In his 2009 memoir, the tennis great Andre Agassi writes of a childhood under the hot sun of Las Vegas—a seven-year-old having to hit 2,500 balls a day off a ball machine firing at speeds approaching 110 miles per hour. His dad, “Mike,” an Armenian refugee whose family came to the United States by way of Ukraine and Iran, demanded this and much more from his young son. Then in the evenings, dad would head to the strip where he worked in a casino, schmoozing with clientele being gutted by games of chance.
Perhaps because it is U.S. Open season, perhaps because my middle child is reading Agassi’s memoir right now, perhaps because I too have been a dad to athlete children, or perhaps because I wrote last week about games of chance, I have been thinking a lot about the contradictions of Mike Agassi: a man cast this way and that by wars and regime changes, migrating half way across the world to a city famous for prostitutes, gambling, mafia, entertainment, and glitz without glamour, spending his days drilling his son and his evenings working amid slot machines and poker tables. There’s a contradiction here.
Tennis is a sport that demands a combination of baseball-like skill, marathon-like stamina, and chess-like strategy. Mike Agassi, it seems, wanted nothing more than to make his son the greatest in the world at this heroic sport. It was as if he would not let luck, or the mafia, have the last word in his legacy, at least not with his son. To hell with the casino floor, each one of those blistering balls coming at young Andre said, greatness could still be earned. Mike Agassi was possessed by a hero’s story while living in the most unheroic city in America.
When Andre Agassi was 15 and on the verge of breaking into the professional ranks of tennis, where he would indeed become one of the Greats, a 54-year-old Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, a biting indictment of American political, educational, and religious culture in the 1980s. In the book, Postman used the theories (if they can be called that) of the famous media critic Marshall McLuhan to argue that the logic of television is entertainment, and in a tv-saturated world entertainment had come to dominate, quite like a mafia boss, the entirety of American culture.
As I wrote last week, for Postman it was Las Vegas rather than Boston or Chicago, Los Angeles or New York, that had grown to become America’s representative city.
Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment.
Entertainment, Vegas style, mingles fantasy with constant titillation (the very combo that drives social-media, and not coincidentally). It is a city designed for escape, allowing ordinary folk to pretend to lives in other places as other people. A little Venice, a little Paris, a little Samoa and Tonga—Vegas offers visitors a Golden Corral of international delights. Vegas is a place where reality is the enemy. In it, fantasy is an ethic and worldview as well as an economy. It’s a place where people learn to reconcile themselves to façades, even embrace them. If it is not fake, if it does not have at least the faint chemical scent of perfumed halls and plastic trees, it’s not really Vegas. And of course it’s a place centered on the Big Dream of getting lucky—either by getting rich or getting laid, or both. That’s Entertainment, Vegas style.
Vegas is a place where distractions are engineered to keep us from thinking about what we are missing when we miss reality. The signal is the noise, all of it. In the spectacular words of a classic Tom Wolfe, Vegas is a city that “takes what in American towns is but a quixotic inflammation of the senses . . . and magnifies it, foliates it, embellishes it into an institution.” Vegas: the industrial center of sensory overload in America, powered directly by the Hoover Dam.
Today, the dam has broken and flooded the nation’s capital. Until Trump entered D.C., Vegas was the one city in America where substance almost always fell to the ground with a thud, KO’d in the first round. Now there are two.
But most importantly, at least for civic culture, Vegas is a place where there are no heroes.
Every community, every culture, perhaps even every individual life, needs heroes to thrive. But in Vegas no heroes are allowed. It would ruin the place, “politicize” it, make it a dud. The most you will find are costumed actors playing the part of heroes. If you look up a list of “Vegas Greats,” you won’t find Andre Agassi. In fact, Vegas doesn’t have “Greats.” It has “famous people.” In Vegas, greatness is fame.
Fame can be manufactured, heroism can only be earned.
Anti-heroism, as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steve Izenour argued in their 1972 famous book Learning from Las Vegas, is built into the very architecture of the city. If given the choice between the “heroic and original” and the “ugly and ordinary,” they argued, Vegas always chose the latter. It’s true, Vegas has become glitzier since Learning from Las Vegas was published. But there’s something remarkably ordinary (and, yes, often ugly) about the glitz. It’s just what you’d expect out of Vegas, only very loud.
Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour found something redeeming in the ubiquitous default to the ugly and ordinary in Vegas—that’s why they called their book Learning from Las Vegas. The place suggested to them, with its preference for façades and conspicuous décor, a preference for ordinary people. But these were ordinary people being corralled into ordinary lives where the heroic and original became almost incomprehensible to them. Bring on Big Elvis.
Learning from Las Vegas helped bring on postmodern architecture, where the linkage between form and function was broken in favor of forms that have no function. In 1991, the great cultural critic Frederic Jameson argued that the preference for form over function was becoming the cultural logic of late capitalism. Las Vegas portended the postmodern culture we now live in.
The point of all of this is not to slam Las Vegas. It is rather to ask what happens when Vegas leaves Vegas and becomes a dominant cultural logic? There’s so much we could think about here. What is “truth” in Vegas? What about “beauty” or “goodness”? How about “history”?
But one thing that happens for sure, perhaps the most significant thing, is that talk of heroes and heroism sounds, well, quaint, artificial, and forced. What matters is fame—a cultural form without a cultural function beyond making someone some money.
Next week Civic Fields is going to take a journey to Boston. Our first new writer, Matt Pitchford, is also relatively new to Boston. Having grown up in the northwest, life took him to the northeast and landed him in the city of the Patriots back in 2021. He’s learned to love the place, own it, care for it. He’s been giving informal tours of the Freedom Trail for a couple of years now, and he’s going to take us on a virtual, narrated one and do some writing on what it means to become part of a place like Boston and learn to love it.
Matt is going to be writing about heroes: Paul Revere, Abigail Adams, Sam Adams, and more. If it sounds quaint, perhaps we should ask why?