A few months ago, I wrote, “[Las Vegas] is actually an alien theme park of planet Earth. Which helps explain both the laser beam [from the top of the Luxor] AND the proximity to Area 51.”
In The Nation, Marc Cooper writes about Vegas as the new capital of America (figuratively speaking, of course: y’know, the way various cities have been emblematic of various stages of our history). He writes:
What a turnaround it has been for once lowly Las Vegas–and for the nation around it. Barely fifteen years ago, the august Citicorp was queasy about publicly admitting that its major credit-card processing center had been relocated to an unincorporated suburb of Las Vegas. A deal with state authorities allowed the banking corporation to postmark and camouflage its mail as coming from “The Lakes, Nevada” instead of from sinful Vegas. Today, that same neighborhood sports several high-end casinos and luxury hotels. And Citicorp’s own credibility, in the aftermath of the great Wall Street accounting scandals, ranks somewhere below that of a midtown three-card-monte hustler.