David Hickey’s text on Las Vegas was a completely different take on the Vegas I experienced. To be fair, I have only visited the city once, and it was at the age of 11 or 12, when pretty much everything is off-limits to the young and puzzled mind. It was a brief weekend trip from Los Angeles, with my parents, a very unlikely destination considering their general aversion to mass tourism and resort-style vacations, not to mention their absolute indifference towards gambling. I believe it was a morbid curiosity that drew them to the Strip, the appeal of the strange exotism that the place exudes.

We stayed in one of the most bizarre hotels in the strip, the New York New York, a pastiche of cardboard cutout New York skyline, and kitsch landmark reproductions, all laced together with a ribbon-like rollercoaster, swerving in and out and around the pseudo-skyscrapers. It looked like a cartoonified version of a film set for a dull action movie. Upon entering, we were released into a cacophony of light and sound, flashing slot machines and spinning roulettes, carpets with impossible patterns and mirrored ceilings, hoards of obese bermuda-wearing tourists and armies of suited casino waiters. As we stood transfixed on the edge of this vertiginous precipice, the sound of screaming rapidly rolled into the room from an opening in the far side, and all of a sudden a rollercoaster exploded into the cavernous casino at a 100mph, carrying a dozen screaming souls over our heads, only to disappear a fraction of a second later through an opposite hole in the wall.

And this was just one casino. Each was more ludicrous than the previous. The Camelot, the Luxor, Ceasar’s Palace, the Venetian… a collection of mock architecture interconnected through air-conditioned elevated walkways so as not to break into a sweat on the street. It was all so absurd. It felt more orchestrated theme park, a perverse Disneyland, than the Rat Packs famed Wild-West playground.

But I can imagine Hickeys Vegas, at least if only as a past version of the current city, before its disneyification. It may all be fake, but at least it doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that it is fake. Its frank. Its a giant spectacle, where you just pick your role, and slip right into it, be it player, pimp, hooker, or drunk. No questions asked. As Hickey explains, there are only two rules; “1- post the odds, and 2- treat everybody the same”. And there is an uplifting reassurance in this sense of simplicity, which allows people to just get on with it (waitress’s humble, but grounded ambition to move up from “food” to “cocktails”). No class or race prejudices exist, and it may be all about money, as most of its detractors claim, but money at least “is the worst way of discriminating among individuals, except for all the others”.

So in this sense, one could perceive Vegas as a true democracy, a city “about stakes, not status “. A place with no secrets, and as sad as this prospect might sound (no mystery, no magic, no myth!) it also means a place “where there is everything to see, and not a single pretentious object demanding to be scrutinized” i.e. no bullshit.

Dubai, on the other hand is knee deep in bullshit (or rather human shit; raw sewage overflowing into the gulf has turned the coastline into a frothy, toxic, bacteria-ridden soup unfit for human bathing, or most aquatic life for that matter). I have never been to Dubai, apart from a short overhaul at the airport, but I already despise the place. It represents everything that is wrong with society. It is abysmal that such technological prowess and construction might is being invested into such an obviously dead ended, unsustainable affair. Socially it is a ruin, rotten from the inside out, a conspicuous consumerist wet-dream, built on slave labor and  petro dollars, which only intensifies the infantilisation of society into perpetual adolescents who’s only satisfaction is sought in buying worthless toys and mind numbing entertainment . Environmentally, well, it will only take an impending water crisis to cause it all to crash and burn. So why all this effort?

Mike Davis quotes a very interesting thought by Trotsky, “In appending new forms the backward society takes not their beginnings, nor their stages of evolution, but the finished product itself.” The Dubai Sheikdom is essentially a backward society. It is a despotic regime that has simply appended capitalism to its millennia-old feudal system. The result is a blurred concoction of totalitarian state and private corporation, where government ministers double as construction developers, and where laws and regulations are bent to the interests of investors.  As for the civil liberties which have usually accompanied the establishment of the free market in the west, these have been completely ignored, from unions, to free press, to the right to vote. Hence “the new forms, in a backward society, appear more perfected than in an advance society where they are approximations only of the ideal for having been arrived at piecemeal and with the framework of historical possibilities.” i.e. Of course you can afford to build the tallest tower or the largest artificial islands, if you build them on slavery!

Dubai’s ambition is to be number one, the biggest, the loudest, the brightest, the most outrageous. A Vegas in the Middle East if you will. But is lacking in one essential factor, if compared to Vegas; its earnestness. Behind Dubai’s showbiz glitz, lies a very obscure reality. It is not a reality where the waitress wants to move from food to cocktails, but where the construction worker wants to be set free and go home. As Hickey beautifully portrays, “Vegas at least cheats you fairly”.­