Phthursday Musings: Gambling Is Stupid and I Hate It

When I watch a ball game, I can pretty much bet on a solid one-fourth, maybe one-third, of all commercials being for sports gambling. On national broadcasts the percentage goes down a little, but still, betting, betting, betting. Prop bet this, bonus that.

The commercials aren’t enough of course: the gambling is embedded in the game itself. You turn on a playoff game and find that the odds are -135 for the third batter to get a base hit. A solid chunk of the regular programming on ESPN now seems to be about making gambling recommendations.

It is all stupid, and I hate all of it.

I fear that I am not being clear enough though. I do not hate it the way that I hate a lot of other advertisements for treating humans like a bunch of sniveling idiots, though there very much is that too.

I hate it because it is vile and predatory. But it is not just that. I hate it because it deeply cheapens things that, so help me, I truly love.

If I were commissioner of a major sport, my first action would be to decree that online gambling entities are barred from advertising at stadiums or during broadcasts. (This would probably be my only action, because the owners would immediately fire me.)

It is not just about sports, though sports are where the action is today, so to speak. It is about gambling in general. It is about the race to the bottom all over America to build more casinos out of a sense that those precious casino dollars are going somewhere else. It is about how screamingly in our faces they all are about their goddamn gambling.

There are reasons why gambling used to not be so pervasive, and those reasons were not limited to the power of the Las Vegas lobby. It should be onerous to gamble. If it’s not then it’s far too easy for people to get horribly sucked in - not that gambling addiction hasn’t been a problem for as long as there’s been gambling.

But I go beyond the more obvious evils of gambling. To me, the whole phenomenon is inextricably tied up with having a huge economy where we somehow don’t actually make anything. And if we’re being honest, sports gambling seems kind of quaint by comparison to some of the obvious financial manipulations going on, or the thorough fraud of cryptocurrency.

The ongoing political crisis we’re dealing with is part and parcel of all of this. We’ve so systematically moved away from the idea of “making an honest day’s wage” and so creepily into high crimes and misdemeanors as “normal” conduct of affairs that the current political moment not only became possible but with almost no guardrails left in place. The billionaire class is completely fleecing the general public and what they have to offer in return is the chance of hitting a three-leg parlay on the app of your choice.

Yeah, there was news in the last 24 hours which informed some of my thinking here, but no, the particulars of that news don’t matter, so I’m not going into particulars here. Six months from now everything I’ve written here will still hold true, include the sentence that there was news in the last 24 hours which informed some of my thinking.

I have no magical solution to offer here, but here’s some limited advice: Don’t just accept all of this as normal. Don’t vote for people who are content to let gambling entities run amok. Avoid patronizing places with video gambling when you’ve got alternatives. This is all empire-in-decline garbage and it doesn’t have to be this way.

That’s it. I hope you all agree with this. Gambling is stupid, and I hate it, and so should you.

Gambling used to have a certain seediness attached to it. One thing that I find frustrating is how the seediness gets cleaned up. I definitely saw this on display when I was last in Las Vegas. Seriously, it felt a lot like being in Anaheim.

I do have a philosophical take on the idea that you can’t just outright eliminate gambling any more than you can outright eliminate greed or robbery. One thing about the seediness being cleaned up though is that the thorough normalization of gambling sort of de-cultures it. For better or worse - and usually worse - gambling and other “sins” have been associated with major aspects of culture. I don’t believe in the idea that everything can be perfect and pure, that “sin” can be eliminated - and rather than outright rejecting everything associated with it, I can acknowledge that the human condition is such that good emerges from bad, and bad emerges from the decay of good, etc.

In that vein (ahem), here is your Phthursday Flag, for Reno, Nevada:

It is a very modern flag, adopted in 2018. You can read all about it here. The gold is the desert, the mountains are the mountains, the river-looking thing is the Truckee River, the silver at the bottom reflects the region’s history, and the star in the corner is the star from the arch you pass under announcing that you are in The Biggest Little City in the World.

I’ve not been to Reno, but the place fascinates me. It’s long since been usurped by Las Vegas, and yet, it’s a boom town, with over 280,000 people, more than Rockford and Peoria combined.

Reno represents something of deep cultural significance to the whole of America, I think, because it is rooted in pure extraction, and evolved to a hybrid gambling / tourism mecca, all of which is very indicative of the trajectory of the American economy over time. It’s a very remote place, except that it also isn’t - seven hours from Las Vegas, but only two and a half hours from Sacramento. Modern yet remote, sprawling yet surrounded by desert and mountains, Reno seems like an embodiment of a lot of the inherent contradictions of America… and they managed to reflect a sliver of all that in the meaning behind their flag.

I’ve shared this before and I’m sharing it again because this performance is so awesome. Before he was The Gambler, and before he was dabbling in Yacht Rock, Kenny Rogers was fronting the First Edition, weaving a wild psychedelic take on Mickey Newbury’s “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)”:

Maybe you might have bet that I would share that again, but would you have bet that I would also share a video of Mickey Newbury himself singing it?

No, you would not have.

And with that I know this post boosted the spirits of at least one subscriber!

It’s a real stretch to come up with anything else positive I can associate with gambling, but here anyway is Oscar Gamble’s 1975 Topps card:

His best season was probably 1977, his lone season on the South Side, complete with the most ridiculous uniforms Bill Veeck could conjure, but alas he was there such a short time there was never an official card issued of him in a White Sox uniform. I go with the ‘75 because of the Smartie-pop color scheme, the particular state of the mustache, and the seeming impossibility of the hat.

Oscar Gamble was also known as “Ratio Man”, which is one of the truly greatest nicknames of all time… all the better since he gave it to himself. The man could rake when they let him bat!

I refuse to make something stupid with AI for a closing image, so instead I tried a roll of the dice and searched for “gambling porcupine”, and what I got was this baby porcupine eating a carrot. Works for me. Good night, I hate gambling.