Friday, December 23, 2005

’Tis the Season

This is the season for miracles, so what better time to try my luck at a colorful array of Hoosier Lottery scratch-off games. So I bought one chance on each of the $1 and $2 scratch-offs available at my local mini-mart, doling out $27 in cash for the stack of them. These are “games” in the most minimal sense. With the exception of a few crossword and bingo games, if you can match two numbers or symbols, the only other skill required is in the wrist action of scratching off the crumbly gray overlay concealing the figures. I’d recommend using a lucky penny for this task.

I didn’t bother to scrutinize the cards at the store, let alone stand at the counter and commence to scratching, as I’ve seen done before: grown men scratching off the promising little images while mumbling a mantra, “Come on, gimme, gimme, gimme.” I didn’t want my bad luck displayed publicly. It seemed a bad enough sign that when the clerk handed me the cards and told me “Good luck,” his tone suggested that he was only barely suppressing the word “sucker!”

The Hoosier Lottery Website advertises a total of 46 scratch-off games. Several are more expensive than the ones I chose, but a $20 bet on bad odds was a gamble for a man more desperately in need of a miracle than I. All of the games are thematic, and three of the ones I played have Christmas themes. In one called “Holiday Cash,” you match your ten numbers, which are hidden under Christmas tree images, with the winning numbers, concealed beneath two red Christmas light bulbs. Another is called “Bah Humbucks.” Under that title is the phrase, “Win like the Dickens!” I catch the allusion to the beloved author of A Christmas Carol, but I’m not sure what the phrase is supposed to mean in this context, since “the dickens” most immediately refers to the devil. A laughing figure of Mr. Scrooge decorates the background, leaving unanswered the question of whether you’ve gotten the happy Scrooge or, as clearly happened to me, the stingy, unconverted Scrooge who laughs at your misfortune.

The third is my favorite, called “Candy Cane Cash.” I appreciate the simple equation between money and candy. Candy is a child’s money, and there’s something childish about money, too. The small red-and-white striped card pretends to be a gift label, with impossibly small blanks, “to” and “from,” for the names of giver and receiver. In this case, I’m pleased to announce, the state of Indiana was going to be the giver of two dollars to yours truly, which was precisely twice what I paid for the ticket.

Now I was catching a bit of that Christmas spirit. I had thirteen game cards to go—untold riches yet to win from games called “Gold Fever,” “Silver and Gold,” “Sapphire Blue 7s,” “7 Times Lucky,” “Red Hot Fives,” “Fortune Cookie,” and “Super Bonus Bingo.” Every image shouted excitement of the carnival coin-toss variety.

Soon I was caught up in what has become something like a state religion. The government rarely bothers to promise to work for steady improvement in the lives of citizens, but almost every state holds out the promise of enormous riches in order precisely to raise money to keep the government running. The lottery system returns us to an ancient, pre-Christian way of negotiating social justice—something akin to oracles and the sudden inexplicable acts of kings who are also gods, sometimes merciful, sometimes cruel, and never answerable. As I was scratching off the cards to reveal secret numbers, I was also paying my tribute to the local tyrant, from whom I was praying for a miracle. If I were poorer than I am, it would be as though I were praying for a release from the masterless system of slavery that governs the low-wage economy, and I would be praying for my individual release, a personal favor, wishing merely to escape the common fate.

This is a step backwards from modern concepts of community, communal action, class consciousness, and social progressivism. The lottery is designed not only to skim illicit tax revenues from the funds of the struggling classes, but also to teach them to believe in narrowly personal miracles and to persuade all of us to abandon the hard work of caring for one another, which traditionally characterizes the spirit of this season in the modern era, the spirit Charles Dickens celebrates.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on December 23, 2005
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