day 1: viva

Heathrow, 2pm UK Time. At the gate.

A direct flight to Vegas, it seems, attracts a certain type of man.

They wear a suit jacket over their jeans. They speak very loudly. Their heads are either very square, or very round.

“Will passengers travelling in Upper Class…”

Up they all get.

They all seem to know each other?

“Steve!”

“Gaz!”

“I’ll see you out there!”

Is everybody on this flight going to know each other except me? That’s probably already a film.

Who would these men vote for in the Democratic Primary? Biden? Bloomberg? The answer of course is that they would bite their own dicks off to be able to vote for Trump.

That prompted me to look something up. Turns out, Trump has a hotel in Vegas, but it’s not a casino. He did own casinos in Atlantic City, but they went bankrupt. How stupid to you have to be to lose money running a casino? 2/1 it lands on either red or black?

A man and woman file past, the man holding a copy of The Times and a copy of The Sun. One for him, one for her. They’ve got a cute little kid. I don’t think he knows what he’s in for. It’s occurred to me that this might not be a very left-wing flight.

“Will all passengers for Premium Economy…”

That’s Warren, I think.

‘Coach’ class is full of the lads: stag-dos, birthdays, ‘I booked this drunk 12 months agos.’

That was the story of the large blokes I was sandwiched between for 10 hours. Very narrow seats in coach. I did ask them if they’d like to sit next to each other, as they were travelling together? “I’ll see enough of him when we get there!” Haha, I guess?

One of them was a nervous flier. He didn’t say anything, but I could tell by the way he was brushing his palm with his forefinger during takeoff. He just suffered in silence, trying not to look weak in front of his mates. He was in his ’50s.

They were actually really nice, the lads. I’ll miss ’em.

The sky was incredibly clear and I was close to a free window. We flew over Canada, which was breathtaking. Ribbons of snow strewn across tundra. It was so striking to see North America as this geographical entity. It reminded me that I was going to staying on land that was stolen. The area that became Las Vegas was one of the ancestral homes of the Southern Paiute people, before it was colonised by whites. What followed was a hundred and fifty years of brutal Americanisation, forced relocation and termination which all but wiped out the population. Even as I write Canada is committing colonial atrocities against the Wet’suwet’en people in the name of a Climate policy which will kill thousands of indigenous people in the global south (though come the next summit Trudeau will be being cheered as the liberal antithesis of Trump).

Nevada now has reservations in the North with stable, if deprived, communities. The Bernie campaign has been canvassing them, and many Native Americans are hopeful of Bernie winning. But it will not be enough. Not even close.

When you land in Las Vegas, the first thing you see as you exit the jet bridge is a slot machine. That’s not even an exaggeration.

For the purposes of getting past airport security, I am not here with ‘the express purpose of influencing US elections.’ This seemed a tad hard to enforce: surely the mere act of denying that that was my purpose would by definition mean it wasn’t express. But I didn’t want to test this theory with the Border Control, who have unilateral, extrajudicial, internet surveillance-backed authority to refuse entry.

The border guard took thumb prints of all 10 of my fingers. This just felt like rubbing it in.

I picked up a Lyft from the airport, which I shared with a woman who had flown in from Minnesota. She was a veteran of the Vegas scene, which she claimed had made her money over the years. She was looking forward to visiting the ‘Indian Casino,’ among others.

The roads of Las Vegas are wild. There’s like 10 freeways that run right through the city centre. Everything is lit up – obviously the casinos and hotels, but your backwater garage still blares its name in moving neon.

‘Do you play Freebat?’, the Minnesotan asked me. ‘I’m sorry?’ She tried to explain that it was a variant of Blackjack, but I found myself zoning out. The word ‘Freebat’ kept flitting across the dark cave of my brain, like a liberated flying-squirrel.

When she got out, I was left with the driver, Stanley, who it turned out was a Bernie supporter! He was young, my age, working with deprived children in the day, making music and driving Lyfts in the nights. I asked him what thoughts he had about politics. He told me that in the last year, his home’s rent had gone up 38%. He lived with his parents. I asked if it was a supply issue, but he said no, there’s too many homes in Las Vegas. Empty McMansions in the suburbs. The problem was people were coming in from LA (where they had been priced out) and driving up the prices.

Stanley was worried that older people would not be persuaded to vote for an agenda to change stuff like this because they felt comfortable with how things were. Yeah, I said. And we talked about that. I wondered if he needed the Lyft job in order to have health insurance. Stanley’s a fucking legend and you know what he deserves better.

Stanley dropped me off at the Northwest Las Vegas Bernie field office. The vibe was so nice, so chill, so collaborative. Everyone was young, everyone looked achingly cool. They blew up an air sofa for me to sit on because I said I was a little tired. They offered me bottled water, which is apparently a thing. I wanted to take a selfie with their life-sized Bernie cardboard cut-out, but I didn’t because they might think I was lame.

My British comrades soon arrived, and suggested a welcome drink in Downtown. One of them, Cam, was quite experienced coming to Vegas, as he knew the deputy field director. Also there was Shaun, who is very graciously letting me stay with him and his grandmother. Infectious laugh, totally generous spirit. Ice-cold in pursuit of building the DSA in Las Vegas.

We headed to Atomic’s. It was a proper dive bar. The kind of place a nervous debtor makes a deal with a second-rate criminal that he spends the rest of the movie trying to put back in the bottle. Dimly lit, with a purple neon glow, staffed by punks.

Shaun was on a bit of a chirpse so we left him in Atomic and headed for Fremont Street.

It was, by this point, 8am body-clock time, but I don’t think any level of alertness could have prepared me for what this place looked like.

The whole ceiling is one giant television screen showing an exotic underwater updrop. There are 4 live bands playing within 300 metres of each other. Street magicians weave inbetween the drunken bustle of a million tourists. Every building is a casino, mostly with dancers. In one, they had games built into the bar, so that you didn’t have to pause whilst ordering refreshments.

Of course, the full impression cannot be conveyed with a series of facts. I’m not really sure it can be conveyed in how I felt either, or at least I am not a good enough writer to do so. The feeling is in many ways horror, but as if horror was a narcotic. What’s noticeable about it is how… rubbish a lot of it is. The fish animation isn’t good. The music is desert-rock covers of Hot 100 songs. The carpets in the casinos are diabolical. None of it is attempting to be clean. It’s almost like mask-off capitalism, where it stops bothering with the pretence of civilised exchange, and just openly takes you for the gullible, exploited, gagging scum that you are, or that it has made you. In that sense, I almost respect it, as a hero respects their nemesis more than their acolytes.

We’re there for about 15 minutes.

‘This is the quieter, more traditional bit,’ Cam tells me. ‘Wait until you see the Strip.’

“The greedy of today no longer practice asceticism as excess, but with caution. They are insured.”
– Adorno, Minima Moralia