Sunday, Sept. 9, 2007 | 1:23 a.m.
After a week of talking about sex, we should not get too hot and bothered debating whether Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman is a tiresome buffoon or whether prostitution will be legalized. One question is settled; the other is moot.
But a discussion, maybe even an argument worth having, is what kind of community we strive to be and whether we are content to tell a tale of two cities. One is where Goodman, a Dickensian character if ever there were one, sets the tone, a place where anything that's legal is just fine, where taste is optional, where no sin is too sinful. The other is a wholly different venue, one where parents are proud to raise their children, where culture, sophistication and erudition are prized, where family values refer to something other than mob mores.
Or, perhaps, there is a third way, where these two places co-exist, uneasily but peacefully, separately but equally. Sin City and Sun City, Spearmint Rhino and the Springs Preserve, the mob museum and The Meadows.
The valley's schizophrenia has grown more and more acute as the area has sprawled, bringing with it not just metropolitan challenges - buckling infrastructures of all kinds - but also big-city trappings - high-quality medical, educational and recreational facilities. The schizophrenia, though, isn't just between the Industrial Road strip club sleaze and the Summerlin or Green Valley verdant beauty. Even within neighborhoods far from the Strip or Glitter Gulch, residents are riven about what they want the city to be.
As beautiful as you may think the Green Valley Ranch or Red Rock might be as resort complexes, they are gaming establishments. And some people - myself among them - have argued for decades that once casinos were allowed to migrate beyond downtown and Las Vegas Boulevard South, any chance that Las Vegas could become a great, soulful city instead of a caricatured, soulless one vanished.
It's not that I am anti-gaming - I've played a hand or hundred thousand of poker - or that I buy into every cliche about the social ills of gambling. But it is a different kind of business with a different kind of effect on communities.
Consider how this dovetails with the past week's debate about sex for sale and the harrowing stories of women working in legal brothels told in Melissa Farley's "Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connection."
Whores are not Jane Fonda in "Klute," supremely in control and empowered by their job, but more like the girls of "Deadwood," sad-faced and haggard. But, Goodman and libertarians argue, women have a right to choose, as if most prostitutes choose a life on their backs the way a woman chooses to have an abortion.
It is this same right-to-choose, anything-goes view that creates a community ethos that cannot be contained - even mobile billboards now sell sex. There is no escape.
Just as - here's the connection - there is no escape from gaming, the industry that fosters a Zeitgeist that cannot be seen as anything but inhibiting for the city's maturity. The gamers have shown a ruthlessness that would make any brothel owner or pimp shudder. They supposedly don't condone prostitution, which flourishes through strip clubs and outcall services - and in a casino or two. But, as Jack Sheehan reported, if the opportunity arises for them to go into the business, the gamers will leap at it. Just as they leapt at opportunities in New Jersey, on Indian reservations, and around the globe - in most cases, shortly after fretting about the threat to their bottom lines and stifling any talk of taxation.
The Stripcentric gamers may ensure we don't pay an income tax, but they also gave us Gov. Jim Gibbons, who ensures no one will pay any taxes to pay for roads, schools, health care and so on. Others have culpability here, too, especially a business community that has had a free ride, with many getting rich quickly and then pulling up the drawbridge. But Las Vegas is inextricably linked with gaming and all it implies, including the prospect for illicit sex even as the industry itself has become schizophrenic, catering to a more upscale clientele while relying on slot players who look as sad and haggard as any exhausted hooker.
This is about preying on human weakness, selling with sizzle something that too often leaves you feeling empty, wondering if it was worth the cost. Sounds like prostitution, but the same goes for the industry that encourages this environment to exist.
That's hardly debatable. And that's Las Vegas. If we let it be.
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