Focus
Whatever it is, Vegas' raison d'etre isn't Hawai'i's

By John Griffin

LAS VEGAS — Italians used to advise, "See Naples and die."

Hawai'i people intone, "Go to Las Vegas and live."

Gamblers feed their hopes and cash into slots in Las Vegas casinos, which rake in billions. Associated Press library photo • July 31, 1997

And that doesn't count the reason for being and the heart of Las Vegas — the dozens of smoky 24/7 casinos filled with canned or real music, the ke-clank of slot machines that devour cash like dogs gobble treats, and a great assortment of excited or bored-looking players, most dressed in a beefy way for a day at Disneyland.

I arrived with my own cultural pretensions, planning to be like the "The Flaneur" in author Edmund White's new book about Paris' paradoxes, a stroller who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned and informed of the place.

Alas, it's hard to be cool and uninvolved in the heat, neon glitz and ersatz atmospheres of the storied Strip, a kind of Waikiki or Times Square on steroids.

So I didn't feel like much of a flaneur by the time we got to Paris, the relatively pleasant hotel-casino, and up on its half-sized Eiffel Tower with an elevator operator who drawled, "Bon jour, y'all" and said she found French bread too crusty.

The view looked down upon the smashing light and water show on the artificial Lake Como fronting the swanky Bellagio, the volcano that erupts at night outside Mirage, Luxor's glass version of a pyramid, and the Brooklyn Bridge and Statue of Liberty fronting New York New York, our mid-scale hotel. Try doing that from the "real" tower in Paris.

Some day, if Las Vegas keeps on as the nation's fastest-growing city, the present 4-mile strip may stretch over the horizon and include new theme hotels and gambling spas with names like "Hawai'i," "London," "Havana" and "Asia."

By then, another half of our Island residents may have moved here, joining the tens of thousands already in residence or visiting and gambling away a few miles from the Strip at the older downtown hotels that cab drivers sometimes call "The Hawaiian Village." There the faces, and some of the food, are mostly out of Waipahu or my Kaimuki.

It's easy to parody or otherwise put down Las Vegas as the American dream run amok. But it's better to enjoy it on its own terms for a few days. Those terms include very friendly people and streets that are relatively clean and safe.

This is, as billed, a city that doesn't sleep, so it doesn't matter much when you arrive. Our Aloha Airlines flight came in around midnight when it was cool and just in time to join the action.

If Las Vegas can be fun for a few days, it also has its serious sides, and you hear about them from people who work there or have visited frequently to do business or write about the place.

Fireworks explode over the New York New York, a $460 million hotel and casino in Las Vegas, where there's also a Paris hotel. Could a "Hawai'i" be far behind? Associated Press library photo • Jan. 2, 1997

Casinos in Nevada rake in over $9 billion a year, and Las Vegas attracts some 35 million visitors annually, five times Hawai'i's total. Add to that $2 billion in racing and other sports betting.

Moreover, Las Vegas city fathers and mothers are planning another spectacular almost as dazzling as the Strip — a new downtown with tall office buildings, swank condos, an arts district, a medical research center, a museum and other cosmopolitan trappings now lacking in the somewhat seedy urban core. This would center on what's now a 61-acre railroad yard adjoining the old downtown.

Typically, it would all be topped by the world's tallest building, a skinny 2,200-foot Millennium Tower, of course featuring a super-casino in the sky and much else.

If all this seems hopelessly crass and commercial, consider that among the 4,000 conventions coming to Vegas this year was the 28th annual gathering of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy.

One professor commented it was the first philosophers' conference he had attended "where the rooms had mirrors on the ceiling."

But the New York Times also reported this quote from one Mark Taylor, who teaches philosophy and religion at upscale Williams College and created a philosophical video game set in Las Vegas:

"Las Vegas is a realization of the kingdom of God on earth. The culture of simulacra has become both all-encompassing and inescapable ... You can't understand the world today if you don't understand America. So if you want to understand the world, you've really got to come to Las Vegas."

But, you may ask, isn't the underworld part of the Vegas world?

That brings varying answers. A writer friend who gambles and has covered Vegas for many years says that regulation finally got organized crime out of the casinos and that liberal labor unions are more of a power in the city today.

Others say the mob remains a factor in important areas such as waste management and transportation. "If the mob left, this place would collapse," said one. "But now they are more discreet."

More sinister are the ultimate conspiracy allegations in a new book, "The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000."

In it, Vegas is not just a caricature of the American dream but the source of its corruption and its controller.

A quote: "The city has been the quintessential crossroads and end result of the now furtive, now open collusion of government, business and criminal commerce that has become — on so much unpalatable but undeniable evidence — a governing force in the American system."

Married authors Sally Denton and Roger Morris have some impressive credentials and did much research, but reviews I have seen suggest the evidence presented doesn't equal all the extreme allegations.

Still, that's something else to think about. And so is the future of Las Vegas and gambling.

With casinos and gambling centers growing in other parts of the country and world, Vegas has to keep renewing and reinventing itself to attract business. This it has done, but the treadmill of challenge is moving faster.

In this picture is skyrocketing gambling on the Internet. Some 1,400 Web sites operated by 250 companies in dozens of foreign countries already produce growing billions in revenue. And that's just a beginning.

In recent days, Las Vegas' biggest hotel-casino operators decided to give up opposing Internet gambling, and the compliant Nevada legislators quickly voted to become the first state to offer it. That's getting on another treadmill.

Court tests will decide what happens next, including in Hawai'i, where gambling remains illegal but practiced by some on the Internet and many others in various social and organized forms.

I came home still convinced that Hawai'i can't and shouldn't want to compete with Las Vegas or other lesser gambling centers. Any potential gain is not worth the almost certain problems.

Still, I'm also glad Vegas is there to provide something for so many Hawai'i people. In a way, I agree with the late editor-columnist Bud Smyser, who said he liked Las Vegas — but liked it right where it is.

We can be glad for the few local winners (who get well publicized so more Hawai'i folks are lured to Las Vegas). But beneath all the lures and glitz, Vegas thrives on dreamers who become losers.

And that includes most of us.

John Griffin, former editor of the editorial pages for The Advertiser, writes frequently for these pages.