As an internationalist with a deep interest in history, there are a vast number of places I would like to visit in my lifetime. Las Vegas is not one of them. For some odd reason, my little brother and his fiancee decided to get married in Vegas, and that too, during Spring Break, never mind that the bride was in school herself (imagine returning to midterm exams a few days after getting married!) Initiallly, I balked at lil' brother's invitation, since I loathe Vegas and all that it stands for. It was quite a conundrum, since I am close to my brother emotionally, though not politically and spiritually. It seemed he really wanted me there, even buying my plane ticket and hotel, and finally, I spinelessly capitulated. And so, I found myself in Sin City during Spring Break 2006.
My Abba (father) and I had travelled separately to Vegas for the wedding. On our first morning there, we decided to meet over breakfast. While waiting for him, I went on-line. The anniversary of the Iraq War was the next day, and I needed to check the United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) website for the rundown on University of Nevada (UNLV) protests marking the anniversary of the Iraq War. The protest was scheduled for Monday--Wedding Day. Sighhh, what a tough choice.
Since our hotel, Treasure Island, was huge and getting lost would have required little effort, my father and I met, well, in the casino. It is, unfortunately, the first thing one sets upon emerging from the hotel's elevators. The casino is huge, and one literally cannot exit the hotel without traversing it. And, since it is a casino, patrons smoke (indoors) without qualm. It was a bizarre sight for me, coming from the East Coast, where the penalty for smoking indoors is often immediate expulsion.
The other bizarre thing was the presence of waitresses in mini-mini-mini (I mean mini) skirts a la Hooters and torturously high stilleto heels. They were serving casino-goers. So, this is the land of women’s lib, I thought, and all the poor burka-clad women in Muslim countries are terribly oppressed. Phew!
Walk Down the Vegas Strip
So, Abba and I had breakfast, then left Treasure Island, and walked toward the main throughway, Las Vegas Boulevard, about a block away. We could see the Wynn, the newest and grandest of the hotels—correction, resorts—on the Strip, where my brother, his fiancee, and her father were staying. All the major hotels on the Strip, including ours, insisted on referring to themselves as resorts; they were no mere hotels. No sooner had we turned the corner from our “resort,” we saw some beautiful fountains. My stepmother had asked Abba to bring her some pictures of Vegas, and so I volunteered to take one there.
Then we were at Caesar’s Palace. It was huge, bigger than Grand Central Station. Everywhere there were nude statues, and people being photographed with nude statues. I joked with Abba, whose nom de plume is butshikan, that the buts better look out, here comes butshikan. Call me culturally deprived, but I am thankful for the Islamic prohibition on depiction of the human figure.
“Caesar’s Palace is famous; maybe you should take a picture of its main facade with the laurels (minus the human statues) for Stepmom,” I told Abba.
He refused, in what was perhaps a symbolic gesture. Butshikan does not glorify Caesar, either through photography or other means.
Caesar’s Palace continued on for what seemed like blocks. One of its most prominent statues was—what else--Caesar himself. Abba went off on a discourse about Caesar’s most famous speech, recalling much of it verbatim. You might think I am just a chamcha of my Abba, but I marveled, for the umpteenth time, at his knowledge and wisdom of even those things that were anathema to him. My Christian friends have told me on many occasions that Abba seemed to know more about Christianity than most Christians.
A bit further down the strip, we encountered the Statue of Liberty replica. This time, Abba agreed to be photographed next to it (am I surprised?). I tried to take the picture, but it was virtually impossible to photograph the gargantuan statue without completely crossing the street--and then the picture would be terribly obstructed by the substantial passersby and traffic--or using a wide angle lens, and I eventually gave up.
The Luxor Hotel
Near the end of the Strip, we found a resort called the Luxor Hotel, modeled after the infamous original in Egypt, complete with gambling, liberated waitresses, and free flow of toxins (liquor). I felt disgusted that this was the only representation of Luxor presented to Vegas visitors thirsting for knowledge (well, there had to be some who were thirsting). It was representative neither of the greatness of Ancient KMT, with its mathematics, physics, and engineering genius, nor of the more recent Islamic Egypt.
Abba and I realized roughly simultaneously that the Luxor Hotel, like all the major Vegas resort-hotels, were modeled after existing structures, and that this one had to be modeled after a center for drinking, gambling, and prostitution, in modern day Luxor--thrust under the noses of Egypt’s Muslim majority. I could imagine why Egyptian Islamists were so angry. But Luxor in Vegas wasn’t all bad: Like dissolves like, as they teach us in biochemistry, and here at least, jahiliyyah fit in perfectly with jahiliyyah.
We were nearing the end of the Strip, and with it, the end of Vegas’ glamour. A few yards on, young Latino immigrants were handing out glossy postcard size circulars. They handed one to my father, who looked at it briefly, and then dropped it on the ground. It was a completely nude picture of a woman, probably with the offer of sex (neither he nor I looked at the circular long enough to scrutinize it for details).
The Porn Distributors were nearly all Latino, some of them very young, and some of them women. There was an art to dissemination of porn. The worker shuffled the stack of nude pictures making an attention-catching smack! Then, attention captured, he handed it to a potential patron. I was not exempted from this depravity: one youth, eager to get rid of his stack as soon as possible, even gave me one. My father and I were shocked and saddened to see Latino immigrants in such a state. As we walked, we discussed what causes a people to stoop to such a level. Latino immigrants, if such a generalization can be made, were overall very dedicated to family and to the church. It seemed that just as wealth could grossly change a person, eliciting behaviors previously alien to them, poverty sometimes induced horrible and desperate responses in people.
By this time, we were more than two miles from our hotel, and decided we’d better make our way back, in order to have enough time to prepare for the evening’s wedding-related events. Walking back, we saw MGM, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and Hooters.
“That’s great,” I remarked to Abba, “All my favorite things in one place. I think I’ll need therapy when I get back home.”
Heading in the direction of our hotel, we encountered the Paris Las Vegas Hotel, with its Eiffel Tower replica (built half scale to the original). I went inside to use the restroom, and Abba waited for me in a relatively quiet corner of the resort’s casino (since it was virtually impossible to be on the main floor of any of these resorts without being in a casino). When I returned, I found Abba sitting at a slot machine—an odd site indeed. But, it was the first available seat he found. I pointed out to him that all the signs, including those for the bathroom, were in French! See, who says Vegas doesn’t have couture?
The Mosque-Casino
Then we saw something that really blew our minds: a mosque with a casino on the first floor. Really. The architecture was not just Middle Eastern-looking, but precisely that of a mosque, down to the mimbar. This was Aladdin Resort and Casino. Here are a couple links, showing how it looked:
http://govegas.about.com/od/downtownvegas/l/bllongwalk8.htm
http://www.lasvegas.com/shopping/desertpassage.html
Adjoining it was the Desert Passage Shopping Mall. We did not go inside, but I later learned that inside the shopping mall was Starbucks, the Nestle Toll House Cafe, and other attractions. (Starbucks and Nestle are both closely linked to Israel, and as such are part of the boycott Israel movement. Their placement inside a shopping mall with a very clearly Islamic appearance is indicative, at best, of a gross lack of awareness of Muslim sensibilities.) Immediately adjacent to the Aladdin Resort-cum-mosque was Krave, a gay bar. I shuddered. Nothing but nothing was sacred to these “people.” Abba and I were both very disturbed by the Mosque-Casino. We wondered if some of the other patrons realized the significance of such a presentation. Almost like Rushdie all over again. I jotted down names and details, so that I could register my objections upon returning home.
Along the route, we’d been looking for a tee shirt for my stepmother—a souvenir she’d requested. If mental septicemia were a true to life condition, I would say that it overtook us after the Aladdin Resort, and we stopped looking for the tee.
Finally we were back at our hotel. After what we’d seen that day, Treasure Island suddenly seemed very wholesome. I’d completed my first (and hopefully last) traipse along the Strip. I felt strange being there, where the people seemed so oblivious to EVERYTHING going on around the globe. They appeared egocentric and corpulent in carriage; self-absorbed and brainwashed in outlook; glutinous and sybaritic in habit.
