Last weekend I was in Atlantic City to give a talk on cybersecurity and computer crimes law at the annual convention for New Jersey State Prosecutors. My wife came along so we could get away for a day.
I want to say that I don’t “get” Atlantic City. It’s the cheesiest place on the East Coast, and it doesn’t seem to possess any sense of irony about its cheese factor. In one of the shops at the Taj, there’s a classic quote stenciled on the wall from Donald Trump: “You have to think anyway, so why not think big?” Um… yeah.
All of this over-the-topness can be fun, and indeed my wife and I had a nice time walking the boardwalk, gawking at the Jersey Shore most of the world knows, only an hour down the Parkway from our beloved and peaceful vacation spot of Long Beach Island.
The layer of reality just beneath the facades of such a place, of course, can also look quite sad. There are the folks parked at the slots, many of them senior citizens, pressing the “bet” button over and over and over with glazed expression. There are the slots themselves, which are so automated that bettors don’t even need to insert quarters and pull a lever — you buy electronic credits and push a button until your credits are gone. (I did try it — $15, gone in ten minutes, and that was it). There are the young people wearing “Jen’s Bachelorette Bash 2011” T-shirts, wanting to play high-rolling let-it-ride party girls, but mostly looking tired, lost, and lame. The are legions of regular working people, black and white and Asian and Latino, who by their rumpled dress and manners seem nothing at all like the spiffy dandies flashing smoky, knowing grins towards the ad agency’s cameras in the Casino billboards along the Boardwalk.
It’s tempting to play a class card when visiting such a place. My class of person, so I’d like to think, might dip into AC once in a while just to revel in the irony of it all, but we quickly come back up to Bergen County and shower it off. But I came away feeling a solidarity with these crowds. It would be an interesting place, I said to my wife, to plant a church.
What I felt underneath the thin veneer of faux opulence was a longing for community and love. The god of the Taj is the god of this age: the god money-sex-pleasure-bling. This is a stern, impersonal god, whose promises are lies, who always, sooner or later, leaves his worshipers alone and abandoned, sacrificial victims for new generations of acolytes. At the Taj, in AC, money-sex-pleasure-bling shows himself openly. Up in Bergen, out on LBI, there are churches and families and institutions and healthy pursuits that help keep him at bay. But he is there, too, in the cracks and shadows, often flashing violently through those churches and families and institutions and pursuits, threatening to burn them to cinders. His is the kingdom dismantled by the cross and resurrection of Christ and against which the community of the Church is called to prevail.