Why we should be embarrassed

By Jon Ralston

Friday, Feb. 13, 2009 | 2:01 a.m.

Unlike Oscar Goodman (all the time) and the Nevada congressional delegation (this week), most people are not immune to embarrassment.

But as Las Vegas and Nevada have struggled for decades to overcome a tawdry image while cultivating that tawdry image, Goodman has (again) reinforced to the world that we live in a backwater, one that elevates the town drunk to the mayoralty and the village idiot to the governorship. And as someone who has lived here for nearly a quarter-century and often defends my home against condescension and sneering from elsewhere, I am red-faced that Mayor Solipsistic has once again, in his obsessive pursuit of attention, made us into a laughingstock by amplifying a perfectly reasonable statement by President Barack Obama about abuse of bailout money.

“You can’t take a trip to Las Vegas or down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime,” the president said this week, sending Goodman into a froth as he ludicrously demanded an apology and (successfully) pursued national media attention while catalyzing members of the congressional delegation to spend valuable time writing remarks and rushing to the floor to defend the city’s honor.

So as the country suffers from an economic disaster and as state and local governments wither from the reverberations, our “leaders” are behaving as if they represent the Strip and not broader interests and are engaging in a collective whine that is not only unjustified but humiliating.

These folks are behaving like petulant children — the president was mean to us, it’s just not fair. Is there a place in America — the world? — more known for junkets than Las Vegas?

This is all part of the city’s schizophrenia coming home to roost. We want to be known as the place where anything goes, where you can lose yourself in your revels, where what happens here stays here. But we also want to be known as a city with world-class hotels with first-rate convention facilities and fine dining establishments, a place where visionary community leaders want to erect gleaming performing arts centers and medical facilities, a real city where real people live.

But since the first tourist asked me nearly 25 years ago which hotel I live in, I have realized and accepted that the city has an image that cannot be remade and instead should be celebrated and exploited to get business. That’s why Obama unconsciously used Las Vegas as an example: because the city is the symbol of sinful excess (and, probably, because of a couple of high-profile cancellations by companies that took bailout money).

So be it. Get over it.

To whom were Reps. Shelley Berkley and Dina Titus speaking when they went on the floor to prattle on about how wonderful Las Vegas is and how the president should know that? Their constituents in neighborhoods or in Strip boardrooms?

Goodman acknowledged Thursday that he made his comments after two casino executives complained about Obama’s remarks. His chain was pulled, so he barked.

I have sympathy for the gamers, who are languishing as never before and surely winced when they heard Obama’s statement. But my sympathy has limits.

Instead of urging Goodman and the delegation to protect their businesses, perhaps they should take responsibility, as the state’s most powerful special interest, for creating the situation. The gamers are partly responsible for the elevation of Goodman to the city’s most high-profile position and primarily culpable for ensuring Gibbons won the state’s most influential job.

Their anointment of those they believe will help them most — i.e., tax them least — has contributed to a state where the mayor is trying to enact a much-criticized financing scheme to build a City Hall monument to himself and the governor is blithely destroying the state’s higher education system and cementing Nevada’s Third World status.

If these “leaders” really care about the city beyond Las Vegas Boulevard South, why are they not publicly lambasting Gibbons for his budget and what he has done to the state? Why are they so upset about Obama’s comments but not by Gibbons’ actions? They are responsible for both.

Sin City will prosper again no matter what Goodman disgorges, perhaps because of it. But it’s the other city I worry about.

That’s Backwater USA with its clogged roads, underfunded K-16 education system and porous social safety net — all getting worse because of the values of the man the Strip installed as governor. The gamers are mewling, Goodman is sputtering and Gibbons is dithering. And we are worried about Obama’s remarks?

This is not the time to be ashamed of what we are and have been; it’s a time to be embarrassed for what we are not and will not be.