels, and vacant lots. The fine mist coming from these devices is supposed to cool the heated and fretted brows of the bovine herds of tourists. Trouble is that most days it is too hot and the mist has long evaporated before it gets anywhere near anybody.
And as bad as any of that is it doesn’t come close to the criminal, criminally insane, practice of cooling the outside. As daft and cracked as it may seem it is common for sidewalk restaurants, patios and the entrances to casinos and hotels to be cooled by giant air conditioning vents.
Think about it, think of all the energy it takes to generate the power, to cool the air, to pump the air, and then what . . . throw it outside into the desert heat? Does this make any sense? Of course not.
It can only be put down to a genetically programmed psychopathy among those responsible. It is as incomprehensible as ritual serial killing, cannibalism, infanticide, and being very very ignorant.
The planet does not have a chance, not one, not even a blind throw chance on double zero at a roulette table.
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