Below is the beginning phase of a painting my dad was working on a couple years ago. I wish I could post a more complete version of it, but he ended up painting over it for some reason. I might commission him to do another. My mom and dad live in northern Texas just on the border of Oklahoma whose new state motto must be “We Hit on Soft 17.” In this rural area within a several mile radius there are three casinos. Adults are adults, but there are some parts of the country where the residents that have either stayed behind or been left behind can’t handle the allure of the quick buck action that the casino offers. Yet on their backs casinos are sold as the source of new jobs, and lotteries across the country are advertised for the money they generate for state education.
When further along, this painting showed the old woman with the overlapping belly hooked up to a machine sitting beside her that looked like an oxygen tank. It could have functioned as that because most Indian casinos do still allow smoking, and they make a lot of money selling tax free cigs. But a cord from her life machine extended into the slot. The imagery is simple: points accrued from slots and the action of gambling is the oxygen – the life – feeding this woman and, thereby, many of the people who visit these casinos.
Even though he’s done some gambling there himself, I can picture my dad in the casino scoffing at these obese, diabetic, skeletal, haggard, toothless patrons. For what it’s worth, he was complaining about People of Walmart way before it turned into a website. His favorite topic of discussion there for a while was the girth of Wal Mart shoppers. He couldn’t understand how the size of people in the area had flipped so dramatically from the time he showed up in the States (1975) to today. And like many fathers or middle-aged men in general, he’s always eschewed advertising and corporations in general. I disregarded his dinner table rants because of my dad’s lack of formal education, but I’ve begun to see that he may have been on to something.
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This is what gambling looks like in the midwest or on the fringes of Las Vegas.
Is your father’s name Lucien Freud? the grandson of Sigmond Freud?
http://www.google.com/search?q=lucien+freud&hl=en&tbo=d&rlz=1C1RNNN_enUS358US467&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=UXUFUcLuIMGZyQGSxYGQDw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAA&biw=1543&bih=1021#imgrc=_wrb5u36cRG5BM%3A%3B187f2evSJ4jFTM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.antiquity.tv%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2009%252F11%252Fbenefits-supervisor-sleeping-lucian-freud.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.antiquity.tv%252Flucian-freud%252F%3B956%3B670
http://www.google.com/search?q=benefits+supervisor+sleeping&hl=en&tbo=u&rlz=1C1RNNN_enUS358US467&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=J3YFUbqHGPCGyQGmiYDABg&ved=0CDoQsAQ&biw=1543&bih=1021
I made the same realization about my father. What he lacked in education he more than made for in clarity of observation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_Supervisor_Sleeping
I admire this work. In the peak of Russian wealth, Roman Abramovich paid $33.6 m. at auction.
This is part of the money for nothing culture that was at its peak mid-00s. Casinos are fully funded by private firms, provide economic benefits thru jobs and tax revenue, and no one bats an eye. Our govt lacks creativity so much that casinos are a go to now for economic development. The casinos never provide the regional spark that they do for the economy like the Vegas strip.
I had a Professor who used to say, at least once a week, “Don’t let College get in the way of your Education”, and he meant it exactly as it seems…formal education is often stifling, rather than enlightening.
Einstein was a patent clerk and all that.
This is why I prefer horse racing.
The casinos are everywhere here. I live in a small town and there are four casinos within ten miles of my house. And they’re always adding more rooms and machines to the casinos, or they’re tearing down the smaller casinos to make way for bigger ones.
Back in the day when you went to other states and told someone you were from Oklahoma they might talk about football or country music or something like that. Now, they all ask you about the casinos and whether you’ve hit any jackpots lately…
It gets worse. Around here, they legalized these video poker machines run by the state lottery. Businesses get a license to put them in. Most of the ones I’ve seen have been in bars, but about a month ago, I stopped for gas in this little town, and they had a whole room filled with video poker machines, and women like the one in the painting sitting there pumping money into them.
As pathetic as casinos are, at least they’re someplace to go. Can you imagine waking up one morning and deciding to spend the day hanging out at a gas station, playing video poker?
Casinos are a mug’s game. At best they are revenue neutral. That is because they don’t create real wealth, the way resource extraction or farming or manufacturing creates wealth. Casinos just take money from one pocket and put it into another.
The result is that multiple local businesses suffer: the local movie theatre, local restaurants and bars, hobby shops, miniature golf courses, whatever. Much of what people used to do for entertainment shifts to the casino. And the people who cull the profits aren’t locals but generally large casino corporations or management companies (if they are Indian casinos, Indians being incapable of running them by and large).
Sure, some jobs get created, but many are also lost elsewhere. And the damage done to people’s lives is quite real. As with so much else, our grandparents were right about the dangers of gambling and wisely restricted it to a very few places. The casino boom has been yet another force of destruction in America. One more in a very, very long list.