Columnist Susan Snyder: Vegas and America inch ever closer

Sunday, March 19, 2000 | 9:55 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@vegas.com or 259-4082.

A new book by local sociologists Claudia Collins and David Dickens says the rest of the country is becoming more like Las Vegas and Las Vegas is becoming more normal.

Is that scary or what?

But it's right there in "Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City." The book ranks 18th in Nevada and eighth in Las Vegas on Amazon.com. That's not bad for a sociology text competing in a general market with "A Hippopotamusn't and Other Animal Poems."

Collins says the most buyers she sees at signings are planned-community newbies wanting information about Summerlin, Green Valley or maybe Boulder City.

Boulder City, the book says, was the area's first "planned community." Hoover Dam families' homes were built with the pecking order in mind. Those in charge of the project lived in the largest homes on the highest hills.

Liquor sales were illegal in Boulder City until 1969, and until 1948 visitors who wanted to stay more than a day needed a permission slip signed by the city manager. Maybe that's how we ended up with silly resident association rules about how long the garage door can be open.

Plenty of what has been written about Las Vegas is trite and thin, Collins says. She and Dickens wanted to factually explore the Las Vegas Valley that exists beyond the image of glitz, mobsters and movies.

"There are people who will come in for a weekend and then write about the political climate of Las Vegas," Collins said. "They want to define it in terms of a Steve Wynn. They don't look at what comes before, during or after."

Until recently Las Vegas wasn't even on the map with many sociologists. They called it an "other."

"It was an island of sin in the middle of a desert," Collins said. "You come across the desert, anything goes, then you went back across the desert."

Obviously, a whole mess of people aren't leaving. They're staying, and they want to live in a regular town. Meanwhile, more regular-town people want a little more Vegas in their lives, the book says.

Cities are marketing themselves like Las Vegas has been doing since city officials here first hired a professional marketing firm in 1945, Collins said.

"Las Vegas was marketing itself when nothing was here," she said.

Some form of gambling is legal in all but Hawaii and Utah (most fun is illegal in Utah). And planners all over the place are courting tourism by building themed hotels and restaurants into their towns' aging centers.

"The U.S. is now a service-based economy, and Las Vegas perfected the service economy," Collins said. "The rest of the country is trying to become more like us, which is a huge transition."

People have always been fascinated by Las Vegas, she says. And there still are a bazillion reasons to walk around slack-jawed in amazement (at least two sit on the Clark County Commission).

But people aren't looking to laugh, Collins said. They want to learn.

"The interest now is that the economics is working so well," she said. "We used to apologize all the way to the bank. Now we don't even apologize. And we're still going to the bank."