"Ugh! Imagine having to lead your class through a casino to get to an art museum!" my mother exclaimed on Memorial Day.
Uh-oh, I thought to myself.
There it was on page A14 of that day's New York Times: a photo of fifth-grade teacher Jennifer Silver leading her class through the Venetian casino floor, between banks of slot machines, to get to the Guggenheim Hermitage.
It's crap, though. You need not walk through the casino area to reach the art galleries. The Guggenheim Hermitage is located right off the Venetian's lobby, by the main entrance at the hotel-casino's porte-cochère, where cars (and school buses) unload their passengers. Perhaps there's a reasonable explanation—the school bus was directed to an alternate entrance, say—but I can't shake off the possibility that the walk-through was staged by the Times. With the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg imbrogliios last year, duplicity at the Times is no longer beyond imagination.
Whatever the photo's origin, it had its desired effect: to give somewhat sheltered New York sophisticates who make up the Times readership a terribly misleading impression of Las Vegas—a city so amoral that it forces its children to maneuver through a smoky den of gambling and debauch to reach one of its few bastions of culture.
It would be easy to say that that picture is representative of what was wrong with the Times' "American Dreamers" series last week. Indeed, there are several instances where the articles feed the pesistent (but, of course, false) outside notion that casino culture pervades every fabric of our lives, whether it's that march through the Venetian, the "forgivable" assumption that a former female mayor was once a stripper, or the Times' insinuation that corrupt gambling interests engineered the election of our current mob-lawyer mayor. (Although we don't help our case any when our teachers use the Mandalay Bay in grammar exercises, as one article noted.)
But it's not that the Times by and large lied to its readers. Rather, it misdirected them. Few of its depictions are specific to Las Vegas. Erase the dateline and a few location references, and oftentimes you couldn't say where the stories were situated.
Take the opening article of the series, "The Budget Suites," given a place of prominence on the front page of the Times' renowned Sunday edition with a two-page spread inside. Dealing mostly with residents and would-be residents living out of a motel, the article conveys the transience of some of Las Vegas' population and their hand-to-mouth existence, particularly when people move here looking for a job, or before they earn enough to settle down properly.
This is not inaccurate, but it is not uniquely Las Vegas, either. Such living arrangements are all too common—and disturbingly so—among low-wage workers in blue-collar communities across America. In 1998, progressive writer Barbara Ehrenreich went "undercover" as a coffee-shop server in Key West for a Harper's essay to understand how the working poor get by in this country. One of her co-workers paid $60 a day to live in a Days Inn motel, and another contemplated such a move:
["Gail"] tells me she is thinking of ... moving into the Days Inn herself. I am astounded: how can she even think of paying $40 to $60 a day? She squints at me in disbelief: "And where am I supposed to get a month's rent and a month's deposit for an apartment?"
(The Tuesday, June 1 article, focusing on a family court judge whose daughter fell in with a bad crowd, was even more egregiously generic, but Stacy J. Willis amply covered that last week ["The Old Gray Cliché," June 3rd].)
Let's give credit where it is due, though. The penultimate installment, depicting an immigrant Mexican family achieving the American dream here in Las Vegas, with a sidebar profiling the success of the Culinary Union, was on the mark. True, it was also the only really Vegas-positive article of the lot, but I'm not arguing that the negativity was unfair. I'm arguing that it was misplaced.
The stated purpose of the "American Dreamers" series may have been to expose the "unmatched opportunity and extreme dysfunction" of Las Vegas, but ultimately, what the series illustrated was the opportunity and dysfunction found throughout working-class America: kids falling under the spell of drugs; sex-industry workers living unorthodox lives; families seeking greener pastures to make a living, or at least eke one out. Instead of that tired nonsense about Las Vegas being "America's strangest, most mythic magnet city," the series should have positioned itself as examining Las Vegas as a microcosm of American society at large.
What sets Las Vegas apart is that we're the (strictly metaphorical) greener pasture du jour. Thirty, 40, 50 years ago, these articles would have been written about California and Los Angeles, self-styled "City of the Future." And the series does make several references to the twilight of the California dream, noting the influx from the Golden State as an exodus from its inflation and fiscal crisis.
Las Vegas and Nevada have more than their share of ills—underfinanced education and social services; depleted water resources; a health care crisis; an undereducated workforce; high teenage pregnancy and suicide rates—and disseminating these facts, as the Times did, is no crime. Reports on the state's low-ranking status in this or that category come out so often that it's become a running joke in this very paper. Our anger at the Times' underscoring these faults comes more from wounded pride than anything else.
There's still much that needs to be set right here. Let us not be so impervious to the Times' attack that we don't try, or keep trying, to make things better.
Jeremy Parker writes about politics biweekly. His website is lasvegasweblog.blogspot.com.