a tale of three cities (Pottersville, Vegas, and Panama City Beach)
Okay, I get that this post may seem a stretch, but bear with me.
Tale #1:
I just finished reading a great article by Wendell Jamieson in today's New York Times about the more "angst-istential" elements of the Holiday Classic It's a Wonderful Life. If you've got time to read it, I highly recommend it, as it will inform some of my thoughts here. For the quick-readers, he basically suggests (as others have ) that Pottersville was a much more happening place than sleepy Bedford Falls. Jamieson even does a little digging and asserts that a town like Bedford Falls would hardly be thriving in our current economic milieu/malaise. Pottersville, by contrast, would be a happening place to be--wine, women and song (and stronger versions of each if you're craving something more.) Loosely, Pottersville is meant to look like Babylon, but it looks more like how Capra would have seen Vegas if it were in upstate New York.
Tale #2:
Printing cliches about Vegas is almost too easy. Supposedly whatever happens there stays there (except things requiring antibiotics). One recent commercial (paid for by the tourism department) actually featured two women going into a bathroom and removing their wigs, as if to shed their "Vegas" identity to return to the "real" world. I'm not meaning to wax moral here, but suffice it to say that Vegas is Pottersville if Potter were Donald Trump.
Earlier this year Jen and I went with my parents to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. They have an IMAX theater there and the movie was a challenging film called Grand Canyon Adventure that focused on a rafting expedition down the Colorado River. What we didn't know is that it was narrated by Robert Redford, had an amazing soundtrack by the Dave Matthews Band, and featured information about the falling river height of the Colorado River and the ensuing environmental degradation.
Because cities need water, so they dam up rivers and make reservoirs.
In desert climates, the water evaporates faster. Lots of it. Like 40 feet in 10 years.
But big cities need lots of water, particularly when they're man-made cities of pleasure plopped in the middle of a desert.
According to the US Geological Survey, this is a huge problem. But the average tourist in Vegas probably isn't thinking about the water.
Tale #3:
Now leave Vegas and the trickling Colorado for a second and suppose you're speaking at a youth retreat in Panama City Beach, Florida and you happen to leave your sheets, pillows and requisite miniature fan at home. You'd probably drive to the nearest Wal-Mart. But if it's the end of July, a Friday night around 8:30, you probably shouldn't go down the "Strip". Unless you forgot what kind of crowd you're going to run into. It's kind of like Bourbon Street without the beads. Trucks, Jeeps, Loud Radios. Lots of people under the age of 30 in varying levels of intoxication and stages of undress.For awhile I remember just watching it all happen, fully expecting some camera crew to be somewhere trying to turn college-age debauchery into quick and easy money.
But then I realized what was behind it all. "It was college, spring break, summer, whatever..." I was soooo drunk, I don't even remember...." And it's excused. Because you were drunk/hungover/on something/on spring break/at a club/with some friends/in PC.
Epilogue:
The reality of Pottersville, Vegas and Panama City Beach isn't the extent of their respective excess, nor is it found in moralizing about the various consequences of such behavior. The great reality is that they are places that they don't exist. They are figments of our imaginations, magical worlds where all sorts of things are possible, where hardship, fear and environmental degradation are not known. They are thriving, not because they are selling a reality but because they dare our creativity to imagine something better than what already is. So we go. We lose money and memories. We damage relationships and break sacred trusts. All for the illusion of something better.
And it never dawns on us that we don't have to live in Pottersville.
That the water we drink in the casino is taken from the children of Mexico, for whom the Colorado is a dirty stream.
That one crazy week can haunt you the rest of your life.
The most salient point of "It's a Wonderful Life" (which is as much Kafka as it is Capra) is that it's not better out there. I have a good friend who gets irritated when people verbally express their version of the greener grass. "When I graduate, things will be so much better..." or "When I'm married, I'll...." or "If I were just in a better place..."
Discontent and selfishness can be good bedfellows.
Shiny things look good until they turn your finger green.
And a vacation sounds nice until the wells run dry.
May we exchange the folly of what could be for the sacrament of what is.
