Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 131

Las Vegas, Las Vegas

127

chines available for every player,” he remarks, “[because the] same is true about
slot machines. People don’t like to play next to a stranger, so we give them room.
There is usually an empty machine next to them.” 12The point seems less about sex
than it does about personal space, yet one cannot rule out the fear of arm-envy (as
in the gentle stroke, the sudden jerk of the handle on a one-armed bandit). Perhaps
urinators and slots players aren’t looking for community. O f all the games on the
floor, slot machines are the most isolationist. “An interesting thing about oldtime gambling,” explains Michael Ventura:
is that...you bet alone — but the game itself creates a brief
community. You play cards with people....As for roulette, there
are few things more desolate than being the only one at the
table....Same with craps. And you can have fun, cheer each
other on, give each other good or bad luck, get jealous, feel
neglected, feel close. You’ve bet the same number and it wins
and you’ve both won a hundred bucks and are juiced enough to
take it for a sign that the wheel approves your love. In short,
human contact. Real life. Anything can happen. But slots
and video poker — these are not Anything games....No com
munity. No contact. Little to cheer about. Nothing to fight
about....You don’t get excited; you get dazed....The masturbatory slow-motion pulling of the lever lulls you into a timeless
nether-mood....[W]hy come to Vegas’ for it?...[This is the way
you] secretly feel inside [your] own home.13
Part of the reason we come to Las Vegas is to leave home — to leave
our necessary isolation, the imprisonment of a radically Liberal culture that forces
us into desperate individualism. Ours is a society that destroys community at ev
ery turn. Our economy and culture are such that we are forced to abandon home,
family, and friends in the chase for a job on the other side of the continent; we are
pushed, then, toward a home office where we can do our jobs over the Internet and
never have to have any real co-workers; and through it all we struggle to maintain
the presence of the Other, filtered as she is through the gauze of technology: the
phone, the video screen, the Internet Service Provider. How deeply have we given
in to the mindset when our collective best hope is the ACLU? Yes, it is one of the
most important political and legal resources fighting for a sense of justice today;
but inevitably, the ACLU is part of the system and thus part of the problem. Every
issue is taken up as an issue affecting individuals and their individual rights. In
deed, Las Vegas should have been sued for privatizing Fremont Street — we should
all fear the corporate takeover of our everyday life, we should all fear eventually