Lost Wages

Las Vegas, the spiritual center and holiest ground of American culture in the '80's, '90's, and first seven years of this decade, is falling into ruin.

I've known for some time that this would happen. Even back in the days when I was occasionally making the five-hour drive to Vegas from Bakersfield to worship in the immense holy temples of Something-for-Nothing that (in Alan Ginsberg's words) "stand in the long street like endless Jehovahs," I could envision what this latest incarnation of the western desert boom town would look like as a ghost. As I watched it through the '90's, spreading like a malignant amoeba over the bleak desert sand, so unjustifiable in its prodigal gluttony for the scarce resources of an arid land, I saw the future, and now it's here.

For decades, Las Vegas, ripe with new construction and economic development, burgeoned into a shimmering urban carnival, a recent article at Forbes.com ominously begins, then tells us that Las Vegas edged Detroit last year to become "America's most abandoned city."

This is certainly not the end of civilization. It's not the fall of the Roman Empire. But our way of life is changing, and the party's over. The shallow glamor, glitz, and easy money of times so recently passed by is suddenly neither popular nor attractive. I think we're going to become, once again, a stay-at-home nation of smaller cities, one-car families and boring relatives, provincialism, modester pleasures, and homelier aspirations.

Good-bye Vegas, it's been good knowin' ya, you toxic whore.

We had our fun, but How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places, says Second Samuel 1:25.

As much as I'd like to see the Vegas strip's Venetian Casino after it's abandoned, I know that it would be too dangerous to go there. The city will be the biggest ruin in the world.

"I am Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works ye mighty, and despair."