New York Times parachutes into Vegas again to make stuff up

In the 1980s, I lived in a neighborhood in Providence, R.I., among numerous families recently immigrated from communist Russia. More than once the adult children told me of having to go rescue grandma from the supermarket, where they found her wandering around aimlessly in tears, unable to cope with the necessity of choosing among so many brightly packaged brands and sizes.

All her life, she'd waited in line in the brown snow to enter a dull gray monopoly state store, submitted her shopping list to an officious clerk, been told what they were out of (meat, fruit, fresh vegetables) and what she was actually going to get (lard, dried beans, maybe some cabbage or potatoes), and then waited in a second line to pay. There was no "choosing."

Columnist Bob Herbert of The New York Times visited Southern Nevada for a couple of days recently -- three days anywhere qualify a New Yorker to lecture the natives on anything -- and had the predictable reaction of many an inmate from the gray world of socialism when first exposed to the bright lights of relative freedom. He hated it.

Prostitution is legal in most of Nevada, Mr. Herbert reports, quaking with emotion for all the world like Billy Sunday condemning skirts so short they reveal a woman's knee. Women in Nevada's legal bordellos work for pimps who hold them in virtual slavery, Mr. Herbert "reveals." Furthermore, where prostitution is legal, there's more illegal prostitution than where prohibition persists, Mr. Herbert reports.

Glad to see the Times is still keeping its attributed, fact-based reporting up to the standard established by the redoubtable Jayson Blair.

It would be tempting to double-check Mr. Herbert's statistics, if he'd presented any. Even if he means "per capita," we're supposed to believe there's more illegal prostitution (slavery, venereal disease, battering of womenfolk, etc.) in Elko, where a miner can visit a legal bordello without fear of arrest or disease, than there is in New York, Philadelphia or Atlantic City?

Where were you more likely to get poisoned with "bathtub gin" -- at an illegal speakeasy during Prohibition, or at a modern, legal tavern or liquor store where the owner and manager are subject to legal repercussions if they sell you poison?

Where are the other guys at the table more likely to have their associates ambush you and steal your winnings after you leave a card game -- in some illegal gambling den down a dark road outside Covington, Ky. ... or amidst the bright lights of the Vegas Strip?

The pregnant and diseased 14-year-old prostitutes kept in virtual slavery, beaten up and ripped off by their pimps, are a phenomenon created by the prohibition of this ancient trade -- the inability of either whores or johns to seek legal redress for unjust treatment. If Mr. Herbert met any such creatures in Nevada's legal bordellos, we might wish he'd given us at least one name, so we could go ask what other tall tales she's been spinning for the tourists.

Perhaps she's the older sister of "Jimmy," the 8-year-old heroin addict invented by Janet Cooke of The Washington Post -- Izvestia to Jayson Blair's Pravda.

Actually, in his fine book "The Birth of Heroin and the Demonization of the Dope Fiend," Thomas Metzger reminds us that Mr. Herbert proudly continues a Times tradition far older than that:

"The allegedly common practice of female slavery in American Chinese communities was also widely discussed. The New York Times in 1905, for instance, ran the story 'Rescuing Angel of the Little Slaves of Chinatown,' complete with illustrations of beautiful 'brothel inmates' and Chinese procurers whipping them with the cat-o-nine-tails. The piece focused on the work of missionary Helen F. Clark, who 'risked the murderous threats of enraged highbinders' in 'the nether region of squalor and vice.' Sensational tales of abduction, torture and moral decay dovetail neatly with the common association of Chinese and opium use. Sentimental at times, and occasionally dumb with disbelief, the Times reporter described the plight of a young slave girl in New York's Pell street:

" 'One day Miss Clark discovered little Ah Foon, discovered her in an opium den on a hank of matting by the side of her opium-soaked mother, who was molding pills for a score of depraved Chinamen to smoke. She was only seven years old and she was used for a runner for the opium joints.' "

You'll want to read for yourself Mr. Metzger's account of "Chuck Connors, one of New York's most-quoted celebrity raconteurs," who made a living in the 1890s as a "lobby gow," or tour guide, taking groups of well-heeled slummers into Chinatown, spinning tales of depravity and sin, identifying women seen in upper-story windows as "slave wives," etc.

A full century later, Mr. Herbert pegged his updated fairy tale on the horrors of slavery in Vegas to the fact that Mayor Oscar Goodman, "a former defense lawyer for mobsters who unabashedly describes his city as an adult playground," told him that legalized bordellos would be a great boon to this town.

At least one local pundit, apparently homesick for the gray repression of the Empire State, hopped up and down and squealed with glee to see the mayor so ridiculed.

I have never been more proud to live in a town with a mayor who is not a career politician, and who has thus not lost the habit of occasionally engaging in straight talk. Does Mr. Herbert mean to imply that those accused of being "members of organized crime" do not deserve competent and aggressive legal representation? That Oscar Goodman's lifetime of experience seeing the way the law really works does not give him some enhanced credibility when he points out the fruitlessness of laws that seek to ban consensual acts including gambling, self-medication and sex for hire?

And what is the New Yorker's solution -- how does Mr. Herbert propose to "set the ladies free"? Why, he would advise us to enact laws like those of the great state of New York, where young women caught in the act of prostitution are arrested, processed through the courts, and locked away in a cell.

Freedom through incarceration! There's an idea! And will he further instruct them that, once locked away, their arbeit will macht them frei?

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I'm off now for a few weeks in the cooler climes of northern Idaho, where they've got them a silver mine and they call it Beggar's Tomb. When I return, perhaps we'll have time to turn our attention to the proudly "college-educated," such as Mount Charleston resident Steve Brittingham, who contended in a Wednesday letter to the editor of the Review-Journal that those of us who want to ride and shoot in the wilderness can be free of their quagmire of regulations merely by "purchasing land for off-road activities" (an outright lie); that "excluding vehicles" from our public lands "does not 'lock people out' since humans have colonized islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and every continent ... without motorized travel" (implying we can gather up our pigs and taro plants and set up housekeeping at any unoccupied desert spring so long as we "walk in," or perhaps arrive by canoe -- another clear falsehood); and that the BLM and Forest Service are justified in closing off our access to our own public desert roads because they're "generally user-created."

I don't know when I've ever seen it better put. From the time the first European set a boot heel on this land, up through at least the 1950s, there was no prouder statement an American could make than that he was a "self-made man" walking a "self-made road." Yet today, our self-appointed rulers from the Cult of Gaia snarl that they have every right to close any road to our use if it was "user-created."

This whole country was "user-created," bub. Washington City has far overreached itself, the time for these simpering wimps to "administer" us is running short, and I'm betting that when the time comes for them to take up arms and actually fight for the right to rule this land, they'll drop to their knees, blubber like babies and hop the first bus out of town.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the novel "The Black Arrow."