The Two Towers: Trump

Rising out of the Great American Desert, two opposing metropolises: One known, rather affectionately, as Sin City, a place where indiscretions of all shapes and sizes are winked at, encouraged even, a sort of moral dead zone by civic decree. The other, shining with the false light of sanctimony, aggressively wholesome, anodyne, a seat of secretive religious power. Two cities, and two obverse faces of the American experiment. Out of nothing—wilderness, rock, sand—something. Out of a vast freedom, radically different visions of America and its people. A big tent in the desert, enclosing devoutness and dissolution. And in between, 424 miles of highway and an indescribably strange and beautiful landscape, defying belief.

The Great Basin drains an enormous swath of the western United States, more than 200,000 square miles encompassing parts of Oregon, California, Idaho, Utah, and more than half of Nevada. Las Vegas lies somewhere in the southern half of the Great Basin; it is certainly not at its center. Major sinks in the Basin include the Great Salt Lake, Pyramid Lake, and the Humboldt Sink; Las Vegas is not among them. Geographically, factually, hydrologically, this is correct; however, in demographic terms, Las Vegas is the Great Sink into which all of the dregs of humanity drain. A quick survey of the Strip is instructive. Who does one encounter? The eternal frat boy, aged 17-60, staggering boozily between topless establishments, the front of his jeans soiled with the residue of a half-dozen lap dances; the graying bar fly, heavily made up, hemline foreshortened , eyes sharpened to descry the felicitous intersection of money and undiscriminating lust; the sidewalk hustlers, always male, usually brown-skinned, passing hand-to-hand pocket-sized color advertisements for the city’s fleshpots, naked women staring with faux-seduction from thin, glossy cardboard (most end up underfoot); youngish ingénues of a calculating sort, teetering painfully in enormous heels and skirts just long enough to conceal their thong underwear when standing upright.

Everywhere falsity and vanity: hulking, steroid-fed men, arms, shoulders, and chests so thick with muscle it constrained movement; women with impossibly buoyant breasts, displayed so as to invite maximum leering; skin tanned the unnatural copper of an old penny clutched in too many hands; garish outfits, especially among women, that defied description or logic (in an episode of The Simpsons, a marquee outside of a boxing match admonishes: “Tasteful attire prohibited.” This dictum applies to the whole of Vegas). And so the Strip: everyone, everywhere, crying in one voice: “Look at me! Desire me!” Never was there a place so transparently superficial; beyond the neon travesty (Great Pyramid, Eiffel Tower, Italian villa), the casino, the club, and the stage, lies the uniform vacancy of the hotel room, when at last one must stare at the mirror and the hollowness within.

But Las Vegas was not without pathos. Once I overcame my initial repugnance (overcame perhaps isn’t the right word—set aside would be more apt), if not my feeling of superiority (yes, it was difficult to suppress), I began to feel a distinct pity for those around me, awash in the spurious glamour of the city. I pitied most of all the permanent or semi-permanent residents of the Strip, those cogs in a great machine of sleaze and degradation, rhinestones and chintz—the cocktail waitresses, bartenders, off-hours showgirls, sidewalk promoters, croupiers, card dealers, and the rest, even those invisible—for example, the janitorial staff who improbably ensured that I saw not a single pile of vomit, indoors or out, during my entire night on the town. Most, undoubtedly, had dreams, weren’t content with their lot, but were nonetheless bound as servants to a depraved and demoralizing master and his thousands of insolent, ill-mannered houseguests. And for that—if only that—they deserved pity.

Then the tourists: the well-behaved majority, who drank and gambled in great quantities and wanted nothing more than to drink and gamble in great quantities. It took some profound fathoming on my part to appreciate the character of these quiet thousands; I failed to touch bottom. Ultimately, I was incapable of seeing the world through their eyes—to me, Vegas could be nothing but falsehood and degradation, a place of exceedingly easy, manufactured pleasures. That it could be seen as an escape, a delight, that it could be anticipated, pined over, returned to, again and again, as to an old lover, I found impossible and abhorrent. The world offered so much to the spirit: discovery and endless opportunity for exultation in beauty; Vegas was a negation of this. It wallowed in its ugliness and tackiness; it reveled in its invitation to debauch. Millions chose to pen themselves up in its hotels and casinos, small, artificial ecosystems of mean diversion, and this was a joy to them, to close themselves off and to forget everything save for personal indulgence of the cheapest sort. Empathy failed me; it saddened me beyond words.

Our plan, mercifully, demanded a quick exit. After a single night, we were on the road. My travel companions and I had vowed not to discuss the city until we were beyond its limits. The disgust erupted in torrents. We all agreed that we could not have borne another day spiraling in that Great Sink. The desert awaited.