Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment.
(from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 1985, page 3.) |
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Exhibit C*
| The city of Las Vegas is perhaps a metaphor of American national character possessing as its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. (Postman, 3) |
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