Scott Dickensheets: Sheesh! If Las Vegas got offended every time it was insulted …

By Scott Dickensheets

Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Open letter to Dearborn, Mich.:

I confess, Dearbornians, that as a longtime Las Vegan, it didn’t occur to me at first that anyone there would take Sharron Angle’s comments about the rise of Muslim Sharia law in your city seriously. I mean, they’re obviously ridiculous on their face: “ … Dearborn, Mich., and Frankford, Texas, are on American soil and under constitutional law. Not Sharia law,” she told an audience in Mesquite, a rundown map-speck in our desert. “And I don’t know how that happened in the United States.”

Never mind that it didn’t happen in the United States. To my ears, it’s just one of those things you say in Nevada to rile you up some rural voters. Plus, I live in Las Vegas, about which people say outrageous things all the time, so I figured you’d blow it off the way I do when tourists worry about hookers stealing their kidneys.

Anyway, a conflict like this was bound to happen — that’s the risk you run by sharing a country with a state like Nevada. Plenty of us are crazy from the heat, our mortgage liabilities, the high yahoo factor or the constant subcutaneous dread of living in a tourism-driven state during a deep recession. Tectonic forces like that crack and skew a lot of people. Look at Tuesday’s Las Vegas Sun — according to a story, in just a month and a half, 3,500 people have called a special hotline to nark on neighbors who haven’t switched their out-of-state license plates. Rough math: About 77 people a day get jiggy on the tiny shiver of power afforded by a good license-plate fink-out. You can see what I mean.

Politics only makes things worse around here, especially because we’re in the hot zone of what is arguably America’s nuttiest campaign, the Reid-Angle slugfest. In high election season, Nevada politics resembles open-cage day at the monkey house: free-swinging and crap-flinging, with very little emphasis on accuracy. A lot of people, here and elsewhere, are gonna get a little something on them.

So I figured you’d laugh it off — oh, those foreclosure-singed, job-scarce, quasi-libertarian Nevadans! They’ll say anything! It’s so cute.

I was wrong. Your mayor, Jack O’Reilly — whose name I’m sure even Sharron Angle would agree doesn’t sound Muslim — went on CNN the other night to dispel this Sharia thing. “It isn’t even talked about in Dearborn,” he told Anderson Cooper. “This is an invention of some people who ... believe that Muslim faith is a false faith ...”

And now I see that Angle’s hyperbole can have real consequences for real people: that is, us Nevadans.

According to the news, one of your Dearborn Muslims, a man named Tarek Beydoun, offended by Angle’s remark, has paid to robo-call 250,000 Nevada residents with a corrective message. It says, in part, “It is a shame in this day and age that any candidate like Sharron Angle would use my religion to stigmatize my city and score cheap political points.”

It is, Beydoun says, “an important response to a stigmatization of my community.”

Reasonable? Absolutely. Who hasn’t wanted to blitz-call a quarter-million strangers at one peevish moment or another?

Good idea? That, I dunno. I submit: Adding another mechanized call to the seeming thousands we receive during election season, on top of the incessant survey-takers, candidate phone-bankers, get-out-the-vote volunteers and single-issue cold-callers, may not, in fact, be the best way to endear Nevadans to your cause.

I understand the impulse to respond, I really do. Here in Las Vegas, we know from stigmatization. Just last week, Smithsonian magazine came out with a longish, snarky piece about how “Vegas isn’t a real city.” It is, rather, a “Sodom and Gomorrah theme park.” Happens a lot.

Here’s the point: We only retaliated by crabbing to Facebook friends and readers of Smithsonian’s comment thread. Not total strangers.

So, if I profusely apologize for Angle now, on behalf of all Nevadans who realized immediately that there’s been no Muslim takeover in Dearborn — and that’s probably a good 50 percent of us — can you hold the robo-calls? Or at least direct them to our license-plate hotline?

Anyway, Dearborn, sorry to dump all of this on you. In fact, I set out to write this to the other town Angle mentioned, Frankford, Texas. Turns out it doesn’t exist anymore.