And Just Like That

In a fifty year

Blink of the eye

Las Vegas went

From a small corrupt

Gangster run

Gambling town to a

Corporation owned

Fantasy land where

A one armed bandit *

Will continue to rob

Its welcome visitors

Drawn by the lure of

Impossible easy money

A mini America

If you will **

A land raping

Environment be damned

Sprawling wasteland

Of desert degradation

Meant for lizards and

Corpse containers

“Bodies Pulled From Parched Lake Mead Stir Wise-Guy Ghosts of Las Vegas”

“As climate change fuels grim discoveries across the West, Las Vegas is awash in bets on the identity of a suspected murder victim dumped in a barrel.”

By Simon Romero

http://www.nytimes.com

• Published May 20, 2022



Constantly inventing

Newer sparkling ways

To empty open wallets

Not based on COGS

(Cost Of Goods Sold)

Rather WTMWB

(Whatever The Market Will Bear)

Throw the highest price

Sticker on it to see if it sells

If it moves off the shelf

Or if the lines are still long

Adjust upward and repeat

Discover no price is too high

To line the pockets of CEO’s

Making greedy policies

Permanent and perpetual

*

“One-Armed” because of its single lever depicting an arm and “bandit” because of its nature to collect an addicted player’s cash leaving him with nothing. The first generation of slot machines evolved from a novelty item to a more complex server-based gaming machine.”

– emeraldislandcasino.com

(Side note)

Gaming, what a useless euphemism. It’s a gambling machine. Life is a gamble. Investing in the stock market or real estate is gambling. Parents sending their children to school, gamble they will not be picking them up at the morgue, having bled out because politicians gamble with the second amendment that it will garner more votes then dead kids in their district. Obviously still a pretty safe bet. At the expense of the fetuses they saved to gamble with.

“I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms or euphemistic language.

And American English is loaded with euphemisms, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality.

Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets worse with every generation. For some reason it just keeps getting worse.”

– George Carlin

**

“It just seems to me, that only a really low IQ population could have taken this beautiful continent, this magnificent American landscape that we inherited.

Well actually we stole it from the Mexicans and the Indians, but hey, it was nice when we stole it. Looked pretty good, it was pristine. Paradise.

Have you seen it lately? Have you taken a good look at it lately? It’s fucking embarrasing. Only a nation of unenlightened half-wits could have taken this beautiful place and turned it into what it is today – a shopping mall.

A big fucking shopping mall. You know that, that’s all you’ve got here, folks. Mile after mile after mile of malls after malls. Many, many malls. Major malls and mini malls.

They put the mini malls in between the major malls, and in between the mini malls, they put the mini marts. And in between the mini marts, you got the car lots, gas stations, muffler shops, laundry mats, cheap motels, fast food joints, strip clubs and dirty bookstores.

America the beautiful. One big transcontinental commercial cesspool. And how do the people feel about all this? How do people feel about living in a coast to coast shopping mall? Well they think it’s JUST FUCKING DANDY!”

– George Carlin

“Life is worth losing”