There are many weird things about Las Vegas, from the truck that drives around offering ‘Hot Babes Direct To You’ to the entrepreneurial hard-up young man on the Boulevard who holds a placard saying: ‘Kick me in the nuts for $20. No joke. No protective cup.’ But the thing I find weirdest is that you can still smoke in bars and casinos, even in some restaurants. Where most American cities, and European ones too, have imposed upon their populations what the New Labour government described in brilliant doublespeak as ‘smokefreedom’, Vegas remains gloriously smokeunfree. In one casino, the fug of tobacco smoke becomes almost unbearable, to my eyes and throat at least. Yet even through the tears, I can see how civilised it is to allow adults to do adult things — drinking, smoking, schmoozing, flirting — and to decide for themselves whether to light up and whether to hang out with smokers or non-smokers. How tragic that one has to travel to a notoriously sinful city in the Nevada desert to see the ideal of choice being respected.
Vegas offers insight into how the ideology of sin has changed. Where once this garish, almost ironically sleazy outpost was known as Sin City for its gambling and boozing, now it’s seen as sinful because it allows smoking in public and because it has restaurants that cajole you into consuming more calories than the average human constitution can cope with. Where Vegas’s old sins of gambling and drinking have been pathologised in recent years, turned from moral failings into pitiable ‘addictions’ that require the intervention of today’s Oprahite therapeutic priesthood, puffing on a fag or stuffing your face with burgers is still explicitly considered immoral, signs of a gluttonous, self-loathing disposition.
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