← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
The Vegas Blues
00:27:55
Justin Rowlatt visits Las Vegas and learns why America's casino capital has suffered...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline.
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But here's the latest edition broadcast on
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BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady Today.
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Sunset in Vegas on a stroll down the famous Strip as the US presidential campaign descends on America's beleaguered casino capital. The Nigerian girls who say they've been forced to give up their babies for adoption. We meet a rebel commander in Syria who'd rather write poetry than fight and visit the tiny island in the South Pacific which inspired the classic castaway tale Robinson Crusoe. Reviving the housing market is proving a key theme of the election campaign in the United States. Mitt Romney's been explaining how the Republicans would do it in Nevada, a state which has suffered more than most from the housing meltdown. Addressing a rally in Las Vegas, he spoke of getting credit going again and reigniting the housing economy. The polls suggest Barack Obama currently has a small lead in Nevada. But the state has a larger than average number of unemployed, and the Republicans reckon it's fertile ground for them. In the 70s and 80s, Las Vegas grew at astonishing speed. Every day saw new houses going up, shops, restaurants and casinos, all thanks to cheap and abundant credit. But the subprime crisis and then the recession brought an end to all that. Justin Rowlett, who's just been there, says the signs of the crash are everywhere, even on the famous Strip, which continues to welcome tourists from around the world.
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Las Vegas illustrates just how varied casino design can be. Pyramids, medieval castles, circuses, pretty much anything goes, says Paul Steelman. But there is one iron rule, he tells me. No mirrors. Mr. Steelman should know. He's a world expert on how to part punters from their cash. His architectural practice specializes in the art of casino construction. Paul is an impish, irrepressible man. Across a table in his cavernous Las Vegas studios, he tells me how he designed his first casino, fresh out of architecture school. Since then, Paul has designed casinos across America and and the world. So why no mirrors? I want to know. Because, Paul explains with a mischievous grin, casinos are all about illusion. You go to a casino to feel like James Bond. The last thing a casino owner wants is for you to catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. Then you'll see your sagging gut or the pimples on your face. And in an instant, the illusion explodes and you stop playing. Down on Las Vegas famous strip, I discover that the Las Vegas casino industry is just like that gambler catching himself in the mirror, being forced to face up to its shortcomings. The Strip still heaves with people. The volcano at the Mirage still erupts on the hour. The gondolas still drift down the Venetians counterfeit canals. And the win, thanks to Prince Harry, can presumably now put by royal appointment on its letterhead. Nevertheless, all is not well in Sin City. Look up from the parade of party hats and takeaway margaritas and you see the garish glamour of the Strip reflected back in the blue glass of the tallest casino complex of them all. The Fontainebleau, or Fountain Blu, as they call it here. This behemoth was supposed to boast 3,889 hotel rooms, 24 restaurants and inevitably, a vast casino. But the Fountain Blue never opened. Its backers went bankrupt, having blown $3 billion on the place. Now the Fountain Blue stands empty, its steel skeleton rusting in the desert wind. Its construction and Las Vegas winning streak came to an abrupt end with the financial crisis when after decades of unbroken growth, Sin City became the foreclosure capital of America. Yet Paul Steelman has been working hard. That's because, like so many American originals, Las Vegas, top spot in the world market, has been taken by a Chinese competitor. Paul has been busy designing casinos in Macau, the tiny territory in the South China Sea. Macau eclipsed Vegas in terms of gambling revenues back in 2006. Now the island rakes in an incredible five times the city's total pot over $30 billion a compared to the 6 billion earned in Vegas. But this year, Macau's growth dipped for the first time since gambling was deregulated a decade ago. A visit to virtually any of China's provincial cities will go some way to explaining why. I spent three weeks traveling in China's vast hinterland earlier this year and passed through a number of smaller towns and cities. Almost all were ringed with giant, dark, dead eyed hulks. Small scale versions of Vegas. Fontainebleau apartment buildings built at huge expense, often with borrowed money, but never occupied. Nowhere is this more obvious than Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia, China's ghost city. The city designed to house more than a million people, appears to have just one bar. And on the night we visited, we were the only ones drinking. One Vegas property entrepreneur commented to me that before the crash, it had seemed that the city's key industry had become growth itself. He said that by 2006, more than a third of the working population was in construction. Vegas was, he joked, gambling on growth. Of course, the bet didn't pay out, we all know what happened next. The magic circle of growth broke and and the city's wealth evaporated as property prices collapsed. As the process played out across America, the world's banks were left with debts that still threaten to bring the entire financial system to its knees. China has been one of the few bright spots in the world as its economy has continued to expand. I walked down the Strip at sunset on my last day in Vegas and looked up once again at the silent shell of the fountain blue, and I remembered those tens of thousands of empty apartments I'd seen in China. I couldn't help thinking of Paul Steelman's warning about mirrors in casinos.
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And that's Justin Rolatte the conflict in Syria has been at the top of the agenda. At the UN General Assembly's annual meeting in New York this week, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, told the gathering of world leaders international action was needed to stop the the 18 month conflict, he said, had become a regional calamity with global ramifications. Earlier, the international envoy Lakhda Brahimi described the situation as grim and getting worse. Damascus, he added, saw the rebellion against President Bashar al Assad as a conspiracy aided by 5,000 foreign fighters. But thousands of Syrians, many with limited military experience, have also taken up arms. Sarah Burke has been talking to a rebel commander who'd apparently rather be writing Poet than fighting I am sitting in
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a room at the Bab Al Hawa border crossing between Turkey and northern Syria, listening to poetry. When I passed through here two years ago, skinny border guards from the regime of President Bashar al Assad were manning the post. Today it is held by a group of opposition fighters. They are led by Abu Azzam, a tanned, portly 30 year old commander whose men obey his orders immediately. Signs of the battle to capture the post from the army are everywhere. Next to the smashed up duty free store, captured government tanks stand idle and there's even an abandoned stretch limousine. Order is now returning fighters dressed in matching green T shirts with the group's logo divide up tasks. Some stand outside directing Syrians crossing to Turkey, others sitting in the office sipping hot sweet tea and attending to Abu Azam. It is Abu Azzam who is reciting poetry. At first glance, the commander does not look like a man of letters, but his mellifluous voice and soft demeanor hint at the more sensitive side. He reads a poem he composed earlier this year. The former Arabic is hard to understand, but his deep, booming voice and hand and facial gestures have everyone in the room transfixed. The poem talks about how the Syrian people stood up to the regime and paid with their blood. Today, Abu Azam's work is inspired by the revolution, but he was writing poetry to criticize the regime long before people took to the streets in March 2011. I knew things were bad here, but we couldn't talk about it, he tells me. So I wrote, but in a way that could be interpreted as apolitical. Arabic is a particularly rich language for literature. Poetry has a long history in Arab lands. Scribes in the courts of Caliphate penned odes to their masters, while local storytellers would recite tales handed down over generations. But under the Assad regime, anything other than government sanctioned culture was discouraged. Because art is often a means of dissidence, famous Syrian filmmakers, writers, painters were locked up. The regime continues to target them in today's crackdown. When Abu Azzam started to compose poetry at the tender age of 15, he wrote about love, he says abashedly. The verses were so good that soon friends and neighbors in his small village in eastern Syria nicknamed him Al Mutanabbi, after the famous 10th century Arab poet. By 2000, the year Bashar inherited power from his father and former president Hafez Al Assad, Abu Azzam won a series of competitions and was crowned Syria's national poetry champion. He went to university in Homs, Syria's third city, to read Arabic literature. That was where he was when the revolution started, he says. He cried at the sounds of gunshots when security forces shot at peaceful protesters. He was under no illusions that poetry or protest alone could change this brutal regime, he says. So when the Free Syrian army started to fight back, he moved to Baba Amma, a poor neighborhood of the city that was destroyed by hell bombardment in February this year. I picked up my gun but did not put down my pen, he says. During the battle there, I wrote poems about the suffering of civilians in the area. As he finishes reciting the poem, I look around the room. Suddenly I see the young fighters in a different light. Abu Azzam's poetry is a reminder that few of these men are professional fighters. They are normal people with hopes and dreams. They were students, engineers, doctors and journalists who did not expect to be fighting a war that now ravages the country. Abu Azam tells me that he lost his notebooks of poetry during the siege in Homs, when the building he was living in was shelled. I pull out my reporter's pad and ask him to write down what he can remember. He does in careful, rounded handwriting. It's good to write again, he says. For as the war deepens and Abu Azam has more responsibilities, he finds less and less time to write. He hopes that the fighting will end soon so he can continue his studies. He wants to do a PhD on the development of Arabic poetry. Then I will become a professional poet and publish freely, he says.
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Sarah Burke on the border between Turkey and Syria Adopting a child in this country is a long and painstaking process under scrutiny as a result, with plans by the government to speed it up. In other places, though, there are calls for more checks and balances to be put in place to ensure no one gets damaged in the process. Will Ross in Nigeria has been looking into allegations that teenage girls are being forced to give up their babies for adoption.
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In the coastal city of Calabar, I met a barrister who runs an organization protecting vulnerable children. On the wall of his office was an interesting piece of art. Can you interpret that? James de Boer asked me. Well, there's the blindfolded Lady Justice, I offered. Yes, and she seems to have her leg wrapped around a man's waist. I hesitated. The barrister helped me out. You see, lady justice is in love with the criminal and she's holding the very lopsided scales behind his back, he said. The artist who produced the piece was depicting deep corruption in the justice system. In this country, bribing to get the desired verdict is not unheard of. As James Ybor outlined how he was determined to take those responsible for abusing children to court, the piece of art kept on reminding me of the daunting task he faces. He handed me copies of a newsletter called Children of the Delta. The first photo I see is of a child with a severe burn on his back. The shape of the wound gives away what had been used to inflict the injury. A hot iron. One of the barrister's goals is to clean up the often abused adoption system, which sees babies bought and sold illegally. He told me of cases where churches have taken advantage of helpless teenagers. Some of them give birth in the churches and many of these young girls never see their children again against their will. They're coerced or manipulated to give up their babies, the barrister tells me, before adding that he's sure many are trafficked out of the country. Even where an organization may be well intentioned and there's no proof of the law being broken, the issue of adoption can be traumatic for a pregnant teenager and for her relatives. I headed out to a village to interview a 16 year old girl. Afiong struggled to hold back her tears as she talked about her battle to keep her baby boy and how she was threatened as she lay on a hospital bed recovering just hours after giving birth. The woman said that if I think of running away with the baby, then they were going to arrest me and jail me. She said the threat came from a member of staff at a refuge for pregnant girls. Afiong had lived there because she'd been desperate for help. Her family is extremely poor. Afyong's father's away in Lagos, working as a security guard. Her mother, Mary, ekes out a living in the village selling palm oil for cooking. She walks from house to house along muddy paths, past tiny vegetable plots. Balanced on her head is a metal tray full of the ready orange bottles. Four relatives share their simple rented home. It's just one room with no electricity. So when Afiong realized she was pregnant soon after finishing secondary school, there was extra strain on the family. The father of the unborn child had cut off contact, and without telling her parents about the pregnancy, she ran away to Calabar, a calm city by Nigerian standards, but for a confused pregnant teenager with absolutely no money, it was terrifying. Then came the offer of help from a refuge. But Afiong tells me it was on one condition. You stay for free, but you leave the baby behind for adoption. Since I didn't have anywhere to go, I had to sign the agreement with them that I'd give up the baby and go, she whispered sorrowfully, adding that she was not allowed to make phone calls or leave the building except to attend church. As each month passed, her parents became more and more distressed. Being missing for so long, I thought she might have been killed, her father told me at the local church. We prayed every Friday that she be found. Afiong delivered a baby son in Calabar hospital and was then desperate to keep her child. But she feared going to jail for not handing him over to the refuge. She was hysterical, a young doctor, Eliu Osim, recalls. She was weeping, not just sad because of what was going to happen to her baby, but she was scared of what would happen to her, said Dr. Osim. I managed to find the refuge where Afiong had been staying. The director of the project rejected Afyong's account and said the girls are never pressured into giving away their babies. She said in recent years, about 100 girls have been taken into the home, and most have chosen to give up their babies for adoption. Afiong now lives back at the family home with her son, Daniel. She says she's grateful to Dr. Osim for standing up for her in the hospital and helping reunite the family. Even if I have no more children, I have one, and that will always make me happy, she says, taking it in turns with her mother to hold young Daniel Will Ross in Lagos.
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It's 150 years now since one of the bloodiest days in American history, when 23,000 people were killed, wounded or went missing in the Battle of Antietam. It was a turning point in the Civil War between the Northern Union forces and the Southern Confederates, who'd rebelled against the United States partly to preserve their right to keep African American slaves. In the days that followed, an emboldened president Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves held in the Rebel states. Daniel Nassau's just been to the old battlefield, which is In Maryland, some 50 miles from Washington, where he saw 4,000 people dressed in period costume reenacting the events of that September day back in 1862.
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The artillery piece booms. Boom. Boom. Across the battlefield, squads of men in blue uniforms line up just yards from others, wearing gray. The sides exchange volleys of rifle and musket fire. My ears begin to ring. The air grows thick with smoke. Men fall to the ground. The spectacle is dreadful, and my heart races. The men are not really dead, of course. They're acting out the bloody and terrible battle of Antietam, of the American Civil War, for their own amusement, while hundreds of spectators look on. After an hour, the guns fall silent and a bugler plays Taps, the traditional tune sounded at dusk and at military funerals. I approach the rebel general, a steely eyed man in gray woolens accented with bright brass buttons, a forage cap cocked on his head. Brian Jesuaro is a firefighter by profession from the state of Maryland, but that was a Union state during the war, I say to him, and here you're wearing Rebel grey. Well, two of his ancestors fought for the Rebels at the real Battle of Antietam, he tells me. For him, reenactment is more of a lifestyle than a hobby. But how do he and other rebel reenactors grapple with the role of slavery in the Civil War? I ask. He bristles. Slavery has nothing to do with it, he answers. These boys in gray were out there protecting their homes, their hearths and their sweethearts. A nearby spectator overhears my question and calls out states rights. That's the familiar slogan wielded by Americans who want to whitewash the stain of slavery from the war's glory. A popular theory goes like the Southern states left the Union in a dispute about the balance of power between them and Washington the war couldn't really have been to defend slavery. Most Southerners were too poor to own slaves. Even today, conservatives invoke states rights when Washington tells them to do something they don't want to do. Only now the argument is not about whether states should ban or allow slavery, but about whether they should do as Washington says and reform their health care systems or protect an endangered species. Prominent Civil War historian David Blight of Yale University tells me the fundamental argument Americans are having now about the rights and purposes of government goes right back to the Civil War. Back on the battlefield in Maryland, I leave the rebel general and wander off toward the Reenactors campground. A group of men in Union blue sit under a large canvas tent, drinking from tin cups and from the occasional non period beer can. To hear the men explain it, Civil War reenactment offers all the fun of army life without the hardship. It's camaraderie, smart uniforms, shiny kit tent, camping under the stars. No tyrannical officers or forced marches. No disease or death. If it's all a game, I ask, how do you decide who pretends to die? The men laugh. I'm told that's a classic question from the uninitiated. If the other side fire a particularly good volley, the men answer, someone's got to drop. If you're tired from all the marching, die. Take a rest. Watch the battle from the ground. I myself am a Northerner by birth and temperament and perhaps feeling a bit smug surrounded by fellow Yankees, I ask the men whether they feel morally superior to the guys who wear gray and pretend to fight for the slave power. But they're too gentlemanly to taunt the losing side. After all, some of them had ancestors who fought for the rebels. So did I. In fact, Steve Giovannini, an engineer, answers, we're all Americans. We try to honor the memory of the men who fought for their values, whether we agree with them or not. Their struggle, Steve tells me, made our country.
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And that's Daniel Nassau. Now, what comes to mind when we think of the island on which Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked? In the book by Daniel Defoe, the answer probably is sandy beaches and palm trees, sun drenched Caribbean idyll. But Defoe drew his inspiration from a number of sources. Certainly there were swashbuckling accounts of voyages to the West Indies, but more influential was the real life story of the 18th century Scottish sailor Alexander Sell. He spent more than four years marooned alone on a tiny island in the South Pacific, 400 miles off the coast of Chile, a world Away from the Caribbean, it's called Robinson Crusoe island, in honour of the famous fictional castaway. And Gideon Long has been there to see how it measures up to the place of popular imagination.
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My first glimpse of Robinson Crusoe island came, appropriately enough, from the sea. Our Chilean military ship had been pitching through the Pacific waves for over 24 hours before we finally sighted land. And what a sight it was. Sheer cliffs plunging down into the ocean. Behind them, wooded volcanic mountains rising up into a forbidding steel gray sky. No white sand beaches and not a single palm tree. Our arrival felt like a homecoming. It seemed the entire population of the island was there to greet us. Now, admittedly, that's not saying much. Only 800 people live here, so the arrival of any ship is something of an event. There are very few commercial flights to the island and only the occasional flight with the Chilean Air Force. As I walked off the ship and stretched my legs, the first street I came to was, perhaps inevitably, Robinson Crusoe Street. The only school on the island is named after him too. Behind the one village, I followed a steep path upwards through fragrant pine plantations towards Selkirk's Lookout. According to the locals, the lone Scotsman would sit up here for hours, scouring the horizon for ships, hoping for salvation. When you read Daniel Defoe's book, it's clear that he took much of his inspiration from the Caribbean. His fictional island is covered in tobacco plants, cocoa trees and tropical hardwoods. But every now and then you come across a passage that could easily have been based on Chile. Crusoe finds grapes, foxes and even penguins on his island, suggesting a temperate, not a tropical climate. He suffers an earthquake and tsunami ever present threats in Chile. All on a sudden, I found the earth come crumbling down from the roof of my cave, Crusoe writes in his journal. The ground I stood on shook three times with three such shocks as would have overturned the strongest building that could be supposed to have stood on the earth. The very sea was put into violent motion by it, and I believe the shocks were stronger under the water than on the island. The modern day inhabitants of this place know all about that. In February 2010, this island was hit by a devastating tsunami. The waves were 20ft high. Much of the village was flattened. I met Rudy Aravena, an energetic young hotelier who told me about the night of the tsunami. He escaped by the skin of his teeth, running up into the hills just before the waves struck. Some of his relatives weren't so lucky. His grandparents and two of his young nephews drowned. We had beds for 36 tourists, plus a little supermarket. Rudi told me it all went. We lost all of it. The only thing that was left was this house, and it was largely destroyed. But the only thing in this life that can't be fixed is death. We fixed the house with willpower, with strength, Rudy showed me around his new home. On one wall, he'd carved a giant map of the island, complete with the caves and coves that once made this a vital hideout for pirates escaping with their treasure after plundering the South American mainland. There are still people who believe treasure is buried here. One American man has spent the last 18 years searching for it, so far without success. As I wandered the island's dirt tracks, I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Selkirk, living here alone for more than four years. The island is just 12 miles long. He could have rowed around it in a couple of days. He must have been astonishingly resourceful. He kept himself alive by eating fish berries and the wild goats descended from animals that were brought to the island by earlier sailors. By the time Selkirk was rescued in 1709, he must have been quite a sight. The captain of the ship that found him here described him as a man clothed in goatskins who looked wilder than the first owners of them. Selkirk hitched a ride back to London, where he became something of a celebrity. Defoe heard of his story, and it was then that he wrote Robinson Crusoe. As I pondered this 18th century story of survival, a foghorn rang out from the harbor. It was our ship, ready to leave for the Chilean mainland. I hurried down to the seafront and clambered aboard. I didn't want to miss the boat. On this remote Pacific outpost, you never know when the next one will come along.
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Gideon, long keen to avoid becoming the next Robinson Crusoe and bringing this edition to a close.