Does the variety of American cities offer a greater, more instructively disorienting shock to the system of a Bostonian than a visit to Las Vegas? The question occurs to me every time I take a red-eye home from Las Vegas, surrounded by citizens of the Commonwealth who mutter and snore “r”-lessly in their fitful upright sleep, wiped out by overstimulation, incipient bankruptcy, and booze fatigue. I had occasion to consider the comparison again last weekend at the Mayweather-Pacquiao extravaganza, a quintessential Las Vegas event: overhyped, overpriced, and inevitably anticlimactic, but surrounded by an anthropological spectacle that blended three parts horror to one part entertainment and one part revelation.
We can pass lightly over the obvious differences, physical and cultural, between the two cities. One is a new, fast-growing desert vice capital laid out on a sprawling grid well-suited to cars; the other an old, compact, wet, slow-growing, self-appointed capital of virtue jammed into a cramped coastal site and built up on layers laid out according to the needs of cows, sailing ships, and railroads.
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Let’s dig down to more essential differences. Las Vegas is organized around the core principle of “action.” The crowds milling up and down the Strip like foraging steers, wearing fewer clothes and carrying larger drinks than might seem advisable, are committed to the idea that they’re there to have a great time by doing and seeing exciting things nonstop. Las Vegas markets itself as a never-never land where the only class is recess, every meal is composed entirely of dessert, and everybody gets to stay up past his or her bedtime every night.
Boston, by contrast, closes early because it’s organized around the core principle of doing your homework and getting to bed on time so you’re not tired for school. Being tired for school could lead to a subpar performance that brings dishonor to your family, so you better go light on the action.
In Las Vegas it’s important to look and act as if you’re auditioning for a part in a film noir. This means that men are reduced to forms of display that call attention to how much they can bench press or their net worth, while women are reduced to what they look like in spike heels. The single self-presentational choice available to women, femme fatale, is an unforgiving one that doesn’t really work for normally shaped humans.
Men get two options. If you have muscles, you expose them and try to appear aggressive, which involves hanging your arms menacingly at your sides except when you bring them up to make parallel gestures, like pointing at somebody with both index fingers and saying something that ends with “baby.” Whether you have muscles or not, you can always try to look like you have money. It’s considered fine, even classy, to carry around a stack of it as a prop to employ during dominance displays.
This is all a sharp contrast to Boston, where it’s important to look as if you had the good sense to check the weather forecast before leaving the house. Strangers on the Green Line look at you as if to say, “Your outerwear appears to keep you warm and dry. Respect.”
I’ve lived in Boston long enough that I can’t help seeing Las Vegas as a stupendously bad idea, a place where poor judgment and misguided priorities have attained official, even sacred, status. But like many other residents of Boston, I’ve noticed, I seem to feel a need to visit Las Vegas now and then to confirm that it’s still a bad idea.
Carlo Rotella is director of American studies at Boston College. His latest book is “Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories.’’