Las Vegas Revealed
Excerpt from A Massive Swelling by Cintra Wilson
"The broad cross section of America that loves the Vegas stars does it with a childlike awe. I find it to be generally true that the people with the most hateful, inhumane, intolerant politics are suckers for the most obscene forms of guileless sentimental exploitation; there's something about the love of handguns and Jesus and Old Glory, astronauts and unborn children that makes a lot of fat, racist, ultraconservative hickweeds want to gamble and buy sweatshirts and get all chocked up in front of some wacked-out, self-worshiping bloatus of an entertainer in a full body tiara signing "Born free". It is this that has made Las Vegas the most obscenely overblown Xanadu fantasy hewn out of pink strobe lights, beige concrete, ravenous fruit machines, and thong clad waitresses on the planet, and home to the most interesting form of celebrity anywhere: Vegas is where strangely ego-poisoned and laughable entertainers crawl off to live like Louis XIV unitl they're dead."
"The broad cross section of America that loves the Vegas stars does it with a childlike awe. I find it to be generally true that the people with the most hateful, inhumane, intolerant politics are suckers for the most obscene forms of guileless sentimental exploitation; there's something about the love of handguns and Jesus and Old Glory, astronauts and unborn children that makes a lot of fat, racist, ultraconservative hickweeds want to gamble and buy sweatshirts and get all chocked up in front of some wacked-out, self-worshiping bloatus of an entertainer in a full body tiara signing "Born free". It is this that has made Las Vegas the most obscenely overblown Xanadu fantasy hewn out of pink strobe lights, beige concrete, ravenous fruit machines, and thong clad waitresses on the planet, and home to the most interesting form of celebrity anywhere: Vegas is where strangely ego-poisoned and laughable entertainers crawl off to live like Louis XIV unitl they're dead."