"What Happens in Vegas ... Lingers!"

This will be critical, but it must be said. I hate Las Vegas! Perhaps I'm judgmental. Perhaps I'm a hater! We just returned from a weekend getaway to Vegas where we celebrated my brother's 50th birthday. What follows is a critique of Las Vegas itself, and not the birthday party for my brother, which was a marvelous celebration.

I was struck first by the constant movement of people. There was no stillness, no contemplative silence. Only frenzy everywhere.

I wondered whether these were sad people, spending their meager income for a few moments of escape from the doldrums of their miserable lives. There are so many people titillated by the fantasy of it all. Anyone can be a star in Vegas! Anyone can become rich! Anyone can have sex with a beautiful woman! At least as long as the money lasts.

But of course the devastating truth is that after the erotic dream, all of these people will slink back to their anonymous lives, deeply disappointed that the money runs out, and when it does the girls aren't interested and the casino is decidedly less hospitable. No one can live this way; one can only escape life in this way. Vegas exists to blot out the memory of one's boring everyday life. After all, is anyone really content working, paying bills, raising children, gazing at a sunset and the like?

And what ever happened to the economic crisis we are told about? How can it be that 50% of Americans are upside down on their home loans, willing to make short sales and willing to foreclose on homes (because they are drowning in debt), and yet this city teems with people flashing credit cards for this and that manifest necessity.

Vegas constitutes one of the most exquisite examples I have ever seen of wealth transfer from the weak to the strong. This is "trickle-up" economics at its finest. Teachers, accountants, engineers and the like spend their hard earned money so they can, for a weekend, feel like something more than a teacher, an accountant or an engineer. And those who sell this fantasy prey (intentional spelling) human nature continues to be as pathetic as it presently is, for as long as men think that a trip to Vegas will help them manage their meager lives the coffers will continue to ring loudly. Surely those who own the majestic casino's of Vegas laugh at the pathetic souls that love this place; people all too willing to search out the next thrill in "Sin City." We seek thrills and they seek our cash. Such a perfect symbiosis.

Perhaps there is no better example of the sad ambition of the masses than the number of women dressed as prostitutes in Vegas. Housewives, mothers and grandmothers attempt (and that is the key word) to reproduce the images of feminine perfection they see everywhere on posters and billboards. And why? Because they too want to be noticed as those women are noticed. They want to feel sexy; to have the feminine power of exciting lust in men, for surely that is the glory of womanhood. And so the streets abound with overweight women, strutting about in outfits a few sizes too small, drinking alcohol until they are uninhibited in their desperate classlessness. Is anyone attracted? Only those equally desperate, and equally inebriated.

Everywhere one looks in Vegas, one finds three realities: sex and alcohol and gambling. Dress all the working women in Vegas in burkas and take away the alcohol and the city would become a hot ghost town. I'm not convinced that anyone comes to this city expressly for the shows, the lights or even the gambling. They come to overconsume and overindulge. And here it is done on a scale that defies the imagination. Where else but in America can an entire city rise up in a desert expressly for the purpose of promoting an endless orgy of human excess? Nothing is made in Vegas and everything is always changing. Whether it be a building, a party, a relationship, or any other thrill; you can be sure that tomorrow it will be replaced by another. Nothing will remain.

The idea that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" is another of the carefully crafted lies that captivates the masses of people drinking too much, spending too much, crowding into nightclubs, erotic shows, patronizing prostitutes, etc.

I wonder if the people who open their credit card statements a month after the trip to Vegas still think that what happens in Vegas stays there? I wonder if men addicted to pornography or alcohol still think that way? I wonder if men and women, enamored by Las Vegas, even know that their ongoing lack of contentment in life has something to do with the fantasies they overconsume because they feel entitled to them? What happens in Vegas bleeds out into everything else. And we all know it!