I Want My Son to Visit Vegas
Vegas is Sin City, where what happens stays, except the clap. But that shouldn’t spook a lad with a shred of Catholic spine.
My son lives in the monastery. It’s a house near the Ann Arbor campus that is known for housing devout Catholic UM students. Saint wannabes but not total nerds. God first, studies second, drinking third.
At semester’s end, they’re bound for that neon-lit Gomorrah, Las Vegas . . . flying into McCarran (“Reid” be damned), a mere quarter-hour from the Strip’s pulsating debauchery. But instead of lingering, they’re immediately snagging a rental jalopy and peeling out for Utah’s state parks, the moral and geological antithesis of that desert Sodom.
That’s unfortunate.
Here’s my open letter to him.
Son:
You better appreciate beautiful women after you see a few ugly ones. You’ll better appreciate the grandeur of Utah’s state parks if you first see Vegas.
Besides, Vegas isn’t ugly. In fact, it’s beautiful, but its beauty is the opposite of Utah’s beauty. Utah’s beauty is God-made, in its raw awesomeness. Vegas’ is man-made, in its rawness.
Vegas is the closest mankind will come to creating like God: ex nihilo. Something from nothing.
Its founding ghosts snatched the sorriest patch of North American nowhere—just a spit from Death Valley’s furnace, a piddling four inches of rain a year—and spun it from a dusty 1890s jerkwater into a two-million-soul metropolis boasting major pro sports squads.
When gambling went nationwide in the 1990s and Vegas lost its wicked edge, the doomsayers crowed it’d flop. Wrong. Population’s doubled since tribal outposts started sprouting casinos like crabgrass.
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Eric Scheske
