August Wilson:"America is a Giant Slot Machine"

August Wilson:"America is a Giant Slot Machine"

The playwright August Wilson got it right when he had Old Joe Barlow say in Radio Golf, "America is a Giant Slot Machine. You walk up and put in your coin and it spits it back out. You look at your coin. You think maybe it's a Canadian quarter. It's the only coin you got. If this coin ain't no good then you out of luck. You look at it and sure enough it's an American quarter. But it don't spend for you. It spend for everybody else but it don't spend for you. The machine spits it right back out" (August Wilson, Radio Golf, New York: Theater Communications Group, 2007, page 21).

August Wilson completed this play just before he died of cancer in 2005. By that time, casino gambling was just about everywhere and still expanding despite signs that the economy was sinking. We were and continue to be encouraged by our elected officials to put our coins into machines that don't give us anything back in real goods and services, even as Las Vegas, the gambling mecca of the United States, proves that economic recovery based on gambling is doomed to fail in the long run.

According to an article in the Sunday, October 3, 2010 edition of The New York Times, casino revenues in Las Vegas is at its lowest since the 1940, resulting in record job losses (unemployment in Nevada is 14. 4 percent, the highest in the country), home foreclosures and all the other problems that go with a sinking economy.

Yet despite this latest example of how gambling does not bring economic development, the expansion of casinos continues. The latest state to get into the game is Maryland. During a press conference celebrating the September, 2010, opening of the Hollywood Casino, the state's governor, Martin O'Malley, remarked that after about four years of political fighting, the state can now keep its revenues at home. People will not go elsewhere to gamble. What he didn't say was there there will be tremendous social costs associated with slot machine gambling.

Take a look at who was sitting at the slot machines during the casino's opening week. These people are hardly high rollers. They're ordinary, hard working women and men who aren't looking particularly happy as they try and make the machines give them some money. Many of them will become addicted to slot machines, as I once was. Hopefully, they will be able to extricate themselves, as I did, before they lose everything they've worked for.

As I go around talking about my memoir, Confessions of a Slot Machine Queen, I'm often asked: You have a Ph.D.; you're supposed to be very intelligent; you're supposed to know better, so how did you let this happen?"

Implicit in this question is that it's okay for people who don't have Ph.D's to be fleeced, but not me. I should know better. So should the people, like Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, who are encouraging us to gamble our lives away. I wonder how much time and money he's going to spend sitting in front of slot machines.

Sandra Adell, author: Confessions of a Slot Machine Queen: A Memoir.