LAS VEGAS, N.V.--  There's a peculiar kind of reverse snobbery going on in Las Vegas that I'll call the "You Don't Know The Real Vegas" Syndrome. Here are some highlights:

1. "Once you get beyond The Strip, Las Vegas is just like any other American city."

2. "Las Vegas will be the leading growth city of the 21st century."

3. "Las Vegas is the most progressive union city in the country, if not the world."

4. "Nevada is controlled by the Nevada Resort Association, whose politics are never understood by outsiders."

5. "Tourists use Las Vegas as a reflection of their own preconceived opinions."

6. "Las Vegas is the most tourist-friendly city in the world, because of its sophisticated marketing and willingness to change quickly to adapt to changing consumer tastes." 

7. "Outsiders have outdated notions of Las Vegas as a Sin City full of vice, racketeering, prostitution and shady operators."

8. "Las Vegas successfully exploits its shady past by trading on the tourist's secret desire to experience the forbidden."

9. "Las Vegas was built on the backs of its women."

10. "Las Vegas empowers women."

If you've been paying attention, you'll notice that the odd- numbered assertions are contradicted by the even-numbered ones, even though the statements frequently come from the same mouth. But they're all qualified by the trump card: "I live here. I know."

Las Vegas is such a young city--only a handful of natives can trace their ancestry earlier than World War II--that it sometimes has the pugnacious attitude of a scrawny school kid who's tired of being bullied by the rest of the country. Even though I've pretty much researched the place to death and written hundreds of thousands of words on its culture and peculiarities, I'm still constantly having my credentials challenged because I don't live here.

"How long are you in town?" is the most common question asked when I show up for an interview. The implication of the question is, "Did you just fly in for a quickie?"

"As long as it takes," is my standard answer.

"Well then, here's what most people think about (take your pick: Steve Wynn, the mayor, the influence of Wall Street, Indian gaming, crime) . . ." And then the clincher: "But let me tell you how Vegas really works."

Now we have an academic text that purports to show us how Vegas really works. It's called "The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas" (University of California Press, 388 pp.), and it's aggressively pro-native in its orientation. I'm tempted to be catty at this point and point out that it was published in California, which controls the Nevada economy in many ways, but let's put that aside for the time being and examine its argument.

Hal Rothman, a history professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Mike Davis, a history prof at State University of New York/Stony Brook, use the introduction as an assault on outsiders like me. "The bulk of outsider reportage on the city," they write, "falls into two general genres: the male gambling adventure and the middle-American freak show."

They use the example of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which is, of course, not representative of anything except the substance-addled mind of Hunter S. Thompson, and they scoff a little bit at the image of Vegas as a mecca for unsophisticated hicks.

"But Vegas is another world," they say, "when you enter the gaming palaces from an employees' entrance in a back parking lot. (And we can safely bet that no Rolling Stone correspondent or postmodernist philosopher has ever done this.) Or when you leave the Strip to explore the everyday American neighborhoods--rich, poor, and in-between--that now make up a desert metropolis of 1.2 million people. . . . Here are the alternative narratives and biographies that give the lie to the overtorqued prose that refuses to see the grit beneath the glitter."

Even though I have entered a casino from the employees parking lot, and explored the maze of cubicles where all the back-of-the-store marketing guys work, I wouldn't really recommend it, even as an adventure in journalism. This is like saying you should cover the Queen Elizabeth 2 by starting in the engine room, and pay special attention to the maids' quarters. It may be intriguing to sociologists--and two of the contributors to this volume are sociologists--but in fact there's a good reason that so many reporters cover the fantasy instead of the reality. That's what the city is selling.

I also think it's a false assumption to say that reporters don't look at the grit beneath the glitter. From the time of the Kefauver organized-crime hearings, through "The Green Felt Jungle" in 1963, through the Howard Hughes and Teamsters eras, and at least until 1986, when Anthony "The Ant" Spilotro was found buried in an Indiana cornfield, most of what reporters looked for was the grit beneath the glitter.

It's true that in the nineties there was a spate of empty- headed articles about how Wall Street cleaned up Vegas and turned it into a family destination--both assertions are questionable-- but, if anything, journalists tend to be too focused on the seamy underbelly. A good example is last year's horrendous history of Vegas, "The Money and the Power," which was mind-numbing in its detailed recounting of ancient crimes that have little bearing on the present, obsessive about the mob (which hasn't had a foothold for at least 15 years), and even put forth silly conspiracy theories that positioned Vegas as a sort of phantom national capital of the black arts.

The fact is that the fantasy summed up in the words "Las Vegas" changes frequently, and in recent years it's changed every three to four years. Rothman and Davis have an interesting take on that, though. "The essence of the Las Vegas Dream," they write, ". . . is not the mythic windfall at the blackjack table, but rather the dignity of life that high wages and a union contract make possible. . . . As New York once defined the commercial economy of America and Chicago used its big shoulders to become the city that epitomized industrialization, Las Vegas has become a vision of the future. It offers the most highly developed version of low-skilled service economy in the nation and possibly the world."

In other words, Las Vegas is the new disease-free Ellis Island where people really do live out their dreams. And to prove their thesis, they offer 21 essays of varying quality, beginning with, oddly enough, the glitter! Norman M. Klein of the California Institute of the Arts, who says he specializes in "eccentric research into mass culture," launches us into this presumed alternate universe with a muddled analysis of the Strip as "architainment." He uses the word to mean that the facades and interiors of the casinos themselves have become tourist attractions. "Architainment is a ducal fantasy on behalf of cinematic tourism," he says, opaquely, and he seems to be putting forth theories of construction and marketing that have been better dealt with elsewhere. At any rate, he breaks no new ground, and it makes for an odd introduction--writing about the facades of buildings, which is about as far from the employees entrance as you can get.

Francisco Menendez, an Associate Professor of Film at UNLV, weighs in with a meandering essay on the films about Vegas and their themes, but summarizes the plot of "The Godfather" incorrectly, repeats some hackneyed truisms about the iconic Vegas as portrayed in the movies, and doesn't really rise to the insight of Mike Weatherford on the same subject in last year's "Cult Vegas."

By the time I got to Peter Goin's lame photo essay on car culture--don't use photos unless you can afford a decent print job--I was almost ready to toss the book, but these are academics, after all, and so they had buried the meatiest and most enlightening work in the middle sections.

First comes Eugene Moehring's expert analysis of the effects of Nevada's militant "no new taxes" gospel, which is driven by the political influence of the casinos and mine operators. Development is rubber-stamped, even in a growth city that's getting choked with pollution and short-changed on such essentials as water, parks and education, and yet the state is one of the few in the nation that won't fund heart transplants with Medicaid. He tells the chilling story of Vikki High, a 31- year-old mother of three, who desperately needed a transplant and lobbied the legislature for a full month to get the Medicaid policy changed. The lawmakers walked past her wheelchair every day, voted her down, and then left her with this solution from John Marvel, co-chair of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee: "Maybe the private sector can do a fund-raiser."

Moehring is a UNLV history professor, and he covers many of the same areas detailed by Jay Brigham and Jon Christensen in their analyses of how Las Vegas, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, buys enough water and electricity to keep the lights on and the tourists and natives comfortable. It's a tangled skein of interstate agreements, and it doesn't augur well for the future. Oddly enough, only 4 per cent of the city's power comes from the nearby Hoover Dam, because of allocation percentages set in the 1920s. Everything else has to be begged, borrowed, stolen--or just bought at a premium price.

UNLV sociology professor Robert E. Parker details the social costs of the city's rapid growth--the state is 45th in health care and has the highest incarceration rate in the country (518 convicts per 100,000 citizens)--and notes that with every new resort built, unemployment and welfare rolls expand as the city is overrun by job-seekers who end up not getting jobs.

But the best article in the whole book is Courtney Alexander's history of the Culinary Workers Union, Local 226. Alexander is the union's research director, so her point of view is a partisan one, but the story has so often been told from the opposite side that her detailed history of the only American union to thrive in the eighties and nineties should be standard reading for anyone interested in the culture of Vegas. Anyone who has ever wondered about what the strikes against the MGM Grand and the New Frontier were really about (the latter was the longest strike in the history of unionism) need to study this document. The only missing element is an analysis of the ongoing strike against the Venetian, which succeeded the unionized Sands.

Mike Davis adds a little piece on the MGM Grand action called "Class Struggle in Oz" that seems out of date, incomplete, and redundant in light of the Alexander article. He also contributes an analysis of the Rodney King riots of 1992 and the city's history of police brutality that goes over old ground.

The weakest part of the book consists of those "alternate narratives and biographies" that are supposedly it's raison d'etre. Brian Frehner talks about growing up in Vegas and having a chip on his shoulder about the cartoonish image outsiders have of the place. Shannon McMackin describes her childhood home in the desert, now overrun with development, and her father's decision to sell out and buy his own working-class slots casino. William N. Thompson, a professor of public administration at UNLV, writes an amusing piece about discovering his own links to the mob through his child's Little League team in the seventies. Amie Williams contributes a weird open-ended pseudo-poetic feminist diary about the making of her film "Stripped and Teased." And Kit Miller does some character sketches of typical casino workers, illustrated with photos, that read like watered- down Studs Terkel.

The personal essay that has the most promise comes from Constance Devereaux, a writer and artist who taught Socratic philosophy classes at the Southern Nevada Correctional Center in nearby Jean, Nevada, while doing research as a UNLV grad student in the late eighties and early nineties. The climax of her narrative comes when her own husband is killed by an intruder, setting up an expected epiphany about her true emotions on the question of leniency and rehabilitation of criminals. But the epiphany never comes. We're left having no idea what she thinks about Jean, criminality in general, or the subjects of her studies.

Joanne L. Goodwin, an associate professor of history at UNLV, attempts to explain the role of women in the very male Vegas between 1945 and 1985, but descends into a welter of dry statistics and doesn't end up having much to say. More to the point is Kathryn Hausbeck's stories about constantly being mistaken for a hooker in Vegas ever since she arrived there to take a teaching appointment in the UNLV sociology department. So many men asked her whether she was a "working girl" or not that she finally devoted herself to the study of the sex-worker industry in Vegas, although her research seems to have resulted in ambiguous conclusions at this point.

William N. Thompson, the aforementioned history prof, contributes a trenchant analysis of Nevada's Foreign Gaming Rule, which prevented the city's gambling interests from expanding out of state until well into the nineties, and, in the essay that seems to have been the inspiration for the book, co-editor Rothman explains the historic reasons for the decline of the mob while debunking the historical accuracy of the Martin Scorsese movie "Casino."

The only problem with Rothman's thesis is its premise. He assumes that Nicholas Pileggi, the investigative journalist and long-time authority on the Mafia who wrote Scorsese's screenplay, had intended the movie to be a roman a clef based on the life of Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, former head of the Stardust Casino. Pileggi could have written that story if he'd wanted to--he certainly has the credentials to do it--but he obviously chose to produce a work of fiction, with Rosenthal as no more than a jumping-off place for a character that morphed into Sam "Ace" Rothstein, played by Robert DeNiro. Pileggi and Scorsese were more interested in the interior logic of their movie than in historical accuracy, and it's fruitless to chastise them for something they never intended.

At any rate, Rothman compiles an excellent summary of previously published information about the early financing of mob casinos, the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, the influence of Howard Hughes, and the Corporate Gaming Act of 1967 that led to the modern publicly-financed casino city. But at the end of the day, the book fails to live up to its initial thesis.

"Las Vegas has long been a carpetbagger's dream," say the editors, "a place where self-proclaimed hip intellectuals and grandstanding writers can project their own neuroses, their fears and needs. . . . To these writers, Las Vegas is little more than a canvas on which to paint their fantasies. . . . Las Vegans are quite practiced at giving people what they want without divulging the soul of their place. . . . No one has ever before stopped to ask the people of Las Vegas what they think of their place."

If Las Vegas does indeed have a "soul," it's a conflicted and troubled one, as this book unwittingly demonstrates. The natives may be offended that their city has been treated as a canvas for caricatures, but their conflicting takes on what really exists there indicates that finding the authentic Vegas is a harder job than they think. Perhaps the true lesson here is that the Las Vegan has trouble understanding himself.

© Copyright 2002 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs

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