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LAS VEGAS

For all its glitter, neon, and supposed gaiety, a depression hangs in the desert air over Las Vegas. Vegas has one of the highest suicide rates in the world to feel death in the air. At the end of World War II it was a tiny gambling town that few knew and fewer cared about. Here, in 1946 Bugsy Siegal and others invented the modern casino. For nearly three decades the gangsters held sway, while the city grew in population and fame.

Gangsters have contempt for society, for normal life and they built this city in their own image. Its garishness, its sexuality, and especially its “play”, the games not of chance but of odds that sucked money from all who came here, reflected their temperament, their values, and above all their secret. That secret, the core of their contempt for society, was simply this: that they could not exist, and certainly could not profit, unless supposedly normal people desired what they offered – desired to escape from a moral code they could not live without but could not entirely live within.

The town made a kind of sense because it seemed aware of its purpose, its secret; and it was small and private and, in its way, rather sophisticated. No one walked into a casino casually. Men wore suits and ties, women wore evening clothes. Their fashions and manners suggested that they had come to do something special: transgress.

By the mid 1970s the place had grown too big, and was too much in the public eye, to be run overtly by gangsters. Corporations began to take over the casinos. Gradually they’ve come to call their hotels “resorts”, not casinos; and they refer to what does on there as “gamming”, not gambling. The gangsters casinos used to be dimly lit; the corporate casinos tend to be bright.

People used to enter a casino formally; now they wear the same outfits they wear to their hometown malls. The corporations are in effect saying, “It’s all right to do this, its good clean fun, nothing to feel shady about.”

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