ABSTRACT
It requires less and less of a stretch of the imagination to see the city of Las Vegas as Babylon epitomised. This glittering oasis in the desert was created in a shadow of its contemporary character in 1946 when underworld figure Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo hotel and casino. Besides its links to organised crime and legalised gambling, Las Vegas is also the home of luxury shopping malls, all-youcan-eat cut-rate pseudo-gourmet buffets, and nearby legalised prostitution. With its neon-lit 24-hour casino-palaces, gargantuan spectacles, and blatant temptations to lust, gluttony, envy, and greed, Las Vegas makes the biblical luxuries and vices of Babylon pale by comparison. If Armageddon threatens the modern Babylon, what better metaphorical enactment of the End could there have been than the dawn parties of the 1950s when the denizens of Las Vegas stayed up to watch and toast the mushroom clouds of the nearby above-ground nuclear testing (Lang 1995). And in telling Las Vegas fashion, rather than fear and trembling, the bombs instead inspired such exaltations as the ‘Atomic Hairdo’, the ‘Atomic Cocktail’,
and the ‘Atomic View Motel’ where guests could enjoy an unobstructed view of the bomb blasts (Ventura 1995). But if to some Las Vegas is a modern Babylon of sinful luxury, licentiousness, and lust, to others it is a postmodern paradise of fantasy, freedom, and fun. Where the former vision forebodes the city’s immanent apocalyptic destruction, the latter foreshadows its apotheosis as a sacred site for playful pilgrimage and worship of its goodly things. In this positive vision Las Vegas is the ‘temple town of the American Dream’ (Tosches 1995). I argue in this chapter that the second, positive, prophesy is clearly ascendant as the millennium approaches. Moreover, I contend that this apotheosis of Las Vegas is a prototype of changes taking place more broadly in world consumption. We increasingly venerate and celebrate a materialistic style of consumption long condemned as sinful and damning (see Belk 1983). In seeking to understand how and why this apparently radical recasting of luxury consumption is taking place, it is necessary to consider the parallel transformation of commercialism from profane and evil to sacred and good. For behind both transformational processes lies a dramatic shift in the locus of our hopes: from redemption to consumption. And rather than resulting from a monumental battle between good and evil like that prophesied for Armageddon, the ascendance of commercialism and consumerism has been gradual and quiet, evoking T.S.Eliot’s revised revelation that the world ends with a whimper rather than a bang.
