Leandro Karnal: Sodom of the Puritans

Places choose people. When we are in the interior of Nepal, it seems that everyone there attended the same school. The same thing has happened to me in Lapa, Rio de Janeiro, or at Heidelberg Castle, in Germany. Tribes don't choose where to go; it's the places that exert a magnetism on specialized groups. We have souls magnetized by the fascination of certain landscapes. Like schools of salmon that obey a powerful instinct to reproduce upstream, travelers integrate obligatory spawning migrations. Apparently, everyone belongs to the same species.
Large communities have a standard deviation that exalts the majority. The heretic's role is to confirm orthodoxy. The deviant displays the light of the straight path. I went to Las Vegas! I confess openly: I was in the capital of sin, the sin city.
I will spare the dear reader the details that explain the choice between academic commitments in California and New York. In the middle of the way, there was a shimmering neon stone: Las Vegas.
I was prepared for the baroque lights and the ostentatious kitsch of the imitations. Despite all warnings, everything exceeded my imagination. I will try to analyze it fairly. First: the food is great. Excellent restaurants with quality superior to many Michelin-starred establishments in more elegant places. There's also the Grand Canyon tour, unmissable and impactful. Descending the Colorado River amidst the silence of the canyon walls is an epiphany that makes us happy to have lived until that moment. As in Dubai or London, there's the joy of talking to people who work in hotels and restaurants and learning about the world, because, from Laos to Mexico, we have all of humanity. Alex, the waiter from Rio; Diego, the gentleman who cleaned the room and was devoted to San Juan Diego; the Cambodian taxi driver praising… China; Inés, the Guatemalan woman at the café: a smile and a fascinating conversation about different societies begins. I love that.
There is little originality in the world. Classical Roman columns were copies of Greek ones. Cities in Brazil copied Portuguese, French, and American urban models. As has already been said, my beloved São Paulo is an overlay of Ouro Preto, Paris, and New York, with other less glamorous cities in the mix, of course. Everything is copied in some way. Las Vegas took copying to a higher level. You could ride a gondola from my hotel. There is the bell tower of St. Mark's Square. The solemn statues of the Lion of St. Mark and St. Theodore are visible from my window. The arcades are painted in the Tiepolo and Bronzino style, only without them available. You can eat in the improved St. Mark's Square, without pigeons, with fewer tourists, and the sky covered by a painting of… sky. Exhausted? A few meters away, there is an almost Colosseum, an Arch of Triumph, the Eiffel Tower, the Sphinx of Giza, and a pyramid projecting a powerful beam of light. Satisfied? We're not even getting started! There are volcanic eruptions, dancing waters, white tigers, trained dolphins, shows of all kinds, scantily clad girls, bachelor and bachelorette parties in the streets, extravagant glasses with colorful drinks, and a casino at every turn. Intrigued? Don't ignore the limousines, Elvis Presley singing on the corner, pythons for photos, and the domestic US tourist, almost a specific category within Vegas's fauna. Baroque can be the art of excess, present in aesthetics and bodies.
It's easy and somewhat hypocritical to criticize Las Vegas. It seems like the strategy Umberto Eco used on similar trips. Imperial capitals are cosmopolitan and, almost always, tacky. Every more sophisticated traveler, like Eco, tends to assume the comfortable initial position of Simão Bacamarte and his Green House: I am the standard of reason (or aesthetics) and the world has gone mad. In the age of selfies and striking images, Vegas is a powerful niche.
It has been said that asylums serve not exactly to say that the madmen are inside. The real crux of the matter is to declare that I, by not being interned there, must be sane. Possibly, Vegas serves to signal to a very puritanical society, the American one, that there is a space to rest from the prudish scenography. Here is a Pasárgada where I can walk around in suggestive clothes, drink in the street, smoke inside casinos, gamble, break schedules. Here, political correctness is ignored and women are harassed in the street, something that in Boston would probably land you in jail. I've imagined that I love New York perhaps because it's the only city that doesn't belong to the USA, but to the world. Perhaps Vegas is a city that also doesn't belong to the American world, but to a fantasy island of suspended superego. It's Sodom, but inhabited by puritans on vacation.
I gambled ten dollars on a slot machine. I won one dollar and seventy-five cents. I stopped gambling. My inner protester is perhaps stronger than the lady in the pink floral blouse next to me. She laughs, gambles, shouts, releases her energy, and drinks happily. Vegas brings back the choice between the blue and red pills from The Matrix. Blue is fantasy, red is reality. The sum of blue and red can result in pink, like the enthusiastic gambler's blouse. Vegas created a Platonic cave with a conveyor belt and souvenir photos. Who can judge her? After all, the good thing about the mirage illusion in the Nevada desert is: everything that happened there will remain in that space, except our pain and loneliness. Happy Sunday to us all.Leandro Karnal, O Estado de S. Paulo)