Hal Rothman explains how the Average Joe can have it all in Vegas

Sunday, Sept. 24, 2006 | 7:31 a.m.

Post-industrial America is a funny place sometimes, but it has been good to Las Vegas. We are now more than four times the size we were in 1980, and there is no end in sight.

Las Vegas has been instrumental in creating a world where experience is currency and entertainment has replaced culture. We have benefited from it immensely, but in the process have done some violence to older values. The culture of me, me, me, now, now, now, the self-indulgent universe we inhabit, is in no small part our contribution to American society.

In the process, we have helped to create a new stage of capitalism. First Americans made things with ebullient joy; then we learned to buy them with credit and take equal pleasure. Now we've reached the point where the goods aren't good enough anymore, where any idiot with $399 a month can drive a BMW and where the fake Rolexes look better than the real ones.

In that world, the only way to differentiate yourself is with experiences that cannot be matched. In this capitalism, we consume experience, using it to differentiate ourselves from everyone else. In mass society, in an age when everyone is basically the same, we use experience to tell ourselves that we're unique ... and better.

There's a time-money equation in postmodern America. Occasionally you'll meet people with a lot of time and a lot of money. Most of them are born to it. A few make it on their own. I guarantee that they have more fun than you and me.

Mark Cuban is the best example. This billionaire made it on his own, sold out to AOL before the dot.com crash and bought himself an NBA team. He gets to go in the locker room, hang out with the players, sit in the first row, wear his favorite player's jersey, and holler at the referees anytime he wants. He gets rung up by the league at half a million a pop. He writes the check, comes back the next night, and does it again. He's having more fun than you and me.

Lots of people have no time and no money. They're screwed. Most of us have a lot of money and a little bit of time or lot of time and a little bit of money.

If you have a lot of money and a little bit of time, you take the corporate Lear jet on Friday afternoon and go skiing for the weekend in Colorado. When you return on Monday, you regale your peers at the water cooler with tales of your adventure.

If you have a lot of time and a little bit of money, you look for more exotic vacations. A friend of mine is a professor at a small university. He is married to a woman from a very well-off family. As he tells it - and husbands are always suspect at such things - for the first 20 years of their marriage, his in-laws would arrive to regale the family with tales of their latest vacation. A mere university professor, he could not afford weeks in the Bahamas or other such trips. His in-laws treated him with disdain; he could see it in their eyes.

Then he received a fellowship for the entire family to spend six weeks in the South Seas. They spent six weeks living in treehouses, planting taro, and communing with the natives. When his in-laws returned and started to speak of their vacation, my friend held up his hand and told them all about it. The kids showed their new skills, and my friend swears he'd never seen such a look of respect in his in-laws' eyes.

We all want to be winners in this game. It's really a game of status, of self-validation, of compelling the world to see our choices as exciting, valuable and especially meaningful. The choices convey status; they also affirm who we are and who we want to be.

That is where Las Vegas comes in. We have always given the middle class a luxury experience at a middle class price. You see it in the newest round of "What happens here, stays here." Ordinary people become special here. That is ultimately what we sell. In a time when most of us cannot win the time-money equation any other way, Las Vegas provides that possibility.