Gambling in America

...In Africa, the only road to development goes straight through the World Bank, and former revolutionaries are pleading for taxfree Western investment...

...The phrase suggests that in the present economy millions of people are bound to "lose," and evokes the image of a society badly divided between the successful and the luckless, whose fates have little or nothing to do with one another...

...Each year the Census Bureau reports that median income is going down, poverty increasing, inequality growing, the mood souring, the bones aching, until you have to ask if the flu ever lasts this long or if it isn't something worse...

...There are disproportionate numbers of smokers and also, since gambling is a leisure activity that doesn't require legs, people in wheelchairs...

...Everyone wins and loses alone...

...And at first glance gambling seems like a fair way to bring it in...

...But it also flourishes in the midst of the given, in the trade union and civil rights movements, in the small-town ethos of helping out and the big-government programs of the New Deal and Great Society...

...in the tubs of dye, junked machinery...

...In the end, take instead of taxes will deepen the alienation, making government more remote from the mass of Americans, more corrupt, less accountable, less just...

...Resisting their mental tyranny requires a constant struggle that will end mostly in failure, but a better kind of failure than losing at Foxwoods...

...it simply avoids the problem...

...Far from offering the gambler's dream of endless possibility, the contemporary market acts as a treadmill— an ordeal without relief...

...It's not just true in this country...

...Alongside the legendary dream of individual freedom and success, a second vision has run through American history, sometimes tempering or offsetting the excesses and cruelties of the first...

...instead of the Gold Rush, McJobs...

...To win is to privatize...

...It falls variously under rubrics like solidarity, this land is your land, neighborliness, and the "e pluribus unum" on all the coins and singles exchanged at Foxwoods...

...In Haiti, the radical priest has been won over to the IMF solution: austerity in exchange for loans...

...With each new hand of seven-card stud there is the familiar rhythm of a thrill rising, the thrill that accounts for my being here, the seductive pleasure of self-interested risk and eternally springing hope (for nothing, not even utopia, can take the place of how the nerves jump when I stake money and pride against you and chance, or how the blood warms when I trick you into folding your better hand, or how the vision dims when your last hole card turns out to have completed a flush...

...It's voluntary...

...he himself had lived his whole life within a few blocks of it...

...q 396 • DISSENT...

...Instead of Horatio Alger, we have the downsized middle manager...

...Before I had time to study the faces of my opponents I was cleaned out...

...When I toured it the mill had been empty for a decade, and the last owner seemed to have fled before an invading army...

...But its endurance, not as a desire but as a possibility, isn't a sure thing...

...The dealer in his faux-Indian embroidered shirt sweeps away the ante...

...This isn't to say that no one is making it the oldfashioned way, only that fewer and fewer people have the idea that it will happen to them, as if the house odds have changed...

...Only the willing contribute— no citizen is obliged by law to stand at a video poker machine and pump it full of quarters...

...it even dispenses rough justice in rewarding the blackjack player's skill and punishing the craps addict...

...But the vast majority were losing...

...I know the private pleasure of gambling, but I also know that the state as dealer won't solve the problem of Americans' notorious alienation from government...

...A trend that had been going on almost invisibly for years—and that could be said to have started in the mills of Lowell, Mass.—suddenly became clear...

...Instead of personal liberation, it confers unyielding circumstance...

...The market's victory has been more total than George Gilder or Donald Trump could have dreamed...

...Does it matter how the government collects its money...

...instead of Vegas, Foxwoods...

...Which is to say, Americans are now losing in enormous numbers...

...Instead of a compulsory tax on everyone's income, the government runs its lotteries and gets a share of the casino's take...

...The cashier in the food court told me she'd been working at Foxwoods for over a year—a long time, she added, compared to most...

...But maybe it isn't true...

...It may be that human beings need an idea of brotherhood—an aspect of our happiness may depend on it...

...Instead of the tax collector, in the old aphorism a leveler second only to death, we have the state as dealer, wearing an implacable mask of indifference to the citizen-players who happen to sit at its table, giving and taking according to the most irrational measure available, blind, mindless, responsible for nothing, just the invisible hand rolling, spinning, dealing...

...With the fourth or fifth card of most hands the thrill ebbs away...

...Nineteen-eighty-nine was the year that simultaneously gave and took away, offered hope and stifled it...

...eight hopefuls scramble for the rest...

...The world's largest, Foxwoods is the great casino of the American middle class...

...My last dollar went for the dealer's tip: as I rose he wished me good night...

...At the very moment when every other ism collapsed and capitalism was left standing alone in the dust, it trembled, as if it had needed enemies to feel self-confident...

...The state as dealer enshrines self-interest at the level of an official national trait, the way the uniformed extorter represents the state in Haiti and the mild-faced bureaucrat in Sweden...

...Nineteen-eighty-nine also began the American recession that officially ended in 1992 and by now appears to be endless...

...I'm not the only one—they're all losing too...

...Its recent disappearance has left us frightened, angry, and alone with the taskmaster market...

...Rows of spinning machines still crowded together on the pine flooring, mechanical rods connecting them to the crank shafts overhead...

...Play, not work, is going on here, and the jobs that exist— croupier, money-changer, waitress—belong to the post-industrial nonunion service economy that has taken the place of manufacturing...

...Lots of people went up these stairs," Donald SUMMER • 1995 • 393 Notebook Marchand muttered as we climbed "Thousands and thousands...

...Around the tables a laconic code prevails...

...And it doesn't go away...

...It assumes that circumstance and chance play a role in people's lives—that losing doesn't always result from poor personal decision making, and that even poor personal decision making shouldn't always be punished to the full extent of the market's law...

...I myself have trouble walking past these machines, with their lurid colors and false promises, without groping in my pocket for coins...

...Upon the market's joyless victory, the contrary idea lost all its power to persuade...

...No one knows how to make it happen, and it's dangerous to try...

...The slots room at Foxwoods seems a long way from that ghost of deindustrialization...

...The grandmothers, the old men in hats, the young men and women in sweatsuits pull levers and push buttons as fast and repetitively and with as little expression as textile workers at their looms...

...Taxes, which are so unpopular that politicians would rather gamble with high-risk securities than raise them, are one measure of a citizen's stake in the common life of a democracy...

...The replacement of taxes by take suggests a new twist in the citizen's relation to the state, one 394 • DISSENT Notebook strongly aligned with the tendency of contemporary life toward fragmentation, the rule of markets, risk over security...

...maybe in the new economy the winners can devote enough of their winnings to insulating themselves from the depredations of the losers that their lives will actually be better off in isolation...

...Economists have begun using the term "winner-take-all economics" to describe the fact that the salaries of investment bankers, software designers, and basketball players continue to rise while the wages of photocopy attendants and paramedics stagnate or fall toward the official poverty level...

...Under the purple ceiling half-globes that hide surveillance cameras, winners look nearly as grim-faced as losers...

...You don't dare get off and can't slow down, but you're apparently headed nowhere under some vague compulsion from within or without...

...In the giant slots room, just beyond the sign with an 800 number for Gamblers Anonymous, a thousand machines all seem to be spinning at the same time...

...It has sometimes expressed itself in a desire to secede from the nation's common life and set up a perfect alternative, from the nineteenth-century religious sects and the bohemian communities at the turn of the century to the communes of the sixties...

...If everyone had to exit through a door under the neon sign "Winners" or "Losers," the line at the latter would be five times longer...

...It was harder to find a good job, harder to hang on to it, harder to pay the mortgage and bills without working all the time, harder to see your spouse and children more than half an hour every evening, harder to get very sick without the whole house of cards collapsing...

...A lot of angry people...

...it's a kind of free market...

...Then at least they would stop being random individuals down on the night, and could become a community of losers, and look into one another's eyes with a shock of recognition: You too...

...voting is an option more and more people pass up...

...We had won, with our crammed supermarkets and growth stocks enjoy...

...And yet its shape almost seems un-American...

...Maybe a few were winning: at every table one or two players warily clutched stacks of chips like dogs with stolen hunks of meat...

...The first time I walked into its vast low expanse, with the ceaseless mechanical din, the people standing shoulder to shoulder at rows of machines into which they were feeding quarters by the bucketful, the room gave me a sense of déjà vu...

...The intensity of gambling leaves no room for an aphrodisiac...

...Inside, the enormous gaming rooms swarm every night of the year...

...Downstairs, amid the stale smoke, you compete against other fallible human beings instead of long odds...

...You can find yourself achy and irritable and wonder why you get tired so easily, before finally realizing that you have the flu—have had it for days...

...In the offices, boxes of time cards and filled-in production tables...

...It has none of Vegas's slick glamour or high-rolling dangers...

...I asked if it was a stressful job...

...Its vast parking lot is jammed with the vehicles of local cafeteria workers, contractors, retirees...

...I walked back upstairs in a daze, past the teepee display and the sound-and-light show of the giant Indian archer, and found myself among the blackjack and roulette tables, where dealers and croupiers kept sweeping piles of chips away from stunned-faced players...

...It stood locked in ice, its shattered windows having looked out on the Merrimack River since the beginning of industrial capitalism in the 1820s...

...So the facts of today—mutual isolation, the scramble for work, the omnipotence of money—seem like an irremediable condition...

...My guide through these five stories of cold and silent gloom was Donald Marchand, the caretaker, an aging bachelor in a corduroy baseball cap and flannel shirt buttoned over his large belly up to his throat...

...And the nations of the world have negotiated a free-trade agreement that, we are told, is our only hope for jobs and prosperity...

...It had become everyone's taslcmaster, a stonefaced dealer of highonly poker in the new winner-take-all economy...

...Well, there's a lot of people...

...And it will intensify a recent trend already strong enough to mark a break from our previous history...

...Look at that emaciated woman who just stepped up to the roulette wheel: two minutes, twenty dollars, now she's wandering away, better luck elsewhere...

...The requirement that citizens surrender some fraction of their income every year should remind us that private happiness partly depends on public institutions and a web of relations to one another whose center is the government...

...As for a larger vision of social reconstruction, it's illegitimate even to talk of it, let alone act...

...Public revenue becomes the take on millions of separate selfinterests colliding in an enormous room, the result determined by modest skill and large amounts of luck—not a bad representation of individual fates, but as a principle of collective destiny it bears some resemblance to the town in Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery," where every year a citizen whose name has been drawn is stoned to death...

...It's hard to pick out couples or families or groups of friends, as if, once through the glass doors and past the men in security jackets, those ties dissolve and everyone becomes a separate individual...

...His father and brothers had worked in the mill...

...but sometimes it begins building to a climax of mute pain or ecstasy...

...it lacks the vacationland lure of the new Mississippi riverboats...

...The collapse of communism in Europe rescued present and future millions from a false, coercive idea of brotherhood...

...This doesn't mean that no one is moved any longer by its appeals—as Orwell wrote in his essay on Dickens, "Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood"—but that most people find the idea weak, incredible, impossible...

...The last time I played, I lost more money than I'd meant to wager, on two heartbreaking hands...

...It means an ability to imagine the lives of strangers and a willingness to look out for them, a sense of collective destiny, a feeling (to use an out-of-date word) of brotherhood...

...It was like a fantastically lit-up, garish makeover of an old factory floor...

...When a payoff clatters out, the quarters get scooped up and go right back into the slots...

...Cocktail waitresses glide by, wearing feathers in their hair and skimpy buckskin costumes that ride high up their hips, but the men seem not to notice...

...The best we can expect is small mercies, individual acts of charity— and even some of those, like giving to beggars, have become suspect...

...The market won the field just when it was ceasing to SUMMER • 1995 • 395 Notebook work for more and more people...

...The victory was pyrrhic but global...

...It isn't going to happen...

...But the explosion in state lotteries, bingo halls, and casinos is mainly due to the inability of governments across the country to raise enough money the traditional way, through taxes, to keep the schools open and pick up the trash...

...In Europe, social critics are questioning the sustainability of the welfarestate model...

...It was a strange victory, the year of liberation 1989, the triumph of individual freedom over forced brotherhood and the free market over economic collectivism— victory with a taste of ashes...

...Taxes measure our willingness to acknowledge that in a sense we're all in it together...

...The chaos of public schools, the corruption of public officials, the filth of public bathrooms: the word itself suggests poverty and danger and failure...

...military service isn't compulsory...

...it isn't bleak and malodorous like Atlantic City...

...And suddenly I had the only thought that could have consoled me at that moment: All these people are losers...

...But the longer you stay, the more this vision of leisure and freedom comes to resemble compulsion and work...

...The winners go on vacation, the losers pay for Medicaid and bridge repairs...

...Gradually you discern human voices too, but they have a scattered, random sound, with no collective focus, directed not at other people but at cards and dice and other inanimate objects...

...A sense of connection is what successful people avoid...

...One cold morning in Detroit a rumor of a casino that would probably never be approved drew ten thousand job applicants...

...Jury duty almost never happens...

...In 1993 Americans spent 330 billion dollars on legal gambling—more than on books, movies, amusement arcades, and recorded music put together...

...But it wasn't very enjoyable...

...It might be resented but it was the only game in town, and still is...

...Instead of taxpayers, citizens become players, white-knuckled with selfinterest, each trying his or her luck against the others and the house...

...We rejoiced to see it reduced to rubble by sledgehammers and overrun by delirious crowds, and then we went back to our Western, free, anxious, and depressed lives...

...A good place to gauge this state of affairs is Foxwoods, the turquoise and purple casino palace that rises like Oz from a small patch of Indian land in the prosaic hills of southeastern Connecticut...

...Last year, a hundred miles north in Lowell, Massachusetts, I'd visited an abandoned yarn mill...

...I prefer the poker table to the games of chance...

...The noise never varies and never stops—the clatter of roulette wheels and click of dice and the mechanical spin and clank of slot machines...

...on the shop floors, busted crates and stacks of great empty spools...

...In some parts of the country, gambling is the only growth industry...

...The decay of this vision is the major problem of our time...