In a city whose promotional slogan touts impunity, you probably should not expect any limit on shabbiness.
The slogan itself raised a ruckus recently when the quasi-governmental authority responsible for promoting the city transferred rights to the slogan to the private advertising firm that devised it. To be fair, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and R&R Partners claimed the authority sold the rights to "What happens here, stays here" to R&R for $1 to defend the slogan more capably against copyright infringement, and the San Francisco law firm hired by the authority to examine the transfer cleared both of wrongdoing.
It could be argued, though, that the authority's $85 million advertising campaign quickly transformed the slogan into a national template for clumsy clichés, and thus pitched it into fair-use territory. Notably among its appropriators was a local "gentleman's club," and certainly one of the sins the slogan covers, at least for many thousands of the city's 35 million annual visitors, has to be patronage of sex-dealing dumps that clad themselves in burlesques of classical architecture. A Greco-Roman getup, of course, is "classy," just what a "gentleman" deserves. Hey, it's Vegas. It's what happens here.
And so it passes without comment that a condominium tower should be marketed as a rhinestone in the tiara of a publicity hound's divorcée. It is so Vegas, is it not, for a developer to enlist Ivana Trump to sell units in a building that was sold to the city as the innocuous "Summit." If built, "Ivana Las Vegas" would be the second most prominent element of the city's skyline and would add to the Strip's architectural carnival the physical embodiment of two squabbling ex-spouses take-that-ing each other across the high-priced real estate of the northern Strip. So, what do you expect? Taste?
The 73-story tower will suit "the person who appreciates privacy and has a certain style," the ex-Mrs. The Donald told the Review-Journal. "I will forever dominate the skyline of Las Vegas," she added, perhaps joking but certainly providing a clue to her idea of "style."
To paraphrase the question attorney Joseph Welch hurled at Sen. Joseph McCarthy 41 years ago, have we no sense of decency, here, at long last?
Probably not. If, as so many observers contend, Las Vegas is the paradigm of the 21st-century United States, rich people snapping up the privacy and taste of "Ivana" is but a minor expression of a society without shame.
Or maybe it's a highly selective sense. Shame, after all, has made an intriguing comeback of sorts in recent years, with moralists both right and left insisting that it is a worthy deterrent or punishment for transgressors of various types. And so a county attorney in Kentucky decides to publish names of "deadbeat dads" in a local newspaper. Other papers print names of reputed johns. Environmentalists urge the shaming of polluting corporations. Jailers humiliate Iraqi and Afghani prisoners to "soften" them for interrogation. Judges sentence miscreants to wear T-shirts that proclaim their crimes.
In a peculiar sidebar to one of Nevada's most grisly crimes, the mother of a child murdered in a casino restroom conducted a rally on a California campus to shame the murderer's collegian friend, who had declined to intervene when he saw the murderer with the child. This and other episodes prompted "Good Samaritan" legislation around the country, compelling punishment of those who refuse to foil crimes.
Communitarian activist and scholar Amitai Etzioni, who advocates shaming as an alternative to prison for some crimes, once argued in a discussion on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation that the negligent friend might have been a good candidate for public dishonor. Other social theorists, however, counter that shaming is poor policy, and that it might be just as likely to promote antisocial behavior as prison. Doing time is a badge of honor in some dystopic communities, so it's not hard to imagine how shaming might backfire. Yo, dude, way-phat T-shirt.
Whatever you think about shaming, it's odd that the idea should revive as resistance to shame solidifies. To some degree, the decline of shame is welcome and overdue, especially when it is directed against activity wrongfully considered immoral. It has become a standard of American conservatives to blame the baby boomers' "sexual revolution" for a host of social ills, and when they list acceptance of feminism or homosexuality among those infirmities, they're simply deluded. Yet it's hard to agree that society is well-served by the marketing of aggressive sexual display to preteens, say, or that visible thong straps betoken a thoughtful feminist sensibility. Restraint and modesty are not inevitably puritanical.
In any event, sexual license is only a small component of shame's eclipse. Rather, the consolidation of self-interest and therapeutic sensitivity—the former exalted by conservatives and the latter cherished by liberals—has built a society in which indulgence is celebrated and almost no sin is beyond excuse. Especially, it's worth adding, if the expiation is televised, and mediated by a caring host.
Poor taste, of course, is not a sin, but it is the hallmark of a shame-free society, and Las Vegas is rapidly becoming its workshop. Our shamelessness exports well, but its artifacts, sadly, stay here.
Chuck Twardy has written for magazines such as Metropolis.