Friday, 4/18/25
Friday, April 18, 2025
Las Vegas getaway!
My wife and I are in Las Vegas after a four hour drive from L.A. through the Mojave desert. I'm on my laptop on the 9th floor of the Luxor Hotel. My wife is conducting an online class across the room. I just got back from a long walk through the Luxor casino into the Mandalay Bay casino and retail area. I also wanted to walk outside for the cool desert evening, but this place is not designed for walking outside, which is a wasteland of construction and busy streets without sidewalks. I must say, though, that I adore the large copies of ancient Egyptian icons decorating the Luxor, both exterior and interior, especially Anubis in the casino, who is, appropriately, god of the underworld (a man with a jackal’s head). The repurposed gods lacked the power to override my aversion to gambling, but they were able to make me want to stay here, I mused at our arrival, as we drove once around the entryway, flanked by imposing columns, a huge Sphinx (a lion with a man’s head, representing the sun-god Ra and a deified pharaoh), and the pyramidal hotel, before seeking the massive airport-sized parking lot. What a sucker I am for falling for this commercialized extinct religion! On the other hand, the figures offer good focal points, especially this Passover week, for meditation on God's immediate purpose in launching the 10 plagues in the book of Exodus. Each of the plagues was designed to destroy a specific Egyptian god, including Anubis and Ra. The best known plague, the killing of the firstborn, was intended ultimately to kill the pharaoh (through his persona, Ra, the king of the gods), and yet here they are, the Egyptian gods, back again in Las Vegas!
Saturday, 4/19/25, 8:00 AM: The casino/resorts of Vegas are hermetically sealed from the surrounding desert to maximize gambling revenue, and I long to escape to Red Rock Canyon, 15 miles west, where the Southern Paiute and many earlier native American tribes hunted and sat around fires over the last 10,000 years. What would be their reaction if they suddenly had a vision of modern Las Vegas? Certainly shock and incomprehension, the same reaction we would have if we viewed our culture a hundred years from now. The desert was not planned into our current trip, though. This is an exploration of the city. Today we see a show at the new Sphere, advertised as "immersive," as Red Rock would have been. I expect to enjoy the show, in spite of my whining about the desert (I did).
As far as gambling, I have an impulse to play blackjack, even if only for the thrill of coming up against an insurmountable force, the dealer, and I have an idea about funds I might designate for this. I earned an extra $50 last week from my sometime employer, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and feel guilty about what I had to do to earn it. The district notified me that my certification would expire if I did not take an online course called "Challenging Whiteness," so I took it. The course informed me that, although individual white people might be acceptable if they speak the mandated words, "whiteness" as a generic term suggests a morally deficient attribute. Racial pride is a plus, but a doctrine of racial moral superiority has been at the foundation of all fascist ideology. In addition to confusing children as to why they are in school, this Woke party line is doing exactly nothing to help them learn to read. In fact the opposite is happening, to all races of students. The current pedagogy, produced not by educators but by sophisticated private companies like Schoology, is to play recorded narrations of assigned books to students, so they can sit in class listening to the books read to them as they passively gaze at the increasingly obsolete physical book. Very few teachers now require students to read on their own, with predictable results: American young people's reading skills are plummeting. Our culture is perhaps moving away from expecting people to read, beyond simple sentences on websites and machines. Back to Vegas, my idea is to feed the ill-got 50 bucks to the implacable Egyptian gods of the blackjack dealer, in a penance of sorts for my compliance with the wasted money and efforts of our school district (I ultimately dropped the idea).
To recap: Las Vegas is worth visiting once in a while, if only because it's in the middle of a beautiful desert and is very strange.
D.L.
[Check out my blog exploring AI technology, "Conversations with AI," and my latest post about teaching humor to an AI, at https://smartypantsgemini.blogspot.com/].
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