[Excerpted from UnConventional, YearlyKos: Citizens, Focus and Action, the eBook documenting, in photographs and essays, the YearlyKos '06 convention and the netroots itself. The eBook can be purchased as a 182-page pdf here; proceeds from sales go towards supporting future YearlyKos events. Please consider supporting YearlyKos '07 by purchasing a copy.]
Over the years, I have learned one thing about driving to Las Vegas on these roads. No matter which road you take, no matter how long the drive to get there, you will always get to Las Vegas, the city, exactly one hour beyond the point where you have begun to lose all sense of patience with the road, the car, whatever junky snacks you have brought, the once-cold water bottles now the exact temperature of the car seat next to you, and the music you are listening to. No matter which road, or how long the journey has taken, or how miraculous the journey through windblown desolation, over rock and plain, past invisible lives lived hard and well, there will be one point, one particular rise and fall of the road through yet another dry and barren pass, where you are simply done with it.
It is as if the city just ahead has leached the excitement—the history, the hopes, the colors, the life, even—from the very hills, in every direction. You can feel the city long before you see it, and underneath the exasperation at road and car and sky and earth, the barely conscious perception feels like looking down a well, deep and cold, into the darkness below. The desert is too wide, the road is too long, and even the brilliant sky and custom-painted wisps of clouds have worn out their welcome. The same landscape that before inspired thoughts of God and history now inspires silent twinges of desperation.
You have passed the point of reveling in the glory of the drive; you have passed the point where you could reasonably convince yourself you were reveling in the glory of the drive; you have passed the point where even mere toleration of the dusty, ill-patched, thumping road is possible. You have no idea whether or not you are ever going to get there, and you should have been there already. There is nothing to see. The desert has gone from glorious stretches of plains to weedy, ill-formed hills and flats. Even the hills themselves seem to be nothing but crumbling imitations of what has gone before them, swollen and uninteresting. At that moment, that singular moment where you crest another ridge and look out down another unending valley, the next ridge impossibly far away, the road bisecting the entire planet through this one godforsaken landscape of barely disturbed dirt, and you utter your first earnestly and sincerely belligerent epithet of the entire trip, and you reach the point where you cannot sit in that damn car one more minute, or listen to the whining drone of the air conditioner or the buzzing of the wind around the car one more second, at that very point:
You will have exactly one hour left to drive.
Once I learned that, through painful experience, and learned to expect it, I was happier during the process. That is the first payment the valley of Las Vegas will extract—it will put a needle in your arm while you are still on the road, and it will drain the excitement from you, in order to better feed the next person entering the next coffin-like casino. When you get there, finally and at long last, it will be your turn, goes the promise.
And then you go over the last swell of the road, and see the city, laid out all at once if you are driving from Barstow, or first dribbled over the landscape as a shallow, valley-wide lake of mesmerizingly identical tract housing and suddenly overbuilt freeway, if approaching from the north, and you are there.
And from that point, too, you have another half hour or so.
What is Las Vegas, in those last moments before arrival? Put all the small towns you have passed together, and erase them. Put all the histories together, all the pained struggle of distant existences, the bleeding, and digging, and burning, and bury them in the sand, for the moment. Deny the desert its glorious sunrise; deny the stars. Bottle the heat radiating off the road, the blistering, desiccating heat, and laugh at it. The neon welcomes you, ready to rattle your cage a bit. From the past to the present. From the eternal to the ephemeral, and the dividing line will be a parking garage.
I find it impossible to hate Las Vegas. I know I should; I know there is reason to. Leave the Strip, and it is a city that clarifies with precision the Modern Way, as the houses spread out in every direction, threatening to fill the entirety of the valley in monochromatic grids within grids. Every major road in Las Vegas is under construction, all the time. I have never been to Vegas when the Strip was not riddled with orange safety cones and dug with holes; I have never been to Vegas when the freeways were not in a state of hurried, excited reconstruction, or expansion, or when some square of the city or another was not being leveled and remade in one large bite. The giant light towers go up in the middle of the freeways, the freeways have new overpasses, and underpasses, and in some cases even broad, reworked curves, all done expensively and expansively in a bustling attempt to grow the veins of the city as quickly as the flesh of the city requires, and always just at the edge of failing completely.
The giant “destination” hotels rise in a distinct line down the Strip, the fault line from which the rest of this earthquake of a city erupted, and they rise as gargantuan, polished crystallizations of the excesses that lie within them.
I have always said that Las Vegas is Disneyland as designed by Satan. The same geographic teases and ancient storytelling themes are there, but more crudely expressed. The same “rides” are there, but they target the darker and supposedly grown-up portions of the psyche. The sense of adventure is substituted by cash; the sense of wonder, by more cash, the sense of mystery, by cash, and the sense of play, by cash. Sprinkle in some theatre that unapologetically revolves around no human emotion more substantial than raw sex -- for which you should expect to pay cash -- and you have a theme park that takes bites out of your heart and charges you for it.
But at the same time, this is a city without pretense. Yes, it is phony, from the facade of every massive but still cheap-looking faux-themed hotel to the faux-smiles of every tired casino worker dying a slow, neon-lit death. But it knows it is phony, and it knows you know it is phony, and it designs entire advertising campaigns celebrating how you and it can be phony together, and it does not give a flying crap about intentionally being as phony as possible, in facade and food and word and deed and vision and promise. It is wholesomely perverted, self-absorbedly parasitic, sincerely and earnestly dishonest.
But there is something more, there, and you will only see it if you drive there, drive from a long way off, so that you can breathe the air five hundred miles away, then three hundred, then two hundred, and catch the changing taste of it on your tongue. This is not a city that, despite all pretense and attempts to the contrary, can deny the land it sits on, or the remembered dreamscapes of gold and silver that fill every gully, every shallow hole in the ground. Las Vegas may deny land, history and even propriety, in gigantic, brilliantly colored punches that seem to lash out at God himself, would he dare intervene, but the desert it sits in has seen dreams met and dreams smothered long before the first dollar was ever spent here. It has seen prospectors rewarded, prospectors failed, the sparkle of coins and the pretty smiles of tired whores long before this city, here, tried to reinvent the old forms, this time expressed in towers and steel and brilliant lights.
The story of Las Vegas is not simply the story of mobs, or crime, or sin. It is not merely the story of greed, of growth, or of water or dust. Las Vegas is a town of the desolate Old West lit up as Electric Future. It is a town that exists for no past, and aims at no future, and yet manages to bottle the motivations of each, savors them, then throws them up in frantic, confused, hurried buildings with faked and contrived and petty architectures that manage to evoke every city and every history except itself.
That is why I cannot hate Las Vegas, the city of self-masochism, the city that will push you to hate it with as much volume as it can muster. Because it is a city expressed as orphaned child, a Pleasure Island that tells you what it is right there at the dock, before you set out, and urges you earnestly to come play a while. It needs you; it craves you; it digs for you in the sandy desert floor and, once it finds you, erupts in a geyser of concrete celebration. It is quiet desperation, momentarily shouted, like a nighttime attempt to banish passing ghosts. It is quiet desperation made loud, made gaudy. Just for now, though. Just until the money runs out, or the water dries up, or a windstorm blows in a passing tattered moral that lodges, stuck, in an inconvenient place.
I cannot hate it because, what the hell. To each his own. I know my place, in this city; that much, at least, I can be thankful for.
Go up to the top of the Stratosphere on a hot, dry, clear day, to the top of the tower, and look out over the city as it covers the valley under it like a sea, threatens to fill the valley whole and fold in on itself, reflecting back towards you. Look at the slash in the ground, the fault line that they call the Strip, and the ripples of humanity that radiate out across the desert floor from that one, smoking fissure, and the glittering, crystalline forms of casinos and luxury malls and condominium towers and blue pools and the unending traffic down that godforsaken black line, at every moment of the day and night.
Las Vegas is a city without pretense, without past, and without future. Las Vegas is a gold rush city. And you are the gold.
It is hard to memorialize a place; it is harder still to memorialize a time. Memorializing a single event? A mere handful of days? At the best, you can dig around the edges of it. You have to, in fact; you have to dig to find where those edges are. You find the outline, and define the thing starting from there. Negative space, artists call it. You find the outline, you trace the edges. If you want to define a tree, look at how it defines the sky shining through it. Look at how the ground wraps around the roots.
This is the heaven and hell of photography. Done well, it shows what is. Done well, it comes with emotions, and textures, and smells, and voices. It traces the edges of the thing; the thing itself lives.
This is the leading edge of the event. The journey, the desert, the city itself. And then the first glimmers of recognition; the first handshake, and a thousand journeys momentarily become one.
It is only a minor act of history. It is carved out of a single cavernous set of rooms in a western town that does cavernous very very well, a desert city built as monument to intentional forgetfulness. The same city that provides a blank, featureless backdrop for whatever cause is worth fighting.
It is only the tiniest possible sliver of history. And, if you like, it comes with fries.
But driving in, it felt like history. It felt like a claim stake shoved into the landscape, a marker denoting a hidden hope.