Chris Van Dyke
Department of Geography
University of South Carolina

Maybe deconstructing Las Vegas is an impossibly
easy task. Easy because it requires minimal critical or
intellectual acuity to detect the sleight-of-hand which
makes the city appealing to so many people – the frenzied
neon signage inviting you to participate in gluttonous
consumption, the busy streets flooded with anonymous
people drifting from hotel to hotel in search of something
indefinable yet promised to them, prompting
them to continue walking aimlessly out in the enclosed
open, and possibility. Capitalism, for many, becomes a
spectacle here. Bitter people who feel tired, exhausted,
and used up, alarmingly retreat to this spot in the
hope of easily winning the improvement they’ve been
sold as their entitlement. And yet the visual, dizzying,
and cacophonic displays of capitalism is impossible to
deconstruct all the same when you have to confront this
endless searching, when you walk through the casinos,
or up and down the strip, by day or night, but especially
at night when the saturnine grimaces shine through
more clearly on the faces of people who are already
helplessly broken, who have sought reprieve from their
troubles in this place, and who are convinced a few days
of rampant, unthinking consumption, gambling, and
the joys of dislocation provide an easy remedy.