Today there are few remaining traces of the city’s cowboy past. Indeed, the global equation has been reversed. While the rest of the world builds Wal-Marts, Arby’s, Taco Bells, and other outposts of Americana, Las Vegas has spent the past decade recreating the rest of the world. The fast food joints along the Strip seem insignificant compared to the new monuments towering over them: recreations of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sphinx, enormous buildings that evoke Venice, Paris, New York, Tuscany, medieval England, ancient Egypt and Rome, the Middle East, the South Seas. Las Vegas is now so contrived and artificial that it has become something authentic, a place unlike any other. The same forces that are homogenizing other cities have made Las Vegas even more unique.
At the heart of Las Vegas is technology: machinery that cools the air, erupts the volcano, and powers the shimmering lights. Most important of all is the machinery that makes money for the casinos. While Las Vegas portrays itself as a free-wheeling, entrepreneurial town where anyone can come and strike it rich, life there is more tightly regulated, controlled, and monitored by hidden cameras than just about anywhere else in the United States. The city’s principal industry is legally protected against the workings of the free market, and operates according to strict rules laid down by the state. The Nevada Gaming Control Board determines not only who can own a casino, but who can enter one. In a town built on gambling, where fortunes were once earned with a roll of the dice, it is remarkable how little is now left to chance. Until the late 1960s, about three-quarters of a typical casino’s profits came from table games, from poker, blackjack, baccarat, roulette. During the last twenty-five years table games, which are supervised by dealers and offer gamblers the best odds, have been displaced by slot machines. Today about two-thirds of a typical casino’s profits now come from slots and video poker — machines that are precisely calibrated to take your money. They guarantee the casino a profit rate of as much as 20 percent — four times what a roulette wheel will bring.
The latest slot machines are electronically connected to a central computer, allowing the casino to track the size of every bet and its outcome. The music, flashing lights, and sound effects emitted by these slots help disguise the fact that a small processor inside them is deciding with mathematical certainty how long you will play before you lose. It is the ultimate consumer technology, designed to manufacture not a tangible product, but something much more elusive: a brief sense of hope. That is what Las Vegas really sells, the most brilliant illusion of all, a loss that feels like winning.
Mikhail Gorbachev was in town to speak at the Twenty-sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange, a convention sponsored by the International Foodservice Manufacturers Association. Executives from the major fast food companies had gathered to discuss, among other things, the latest labor-saving machinery and the prospects of someday employing a workforce that needed “zero training.” Representatives from the industry’s leading suppliers — ConAgra, Monfort, Simplot, and others — had come to sell their latest products. The Grand Ballroom at the Mirage was filled with hundreds of middle-aged white men in expensive business suits. They sat at long tables beneath crystal chandeliers, drinking coffee, greeting old friends, waiting for the morning program to begin. A few of them were obviously struggling to recover from whatever they’d done in Las Vegas the night before.
On the surface, Mikhail Gorbachev seemed an odd choice to address a group so resolutely opposed to labor unions, minimum wages, and workplace safety rules. “Those who hope we shall move away from the socialist path will be greatly disappointed,” Gorbachev had written in Perestroika (1987), at the height of his power. He had never sought the dissolution of the Soviet Union and never renounced his fundamental commitment to Marxism-Leninism. He still believed in the class struggle and “scientific socialism.” But the fall of the Berlin Wall had thrown Gorbachev out of power and left him in a precarious financial condition. He was beloved abroad, yet despised in his own land. During Russia’s 1996 presidential election he received just 1 percent of the vote. The following year he expressed great praise for America’s leading fast food chain. “And the merry clowns, the Big Mac signs, the colourful, unique decorations and ideal cleanliness,” Gorbachev wrote in the foreword of To Russia with Fries, a memoir by a McDonald’s executive, “all of this complements the hamburgers whose great popularity is well deserved.”
In December of 1997, Gorbachev appeared in a Pizza Hut commercial, following in the footsteps of Cindy Crawford and Ivana Trump. A group of patrons at a Moscow Pizza Hut thanked him in the ad for bringing the fast food chain to Russia and then shouted “Hail to Gorbachev!” In response Gorbachev saluted them by raising a slice of pizza. He reportedly earned $160,000 for his appearance in the sixty-second spot, money earmarked for his nonprofit foundation. A year later Pizza Hut announced that it was pulling out of Russia as the country’s economy collapsed, and Gorbachev told a German reporter that “all my money is gone.” For his hour-long speech at the Mirage, Gorbachev was promised a fee of $150,000 and the use of a private jet.
The Twenty-sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange officially opened with a video presentation of the national anthem. As the song boomed from speakers throughout the Grand Ballroom, two huge screens above the stage displayed a series of patriotic images: the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, amber waves of grain. In one of the morning’s first speeches, an executive hailed the restaurant industry’s record profits the previous year, adding without irony, “As if things weren’t good enough, consumers also dropped all pretense of wanting healthy food.” An ongoing industry survey had found that public concerns about salt, fat, and food additives were at their lowest level since 1982, when the survey began — one more bit of news to justify the industry’s “current state of bliss.” Another executive, a self-described “sensory evaluation specialist,” emphasized the importance of pleasant smells. He noted that Las Vegas resorts were now experimenting with “signature scents” in their casinos, hoping the subtle aromas would subconsciously make people gamble more money.
Robert Nugent, the head of Jack in the Box and honorary chairman of the Twenty-sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange, broke the cheery mood with an ominous, unsettling speech. He essentially accused critics of the fast food industry of being un-American. “A growing number of groups who represent narrow social and political interests,” Nugent warned, “have set their sights on our industry in an effort to legislate behavioral change.” Enjoying a great meal at a restaurant was “the very essence of freedom,” he declared, a ritual now being threatened by groups with an agenda that was “anti-meat, anti-alcohol, anti-caffeine, anti-fat, anti-chemical additives, anti-horseradish, anti-non-dairy creamer.” The media played a central role in helping these “activist fearmongers,” but the National Restaurant Association had recently launched a counterattack, working closely with journalists to dispel myths and gain better publicity. Nugent called upon the fast food executives to respond even more forcefully to their critics, people who today posed “a real danger to our industry — and more broadly to our way of life.”
Not long afterward Mikhail Gorbachev appeared onstage and received a standing ovation. Here was the man who’d ended the Cold War, who’d brought political freedom to hundreds of millions, who’d opened vast new markets. At the age of sixty-nine Gorbachev looked remarkably unchanged from his appearance during the Reagan years. His hair was white, but he seemed vigorous and strong, still capable of running a mighty empire. He spoke quickly in Russian and then waited patiently for the translator to catch up. His delivery was full of energy and passion. “I like America,” Gorbachev said with a broad smile. “And I like American people.” He wanted to give the audience a sense of what was happening in Russia today. Few people in the United States seemed to care much about events in Russia, a dangerous state of affairs. He asked the crowd to learn about his country, to form partnerships and make investments there. “You must have a lot of money,” Gorbachev said. “Send it to Russia.”