Reprehensible Acts

I've been spending the past four days in Reno and Tahoe—I met my Dad here and we visited my brother and his fiancée to go skiing and to hang out. And though I abhor Reno and have mixed feelings about Tahoe, it was largely a great trip. But that's not going to stop me from a small sit 'n' bitch purge.

Nothing in Reno tries to be anything but exactly what it is, and that's basically the problem. The casinos are unabashedly casinos, with all the gaudy ornaments and lights and inauthentic courtesies. The suburban sprawl is unabashedly suburban sprawl, with mini-malls of Starbucks and Jo-Anns Fabrics and LA Tanning cradling all the new subdivisions and apartment complexes like mold on cheese. The class stratified housing projects and low-income neighborhoods purport to be exactly that. No effort is being made for veneers, and there appears to have been zero city planning projections. The only place in Reno that you might get trapped inside a delusion is at one of the casinos.

Which leads me to the topic at hand: Gambling is one of the most reprehensible acts ever. I saw an exhibit at the Whitney several weeks ago—I can't remember the artist but it was a concrete or marble bench with lots of "truisms" etched into it. One of the phrases was "To overeat is criminal," which has haunted me ever since. On this trip it occurred to me that the nature of overeating's criminality is exactly the same as what is morbidly wrong about legalized gambling. People shouldn't do it, and there is no way to justify it.

I repeatedly fail to understand how anyone—anyone!—can walk into one of these establishments and think that they're actually going to come out ahead. I mean, seriously: Gambling is the most basic cost-benefit-analysis equations that there ever was. Look around. For every single game that you sit down and play, the odds are against you—it's math! And if the odds aren't against you, that means you're rich. And if you're rich and you have several hundred or several thousand dollars that you don't mind just, I don't know, flushing down the toilet, and that you decide that the medium for your flushing is a goddamn casino, then you are what I call one of the Problems With Humanity. There's no excuse. You are to blame for problems in the world. (Sorry! I know that there are many of you out there that fall into this category and I probably otherwise admire many of you very much, but it's the truth. It doesn't matter if it's just "fun.") And if you are not rich and have turned to gambling with the dregs of your savings or—worse yet, the dregs of some loan that you're in a pinch to repay to WHOMEVER—and hoping for some kind of miracle cure, then you are stupid and you are a Victim of the Man and there are a lot of movies that you should watch. Because can I explain something? About the Man? The thing about the Man is that he doesn't often get beat, and especially when there is a line of complacent motherfuckers sitting next to you at the Texas Hold 'Em table who are willing to finance Him.

I know: Money and America has a fraught relationship. There are any number of topics I could sound off to, and many of which I am probably complacent to. But casinos in America are such lemming-like institutions that benefit no one but the few at the top and create very little good and manipulate people who are in very problematic situations who should know better but who unfortunately are tempted by temptation. It's like the credit card companies and banks who can calculate your inability to meet the requirements of whatever contract you just signed. The only way not to lose is not to play. So don't.