Country of Exiles (15 page)

Kerzner drew up compacts with several tribes, granting him exclusive gambling rights, most notably in Bophuthatswana, just outside Johannesburg, where he built Sun City, the casino-hotel that billed such performers as Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli. In 1985 he was alleged to have bribed officials in the Transkei homeland, demanding similar exclusive rights to run a hotel-casino resort (the Wild Coast Sun) in Umtata, the Transkei capital, within reach of rich international tourists. In 1990 the attorney general of the Transkei, Christo Nel, charged Kerzner with criminal fraud, bribery, and corruption, and giving false witness before an investigative commission. Nevertheless, Kerzner was never convicted of any crime.
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Kerzner’s South African casinos flourished until the early 1990s when anti-apartheid forces took over the government, dissolving the tribal homelands. In 1994, moreover, the South African government required that Sun International reduce the number of its casinos from seventeen to nine.
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Kerzner shifted gears. He turned to America, where another system of homelands existed, many conjured up out of thin air by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. He set his sights, in particular, on the Mohegan tribe in Uncasville, Connecticut. Until the 1980s, this tribe had been defunct, having long ago (in 1861)
voluntarily
asked the state to break up the reservation by selling individual parcels of land to tribal members, thereby converting the Indians into American citizens and residents of Uncasville.
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But the tribe—or the rump that still remained—resurfaced after Congress passed the 1988 law and, in 1994, with help from
lawyers paid for by Kerzner, successfully got recognition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a legitimate tribe. Soon thereafter the Mohegans signed a deal with a developer, Trading Cove Associates (50 percent owned by Kerzner’s Sun International), which developed and managed the casino and got 40 percent of all the profits. Kerzner’s money hired the builders, the designers, the fantasists. The place was called Mohegan Sun. By the late nineties, it was the third-biggest casino in the country, with nearly 3,000 slot machines, hundreds of table games, a parking lot for nearly 7,500 cars, and a four-lane highway built for the tribe that allowed direct access from Interstate 395. The casino included twenty bars and restaurants and a big entertainment complex for children.
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The success of Mohegan Sun fed Kerzner’s ambitions to become the preeminent casino player on the East Coast. In 1997 the New Jersey Gaming Commission approved his application for a license to operate the Resorts International Hotel in Atlantic City, which he had purchased earlier from entertainer Merv Griffin. No one on the New Jersey Commission seemed upset by his behavior in South Africa. One commissioner shook his hand after the proceedings and said, “Thanks again for investing in Atlantic City.” Kerzner himself observed that “this allows us to expand even faster.”
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Resourceful men like Kerzner and Costner, then, along with the reassertion of Indian sovereignty, and, above all, the reliance of Americans on services for employment and income, have given new status to the tourism/gambling industry. And they have so changed the dimension and nature of that industry as to make it into a threat to the sense of place.

Years ago, historian Daniel Boorstin in his book
The Image
discussed the difference between travel and tourism. Travel, he said, was an activity that almost compelled people to face the places they visited. People traveled on their own terms, followed their own passions and quirks, and accepted whatever distress came their way as the price paid for the pleasure gained. Modern tourism, on the other hand, insulated people from experiencing and knowing the world; through an elaborate set of protections (from arranged tours to air conditioning), it transformed travelers into passive consumers of painless adventure.
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This distinction has remained a sound one. At its best, tourism (especially when it approaches travel) can open people up to the unexpected and unknown. At its worst, however, it diminishes place, or the sense of place, by making it nearly risk-free to get where you want to go and—as part of the package—to feel entirely safe there (usually in chain hotels or motels of unrelieved sameness). Previously, when it was harder to get somewhere, the reward was usually more satisfying, the goal more desirable. In our time, however, “travel has become so easy that even the sedentary can reach just about any destination,” to quote Lee Lescaze, writing in the
Wall Street Journal
.
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Worst of all, the “marketing of place” (as specialists in tourism call it), the selling of “brand U.S.A.,” has trivialized countries and places. Disney president Judson Green said at the 1995 White House Conference on Travel and Tourism, that cities with “historic culture” will lose out unless they “sell this culture.” “Dayton, Ohio,” Green observed, “is blessed with the Lincoln-Douglas debates,” but “the town is doing nothing to market those debates.” But what will happen, Green asked, to the Lincoln-Douglas debates if the town decides to “sell” them aggressively? What will happen, indeed? Will Dayton cease to remember because it will not or cannot market its
past? Or, if Dayton does choose to sell Lincoln-Douglas, what parts of the debates will it sell to mass markets? Will there be the usual trade-off between selling and understanding?

For all this, however, tourism, especially when respectfully and cautiously pursued, has often had a benign effect, even to the point of saving some endangered wilderness (e.g., Yellowstone Park) from the ashbin of history.
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In some parts of the country, as well as elsewhere in the world, it has become a means for saving much unused farmland (as rural heritage) which would otherwise be sold off to developers.
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However, when seen in relation to gambling, or when combined with gambling, the benign potential of tourism vanishes, as in the case of Las Vegas.

For the past twenty years, most permanent well-off residents of Las Vegas have either taken refuge in self-contained residential subdivisions or fled to the sunny paradise of nearby Henderson. Most have made a trade-off, having come to Las Vegas to escape taxes elsewhere (the Nevada constitution bans income and corporate taxes) and with full knowledge that casino money ruled everything (the taxes from which also paid for whatever public services there were). Nevertheless, most residents have tried to act and live as if the city did not exist, although ironically they have never been able
visually
to escape the casinos (because the Las Vegas Strip can be seen from virtually any point on the compass).
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The concrete reasons for this denial were no mysteries: Las Vegas is, for a city its size, among the most crime-ridden in America, its urban core suffering from terminal neglect, a condition fostered by the selfishness of Las Vegans who detest taxation.
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But Las Vegans, the rich as well as the poor who lived mostly in dilapidated North Las Vegas, have felt little attraction to the city proper for other reasons. Las Vegas is an American city
in extremis
, “the heart of the American dream,” as Hunter Thompson described it, a metropolis where money stands out in all its naked glory.
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It is a city that has pushed the placeless side of American life to its limits. For one thing, Las Vegas flouts nature. Without the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead—both only twenty miles away, both in their own rights interventions to defeat nature—it would vanish in a dry land that would soon overtake it.
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This sense of coming out of nowhere forms the backdrop for the other features of Las Vegas that make it inhospitable to people seeking stable communities: Las Vegas not only flouts nature, it flouts place and the past. Las Vegas flouts place because it serves only people on the move—transients, tourists. It is truly a cosmopolitan city, which people visit from all over the world, enticed in part by its nonjudgmental openness, which their own transiency facilitates and which the casinos, for obvious reasons, encourage.

Las Vegas also flouts the past (place). Here facades have more meaning than reality itself, the past existing as myth-fragments wrenched out of context—from imperial Rome and ancient Egypt to medieval Europe and New York City circa 1960. Here the casinos enlist the past to arouse the feeling of belonging to another world, of being swept up by some jet stream of fantasy. Gambling requires the freeing of impulse, and that freeing is sustained by a culture that says “Give in, don’t hold back, let go.”

In some ways, such a world is perfect for immigrants, because it says that no pasts matter and that anyone can be an American. From another viewpoint, it endangers immigrants (thousands of whom work in the Las Vegas casinos and hotels)
or all those who want to build new bonds. How can people connect with a world that has no past, or that treats the past as fantasy and entertainment?

Las Vegas is a supremely democratic city, made so by money. The casinos exclude no one; the whole spectrum of human life walks Las Vegas Boulevard—the elderly, children, the crippled, all races, immigrants and tourists from every country, anyone who can pay the airfare to get into the city. That is why a replica of the Statue of Liberty, however absurd it may seem on first sight, belongs in this place. Las Vegas even contains a new Ellis Island Casino! Yet, at the same time, this democracy has nothing to do with political citizenship: it is a people’s (a child’s) playground, every bauble the contrivance of sharp managerial minds.

At the gold-lined Mirage, the city’s most luxurious casino-hotel, Steve Wynn, the CEO, in 1997, put in an exclusive room called “the Salon Privé” for high rollers, precursor to his Gallery of Art in the Bellagio. Decorated with the finest European art
(real
Picassos, Monets, Manets, Matisses, Renoirs, Modiglianis) and with elegant dining spaces and golden toilet seats, it was accessible only to the richest gamblers.
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Rooms like this one have been built in America for at least one hundred years, and all have captured the essence of capitalist culture—the hierarchy of wealth at the heart of the democracy of desire. Anyone might enter them so long as they paid. With enough money in America anyone could be king or queen (or senator); but for the losers, such rooms were locked shut, and Las Vegas reverted to the desert it really was.

A new generation of casino managers armed with MBAs from Harvard have tried, since the 1980s, to make Las Vegas family-friendly, an effort symbolized in Wynn’s Mirage by an aquarium full of “endangered dolphins,” as well as by a zoo full of “endangered cats.”
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In May of 1997 a little girl, left alone
by her gambling father to play in the video arcade of one of the Las Vegas casinos, was raped and murdered at 3
A.M
. in the casino’s lavatory. Three months later, Steve Wynn opened his hotel to a conference of the nation’s governors: the subject was—of all things—the care and development of children. Wynn’s apostles were there, including Governor Christine Todd Whitman; but no mention was made of the child’s death, overshadowed as her murder was by the attempt to link the casinos—Las Vegas—to a noble, moral cause.

Las Vegas reveals, in pristine form, the effects of a gambling-tourism economy, effects so toxic to traditional community life as to compel all who wish to settle down there willingly to do so in gated subdivisions. But wherever cities or towns have turned to tourism or gambling (or similar service-sector work) as their basic source of income, the same outcomes have occurred, if not to the same degree, certainly in kind. They have occurred, as well, on many Indian reservations, indeed in a way that illustrates how high the cost has been when place-rooted peoples turn to placeless activities to save their communities.

Most Indian reservations have nothing in common historically with such cities as Las Vegas or Atlantic City: they were not the handiwork of developers but reputed homelands in which half of all Indians lived. Yet, many Indians have done all they could to entice Las Vegas into their communities, from hiring Las Vegas managers to designing their casinos and hotels in the most up-to-date Vegas style.

Some of the casino-reservations have begun to look and
feel like little Las Vegases. They draw the same kind of crowds, the same Balzacian mix of tourists and transients, giving rise to the same cosmopolitanism. They also resemble Las Vegas in their obvious theatricality and in their anything-goes atmospheres (if they did not, they would not be casinos).

Some tribes have even enlisted their own native culture to stir up the right kind of ambiance. The fanciest restaurant in the Mystic Lake Casino in Minnesota was decorated in 1995 with several Indian murals; one depicted an Indian chief sitting upright in a state of rapt meditation in an open, sunlit field.
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“We are very proud,” said Anthony Pico, chairman of the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians, which after 1996 ran a casino (plus theme park and shopping mall) just outside San Diego, open twenty-four hours a day, every day, “that our casino is unique among most others to the degree that we drew upon our very own culture and heritage from the land and incorporated them into the structure’s design.” Even “the walls are the rich earth-tone colors and textures of the soil, trees, and flowers.”
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The Mohegans of Connecticut also dressed their casino in “the Mohegan Spirit,” which, according to tribal historian Melissa Fawcett, “moves and breathes within the very rocks and trees of the Mohegan Homeland.”

When the Mohegan business opened in 1996, Herbert Muschamp, architectural critic for the
New York Times
, and champion of Indian casinos, raved about its “primal power of place” with its “dense exhilarating forest of symbols.” “The casino has actually revived the Mohegans’ sense of tribal cohesion,” he said. Muschamp even argued that the Mohegans belonged to a vanguard of moral liberators, which he viewed as a good thing. “The casino signifies the shattering of a moral taboo,” he wrote. “Anyone old enough to be admitted to a casino grew up in a culture that placed gambling, along with cursing, drinking and prostitution, on the list of Bad Things. Indeed, in most parts of
the country, gambling remains illegal. That is why the Indians have captured this market. Legally, Indians exist outside the borders of this country. They are exempt from the laws in which America’s moral prejudices have been inscribed.”
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