Since leaving Burning Man, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the role that principles play in a society, and what to do when people don’t live up to them.

Burning Man attracts more than 70,000 people each Labor Day weekend to an inhospitable dry lakebed called “the Playa” in northwestern Nevada. Burners marvel at incredible art installations, boogie to electronic dance music, and create and engage in hundreds of different participatory experiences at camps with a staggering variety of themes. These activities range from walking the catwalk after picking out a new (free) outfit at a pop-up thrift store to hanging from bungees attached to a geodesic dome.

But this year, there was another unexpected activity: waiting out two-and-a-half days of rain and the thick mud it formed on the Playa’s surface. News networks ran breathless stories about how the participants were “trapped,” and interviewed people who fled instead of listening to the requests to stay until the lakebed dried out again.

What really happened, and what lessons can we draw from it given that the event is trying to create a particular type of culture?

The non-profit organization that runs Burning Man was chartered in 2011 to better manage the event, and promote its principles throughout the year. It is very clear about its theory of a good government for society, and that vision is basically libertarian. Among its 10 key principles are “radical self-reliance” and “community effort.” Many of the other principles have to do with the event itself, including a focus on its gifting economy, the immediacy of experiences people have there, and leaving no trace of participants’ presence on the Playa.

For those of us who take these principles seriously, the two days of mud were simply a challenge to be embraced and overcome, even enjoyed. “You get the Burn that you need,” a common saying about the experience goes. The vast majority of people who came this year took the opportunity of the massive rainstorms to connect more closely with their campmates, to create clever art from the mud, and/or to keep on partying their faces off through the deluge.

There’s a growing contingent at Burning Man of newer folks, though, who seem to see it as another version of the Coachella music festival—even though it is held in a patch of desert that might be the most inhospitable place for human life in the lower 48 American states.

I ran into two such party people as the storms were rolling in, and the ground was becoming impassable. “Pretty soon it will be every man, woman, and child for themselves,” one of the women warned me. “This happened before, and people were stuck here for 10 days.”

This precise kind of weather had not, in fact, happened before (at least not since I first came in 2000), and people were not, in fact, stuck for 10 days, nor were we at all likely to be. But two things struck me about her sentiment.

First, in spite of all of the pervasive propaganda around the 10 Principles, the woman had absolutely no idea where she was. Over the course of the next three days, I was overwhelmed with the generosity of the people who were constantly checking on their neighbors, opening up their StarLink WiFi for people to contact their families, or offering an unending stream of food, water, and booze to strangers that became new friends. (Even though very few people actually needed anything since most of us took the radical self-reliance part seriously.)

Had the woman simply asked for anything, she would have gotten more than she needed from a giving community. But she didn’t. Instead, like thousands of others, she and her friends fled or tried to, turning a fine, even fun, situation into a risky one. After folks who waited out the mud finally exited when it was safe to do so—generally no more than a day later than they were planning to leave anyway—they passed a Prius half submerged in the mud. Its driver had ignored all the warnings to just chill out and have fun with what life was presenting us with, and the result was a ruined $30,000 vehicle.

As it’s been reported, the people who fled were generally among the most well-off. I’m looking at you Chris Rock who apparently thought the event was going to descend into cannibalism after one day of rain. Many of those who stayed were the Burners of relatively modest means who make up a big chunk of the event’s attendees, people who spend some or all of their disposable income for the year on a week or two’s escape from the “default world.” And my experience has been that people with disabilities are the very picture of radical self-reliance on the Playa. But a minority of primarily able-bodied well-off folks did panic and the world picked up on that panic, magnifying it.

The second thing that struck me was how much the people who run Burning Man stuck to its view of a good society, especially the fostering of radical self-reliance of the denizens of the Playa. All of the information that we were given over the radio for the better part of a day was to “shelter in place and conserve food and water.” We were eventually directed to find more information on a website that most people couldn’t access.

I do think that the folks who run the event could have put out a less sensationalistic announcement that would have cut down on the panic. “Shelter in place” makes sense as your verbiage if there is an active shooter on the loose or if a tornado is on the way. Less so for what to do during a rainstorm that creates some thick mud. They could have reassured people and told them to reach out to their neighbors if they needed anything.

But the people who run Burning Man are very, even willfully, bad at different elements of event management, including entrance and egress to the Playa and communication during the event. Perhaps this is an intentional call for people to practice those principles of self-reliance and community effort on their own, without their “government” giving them any more additional specific instructions on how to do so when the mud hits the fan?

It got me thinking: What is the obligation of a government to its citizens when the terms of the social contract, so to speak, are so clearly laid out but not followed by many?

In terms of the event itself, I believe Burning Man could do at least a little more to ensure that it has prepared attendees. If you fled the Playa this year, you probably should not have been there in the first place. This may seem to be a violation “Radical Inclusion,” the first principle of the event, and people argue for the importance of acculturation of those who are not long-time Burners into the ethic of the place. Asking people to attend an online seminar or ensuring that they have enough water when they enter the event, however, would not be a major violation of this principle. I do a lot with the Scouts, and the event can probably help folks traveling to this inhospitable wasteland to be at least as prepared as the 11-year-olds that we send to sleepaway camp.

But here’s the rub: societies generally cannot and really should not choose only self-reliant people committed to community effort as their citizens.

This leaves us with the challenge of what to do given the extreme humanness of humans. Libertarianism, like communism, is an interesting theory that is problematic in practice. You can have all of the principles you want, but some people make idiotic decisions and these decisions can have tremendous negative consequences for themselves and those around them. And even though this rainstorm did not actually qualify as a disaster, we clearly need governments that are capable of responding to true crises in a more organized and effective fashion.

Pondering all of these things, I stuck it out to see the climactic “Man burn,” which happened two days late, on Monday. It was a tremendous moment of catharsis for those of us who stayed to see this 70-foot-tall art installation go up in flames after a massive fireworks display. Only the following morning, muddy and tired, did I make my way out of a desert of possibility and back to a world of practicality. In this world, governments generally attempt to take care of us rather than holding us to a standard of self-reliance that most people are not even trying to achieve.

But I hold on to the dream of Burning Man’s governing principles.

You may have heard that Burning Man was a disaster but I “got the Burn that I needed.” The compassion and community spirit modeled by those who stayed behind will remain an inspiration to me. As for those who fled, I will stay curious about how societies can work to help people achieve more self-reliance and avoid panic, in crises both real and imagined. And I will keep working on rebuilding trust in a society that believes that even the minor challenge of a couple of days of mud will quickly lead to people turning on—and potentially eating!—each other.

The post Finding a Good Society in the Mud of Burning Man appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, tourists from all over the world flock to Nevada to experience selective amnesia. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” the slogan goes. But Las Vegas’ culture of forgetting is more than drunken hijinks. The city’s existence depends on forgetting the colonial violence that made the Desert Southwest. Since becoming a state in 1864, Nevada’s basic political and economic infrastructure is a product of the expropriation of Native American lands.

If any one Nevadan represents this history, it’s Patrick “Pat” Anthony McCarran, the Democratic U.S. senator who served the state from 1933 to 1954. McCarran’s name is everywhere in Vegas: on street signs, building names, and, until 2021, the Las Vegas International Airport. Many locals remember McCarran for being a champion of the mining and ranching industries; less proudly, they have come to recognize that he was an unabashed anti-Semite.

For this reason, Clark County Commissioners recently rebranded the airport for a different Democratic senator, Harry Reid. Still, in reckoning with McCarran’s legacy, Nevadans sometimes overlook the ways in which even his most laudable successes carried on an ugly tradition of stealing from Indigenous people.

Dispossession began before McCarran’s time, in the 19th century. After Mexico ceded its northern territory to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, decades of violence ensued between white newcomers and Native nations defending their land.

American diplomatic efforts sought to reach accords between settler and Native communities, but often undermined Indigenous sovereignty in the long run. In 1863, near what is now the Utah-Nevada border, Western Shoshone leaders signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley for the sake of “peace and friendship.” The treaty acknowledged Native jurisdiction over much of the Intermountain West from Death Valley to Idaho’s Snake River, stating that “The United States [is] aware of the inconvenience resulting to the Indians … [from] agricultural and mining settlements” and promising “full compensation … for the loss of game and the rights and privileges hereby conceded.”

Except for limited rights of way, forts, and mines, Shoshone delegates neither ceded nor sold any real estate to the federal government. Nevertheless, Nevada became a state the next year, on Oct. 31, 1864. As American settlers began arriving in droves, they treated Newe (Western Shoshone) land—along with that of nearby of Nüümü (Northern Paiute), Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute), and Washoe nations—as “public domain,” empty for the taking.

McCarran’s father, an Irish immigrant also named Patrick, had emigrated west in 1857 with the California Volunteers, a division of the U.S. Army charged with pacifying Natives along the Sierra Nevada’s eastern slope. The 1859 discovery of silver on the Comstock Lode brought a wave of prospectors to the region, disrupting a fragile truce between California-bound migrants and Paiutes. The elder McCarran surveilled the newly created Pyramid Lake and Walker River Indian Reservations, where Native people tried to rebuild their lives. After serving, he built a ranch on the lower Truckee River, east of Reno. His son, Pat, was born on Aug. 8, 1876 and grew up on the homestead.

Although the younger McCarran was raised to think Native people were vanishing, in reality they were simply adapting to the settler invasion. Some relocated to reservations. Others resettled on the outskirts of mining towns. But most continued to visit traditional territories to gather pine nuts, hunt jackrabbits and perform ceremonies. They also began to mobilize, pursuing treaty rights in the courts as early as the 1920s.

In any event, McCarran inherited his father’s sense of Manifest Destiny. When he entered politics, anti-Indigenous ideas informed his policymaking in ways that continue to shape present-day Nevada. Even as he achieved national influence, serving on the Senate’s powerful Appropriations and Judiciary Committees, he pursued parochial goals in his underdeveloped home state. Often his initiatives involved systematically denying Native Nevadans access to resources—particularly water—while redirecting them to his growth-minded constituents.

In one episode, McCarran went out of his way to enable non-Native squatters on the Pyramid Lake Reservation, whose eldest tribal members may have remembered his father. The Senator called it a matter “of equity and justice toward the white settlers.” Avery Winnemucca, the Pyramid Lake tribal chairman, wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1949, imploring her to lobby Congress against bills McCarran proposed, which would have patented the settlers’ illegal homesteads retroactively. “In defeat our ancestors accepted the white man’s treaties and promises,” Winnemucca reminded the former First Lady. “Then why does Sen. McCarran propose the Congress of the U.S. to blow its nose on the American flag?” Although the immediate bills died, non-Native farmers would continue to contest the reservation’s limited water supply for decades after.

McCarran also pursued his vision of aggressive growth by soliciting military installations on the Nevada desert’s vast, “open” public lands. Nellis Air Force Base (originally an airstrip called McCarran Field, north of Las Vegas) and Fallon Naval Air Station near Reno, both established during World War II at McCarran’s urging, today represent two of the largest defense properties in the United States.

His crowning achievement came in 1950, with the creation of America’s first permanent continental nuclear weapons testing site, the Nevada Proving Grounds (later, the Nevada Test Site). When it opened, Gov. Charles Russell compared the Test Site to a flowing irrigation canal. “We had long ago written off that terrain as wasteland,” he announced, but “today it’s blooming with atoms.” Over the next 40 years, the Atomic Energy Commission (later, the Department of Energy) would detonate nearly a thousand fission devices above and below the 1,300-square-mile restricted zone.

The Test Site was in the heart of the territory of the Western Shoshone, which they call Newe Segobia. In the 1980s, citing violations of the Ruby Valley Treaty, Newe land defenders, along with non-Indigenous pacifists and environmentalists, began protesting outside its gates. The coalition of organizers drew thousands of demonstrators to the desert each spring to peacefully gather and pray for an end to colonial occupation.

To this day, much of the region remains a highly restricted—and toxic—military zone. Native downwinders suffer some of the highest rates of cancer in the nation, likely related to radiation exposure from consuming contaminated game and wild plants in traditional diets.

Pat McCarran achieved his vision for the desert: when he died in 1954, Las Vegas was one of the fastest growing cities in the country. Southern Nevada now contains over two million people, with a Native population of less than 1%.

Growth continues to be a point of pride for state leaders. Recent development measures include expanding the Naval range’s footprint, doubling down on wasteful settler water laws, and transforming Nevada into a “lithium loop,” an all-in-state critical-mineral supply chain. Despite allowing for more citizen and tribal participation—and an ostensibly “green” goal in lithium-ion battery production—the current development agenda channels McCarran’s extractive goals and disregard for Native land rights.

In some ways, things are getting better. Nevadans are rethinking McCarran’s legacy in public spaces. And this month, after years of advocacy efforts by Indigenous land defenders, the Biden administration established a half-million-acre national monument surrounding Avi Kwa Ame, or Spirit Mountain, in southern Nevada. The designation will, at last, protect land considered sacred by Yuman-speaking people of the lower Colorado River.

But decolonizing Nevada will require a more fundamental reevaluation of basic ideas about development, growth and resource exploitation at the core of the state’s economy. Despite facing a megadrought, McCarran’s vision still drives much of the state’s policies. Until that changes, Nevada, along with much of the American West, is living on stolen land and borrowed time.

The post What Nevada Stole from Its Native People appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The news reminded many of the Hoover Dam, a project known for its treacherous working conditions and a death count so high that it spawned myths that workers had been buried alive in the concrete. But since the Hoover Dam’s construction in the 1930s, workers have benefitted from the federal Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act of 1970, so that accidents are no longer considered a part of the job, and employers and the government are morally and legally obligated to protect them. Still, fatalities in high-rise casinos on the Las Vegas Strip brought up an uncomfortable question: How had the American workplace become so profoundly dangerous all over again?

Under American law, work and risk always have had a close relationship. Departing from English common law, 19th-century American courts developed the assumed risk doctrine, holding that agreeing to employment meant that workers in a free market had consented to assume all potential hazards of the job. Legal precedent also protected employers, and so accidents were considered part of the work process.

Early in the 20th century, several factors caused a shift of responsibility for safety from workers to employers. The first was simple economics: Business was not profitable if accidents stopped work, prompting the railroad, iron, lumber, and steel industries to develop basic safety programs and hire company physicians. The second cause was progressivism, an informal, nationwide reform movement that experimented with the idea that governments should provide information about industrial hazards and chemicals, and place controls on employers.

By 1921, the progressive ethic had encouraged 46 states to pass an assortment of health laws and workmen’s compensation. But the private sector partnered with the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations to repress labor unions, and remove economic regulations and industrial safety controls.

By the time the nation fell into an economic depression in 1929, employees regularly ignored safety standards to keep their jobs and employers disregarded well-known hazards, including silica, carbon monoxide, and lead, to stay in business. The most egregious example of this occurred in 1930 at West Virginia’s Hawk’s Nest Tunnel, where at least 764 workers died from acute silicosis and related conditions caused by breathing dust.

The construction of the Hoover Dam, which began in April 1931, occurred during this tenuous period for worker protection, and was further complicated by federal law in Nevada. The state legislature sent the state inspector of mines, Andy J. Stinson, to tour the site and make recommendations that included barring gasoline-powered vehicles in tunnels, outlawed in Nevada in 1929 because it inevitably exposed workers to carbon monoxide. Six Companies Inc., which was the contractor, ignored the order, insisting it would be financially impossible to convert to electric.

The project then began six months ahead of schedule without housing, medical care, or sanitary facilities for workers. The excessive heat, averaging 119.9 Fahrenheit during the summer, hospitalized 150 workers and killed 17 during the first months of construction. These deaths were part of a string of mishaps under the direction of chief engineer Frank Crowe, a supervisor famous for placing unrealistic expectations on workers to finish the job ahead of schedule.

Despite state warnings, Six Companies persisted in drilling the tunnels with gasoline-powered equipment. Large carbon monoxide clouds accumulated underground, leading some workers to suffer from nausea and dizziness, while others became completely incapacitated. Entire shifts became unconscious and crews had to drag their bodies out. Company doctors never listed a single employee death as carbon monoxide exposure, but “pneumonia” and “heart trouble” fatalities surged—both conditions that relinquished the employer of liability. Over the five years of construction, 37 workers died of such ailments, usually in clusters.

When the state filed formal charges in November 1931, the contractor applied for a temporary restraining order maintaining that the federal project was not subject to state intervention. Secretary of Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, a medical doctor who understood carbon monoxide poisoning, fully supported Six Companies’ decision. He even provided federal counsel to appear amicus curiae in statutory court to “protect the interests of the United States.” A panel of federal judges ultimately ruled in favor of the contractor in 1932, extending the temporary restraining order until further trial. A year later the judges officially exempted the project from state mining code, determining that the Nevada law only applied to mining, not reclamation.

Ultimately as many as 187 workers died building the dam. Contrary to popular memory, no workers were buried alive in the concrete—that myth arose during construction as a social response to the high death toll. The Hoover Dam would forever be remembered as a coffin of the workers who built it.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that worker health and safety became a priority in the United States. Radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing raised an initial alarm, followed by greater public awareness of chemical pollution surrounding industrial plants, the widespread use of pesticides in agriculture, and the prevalence of hazardous chemicals in household cleaning products. Americans realized that industrial hazards rarely stayed within the confines of the workplace, eventually affecting us all. This revelation prompted a symbolic switch in name from industrial to occupational health, which paved the way for regulations protecting workplaces, communities, and the environment from harm.

By the end of the decade, a combination of environmental and Vietnam War activism, along with skyrocketing accident rates, brought workplace safety to the national discussion, leading to the passage of the OSH Act in 1970. The Act created two federal agencies, a regulatory agency in the Department of Labor, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), and a research agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), as part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Since their establishment, fatality and injury rates have dropped dramatically, from approximately 14,000 workers killed on the job in 1970 to 5,190 in 2016.

But in the decades since OSH, the United States has entered the postindustrial age, marked by a dramatic decline in industrial work due to automation and imports. Multinational companies also responded to regulation by moving dangerous manufacturing overseas. As the economy deindustrialized, employment in postindustrial trades like service, technology, health care, finance, and education grew. In comparison to the industrial workplaces, these new postindustrial spaces appeared dramatically safer. But the workplaces still functioned like factories and postindustrial workers faced new hazards, with risks that were now harder to identify, define, and interpret.

The Las Vegas Strip exemplifies this shift, as it employs thousands of employees to continuously reimagine and construct the next great experience in hospitality. Before the 1970s, these resorts resembled beachfront hotels, built low and sprawling, but as their structures grew upward, so did the hazards, increasing both construction-related injuries and workplace dangers.

For example, during the construction of the MGM Grand, Taylor Construction Co. overlooked recommendations to install sprinklers. On November 21, 1980 a devastating fire killed 85 people at the resort. Afterward, a state panel voted against revamping the Nevada fire safety code, citing cost concerns. It took another tragedy three months later, in which eight people died in an arson-related fire at the Las Vegas Hilton, to force change. Nevada responded fiercely the second time around, passing the strictest fire protection standards in the nation, a move that inspired a global reevaluation of sprinkler use in high-rise buildings.

By the 2000s, construction at the Las Vegas Strip resembled, in some ways, the building of the Hoover Dam. Sandwiched between resorts, the congested, frenzied, 24-hour construction sites left even experienced journeymen frightened for their lives. While there were similarities between the two worksites, the workers labored in completely different times. By law, the building company, Nevada unions, and federal and state OSHA should have worked to protect the Strip workers. Instead, they failed them by initiating speedups, weakening safety requirements, and withdrawing or reducing citations for violations.

The episode reveals the limits of simple conceptions of responsibility. There is a misconception that the private sector is solely to blame for fostering hazardous workplaces. National, state, and municipal governments are usually involved in the worst cases, as they actively assist dangerous industries to promote industrial development.

We now find ourselves in an ongoing struggle between constantly evolving workplaces and regulations that remain frozen in time. Not only do the OSH Act’s protections fail to protect postindustrial sites, but when we look carefully at the history of occupational safety and health, we can see that its progress in protecting workers has not been linear, in part because workplaces and safety have also changed in non-linear ways.

Nowhere is this clearer than in today’s need to protect employees and guests from large-scale acts of violence such as the Route 91 Harvest festival shooting—an event no one could have predicted 47 years ago. Even before the shooting, where a lone gunman killed 58 and injured 515 at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, fatal injuries among hospitality workers nationally were up 32 percent in 2016 from 2015, and those involving violence increased 23 percent to become the second-most common fatal event. This points to the ongoing evolution of what we consider workplaces, and safety.

Workplaces can be protected, but the occupational health regimes need to be flexible enough to evolve to settings that are always changing. The high death counts at the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel and the Hoover Dam seems barbaric to us 88 years later. We have to assume that 58 people dying at a country music festival will seem equally barbaric in the future.

The post Why Do So Many Nevadans Still Die on the Job? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dearest Nevada,

Marry me.

My proposal may seem sudden, but ours shouldn’t be one of those late-night quickie weddings at a chapel off the Strip.

I, California, want a real grown-up marriage with you, Nevada. We both have reputations for being fun and youthful and wild, but who are we kidding? We’re both mature states that entered the Union in the mid-19th century.

And look how much we have in common. I’m the Golden State and you’re the Silver State. You’re also the girl next door. Heck, more than 90 percent of your people live within an hour of my eastern border. And, one in five Nevadans was born in California. That may not seem like a lot, until you realize that only one in four Nevadans was born in Nevada.

It’s not just that we’re alike—it’s that together, we’re different from other American places. The United States is an increasingly mean, bitter, and judgmental country; most of the other 48 states are getting old and boring, and it feels like they want to close the windows and shut down the world.

But you and I love to entertain, not to judge. We can’t get enough foreigners and tourists, and we don’t care where they’re from, as long as their money is green. Plus we’re both tolerant of deviancy and sin (though I confess I’m uptight about greenhouse gases).

All of which is why we’d both be better off as one merged state, not two neighbors.

Right now, rich people and companies can play us against each other, and we both end up poorer. Recently, you—apparently feeling needy and desperate—gave $750 million in taxpayer money to the owner of pro football’s Oakland Raiders so that he can build a stadium in Las Vegas. Building a football stadium is a terrible investment, and the money will come from a hotel tax that currently funds transportation and your very poor schools. The Stanford economist Roger Noll called it the “worst deal for a city” he’d ever seen. Before that, you gave billions in tax breaks and infrastructure to another California company, Tesla, so they would put a battery factory there. Tesla said your offer was more than twice what the company’s founder Elon Musk had been seeking.

Deals like these leave both of us worse off—we lose a business, and you gain huge liabilities you can’t afford. It’s somewhat similar to the longtime problem of rich Californians establishing nominal residences in places like Incline Village, on your side of Lake Tahoe, because you don’t have income taxes. You don’t end up getting a cut of their income, and we lose money we need to educate and medicate our people.

Eliminating such destructive economic competition is just the beginning of what we could do for each other.

Look at you. Your economy has lagged the country because it’s far too reliant on tourism and real estate. But my extraordinarily diverse economy, which has been outperforming the rest of the country, could help support yours. You desperately need a better-educated populace; if you married me, your kids could more easily go to my terrific public university systems. Your workers would benefit from our wage-boosting laws, Nevadans choking on pollution would be healthier under our environmental regime, and, if we were married, we could stop fighting over water (and could help you screw the Arizonans and Mexicans instead).

In return for all of this, you’d bring me more of the young people and families that you’ve been better at attracting and keeping than me. Perhaps, once we’re official, you can share the secret of how to build enough housing that they can actually afford.

Prospective spouses are not supposed to want to change each other, but I hope you’ll have a good influence on me. You could inspire me to exercise the old pro-business libertarian ethos that helped me thrive, but has sagged in recent decades. You’d surely bring political competition and engagement that I long ago lost. I especially envy your Republican Party, which, unlike mine, not only wins statewide elections but also takes governance seriously.

I also see you as a natural ally in my biggest fight: against the president of the United States. As I’m sure you’re aware, he’s always had it in for you—maybe because he’s more an Atlantic City guy than a Vegas guy. He wants to turn you into a nuclear dump by reviving the Yucca Mountain proposal for storing nuclear waste.

As for me, things are so bad with the White House that Saturday Night Live recently broadcast a skit in which Trump rejoiced when aliens wiped California off the map. (It was well-done, but I didn’t laugh.) The president has called my elections massive frauds, and threatened to defund the entire state if I don’t sign onto his dumbest, most xenophobic policies.

Trump fans with ties to Russia have been encouraging the #Calexit movement to separate me from the rest of the country. And Trump’s buddy Nigel Farage, who led the Brexit movement, is now working in California on an initiative proposal to split me into pieces. Divide and conquer is what Trump wants. That’s why you and I have to unite and fight back.

I can feel your hesitation about a marriage. You may fear there’d be an imbalance in the relationship—I have 40 million people, and you have less than 3 million. But don’t worry. I won’t let the lights of Vegas dim a bit. And you’ll find that you have the same great deal as the rest of inland California. You’ll be subsidized by all the taxes paid by California’s rich coastal people, while you still retain the right to make fun of those same rich people’s many excesses.

Remember: We’ve already done great things together—Burning Man (you host, I send my people), cleaning up Lake Tahoe, reviving Britney Spears’ career, and the Cal-Neva Casino (back when Sinatra owned it, anyway). Las Vegas and Los Angeles—two entertainment capitals—are more deeply intertwined than any two American cities across state lines. Vegas is the leading source of new out-of-state residents of L.A. (It’s no accident that the great L.A. movie of this era, La La Land, turns on two Nevada-California drives—Emma Stone’s return to her suburban Clark County home, and Ryan Gosling’s decision to pick her up there, and drive her back to L.A. for an audition.)

And I hate to go negative, but do you really have other options? Utah is an attractive neighbor, I’m sure, but she won’t marry you unless you convert.

And if our marriage doesn’t work? No worries. You and I are both no-fault divorce states. So we’d just go back to being friends.

All my love,

California

The post Why Nevada Should Get Hitched—to California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear Mom and Dad,

Don’t be alarmed by this unannounced letter. No one we know has died, and I’m not asking for money (although I, and many other Nevadans, could use it). I just thought, having lived in Nevada for more than 14 years, I’d recap my time here and let you know how your first-born son and the Battle Born State are faring. (OK. You know me too well. I’m being paid to write this letter, but don’t let that cheapen it.)

As you may recall, in December 1997, I packed my worldly possessions into my one-headlight Honda Civic and pushed off for Nevada, which I’d never even visited. (I thought I was being adventurous, but later discovered that’s how most people end up in the state.) Before I left Atlanta, our neighbor Bill Banks asked, “Why Vegas?” Saying it looked cool in Swingers didn’t seem like a satisfactory answer, so I said something about it being a place to set short stories and novels, to sports-bet without having to call a toll-free number in the Caribbean, and to explore the West and Southwest.

Crossing Hoover Dam and entering the Las Vegas Valley, I sensed I’d made the right decision. The Spring Mountains were swallowing the sun, painting the desert lavender. Nascent housing developments reached for the foothills. In the depths of the valley, the hotel-casinos of the Strip bloomed like wildflowers.

Even at dusk, it was clearly dawn for this one-time whistle-stop.

I was pleasantly surprised by the other 110,000 square miles of the state, too. Nevada is so much more than secret military bases and beef-jerky stands. It’s home to Reno (“The Biggest Little City in the World”), Lake Tahoe, Burning Man, ghost towns, cowboy-poetry festivals, and earthworks … dry washes and year-round rivers, bare deserts and dense forests, near-sea-level valleys and 13,000-foot peaks. Turquoise (though bathtub-ringed) Lake Mead, technicolored Valley of Fire, and snowcapped Mount Charleston are within an hour of Las Vegas.

I’ve come to view Nevada not as our nation’s junkyard or laboratory, but as a canvas randomly and beautifully touched.

As you know, I planned to stay in Vegas for only a year or two. But the city was booming and rife with opportunity. Every year, 70,000 people moved here-the population doubled in a decade-and 40 million visited. The unemployment rate rarely rose above 5 percent, the average price of a home was $300,000, and the casinos raked in more than $8 billion a year. Journalists christened it the “New Detroit” and the “First City of the 21st Century.”

After temping, freelance writing, and working on short stories for a few years, I joined the staff of Las Vegas CityLife. I covered politics, the environment, the literary arts, nightlife, and anything else that seemed interesting for the 80,000-circulation alt-weekly. The paper was regularly more than 80 pages, and I became managing editor. Though hectic, life was good.

Now, 50,000 residents a year leave Las Vegas-“Even the white people are leaving,” a Mexican cabbie told me recently-and visitation is down 20 percent. The unemployment rate rarely drops below 12 percent, the average price of a home is $115,000, and casino revenue is way down. The homeless, unemployed, and underemployed dress up in chintzy costumes (Mr. T, Bret Michaels, Capt. Jack Sparrow) and pose for photos for tips on the Strip and Fremont Street. The dope man is accepting food stamps in lieu of money. The $5 blow job is back in vogue. (Sorry, Mom, but it’s true.) Las Vegas is the “New Detroit” and the “First City of the 21st Century,” just not in the way the journalists envisioned.

Having written a book about exploring the underground flood channels, where I discovered hundreds of homeless people, and wanting to work on a nonfiction story collection, I left CityLife in early 2008. Six months later, the economy began to falter. I decided to work on the story collection, live off savings, and re-emerge when the economy improved. I’m still waiting.

In the wake of this spectacular boom and bust, the 2012 presidential campaign is underway in Nevada. President Obama visited Vegas a few weeks ago. My friend John, who lives in an underground flood channel near the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, emerged from the shadows and got within earshot of the president. He thought about inviting Obama into his home, but, he told me with a brown-toothed smile, a former businessman living in a storm drain probably isn’t the kind of story the president wants to promote right now.

This week, in advance of the caucus, the Republican presidential candidates are parachuting into the Silver State. It’s time for a road trip to Southern California or Northern Arizona. Seriously, I have no interest in what Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum has to say. I wouldn’t trust any of them to run the local pawnshop-and the Old Man, Rick, Corey, and Chumlee are doing a damn fine job anyway.

Well, folks, I’m rambling. That’s what happens when you’re homesick and haven’t written a letter in more than 14 years. I should unchain myself from this desk and take advantage of the sunny, 70-degree weather. Just wanted to let you know that I’m well and, while I miss you, I have few regrets about moving to Nevada. The media onslaught over the next few days won’t even scratch the dusty surface of this complex, resilient state.

Your loving son,

Matty

Matthew O’Brien is author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas and My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas. He’s also founder of Shine a Light, a community project that provides housing, drug counseling, and other services to the people who live in the storm drains. For more information on Matt and his work, visit www.beneaththeneon.com.

*Photo courtesy of Vanessa (EY).

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