“May you live in interesting times.” That’s the old curse. And wow, are we doing just that. These aren’t just interesting times, they’re downright fascinating…and verging on grotesque.
I follow political and cultural trends. These days odd patterns are emerging…heading off the charts, in fact.
For instance, on April 21, 2010 Las Vegas casino zillionaire Steve Wynn sent the political class into a tizzy. He said something baaaad. “It’s just talk,” said a University of Nevada professor. “Symbolically it would…send a really bad message about Las Vegas.” The congresswoman from Las Vegas, a Democrat, called it “A devastating blow to southern Nevada and our economy.” The mayor of Las Vegas said he hopes Wynn “isn’t serious.” Nevada governor Jim Gibbons intends to “reach out” to Wynn, and Senator Harry Reid, the Senate majority liar—errr…leader—said “I’m not going to get into a dispute with Mr. Wynn…but I will say that taxes are at an all-time low.” (LOL! See? Grotesque!)
What exactly did this guy Wynn say? Not much, really. Just that he’s thinking about moving his corporate headquarters from Las Vegas to a more capitalist location, with more economic freedom and dynamism. That is, to Macau, a special administrative zone in China, where he just opened a $600 million expansion of one of his existing casinos.
As Wynn said in a Bloomberg News interview, “The governmental policies in the United States of America are a damper, a wet blanket….They retard investment; they retard job formation; they retard the creation of a better life for the citizens in spite of the rhetoric of the president.” Well gee, Steve, why don’t you tell us what you really think. He did: “The economic outlook in the United States, the policies of this administration, which do not favor job formation, do not encourage investment at all.”
So instead of “Viva Las Vegas,” it may be “Zai jian, Las Vegas” (Goodbye Las Vegas in Chinese)
But that’s not the bad part. The truly weird is that…the UNV professor can’t figure it out; the mayor of Las Vegas can’t figure it out; a member of Congress can’t figure it out; the governor of Nevada can’t figure it out; and the majority leader of the United States Senate can’t figure it out. Only Steve Wynn and everyone else in the…