DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

During this year's campaign, Nevada added to its stock of commentaries about its peculiar nature. There's something about this state that makes people try to figure it out.

Last month Dave Hickey in Harper's magazine, in a profile of Dina Titus's campaign for governor, observed, "Nevada, in a word, is inauthentic. The mise en scène, whether it's the eloquent desert or the glamorous Strip, is just that, a theatrical setting, and adaptable backdrop before which the theater of human folly is acted out, a usable dream in the midst of which the tricky business of extracting gold from 'them thar hills' or 'them thar tourists' transpires--and this raw inauthenticity has its virtues."

Whew. Leaving aside the issue of how a desert, a part of nature, can be "inauthentic," in 50 years in this state I've never heard a Nevadan say "them thar."

The same article also contained this description of Pahrump's library: "The Pahrump Community Library is a brand-new, faux pueblo painted in earth tones and decorated with western iconography: cow skulls, horns, cacti, etc...." This kind of thing, the use of novelistic writing, is very chic in journalism now.

But Hickey goes further, sounding off on the meaning of the library in the context of its setting: "There is just the new library, the raw desert, the tattoo parlor, and the tarted-up trailer park. In most states this would be a dog whistle for rancor, for zoning ordinances and restraining orders, but not in Nevada.

The state may be a rough jumble; the library may jangle with the tattoo parlor; Bagelmania-Vegas may jangle with Chicken-Ranch-Pahrump. But it is one culture..."

Hickey is a Nevadan. Not everyone who comments on Nevada is, and naturally (since we kind of invite it) much of the commentary is critical.

In 1897 an Ohio minister called Nevada a poor example to its Native American inhabitants.

"Rotten Reno" was the title of a 1931 Philadelphia Daily News editorial. President Truman in 1962 described Nevada as a "black spot" in the union and proposed a national lottery in order to torpedo Nevada gambling.

A columnist in 1968 wrote of Reno, "To build this town where it is had been built is literally a crime against nature." In 1971 the president of Lions Clubs International said Las Vegas was no place for family-style conventions like the Lions.

Conservatives, not surprisingly, seem most disdainful of Nevada.

Telephone callers from Reno have twice been banned from the Rush Limbaugh program because Limbaugh disapproved of the city--once when the city put a homeless person on a municipal advisory panel on homelessness and one because the magazine Psychology Today named Reno the nation's most stressful community. I would not have expected Limbaugh to place such faith in psychology.

Another rightwinger, former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg, wrote in 1999, "In every sense, and Vegas is very much a place of the senses, this desert town is a debasement of Civilization. Everywhere the pillars of human accomplishment are parodied, or worshipped in kitsch." This is a common technique used on Nevada--treat the attractions for tourists as reflections of the community's culture.

As I've noted in this space previously ("Nevada, where there's a Will," April 13, 2005), conservative columnist George Will is more sympathetic to Nevada than other right wing commentators.

But even he warned that taking Nevada's culture national was hazardous:

"One state's welfare is uniquely woven into gambling, but Nevada has an excuse: The silver was gone, the soil was lousy, and the would-be divorcees were bored. After the Comstock Lode petered out, Nevada eventually discovered divorce as a way of making money.

Nevada crushed the competition of a few other states in setting the shortest residency requirement, and then looked around for a new way to mine money from the law and found gambling.

Now, one Nevada is kind of nice. But there is something sinister about more and more governments becoming more and more addicted to money from what was until recently considered a vice."