The questions, then, are: What does money mean to them, what
doesn't it mean, and what do they want it to mean? Of course, they come
hoping to win money, a lot of money. A small percentage do win, and an
even smaller number win big. They hope to win but, since they are not
stupid, they expect to lose. It's clear that the slim chance that they'll
win is the psychological mechanism by which they give themselves
permission to lose, letting themselves lose without feeling like utter
fools. In other words, the slim hope of winning is their door into the
fatalism of losing.
For isn't what they're really doing a rebellion against money? In
these United States money is our common denominator. It is the absolute
standard of access and status--the "bottom line," as we say these days.
Not only commerce but education, justice, art, the environment, health
care, and often liberty itself must meet the standards and bow to the
demands of money. There is precious little among us that isn't rationed,
administered, and ultimately valued, in terms of money. The Constitution
aside, most Americans consider themselves free insofar as they have
access to money.
The "American dream" has come to mean an ideal not of liberty but
of prosperity. Our unconscious or half-conscious definition of liberty
has become "prosperity." Contemporary politics is based on this equation.
Most of our lives revolve around making money (as opposed to the human,
communal value of our work, which was the standard for many eras), and
most of us judge ourselves according to what we can show for our money.
In America money is, if not quite omnipotent, at least
omnipresent.
Money plays covert, even insidious, roles in our most intimate
relationships. Divorcees who vie viciously for each other's money are
only bringing to light what lived in their love from the beginning: the
need to be valued--a need that tends to turn ferociously concrete when
things go bad. Our secrecy about our salaries is a secrecy about how we
are valued. Among men especially, the contest of who will pick up the
check is a contest of dominance, and this is only one of the gentler ways
men make money felt in their friendships.
It is no wonder that these people are grim as they not so much lose
but leave their money in Vegas. Every dollar they sacrifice to the
"games" is sticky with the pain of so much that is unadmitted and
oppressive in their lives.
Thus losing money in Las Vegas is more a ritual than it is anything
else. For when we sacrifice something important and painful, even when it
is against our practical interests to do so, and sacrifice in such a
specific, even organized, manner, then we are in the realm of
ritual.
If this ritual were conscious, if it were a choice, it might bring
release, relief, and even happiness. But though these people make a
choice to come here, and they know they'll likely lose, the ritualistic
aspect of their behavior is hidden beneath countless layers of habit,
denial, and a kind of conditioned blindness. (Psychotherapy wouldn't
exist if people didn't hide their major motives from themselves most of
the time.) Since the ritual itself, as with so much about money, is
unadmitted--repetitive, compulsive, and enacted in a setting that
advertises itself as fun--there is a terrible tension in it, as there is
in any action the wellsprings of which cannot be acknowledged, or any
rebellion that is doomed to fail.
They come to Las Vegas to rebel against the oppression of money and
to escape how they've surrendered their spirits so completely to money's
laws and demands. That is the real "vacation" they seek. But they seek it
in a veritable maze of money, a city that exists to do nothing but suck
money from them and that gives virtually nothing back in return.
Their rebellion against money plays into others' lust for money.
They sense this, and thus the futility of their rebellion is total. They
are, in Las Vegas lingo, "suckers." And there is no way to be proud of
being a sucker, or to feel when being suckered that one is somehow also
being released. To be compelled to come here, and to submit so completely
(though not very consciously) to being a sucker, is to take a vacation
into defeat. It is the final victory of the daily grind over the seeking
spirit, an unacknowledged submission to all the ways that money causes
pain. Thus it is a ritual that defeats and trivializes itself precisely
because it is so unconscious.
So for all its glitter, neon, and supposed gaiety, a depression
hangs in the desert air over Las Vegas. You don't need to know the
statistic that Vegas has one of the highest suicide rates in the world to
feel death in the air. You don't need to remember that this city lies in
the midst of the Mojave Desert, susceptible to earthquakes on the San
Andreas Fault not 150 miles away--a city with lax building codes and thus
more vulnerable to quakes than Los Angeles. (A major earthquake's
disruption of power, water, and transportation in the 100-plus-degree
heat would leave its million-plus inhabitants and visitors dead in
days.)
Tags:
anathema,
demographics,
fantasies,
fantasy,
gambling,
good reason,
impulses,
job security,
las vegas casinos,
little time,
malls,
michael ventura,
middle class,
money,
money money,
national shrine,
nothing but time,
oppression,
personality disorders,
potent mix,
rival,
Social Security,
supermarkets,
weekdays
