Books: Barfbag required

By Geoff Schumacher

Its freaky shortage of relevant rock bands notwithstanding, France is all right. I spent several hours in a big airport there some years ago and it was fun. I get a kick out of Marcel Proust devoting 18 pages to childhood anxiety over whether his mother is going to kiss him goodnight. For me, the fact that France didn't buy into President Bush's Iraq war is a point in "old Europe's" favor.

But France apparently is responsible for Bruce Bégout, and that is nearly unforgivable. Bégout, a French philosophy professor, spent some time in Las Vegas and has turned his observations into a book, Zeropolis: The Experience of Las Vegas. This book is total crap, an absurd attempt to dissect the philosophical underpinnings of the city.

Bégout employs the most flowery language imaginable to describe the neon lights and fantasy themes of our "phantasmagorical fairground," while at the same time condemning the spectacle as the epicenter of everything that's wrong with modern society. Cliché builds upon cliché, inaccuracy upon inaccuracy, stereotype upon stereotype as Bégout assaults Las Vegas with his inane judgments.

While Bégout is mildly amused by some aspects of Las Vegas, his overall assessment is withering: "Once what hits you in the first few hours has faded, the city very quickly becomes wearisome. There is little to see beyond the casinos and the themed hotels, and even less to do." Yet, book contract in hand, Bégout presses on, churning out page after page of pop analysis.

Accuracy is a problem. For example, Bégout submits that you can gamble "in the toilets" at McCarran International Airport. He places the "Star Trek" attraction on the top floor of the Stratosphere Tower. In a rare venture beyond the Strip, he characterizes the suburbs as full of gated communities "where your credentials have to be checked by heavily armed watchmen guarding entrance gates that resemble the way into medieval cities." In reality, most such communities across the valley have flimsy automated gates and no security guards.

Stereotypes abound, such as Bégout's characterization of slot players as "every kind of person America classifies as a deadbeat (poverty-stricken pensioners; obese and dowdily dressed black matrons; Southern white trash there to gamble away their Social Security checks; large parties of convention participants who have flown in to do some slumming on the cheap, etc.)." He later describes someone hitting a jackpot with a "shower of coinsÉdropping round the feet of the happy winner." Doesn't happen that I'm aware of.

Casino employees get their share of abuse too, as Bégout describes a typical cocktail server: "a waitress, supposedly sexy by the standards of the management, in a toga that is too short so that it exposes her too-flabby thighs, equipped with her regulation carotene-based, orange-hued fake tan."

Poetic gobbledygook makes frequent appearances in Zeropolis, as Bégout gets lost in his own meandering prose. For example, he describes the feeling of air conditioning in a casino: "We are moving forward on a permanent air cushion, swimming effortlessly in an undefinable atmosphere that annihilates all sensation of weight and resistance. With neither bodies nor presence, we float along the pathways like ghosts, the few tiny drops of sweat shyly intimated on our brow being instantly turned into crystals of ice, thereby showing us that our process of mineralization is under way." And you thought air conditioning was just a nifty method of cooling the air.

Despite these drawbacks, Bégout makes a few thoughtful observations about the fundamental nature of the city. For example, he points out that Las Vegas is not an anomaly--at least not anymore. The world of commerce has learned from Las Vegas and adopted its techniques. "Las Vegas is nothing more than our everyday cityscape," he writes. "No matter where we live...the culture of consumerism and recreation that has transfigured Las Vegas for nearly 30 years daily gains more ground in our everyday relation to the city."

Bégout's harsh assessments of Las Vegas are not the problem with Zeropolis. Las Vegas, frankly, is worthy of loads of criticism. But Bégout isn't up to the task. His book is a hatchet job trying to pass as a deep intellectual exercise.