The
only thing less telegenic than talking-head journalists on TV is poker. A bunch
of oddball guys in trucker caps and Hard Rock tee shirts sit around a table betting on cards
with company money. Hardly a girl crosses the screen except to serve a drink.
Occasionally a celebrity wanders in to remind us that it’s still television. The
pictures are ugly. The talk is primitive. Yet the shows proliferate. The
World Series of poker. The U.S. Poker Championship. The World Poker Tour. High
Stakes Poker. Poker After Dark.
How did these guys jump the casino surveillance monitor to my TV screen?
When
I show something in the gallery that doesn’t look like art there is always an explanation
for it’s presence and so I assumed there was one for the poker on TV and it came
to me when I sat down with my wife a few months ago to review our new health
insurance options. They’re essentially a bunch of different gambles and it
dawned on me that we have become a nation of gamblers. My health plan demands
that I bet on my body’s need for treatment by opting for a low annual premium
and a high co-pay when I visit the doctor, or the opposite, high premium and
low co-pay. The low premium succeeds if I stay healthy; the high premium succeeds
if I get sick. I want to bet for
my body the way I want to root for my team. But I don’t want a financial
incentive to keep me from going to the doctor because I might deny myself
treatment when I need it. The decision process feels weird and inappropriate
and that’s why the poker champs are there, all the time, to convince us that
gambling is not just something you do late at night with a bunch of
degenerates, it’s a natural, normal, everyday activity. Welcome to the U.S.
of Hustle. We have gone from a
nation of hard workers who gambled on vacation to a nation of hard-working
gamblers who do it as vocation.
We’re
not talking here about the proliferation of fraud and ponzi schemes on Wall
Street. There will always be criminals. We’re talking about the normalization
of gambling as a way to structure and define behavior. If it’s not the extended
warranty on your digital camera or the lottery at your kid’s school, it’s the
balloon payment on your mortgage and the futures in your stock portfolio. Once
confined to one or two special locations, casinos are now common sights all
over the country. Once forbidden in sports, gambling experts are now prized on
radio and television for their powers of prediction and analysis. We use
gambling to predict elections, terrorist activity, and soon, I’m sure, the
weather. Life insurance has always been a bet on your body after death. Now,
with 21st century health care, you get to bet on your body while
it’s still alive. This may be gambling’s most devious infiltration given how
alienated we are from our flesh. The perfect beauties of fashion turn us
against our bodies and the health care industry cleans up when we don’t
treatment ourselves.
Theories
of how to succeed in poker have evolved. I have a book from the 1950s that
claims 90 percent of all success in poker lies in one’s ability to bluff. It is
that remaining 10 percent that the poker masters of today are interested in.
They use sophisticated card counting systems to try, ever so slightly, to
improve their odds, just like the mathematicians on Wall Street. Part of
poker’s charm is the way it offers a boozy window onto the mystical secrets
inherent in numbers. As if all of life’s problems could be solved if only we
could get the numbers to talk to us because numbers never lie. Far from the scoundrels
and con men they used to be, poker players are the current high priests of our
risk-centric lifestyle, even if they’re only cardboard cutouts for the real
people who control money, like the good people at AIG.
We
can thank the growing influence of right wing ideology for gambling’s
transformation into a mainstream behavior model and risk- calculation into a
lifestyle. Using numbers to gauge risk used to be the sole province of the
actuary. We were just chips in their giant game of craps. But it was their
game. We didn’t have to worry about it. Now their profession has become the
architecture of our lives and we are placing the bets ourselves.
Conservatives
say the risk model represents the most adult response to the unpredictable
nature of life. When the Bush administration came into power they kept
referring to themselves as “the adults.” However, this notion wrongly equates
adulthood with a kind of Rambo self-reliance. It confuses gambling with other
potential definitions of being an adult such as having the skill and power to
choose. For example, I choose to construct a society where I don’t have to
gamble on my health. Or, I choose to do something else with my life besides
placing one bet after another.
One
would have thought the near collapse of the risk system would have knocked us
off our gambling bender. If the Bush administration had succeeded in
privatizing social security in 2006 and allowed people to bet their safety nets
on the market, the scary recession we’re having would have been downright
bloodcurdling. Maybe one day we’ll look back and think collapse was preferable.
We could have reset everything and just started from scratch. For now, it looks
like we’re not going to leave the craps table until we’ve bottomed out and
pissed it all away. Then it will be another kind of morning in America, where
the TV stars don’t’ play poker they perform 12 step confessions.
I have a theory that the history of America is a history of the con. It's the P.T. Barnum quip, "There's a sucker born every minute," but it's also the testimony from Wall Street moguls that testifies to (a) the degree they've conned themselves, (b) their willingness to con the American taxpayer, or (c) both. An economic system predicated on never-ending expansion can't be anything but a Ponzi scheme, can it? As somebody who does not have cable (or a plugged in TV, for that matter), but who can't help but stare with mute pleasure when the one in the hotel or parent's house is tuned to some or another poker tour, I read it as I read all sports, an experience of faith--there will be winners and losers, blessed and damned, and a vicarious opportunity to become rich and famous while in the process diverting attention from anything that affects the quality of anybody's day to day life, other than some made up emotion.
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