BILOXI, Miss. —
All of us are gamblers, whether we admit it or not. If we put money in the stock market, or drive a car on roads overrun with texting fools, or even get out of bed and go outside, we are gambling, if not with our money with our lives.
And yet there’s something altogether different and desperate about the casinos and the fast rate at which ordinary people will push money into machines in the hope of making more. A suspension of disbelief, I’d call it.
I never can figure out the appeal, exactly. I love the Mississippi coast, always have, one of the best kept secrets in the South. Even post-Katrina, it’s an unofficial architectural museum, a laid-back anecdote to the high-rise clutter of Florida beaches, where you have to check into a hotel or condo to see the water.
But the casinos that thrive where the working shrimp boats used to dock are a mystery to me. I’m clueless, as the kids would say.
There is no glamour, once you pass the fancy shops and live flowers in the lobby of a hotel that wears the casino name. Patrons wear blue jeans and tennis shorts and maybe even their idea of what one should wear to a casino, but the amalgamation is decidedly unglamorous, like old Mardi Gras beads strewn in a kitchen junk drawer.
There is no view of the ocean, lest you be distracted from gambling. There is no raucous laughter or convivial air; gambling is a solitary sport.
Coast casinos are not one-size-fits-all. There are smoke-free casinos for the sensitive, military and senior discounts at some of the restaurants, a Jimmy Buffett casino for Parrotheads. The casinos work at it, whatever “it” is.
You might say you come here for the cheap buffet, or the shops, or a show, but I’m betting you’ll gamble just a little. Just enough to pay for the evening at the restaurant, the shops or the show. If that doesn’t work out, you say you paid for the fun. As that “man of virtues” William Bennett once told us, not everyone is betting the milk money.
I check my watch and feed the quarter slot $20. It takes three minutes for the hungry machine to finish it off. It would take a minimum-wage worker nearly three hours to earn it.
I sound like a scold whenever I talk about gambling. But having grown up with Depression-era parents and grandparents, I’m more incredulous than disapproving.
My grandmother would wash and reuse tin foil until it was soft and wrinkled. Now, two generations later, grandmothers are rolling in behind their walkers to push their Social Security checks into the clattering slot machines.
I’ve wasted more money in my life than I care to recall. I’ve bought more useless bric-a-brac than a Dollar Tree store, more clothing in a year than my grandmother owned in her entire life. And boats — those holes in the water into which you throw money —have seduced me since I could float in a miniature boat in a circle at the state fair.
But when I’ve spent money — carelessly, unwisely, impulsively — there’s most always been something in a bag or on a trailer to haul home.
(To find out more about Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com)
Opinion
Something to haul home
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Opinion Headlines
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
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