There are currently 28 states that
have casino gambling, and like a drunken man tossing down his last $20 at the roulette
table, Massachusetts is rushing pell-mell to become number 29. Here in Western
Massachusetts, depressed locales such as Holyoke, Palmer, and Springfield are
already battling for the dubious honor or further depleting resources in order
to lure a hypothetical casino to their squalid borders. I say hypothetical
because no casino has actually been
built yet, and only one in the region
stretching west of Worcester to the Berkshires will be permitted. Cities are
literally betting on red—they are going deeper into debt to toss financial
inducements to developers that might
be awarded a casino license.
I shall not delve into the morality
of casino gambling. I will say, though, that the poorest state in the Union,
Mississippi, has 15 casinos and shows no sign of pulling itself above the
Inferno's lowest rung. I understand the allure of casino gambling—it’s a lot
like the drunken man down to his last twenty. As the Massachusetts’ Lottery—a
cash cow in danger of being sent to the abattoir once casinos open—puts it,
“You have to play to win.” Cities are like dream-drunk bettors who think they
can defy the odds. After all, look what happened at Foxwoods in Connecticut.
Funny that everyone looks there, but fail to see; Foxwoods has been
hemorrhaging cash for several years and has been quietly moving resources into
non-gambling ventures. Funny that people continue to treat the post-apocalyptic
landscape of Atlantic City as an aberration rather than the rule. When Holyoke
or Springfield boosters speak of casinos as the centerpiece of urban renewal, I
wonder why they never invoke Detroit, which has three casinos and remains near the top of everyone’s “Why would I
want to go there?” list. They never visit the wastelands of St. Louis, which
opened casinos on dry land in the vain hope of raking in money that it thought
went to Illinois when riverboat gamblers drifted across the Mississippi River’s
state line.
What’s not to understand, folks? The
entire point of casino gambling is
that the house wins and the rest of us lose. Please refrain from playing the
“Casinos create jobs” card because the house is holding at 21. Go online and
check out where the nation’s 500 casinos are located. They fall into two
categories: places you’ll never be able to afford, or places you’d never want
to live. Casinos are simply the latest quick-fix straw at which
down-on-their-luck states and municipalities are grasping. When the U.S.
economy tanked in the 1970s, lots of places were sure that shopping malls were
the answer and built them at the speed at which Henry Ford once cranked out
Model-Ts. America got malled/mauled and the only discernible effect was that
inner cities declined further. Come the 1980s, it was tourism that was supposed
to rescue the economy. Golf course projects got enormous tax breaks, but we
didn’t really become a nation of duffers; we simply built lavish playgrounds
for the 1%, the ones who never stop at the local visitors’ center to pick up
brochures for the area’s historical houses, scenic delights, home-cooking
restaurants, or “unique shopping experiences.” Now it’s gambling’s turn to fuel
false hopes.
If we actually lived according to
the logic of one-fix experts, the America of the future would consist of
dividing the masses in halves. A pot of money would be set aside for allocation
to the masses. For six months of the year people would work in either the
tourist or gambling industries and collect their allocations; for the other
half of the year they would be furloughed and forced to spend their earnings at
tourist sites and casinos while the other half worked. If my remarks sound as
if I see municipal planning as a cynical shell game, that’s because I think it such. Has it not dawned on anyone that we’ve been spinning our wheels
trying to substitute a future one-industry strategy (gambling) for the failed
one-industry models of the past? (Detroit-automobiles; Holyoke-paper; Atlantic
City-conventions; Springfield-machine tools) As a student of proverbs, I know
that many of them convey timeless wisdom. Like the one that goes: Don’t put all
your eggs in one basket. Like the one that says: A fool and his money are soon
parted.
The drunken man stumbles to the
table. His hoodie says Massachusetts on the front.
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