far more important now than the land —we’re not even dealing with the land anymore, we’re dealing with our manipulation and pollution of it. And what we’ve done with the very concept of “image” is taking on far more importance for many of us than the actual sights and sounds of our lives. For instance: Ronald Reagan stands on a cliff in Normandy to comWhat we’ve done with the very concept of “image” is taking on far more importance for many of us than the actual sights and sounds of our lives. memorate the day U.S. Army Rangers scaled those cliffs in the World War II invasion. Today’s Rangers reenact the event while some of the original Rangers, in their sixties now, look on. Except that it is the wrong cliff. The cliff that was actually scaled is a bit further down the beach, but it’s not as photogenic as this cliff, so this cliff has been chosen for everybody to emote over. Some of the old Rangers tell reporters that the historical cliff is over yonder, but the old Rangers are swept up (as well they might be) in the ceremonies, and nobody objects enough. This dislocation, this choice, this stance that the real cliff is not important, today’s photograph is more important, is a media event. It insults the real event, and overpowers it. Multiplied thousands of times over thousands of outlets of every form and size, ensconced in textbooks as well as screenplays, in sales presentations as well as legislative packages, in religious revivals as well as performance-art pieces, this is the process that has displaced what used to be called “culture.” "I I ’m not even sure it’s a culture A anymore. It’s like this careening hunger splattering out in all directions.” Jeff Nightbyrd was trying to define “culture” in the wee hours at the Four Queens in Las Vegas. It was a conversation that had been going on since we’d become friends working on the Austin Sun in 1974, trying to get our bearings now that the sixties were really over. He’d spent that triple-time decade as an SDS organizer and editor of Rat, and I’d hit Austin after a few years of road-roving, communehopping, and intensive (often depressive) self-exploration—getting by, as the song said, with a little help from my friends, as a lot of us did then. This particular weekend Nightbyrd had come to Vegas from Austin for a computer convention, and I had taken off from my duties at the L.A. Weekly for some lessons in craps (at which Jeff is quite good) and to further our rap. The slot machines clattered around us in unison, almost comfortingly, the way the sound of a large shaky airconditioner can be comforting in a cheap hotel room when you’re trying to remember to forget. We were, after all, trying to fathom an old love: America. There are worse places to indulge in this obsession than Las Vegas. It is the most American, the most audacious, of cities. Consuming unthinkable amounts of energy in the midst of an unlivable desert (Death Valley is not far away), its decor is based on various cheap-to- luxurious versions of a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical. Indeed, no studio backlot could ever be more of a set, teeming with extras, people who come from all over America, and all over the world, to see the topless, tasteless shows, the Johnny Carson guests on parade doing their utterly predictable routines, the dealers and crap-table croupiers who combine total boredom with ruthless efficiency and milk us dry—yet at least these tourists are risking something they genuinely value: money. It’s a quiz show turned into a way of life, where you can get a good Italian dinner at dawn. Even the half-lit hour of the wolf doesn’t faze Las Vegas. How could it, when the town has survived the flash of atom bombs tested just over the horizon? The history books will tell you that, ironically enough, the town was founded by'Mormons in 1855. Even their purity of vision couldn’t bear the intensity of this desert, and they abandoned the place after just two years. But they had left a human-imprint, and a decade later the U.S. Army built a fort here. The settlement hung on, and the railroad came through in 1905. During the Second World War the Mafia started to build the city as we know it now. Religiouszealots, the Army, and the Mafia—quite a triad of founding fathers. Yet one could go back even further, some 400 years, when the first Europeans discovered the deserts of the American West—Spaniards who, as they slowly began to believe that there might be no end to these expansive wilds, became more and more certain that somewhere, somewhere to the north, lay El Dorado—a city of gold. Immeasurable wealth would be theirs, they believed, and eternal youth. What would they have thought if they had suddenly come upon modern Las Vegas, lying as it does in the midst of this bleached nowhere, glowing at night with a brilliance that would have frightened them? We have built our desert city to their measure —for they were gaudy and greedy, devout and vicious, jovial and frenzied, like this town. They had just wasted the entire Aztec civilization because their fantasies were so strong they couldn’t see the ancient cultural marvels before their eyes. The Aztecs, awed and terrified, believed they were being murdered by gods; and in the midst of such strangeness, the Spaniards took on godlike powers even in their own eyes. As many Europeans would in America, they took liberties here they would never have taken within sight of their home cathedrals. Their hungers dominated them, and in their own eyes the New World seemed as inexhaustible as their appetites. So when Nightbyrd described our present culture as “a careening hunger splattering out in all directions,” he was also, if unintentionally, speaking about our past. Fittingly, we were sitting in the midst of a city that had been fantasized by those seekers of El Dorado 400 years ago. In that sense, America had Las Vegas a century before it had Plymouth Rock. And our sensibility has been caught between the fantasies of the conquistadors and the obsessions of the Puritans ever since. Yes, a fitting place to try to think about American culture. “There are memories of culture,” Nightbyrd was saying, “but the things that have given people strength have dissolved. And because they’re dissolved, people are into distractions. And distractions aren’t culture.” Are there even memories? The media have taken over our memories. That day Nightbyrd had been driving through the small towns that dot this desert, towns for which Vegas is only a dull glow to the southwest. In a bar in one of those towns, “like that little bar in The Right Stuff" he’d seen pictures of cowboys on the wall. “Except that they weren’t cowboys. They were movie stars. Guys who grew up in Glendale [John Wayne] and Santa Monica [Robert Redford].” Surely this desert had its own heroes once, in the old goldmining towns where a few people still hang on, towns like Goldfield and Tonopah. Remembering those actual heroes would be “culture.” Needing pictures of movie stars for want of the real thing is only a nostalgia for culture. Nostalgia is not memory. Memory is specific. One has a relationship to a memory, and it may be a difficult relationship, because a memory always makes a demand upon the present. But nostalgia is vague, a sentimental wash fhat obscures memory and acts as a narcotic to dull the importance of the present. Media as we know it now thrives on nostalgia and is hostile to memory. In a television bio-pic, Helen Keller is impersonated by Mare Winningham. But the face of Helen Keller was marked by her enormous powers of concentration, while the face of Mare Winningham is merely cameo-pretty. A memory has been stolen. It takes a beauty in you to see the beauty in Helen Keller’s face, while to cast the face of a Mare Winningham in the role is to suggest, powerfully, that one can come back from the depths unscathed. No small delusion is being sold here. Yet this is a minor instance in a worldwide, twenty-four-hour-a- day onslaught. An onslaught that gathers momentum every twenty-four hours. Remember that what drew us to Las Vegas was a computer fair. One of these new computers does interesting things with photographs. You can put a photograph into the computer digitally. This means the photograph is in there without a negative or print, each element sof the image stored separately. In the computer, you can change any element of the photograph you wish, replacing it or combining it with elements from other photographs. In other words, you can take composites of different photographs and put them into a new photograph of your own composition. Combine this with computer drawing, and you can touch up shadows that don’t match. When it comes out of the computer the finished product bears no evidence of tampering with any negative. The possibilities for history books and news stories are infinite. Whole new histories can now be written. Events which never happened can be fully documented. The neo-Nazis who are trying to convince people that the Holocaust never happened will be able to show the readers of their newsletter an Auschwitz of well-fed, happy people being watched over by kindly S.S. men while tending gardens. And they will be able to make the accusation that photographs of the real Auschwitz were created in a computer by manipulative Jews. The Soviet Union can rewrite Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the United States can rewrite Vietnam, and atomic weapons proponents can prove that the average resident of Hiroshima was unharmed by the blast. On a less sinister, but equally disruptive, level, the writers of business prospectuses and real-estate brochures can have a field day. Needless to say, when any photograph can be processed this way then all photographs become suspect. It not only becomes easier to lie, it becomes far harder to tell the truth. But why should this seem shocking when under the names of “entertainment” and “advertising” we’ve been filming history, and every facet of daily life, in just this way for nearly a century now? It shouldn’t surprise us that the ethics of our entertainment have taken over, and that we are viewing reality itself as a form of entertainment. And, as entertainment, reality can be rewritten, transformed, played with, in any fashion. These considerations place us squarely at the center of our world — and we have no choice, it’s the only world there is anymore. Electronic media has done for everyday reality what Einstein did for physics: everything is shifting. Even the shifts are shifting. And a fact is not so crucial anymore, not so crucial as the process that turns a fact into an image. For we live now with images as much as facts, and the images seem to impart more life than facts precisely because they are so capable of transmutation, of transcendence, able to transcend their sources and their uses. And all the while the images goad us on, so that we become partly images ourselves, imitating the properties of images as we surround ourselves with images. This is most blatant in our idea of “a vacation”—an idea only about 100 years old. To “vacation” is to enter an image. Las Vegas is only the most shrill embodiment of this phenomenon. People come here not so much to gamble (individual losses are comparatively light), nor for the glittery entertainment, but to step into an image, a daydream, a filmlike world where “everything” is promised. No matter that the Vegas definition of “everything” is severly limited, what thrills tourists is the sense of being surrounded in “real life” by the same images that they see on TV. But the same is true of thef Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone National Park, or Yosemite, or Death Valley, or virtually any of our “natural” attractions. What with all their roads, telephones, bars, cable-TV motels, the visitors are carefully protected from having to experience the place. They view its image, they camp out in its image, ski down or climb up its image, take deep breaths of its image, let its image give them a tan. Or, when they tour the cities, they ride the quaint trolley cars of the city’s image, they visit the Latin Quarter of its image, they walk across the Brooklyn Bridge of its image— our recreation is a re-creation of 6 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989
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