LAS VEGAS - No wonder
Ocean's Eleven, the remake of the Brat Pack
classic with George Clooney and Brad Pitt was a smash
hit: which red-blooded Americans in their right minds
would not dream of breaking into the vault at three Las
Vegas casinos simultaneously and leaving with the loot
through the front door?
Vegas bills itself
officially as "The City of Entertainment" - and
unofficially as America's most fabulous city. A
carefully constructed public relations myth rules that
while the rest of the United States is devoted to
"family life and economic liberty", Vegas concentrates
on the "pursuit of happiness". In Vegas, more than
anywhere else in America, perception is indeed reality.
But even if Vegas is the national capital of the pursuit
of happiness, "a little less conversation"(Elvis) and
some investigation reveals that some dudes are
definitely getting happier than others.
Charge my life to my room The whole
Vegas strip can be experienced as an ultra-tacky
competition over who rakes in more bucks in the sport of
converting Europe (or "Yrup", in mid-America speak) into
a shopping mall.
The Paris-Las Vegas casino,
with its fake Eiffel Tower and opera house, almost takes
the cherry in the showgirl cake ("a taste of France
without leaving the States"). The fake cobblestone
street, Le Boulevard, "lined with store facades designed
to resemble charming country-style cottages and houses",
would enrage many a Washington neo-con: the food is
predictably lousy, but why aren't there any "freedom
fries" on sale?
In the average Vegas casino
mogul's Italian obsession stakes, the only one that
delivers a decent "luxury experience" is the relatively
discreet (for Vegas standards) Bellagio - the imitation
of a deluxe belle epoque hotel on Lake Como in
northern Italy. The Venetian, with its fake frescoes in
the grand lobby and fake Vegas gondolas under a
mini-replica of the Rialto bridge, is just plain tacky.
More to the point would be to shop like a gladiator in
the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace, which, in the
imperial words of Wallace Barr, Caesar's entertainment
chief executive officer, "gives Las Vegas visitors even
more reasons to make Rome their home". For those on a
Russell Crowe swords-and-sandals trip and a Bush family
budget, it's even possible to buy a "timeless Tuscan
setting" in the desert: the Chateau Bella villa sells
for a cool US$6 million.
The MGM Grand - the
largest hotel in the world, with almost 6,000 rooms - is
still afflicted with a serious identity problem: it
strives to be hip while its customers tend to the
trailer-park variety. Gastronomically at least, the
parts of Vegas that consider themselves hip seem to have
solved the all-you-can-eat buffet syndrome: enough of
it. Vegas is now importing great chefs such as world
number two Alain Ducasse, as well as Thomas Keller,
Mario Batali, Julian Serrano - the chef at Bellagio's
Picasso, Vegas' best restaurant - and even world number
one Joel Robuchon, who will be hosting his own atelier
at the MGM Grand next year.
Still, some things
never change. Tom Jones will be singing Delilah
till he's a century old. The old guard - from the
perennial Wayne Newton to the Eagles - performs
never-ending comebacks, while the new guard slugs it out
in the MGM Grand boxing ring. Blunt forms of Chinese
torture like Celine Dion keep attracting masochistic
hordes. There's even some fine art on display - although
the hordes may not distinguish a Monet at the Bellagio
Gallery of Fine Arts from a Manet.
For those who
charge their life to their room and plan of escaping to
a desert island before the credit card company collects,
there's always that dreamy "whoooosh" of the Bellagio
dancing fountains - synchronized to Frank Sinatra or
Andrea Bocelli's Con te Partiro. It takes a
planeload of high-tech equipment to make water dance in
the Nevada desert, the whole thing housed in the
Bellagio's "Bat Cave". Curtis Hunton directs a team of
36 engineers through the daily shows - one every half
hour until 7 pm and then one every 15 minutes until
midnight. Nine main compressors supply water, taken
through high-pressure air to "dizzying heights". The air
creates the "whoooosh", while supershooter jets create
the "boom"; everything operated from a show control room
stuffed with computers and fiber-optic cables.
One can't stop imagining a similar franchise in
Baghdad's Green Zone: that would seal the end of the
insurgency. The Bellagio even collects buckets of money
from the lake around the dancing fountains (people dream
they may be at the Trevi Fountain in Rome). "But we
donate everything to the local Red Cross," adds a
politically-correct Hunton.
Vegas recently
discovered the ultra-lounge - such as Tabu in the MGM
Grand, self-billed as "one step ahead of the seven
deadly sins". In the 1990s, Vegas was heavily sold as a
family destination. Not anymore - not in the age of
Survivor and Big Brother sleaze. Room
service now reaches new heights in Vegas for those who
prefer to order two choice blondes, private, in person
and totally nude ("direct to your room in 20 minutes or
less"), 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and with all
major credit cards accepted.
So much fun elicits
paranoia. Take, for instance, the security agent on a
bike, probably on minimum wage, intercepting a heavily
suspicious operation: the taking of a photograph in a
Vegas parking lot. "Is this a political statement?", he
asks. Echoes of Fallujah come to mind - or just another
sample of the private militarization of American life.
Kirk's house always wins The MGM
Mirage group owns the Bellagio, the MGM Grand and the
Mirage - whose common vault, housed at the Bellagio, was
broken in Ocean's Eleven. The group also owns
Treasure Island, the New York-New York and other minor
additions such as the MGM Grand in Detroit and the Beau
Rivage in Biloxi, Mississippi. Now MGM Mirage has
offered nearly $8 billion to buy the Mandalay Resort
group - which owns, among others, Mandalay Bay (of caged
tigers fame) and the fake-pyramid Luxor.
Billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, 87, MGM Mirage's
boss, is bound to control more than 30 casinos and at
least 36,000 hotel rooms - including more than half of
all the hotel rooms in Vegas. Kerkorian, already
instrumental in positioning Vegas as the world's
gambling capital, now is the undisputed king of the
strip. The buck stops with Kirk. Or should that be the
bucks stop with Kirk?
Vegas and
war After severe exposition to the Vegas
lifestyle, it's irresistible to examine the possible
correlations between this land-of-make-believe, the
charge-my-life-to-my-room syndrome, exploding
cholesterol, the Western life of privilege, and the
situation in Iraq. Vegas is the American apotheosis of
distortion of perception, a phenomenon closely linked to
distortion of information. A case can be made of a
naturally good and decent American population eager to
buy distorted perception and information.
Vegas
became the fastest-growing major city in the US not
because it is Disneyland on steroids, but because it has
exploited the "sunk cost" fallacy (the more one's
invested the less likely one is to leave) with extreme
success. Wily casino managers of course always fix the
odds in favor of the house. This means that Vegas
gamblers consistently lose to the house, and they will
keep on losing forever while charging their life to
their rooms.
At the "Mesopotamian casino",
things are not very different. The sunk cost argument
holds in the form of "we have to stay the course". After
all, previous arguments failed (liberators greeted with
flowers, weapons of mass destruction, a self-financing
occupation, peace and democracy expanding to the Middle
East, etc). American taxpayers will soon have committed
$200 billion to Iraq, plus the sunk cost in casualties -
even though Washington has not met a single pre-war
target, save deposing an already defanged Saddam
Hussein.
Pill-popping nation And then
there are all those hugely expanding waistlines. Vegas,
more than America's capital of entertainment, seems to
be America's capital of obesity.
Impeccably
sipping a martini at the Tabu ultra-lounge in the MGM
Grand, surrounded by a brash mob, Paris-based Dr
Jean-Philippe Minart, a doctor-communicator and a
fixture at every major international medical congress in
different domains, has granted a few minutes between
meetings to talk to Asia Times Online about America's
number one problem.
"According to the World
Health Organization [WHO], in a report last March,
obesity is fast becoming the number one cause of
mortality, before cancer. The WHO talks of a global
epidemic; at first, we thought it was a purely American
problem. The main causes of obesity are the
uniformization of eating habits and a sedentary way of
life. This is extremely serious in the US: the Center
for Disease Control in Atlanta [Georgia] has announced
that in 2005 obesity will be the number one cause of
mortality in the US, even worse than smoking."
Minart frames the problem in simple formulas:
"The more you eat fat, the more you get obese. Just a
minority of the American population exercises.
Sixty-five percent of the American population is
overweight." At least now there's deep concern among
medical associations. "The first to move was the
American Diabetes Association, because obesity is a
major factor in the risk of diabetes and hypertension,
coronary artery disease and strokes," Dr Minart says.
He explains that there are "multiple metabolism
factors which are altered by obesity, like cholesterol.
Ten years ago, the first statin appeared on the market.
Statin lowers cholesterol and saves lives. Cardiologists
started to be interested in cholesterol and soon
discovered the real problem - obesity." The statin drug
business is a business of billions. The leading statin
medicine is Lipitor - a billion-dollar drug produced by
Pfeizer, the world's number one pharmaceutical giant.
So obesity, according to Minart, is "both a real
threat and a real business. The pharmaceutical business
is the second-largest investor in volume behind the
automobile industry in this country, where more than
half of the population has no health insurance." He says
"this may be the land of the hamburger - but hamburger
is not good for your health. Junk food plus TV equals
short life."
Now there's something even juicier
in the horizon. The first results of a new medicine that
acts directly on the causes of obesity were revealed at
the latest congress of the American College of
Cardiology. "It has a revolutionary potential," says
Minart. This latest frontier is a smart drug - a
weight-loss pill. "It acts directly on the rewarding
centers in the brain, so you have less stimulation. The
same receptors are found in the adipocytes [fat cells].
The drug has a central action over the centers of
pleasure and the adipocytes. The result: you eat less,
you stop smoking and your waistline is reduced."
The whole, multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical
industry is involved in this breakthrough. "The first
smart drug was Prozac. Another great example is Viagra.
Prozac, Viagra and the weight-loss pill are lifestyle
drugs." Sipping the last of his martini, paying no
attention to the chill-out lounge music on offer, but
always pointing out potential stroke victims crowding at
the bar, Minart enunciates his formula for the future:
"Be positive, take Prozac. Have good sex, take Viagra.
Look smart, take the weight-loss pill." Cynics would
argue about the side effects on the libido. The answer
would be circular: take more Viagra.
America is
already a pill-popping nation - and there's many a place
in Vegas, including the Tabu ultra-lounge, where patrons
happily imbibe their "secstasy cocktails", Viagra
included. But if a combination of Prozac, Viagra and the
weight-loss pill may represent the ultimate bright
future of the American consuming hordes, there's always
that nagging question of money, and where will it come
from to finance so much fun?
Bring on the
dancing fountains Answering this question
requires a tortuous pilgrimage through the
interconnected bowels of casino-land as we look for a
specialist in casino economics. We're ultimately lucky:
we find a character who is happy to talk but requires
anonymity. Let's call him Dan the Fat Cat.
Dan
the Fat Cat, a very successful ad executive from
Colorado via California, is a would-be candidate for the
weight-loss pill. He is also a high roller. He's in
Vegas practically every other weekend and enjoys the
customary perks at the Mirage. Donna Harris, director of
poker operations at the Mirage, says that to play "you
have to give your name at the door, get on waiting
lists, know where to go for the limit you want to play".
None of this for Dan the Fat Cat - he only plays high
stakes in the high-roller room. He's the quintessential
poker man: familiar with nuts (an unbeatable hand),
trips (three-of-a-kind), holes (the first two cards one
is dealt, face down, in the game Texas Hold'Em) and flop
(the first three cards on the table in Texas Hold'Em).
He's a Republican who will vote Democrat next November
(John Kerry is carrying a five-point lead over Bush in
Vegas at the moment).
Poker players better take
Dan the Fat Cat's message seriously: America will have
to stop consuming like crazy because its economy is in
trouble. "Politicians always promise the free market is
our salvation and the key to our prosperity. That's
wrong, because we cannot live with an everlasting trade
deficit. Last year it was almost half a trillion
dollars," he says.
How does America manage?
According to Dan the Fat Cat, "China, Japan and Europe
lend us a fortune, so we can keep on buying more and
more imports. And the trade deficit keeps growing.
Imagine when they decide to stop lending. When that
happens, we will have huge interest rates, a collapse in
the stock market, a collapse in home prices. That'll be
the end of easy credit. I don't need to tell you that
when you have these everlasting trade deficits getting
bigger and bigger, this is always interpreted as a sign
of weakness."
Dan the Fat Cat, never a man to
spurn a first-growth Bordeaux at a four-digit price at
the Renoir restaurant in the Mirage, is nevertheless
worried: "Last year we had to borrow something like $540
billion from Europe, Japan and China. We became a debtor
nation in the late 1980s. Now our debt abroad is
something like $3 trillion. It will be double before
2010. Some people say that when the dollar hits new
lows, Americans will buy less and less imports. That's
bull. The way I see it, we are indebted to the house.
And the house one day will come to collect. The house is
now a bunch of countries. They hold our debt paper, they
collect interest on our Treasury bonds and private bank
loans. We may be a very wealthy nation, but we can't
keep spending what we don't have and borrowing money
forever. One of these days America will lose control of
its destiny."
So when does the poker game end?
"It ends when one of the major players decides it's time
to collect and go home. Suppose China has a banking
crisis. They would have no choice except selling off
their US bonds and use the proceeds to correct their
financial system, and also to politically appease their
masses."
Dan the Fat Cat would be branded a
dangerous communist in many poker circles when he says
that the American labor force is paying the price for
the casino economy. "US multinationals would never allow
themselves to be on the losing side, nor would the US
government be able to resist them. These huge trade
deficits are in large part a 'gift' from the
multinationals. They export and import within
themselves, between US-based factories and their
subsidiaries abroad. Half of US foreign trade -
excluding oil - is intra-trade. That's why trade
deficits equal job losses in the US. Suppose an American
multinational switches production to China: they still
produce the same thing, but the labor costs are much
lower and the products become imports - and that makes
the trade deficit rise. But of course you know that in
America the government puts the interests of
multinationals way ahead of its own citizens."
After all his talk, Dan the Fat Cat sips his
cappuccino and leaves - he has a game to play. He's a
moderate consumer, for American standards. He never
charges his whole life to his room, and he makes sure he
has kept enough collateral. He knows the house always
wins, so as a rule of thumb he always collects when he's
still flush - after all, he refuses to further enrich
Kerkorian, the king of the strip. As for the legions of
losers, there's always the sight of the dancing
fountains of the Bellagio erupting to the sound of
Sinatra.
The house always
wins
