(A series of meandering notes in prelude to Netroots Nation 2010, which begins this week in Last Vegas. Part 1 of 4.)
The first Netroots Nation gathering was in Las Vegas. On the strip, in the Riviera. And it wasn't called Netroots Nation, that first year, but Yearly Kos, a name that spoke succinctly of its origins, but was deemed misleadingly narrow, as it implied loyalty to a site rather than a movement. Since that first event, there have been three others, and now comes a fourth. It returns, no longer a newborn thing, to Las Vegas.
The reasons are banal enough; there are surprisingly few cities in the nation capable of hosting large events, and of them, Las Vegas is king. It is easy to get to, and a pleasure to leave. It can feed a thousand people at a sitting without batting an eye -- or even bending delivery schedules. You can walk from hotel to convention floor without so much as stepping outside of an air-conditioned corridor.
And all those reasons are very logical and sensible and as boring as crap. My own love for the town is deeper rooted, and visceral: Las Vegas is everything a city should not be, and proudly so.
It is a modern metropolis founded and devoted to and utterly dependent on vice. It exists in the midst of a barren, sand-blown poverty, but rises in glittering crystals of decadence and folly and outright belligerence. It is desert-locked, but landscapes itself in massive pools and towering, pointless fountains. It is manipulative, egregious, futile, and loud.
What is there not to like? Every spot of claimed turf on the famous and appropriately named Strip consists of an architect shouting at passersby like a madperson. Cheapened, delirious versions of landmarks from other, far older and more notable cities jut out from the various hotels like giant carnival prizes. The elegant and the merely gaudy, the dignified and the tasteless mix into an inseparable blur. The impression one gets is that the owners of the giant casinos and hotels could not differentiate one from the other if they tried; even the newest venues scatter both in seemingly random proportions. Fabulized landscapes of color and noise exist under grim black-painted ceilings littered with pipes and ducts and lights. The city is all about sex, and sin, and excess. It wraps all of the follies of humanity into a single set of glass-and-concrete shells, and bends every force of nature in order to best supply them. Within this desert oasis, the four primal elements themselves have been captured, enslaved in order to power the forces of each momentary spectacle.
Las Vegas is a gigantic, electric-powered lie, willingly and boldly and badly told.
And for all that, Las Vegas is America's most honest city.
Here is a city that loves you in direct proportion to your wealth. It caters to your whims according to your status, or lack thereof. It separates classes efficiently. It pretends at taste, but has next to none. Its fame can either take the form of a nostalgic, treacle-laden past or an utterly vapid present. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas goes an ad campaign that practically begs the visitor to sin without remorse or consequence.
Again, what is there not to like? If you want to seek out the essence of America, raw and unrestrained, go to Las Vegas. It is the id, written in lights. Forget oil spills, forget war. Forget notions of a planet hotter tomorrow than it was today. Forget our national moralizing and pompous religiosity: go to the town that is equal parts Disneyland and suicide, and celebrate this moment, this one brilliant camera-flash of life.
From a bare few central arteries, the city suburbs radiate outwards, threatening to touch the surrounding mountainsides. Within even a few blocks from the Strip, they already have become normal, and average, and boring; a mirror of any other American town. The same stores, the same streets, the same shopping centers laid out in the same ways. The same food and drink; the same jobs; the same booms and busts and worries and tenuous hanging-on. It is only the source of the money that is different, and not very different at that.
Other extraction-oriented western boom towns were founded on oil, or copper, or lumber, or gold. Las Vegas was built to extract hope, a more renewable resource than all the others combined. Hope primarily of wealth, but also hope of sex, or status, or fame, or escape. I cannot help but salute it: it is, in a word, brilliant.