Las Vegas Culture As Exemplified By Billboards

Las Vegas Culture As Exemplified By Billboards

I'm not sure that it's fair to judge a community by the billboards, but you do certainly get an impression of the dominant values of a society by what is important enough (and acceptable enough) to advertise. In Riverside and and East Los Angeles County, from my last trip there, the theme was topless/bottomless "gentlemen's clubs." (For a very loose definition of "gentlemen.") Yes, you see one or two billboards in Boise for that sort of thing (it being a very liberal part of Idaho), but there's no comparison of the number of those billboards between the two locations.

I was a bit surprised when I first moved to Boise how many ads there were for personal injury lawyers. In Las Vegas, gobs and gobs of lawyer billboards--but instead of personal injury lawyers, these were largely for drunk driving defense. Many of the billboards promised to defend you on DUI for $1400, or $1200--and even a cut-rate operation that was promising to do it for $700. It was not exactly an overpowering statement about the moral state of Las Vegas--or perhaps it's a statement about the number of visitors who discover that the advertising slogan, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," isn't quite true.