Las Vegas

“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him;  in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.  We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh.  But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on those faces there is no smile.”                                                 – Hilaire Belloc