At the circus

THE MOST SURREAL EXPERIENCE that I had during three years of research into fast food took place not at the top‑secret air force base that got its Domino’s pizzas delivered, not at the flavor factory off the New Jersey Turnpike, not at the Dachau McDonald’s. It occurred on March 1, 1999, at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. Like an epiphany, it revealed the strange power of fast food in the new world order. The Mirage – with its five‑story volcano, its shark tank, dolphin tank, indoor rain forest, Lagoon Saloon, DKNY boutique, and Secret Garden of Siegfried & Roy – is a fine place for the surreal. Even its name suggests the triumph of illusion over reality, a promise that you won’t believe your eyes. On that day in March, as usual, Las Vegas was full of spectacles and name acts. George Carlin was at Bally’s, and David Cassidy was at the MGM Grand, starring in EFX , a show billed as a high‑tech journey through space and time. The History of Sex was at the Golden Nugget, The Number One Fool Contest was at the Comedy Stop, Joacquin Ayala (Mexico’s most famous magician) was at Harrah’s, the Radio City Rockettes were at the Flamingo Hilton, “the Dream King” (Elvis impersonator Trent Carlini) was at the Boardwalk. And Mikhail Gorbachev (former president of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, winner of the Orders of Lenin, the Red Banner of Labor, and the Nobel Peace Prize) was at the Grand Ballroom of the Mirage, giving the keynote speech before a fast food convention.

The convention and its setting were an ideal match. In many ways Las Vegas is the fulfillment of social and economic trends now sweeping from the American West to the farthest reaches of the globe. Las Vegas is the fastest‑growing major city in the United States – an entirely man‑made creation, a city that lives for the present, that has lit‑tie connection to its surrounding landscape, that cares little about its own past. Nothing in Las Vegas is built to last, hotels are routinely demolished as soon as they seem out of fashion, and the city limits seem as arbitrary as its location, with plastic bags and garbage littering the open land where the lawns end, the desert not far from the Strip.

Las Vegas began as an overnight camp for travelers going to California on the Old Spanish Trail. It later became a ranching town, notable in the early 1940s mainly for its rodeo, its Wild West tourist attractions, and a nightclub called the Apache Bar. The population was about 8,000. The subsequent growth of Las Vegas was made possible by the federal government, which spent billions of dollars to erect the Hoover Dam and build military bases near the city. The dam supplied water and electricity, while the bases provided the early casinos with customers. When authorities in southern California cracked down on illegal gambling after World War II, the gamblers headed for Nevada. As in Colorado Springs, the real boom in Las Vegas began toward the end of the 1970s. Over the past twenty years the population of Las Vegas has nearly tripled.

Today there are few remaining traces of the city’s cowboy past. Indeed, the global equation has been reversed. While the rest of the world builds Wal‑Marts, Arby’s, Taco Bells, and other outposts of Americana, Las Vegas has spent the past decade recreating the rest of the world. The fast food joints along the Strip seem insignificant compared to the new monuments towering over them: recreations of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sphinx, enormous buildings that evoke Venice, Paris, New York, Tuscany, medieval England, ancient Egypt and Rome, the Middle East, the South Seas. Las Vegas is now so contrived and artificial that it has become something authentic, a place unlike any other. The same forces that are homogenizing other cities have made Las Vegas even more unique.

At the heart of Las Vegas is technology: machinery that cools the air, erupts the volcano, and powers the shimmering lights. Most important of all is the machinery that makes money for the casinos. While Las Vegas portrays itself as a free‑wheeling, entrepreneurial town where anyone can come and strike it rich, life there is more tightly regulated, controlled, and monitored by hidden cameras than just about anywhere else in the United States. The city’s principal industry is legally protected against the workings of the free market, and operates according to strict rules laid down by the state. The Nevada Gaming Control Board determines not only who can own a casino, but who can enter one. In a town built on gambling, where fortunes were once earned with a roll of the dice, it is remarkable how little is now left to chance. Until the late 1960s, about three‑quarters of a typical casino’s profits came from table games, from poker, blackjack, baccarat, roulette. During the last twenty‑five years table games, which are supervised by dealers and offer gamblers the best odds, have been displaced by slot machines. Today about two‑thirds of a typical casino’s profits now come from slots and video poker – machines that are precisely calibrated to take your money. They guarantee the casino a profit rate of as much as 20 percent – four times what a roulette wheel will bring.

The latest slot machines are electronically connected to a central computer, allowing the casino to track the size of every bet and its outcome. The music, flashing lights, and sound effects emitted by these slots help disguise the fact that a small processor inside them is deciding with mathematical certainty how long you will play before you lose. It is the ultimate consumer technology, designed to manufacture not a tangible product, but something much more elusive: a brief sense of hope. That is what Las Vegas really sells, the most brilliant illusion of all, a loss that feels like winning.

Mikhail Gorbachev was in town to speak at the Twenty‑sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange, a convention sponsored by the International Foodservice Manufacturers Association. Executives from the major fast food companies had gathered to discuss, among other things, the latest labor‑saving machinery and the prospects of someday employing a workforce that needed “zero training.” Representatives from the industry’s leading suppliers – ConAgra, Monfort, Simplot, and others – had come to sell their latest products. The Grand Ballroom at the Mirage was filled with hundreds of middle‑aged white men in expensive business suits. They sat at long tables beneath crystal chandeliers, drinking coffee, greeting old friends, waiting for the morning program to begin. A few of them were obviously struggling to recover from whatever they’d done in Las Vegas the night before.

On the surface, Mikhail Gorbachev seemed an odd choice to address a group so resolutely opposed to labor unions, minimum wages, and workplace safety rules. “Those who hope we shall move away from the socialist path will be greatly disappointed,” Gorbachev had written in Perestroika (1987), at the height of his power. He had never sought the dissolution of the Soviet Union and never renounced his fundamental commitment to Marxism‑Leninism. He still believed in the class struggle and “scientific socialism.” But the fall of the Berlin Wall had thrown Gorbachev out of power and left him in a precarious financial condition. He was beloved abroad, yet despised in his own land. During Russia’s 1996 presidential election he received just 1 percent of the vote. The following year he expressed great praise for America’s leading fast food chain. “And the merry clowns, the Big Mac signs, the colourful, unique decorations and ideal cleanliness,” Gorbachev wrote in the foreword of To Russia with Fries , a memoir by a McDonald’s executive, “all of this complements the hamburgers whose great popularity is well deserved.”

In December of 1997, Gorbachev appeared in a Pizza Hut commercial, following in the footsteps of Cindy Crawford and Ivana Trump. A group of patrons at a Moscow Pizza Hut thanked him in the ad for bringing the fast food chain to Russia and then shouted “Hail to Gorbachev!” In response Gorbachev saluted them by raising a slice of pizza. He reportedly earned $160,000 for his appearance in the sixty‑second spot, money earmarked for his nonprofit foundation. A year later Pizza Hut announced that it was pulling out of Russia as the country’s economy collapsed, and Gorbachev told a German reporter that “all my money is gone.” For his hour‑long speech at the Mirage, Gorbachev was promised a fee of $150,000 and the use of a private jet.

The Twenty‑sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange officially opened with a video presentation of the national anthem. As the song boomed from speakers throughout the Grand Ballroom, two huge screens above the stage displayed a series of patriotic images: the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, amber waves of grain. In one of the morning’s first speeches, an executive hailed the restaurant industry’s record profits the previous year, adding without irony, “As if things weren’t good enough, consumers also dropped all pretense of wanting healthy food.” An ongoing industry survey had found that public concerns about salt, fat, and food additives were at their lowest level since 1982, when the survey began – one more bit of news to justify the industry’s “current state of bliss.” Another executive, a self‑described “sensory evaluation specialist,” emphasized the importance of pleasant smells. He noted that Las Vegas resorts were now experimenting with “signature scents” in their casinos, hoping the subtle aromas would subconsciously make people gamble more money.

Robert Nugent, the head of Jack in the Box and honorary chairman of the Twenty‑sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange, broke the cheery mood with an ominous, unsettling speech. He essentially accused critics of the fast food industry of being un‑American. “A growing number of groups who represent narrow social and political interests,” Nugent warned, “have set their sights on our industry in an effort to legislate behavioral change.” Enjoying a great meal at a restaurant was “the very essence of freedom,” he declared, a ritual now being threatened by groups with an agenda that was “anti‑meat, anti‑alcohol, anti‑caffeine, anti‑fat, anti‑chemical additives, anti‑horseradish, anti‑non‑dairy creamer.” The media played a central role in helping these “activist fearmongers,” but the National Restaurant Association had recently launched a counterattack, working closely with journalists to dispel myths and gain better publicity. Nugent called upon the fast food executives to respond even more forcefully to their critics, people who today posed “a real danger to our industry – and more broadly to our way of life.”

Not long afterward Mikhail Gorbachev appeared onstage and received a standing ovation. Here was the man who’d ended the Cold War, who’d brought political freedom to hundreds of millions, who’d opened vast new markets. At the age of sixty‑nine Gorbachev looked remarkably unchanged from his appearance during the Reagan years. His hair was white, but he seemed vigorous and strong, still capable of running a mighty empire. He spoke quickly in Russian and then waited patiently for the translator to catch up. His delivery was full of energy and passion. “I like America,” Gorbachev said with a broad smile. “And I like American people.” He wanted to give the audience a sense of what was happening in Russia today. Few people in the United States seemed to care much about events in Russia, a dangerous state of affairs. He asked the crowd to learn about his country, to form partnerships and make investments there. “You must have a lot of money,” Gorbachev said. “Send it to Russia.”

A few minutes into Gorbachev’s speech, the audience began to lose interest. He had badly misjudged the crowd. His speech might have been a success at the Council on Foreign Relations or at the United Nations General Assembly, but at the Grand Ballroom of the Mirage it was a bomb. As Gorbachev explained why the United States must strongly support the policies of Yevgeny Primakov (the Russian prime minister who was fired not long afterward) row after row of eyes began to glaze. He earnestly asked why there was “some kind of a dislike of Primakov that is widespread in this country,” unaware that few Americans knew who Yevgeny Primakov was and even fewer cared about him, one way or the other. I counted at least half a dozen people seated near me in the Grand Ballroom who fell asleep during Gorbachev’s speech. The executive right beside me suddenly awoke in the middle of a long anecdote about how the Mongol invasion had affected the Russian character in the Middle Ages. The executive seemed startled and unaware of his surroundings, then glanced at the podium for a moment, felt reassured, and drifted back to sleep, his chin resting flat on his chest.

Gorbachev sounded like a politician from a distant era, from a time before sound bites. He was serious, long‑winded, and sometimes difficult to follow. His mere presence at the Mirage was far more important to this crowd than anything he said. The meaning hit me as I looked around at all the fast food executives, the sea of pinstriped suits and silk ties. In ancient Rome, the leaders of conquered nations were put on display at the Circus. The symbolism was unmistakable; the submission to Rome, complete. Gorbachev’s appearance at the Mirage seemed an Americanized version of that custom, a public opportunity for the victors to gloat – though it would have been even more fitting if the fast food convention had been down the road at Caesars Palace.

As a Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev never learned when to leave the stage, a flaw that led to his humiliating defeat in the election of 1996. He made the same mistake in Las Vegas; people got up and left the Grand Ballroom while he was still speaking. “Margaret Thatcher was a lot better,” I heard one executive say to another as they headed for the door. Thatcher had addressed the previous year’s Chain Operators Exchange.

The day after Gorbachev’s speech at the Mirage, Bob Dylan performed at the grand opening of the new Mandalay Bay casino. And billboards along the interstate announced that Peter Lowe’s Success 1999 was coming to Las Vegas, with special appearances by Elizabeth Dole and General Colin Powell.