It's Halftime in Las Vegas

I just got back from a pretty big convention in Las Vegas. From what I saw, those high-falutin’ Government Services Administration staffers who managed to blow $823,000 (give or take a grand or 10) of our taxpayer dollars at their extravaganza there in 2010 (complete with ha-ha videos to chronicle their antics)  are the exception, not the norm these days.

I’m tempted to place a call to Jeff Neely for a primer on how to spend so much so quickly, but I think he’ll suggest a constitutional escape route. How passé. How Solyndraesque.

Of course it’s still plenty crowded, and there are still plenty of pervs and derelicts on the streets, and senior citizens from upstate somewhere or another at the buffets, and more Louis Vuitton boutiques than anywhere else on the planet, even a three-story version at the super swanky new City Center. But it’s also quite apparent that it’s halftime in Las Vegas, just like in America (as Clint Eastwood opined at Super Bowl halftime), here in April of year number four of the Interminable Malaise.

There are no lines at the restaurants — neither at the super high-end celebrity chef offerings, nor at the more modest eateries. Whether you want Wolfgang Puck or Sammy Hagar to feed you, you need not make a reservation, there’s plenty of room.

Sixteen of the 20 largest hotels in the world are located within a two-mile radius in Las Vegas. And a lot of them are half empty — or I should say, because I am an optimist, half full. Of course, it’s hard to image that all those rooms could ever have been near capacity, way back then before the fall in the fall (i.e. autumn) of 2008 — could that many people ever want to converge on one relatively small strip of land at the same time to try to make (and most often turn around and blow), a fast buck? Was it just more of the collective grandiose thinking that got this country so off track in the first place?

It’s not just what I saw, it’s also what I did not hear that was pretty telling.

Every time I go there, I find the noise of Vegas jarring, especially in the casinos when the ding, ding, ding of the slot payouts mix cacophonously with the din of the crowds and blaring music.

This time, there was hardly a ding, ding at all. Just a half-assed ping, here and there.

It was quiet. Not much gambling; not much winning. “You cannot win if you do not play,” the adage goes. And you cannot play if you don’t have money. Ipso facto.

However, putting all this negative chronicling aside, I did see one AMAZING, new thing in Las Vegas 2012: PATRIOTISM.

New York, New York is bursting with pride. And Steve Wynn has changed things up at the dancing water show at the Bellagio fountains. Italian Andrea Bocelli and Brit Sarah Brightman have been replaced by Sacramento’s own Lee Greenwood singing, “God Bless the USA.” (Wynn really has that audio cranked, too.)

Folks were singing along as the fountains blasted up grandly and Greenwood crooned with emotion.

At the end, people started clapping. Many were not Americans.

I was so glad that I am, and always will be, and will be happy to see America thrive once again. In the second half.

Best damn ding, ding, ding in the world.