Author: TheGentlemanAtLarge

Gambling on Children

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Gambling is a funny thing. Like any good vice it’s a thing we all kind of do from time to time, but savor in sanctimonious condescension over those who go too far. And like any good vice it’s dubiously legal, and the rules don’t really make sense.

You can gamble on some Indian Reservations, and in Nevada, but not on the internet. Well, that’s unless you’re in a bar, where you can play video poker but not live poker (except for sometimes) and Black Jack is a definite no-no. Keno is a demon to be feared, but Bingo? Bingo is fine.

You can bet on dogs, and horses, and horses with little humans on top, and horses with little people in little carts behind them, but not on people who do the running themselves. You can’t bet on football, unless it’s fantasy football, which is still really just football.

But one thing we’re all pretty much on the same page about is gambling on children. That’s off limits. Betting on a kids’ t-ball game, or a swim meet, or spelling bee, or whatever, stands out pretty clearly as rock bottom for a gambling problem.

It stands to reason, then, that collegiate sports should probably fall into that same category as betting on pee-wee hockey. After all, the vast majority of NCAA athletes will never compete professionally. In very competitive sports, like basketball, the best players on the best teams are drafted to the NBA after a single season of collegiate play. These young phenoms are 17 and 18 years old – literally children. Gambling on children, even exceptionally talented ones, can’t be morally tenable, right?

But then, doesn’t everyone gamble on children when they’re their own? Isn’t that what designer Montessori schools and college savings accounts are? $10,000 sleepaway camps and the Little League World Series scouting trips? A gamble that the child will blossom and flourish into an adult of means and love enough to care for infirm parents?

Isn’t a week away from the office (oh, the opportunity cost!) for a family hike in the Shawangunks a gamble that the child will learn to love the natural world, or a bit of self-sufficiency, or at the very least to appreciate those high thread count bed sheets back at home?

What decision over the life and rearing of a child is not a gamble? And who are we, as a culture, to say that we can bet on the lives of our own progeny and not the athletic performance of others? It’s a travesty. A nanny-state run wild. If it’s fair game to send your kid to Harvard Business Summer Camp and pump them full of performance enhancing drugs to crush me in life, it’s hard to concede that I should not be able to place one little bet on one little basketball game for a few days in March.

Categorizing the NCAA basketball tournament as off limits to gambling is ludicrous. On what grounds can that argument be made? That the NCAA is a non-profit? That somehow the event is all about sport, and nothing about the money? That’s outrageous. The NCAA is as much a cartel as the Sinaloa or the IOC. Any argument against gambling on the March Madness tournament boils essentially down to the fact that the NCAA can’t control it, and therefore can’t profit from it.

I say let the floodgates go. Sure, we can still draw a line at bookmaking on AYSO games, but let’s stop pretending that gambling on basketball, or on children, is taboo.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

 

 

I’m Done with Water

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

It’s usually around this time of year, when the daylight creeps later into the evening and the birds dare to spend their mornings chirping, that it occurs to me that I have not had a glass of water in months. I’ve heard stories about how “you really do need to drink water in the winter” and “just because it’s cold doesn’t mean you can’t be dehydrated,” but I’m not sure I buy it. In the cold, dark months I find no problem or decreased vigor by hydrating almost entirely with coffee, cocoa, and beer. It works. It’s European.

Outside of the United States our infatuation with drinking water is scoffed at. At any restaurant in France, or Mexico, or Argentina a drink of water must be specifically requested, usually to the response, “¿sin o con gas?” Still or carbonated? It will invariably come in a bottle.

Of course the Europeans know that the purpose of a meal is to be enjoyed, and for the flavors, textures of the food and drink to come together and transcend the sum of their parts. Nothing is less inspiring to the palette than a tall glass of tap water and fist full of misshapen ice cubes. A meal is to be savored. Drinking water is a chore to be done out of obligation and a sense of “adulthood,” like making the bed or brushing your teeth.

And so this is why I am inspired by our government, for following the European lead and swearing off water all together. The current administration’s latest move to undermine our nation’s drinking water should inspire state and local governments to stop wasting money on “compliance” and “monitoring” and drill, baby, drill.

So excited to finally be done drinking water.

By fast tracking the Keystone XL Pipeline in spite of leaks and damage to the current Keystone Pipeline, allowing coal mines to dump ash in streams for disposal, and doubling down on hydraulic fracturing on public land, we’re right on track to catch up with visionaries across the pond. The leaders in Cape Town, SA have already renounced drinking water all together, effective in the next few weeks, and serve as a model for the rest of us.

The champions in Flint, Michigan have been pioneers in our new way of life right here on American soil. They’ve gone so far as to declare a state of emergency to get people off the stuff. Let them drink Coke, I say. Water is for the old ways. It doesn’t even have electrolytes.

Together, under this leadership we can all achieve a post water reality. We can bring back coal jobs just in time for them to be done by robots. We can drill in the arctic just in time for consumer vehicles to abandon the internal combustion engine. And we can reinvest in hydrofrakking and finally let the world know that we really mean it when we order an agua con gas.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

Resist the Militarization of Civil Society

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

In 2018, in the United States, large scale acts of violence in places like schools, shopping malls, and nightclubs are more or less commonplace. In the wake of attacks like these the outpourings of thoughts, prayers, and ultimately useless calls for meaningful change are predictable, choreographed affairs that tend to run their course in a week or two (except, of course, for people personally affected by the violence, who will live with it for the rest of their lives).

But in the aftermath of the most recent school shooting things feel somehow different. It’s unclear whether this attack resonates because of the response of the surviving victims, who have organized to hold elected representatives accountable, or whether it is that the concept of a person walking into a school and shooting 32 people is no longer a vague, hypothetical bogeyman for a majority of parents, families, etc.

Even so, the fact remains that the Parkland shooting was a whole two weeks ago and we’re still talking about gun violence and reform. Holy cow. Even with the Olympics on we’ve managed to stay focused. This may truly be a new day.

Of course the arguments and solutions for attacks like this are forming generally (but not entirely) along party lines: the left tends to get worked up about pistol grips and magazine capacity, and the right reverts to empty platitudes about “mental health” (which as far as I can tell means incarceration), and meticulously rehearsed daydreams in which they shoot a bad guy with the .380 hidden in their ass. No mainstream narrative really seems to capture the essence of the issue: that gun violence only correlates with gun ownership per capita, and does so strongly.

In classic American fashion, we neglect the evidence in favor of the narrative, and so our conversations gravitate toward dramatic, horrifying events like Parkland, Orlando, Las Vegas, et cetera, ad nauseum.

But in spite of a tidy, mostly partisan divide on how best to address these attacks, the actual policy responses have been much more consensus based. As a society confronted with adversity we lean toward militarizing our civil establishments.

Fallout of the Ferguson, MO protests shone a spotlight on the military’s 1033 Program, which allowed/compelled the pentagon to funnel surplus equipment to local law enforcement agencies. When you saw photos of unarmed demonstrators facing local police officers clad in body armor and brandishing assault weapons from armored vehicles, you saw the effects of the 1033 Program.

The 1033 Program was limited by President Obama and expanded under the current administration. However, it was established in its current form by President Clinton in 1997, and enjoyed relative obscurity until recent displays of authoritarianism.

Now, some parties seem to be seriously suggesting that filling schools with guns is a solution for violence in those schools. Unfortunately, this premise has been in play for decades, as colleges and school districts have taken advantage of Pentagon incentives to equip tactical response units. As early as 2001, school districts in California have used the 1033 Program to purchase mine-resistant armored vehicles, assault rifles, and grenade launchers. A school district in Texas funds its own SWAT team. The unapologetically abusive Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is currently pursuing access to unaccountable, warrantless surveillance programs.

Repeatedly, when confronted with a narrative of danger, we respond with an appeal to militarize our civil institutions.

From our borders, to our local police, to our colleges, to our elementary schools, we have seen a bipartisan effort to place military weapons and tactics in our communities. We have seen a willingness deploy those weapons and tactics in the face of dissent. In order to maintain the civil society that we apparently take for granted, it is essential that we resist this instinctive draw toward military control.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

Screw It. Let’s Just Have The Hunger Games.

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Hot damn the Olympics are here and I, for one, am excited. You know the Olympics. It’s that biennial tradition when you gather around the television during Prime Time to pretend you care about swimming, or that you know the difference between figure skating and ice dancing, and eventually you probably just smoke a bunch of weed and watch curling for, like, hours.

You wake up at three o’clock in the damn morning to watch that nordic skier you have a crush on, or an early-bracket hockey game between warring nations that you think might be extra spicy. You know someone who is competing (or at least you know someone who knows someone [well really what happened was your sister’s boyfriend’s cousin made it to the Trials but got food poisoning and anyway she was on the long list so there).

You seize on a story of human grit and inspiration that resonates with you, like the US snowboarder who seeded in last, slept through his alarm, lost his coat, and then showed up to win maybe the most flustered Gold Medal of the games just in time to drop the F-Bomb on NBC. You know, heroes.

It’s the Olympics, that ancient celebration of pure sport, where amateur athleticism is prized above profits and professionalism. It is as much about the ceremony and pageantry as it is about the competition itself. But while the Olympics are, at some level, an opportunity for the entire planet to get together, hold hands, and sing Koombaya, we would be remiss not to remember that it is ultimately a festival of competition.

The Russians have not forgotten. Even after Russia was banned from this Olympics as a nation, hundreds of Russian Athletes managed to petition their way to the games, only to find that one of their curlers just got popped. For Doping. In Olympic Curling. Let that sink in.

And so I propose that we consider the nature of sport. All games, competitions, matches, at some level attempt to emulate the original struggle of life against death. The very purpose of sports is to define a framework of rules by which to define a winner somewhere before one of the contestants has died. But I propose that the nanny state constructed by the IOC has gone too far.

The Games have already embraced every variety of martial arts, from Karate, to Judo, to Tai Kwan Do. Wrestling was the original Olympic sport. Biathlon actually began as Military Trials, and included much more complex challenges than biathletes see today. The Olympic Commission introduces new sports at every Games, and it’s time to have a Hunger Games.

The rules would be simple. Set competitors on a small island with good closed circuit television (Alcatraz would do), and watch while they battle to the death on live TV*. The Olympics are a celebration of amateurism, of course, and so no active military service members or veterans should admitted. Youth and natural athleticism should be prized – and in order to ensure that no households are left without patriarchs and matriarchs, I suppose we should limit participants at, say, 19 years of age. Face it: you would watch.

It’s time for competition to return to its roots, and there’s no better venue than the Olympics to introduce the Hunger Games. The pageantry and production value are already in place, we need only to find competitors.

In fact, the only real issue I can see is that most countries on earth have more or less decided that they value the lives of their children. So far I guess it’s pretty much just the United States that cherishes the amusement of aging white men over the futures of its youth, and we may find that it’s hard to find nations to compete in the first few years.

The GREAT Olympic Hunger Games may need to begin as the GREAT American Hunger Games, with each of the 50 states submitting a competitor. That’s ok, this is going to be a hit, and once they see the ratings I’m sure all those European ninnies will clamber to get on board. It’s time to make competition competition again, let’s do it with the only rule that counts.

 

*It would probably need a short delay in case there was any cursing or nudity, that would be inappropriate for family audiences.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

Spacemen

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

It was dark in the boy’s room and, as sometimes happens with children of his age, he was afraid. In the daytime his second floor bedroom looked out across a swingset and a little pond where ducks sometimes landed and a few acres of sugarcane and beans before the briary swamp consumed the short hills and swales just past the pump house by the fence.

In the daytime he crawled through the brambles and played Nazis-and-good-guys. He made rifles from broken off branches and stormed Normandy Beach and sometimes when he was bored of war went fishing for bluegills in the little pond. His mother called for him, eventually, to come in, to wash up, to eat supper, and when the sun went down they sat together on the couch to watch movies.

His father sat in an easy chair in the corner and picked through a small cup of pistachios and almonds and licked beer from his mustache and the boy sprawled across the couch in a cocoon of old fleece blankets, his head on his mother’s lap. Wide eyed, together, they caught up on the classics. The Hitchcocks, the Lugosis, the grainy black-and-whites from when the moon was just beyond our fingertips and spacemen were maybe just real enough to scare. They watched a story from a faraway place each night and went upstairs to bed.

And in the darkness the boy’s window didn’t overlook anything at all. Across the marshes there were no streetlights. On moonless nights the blanket of mist that crept across the pond could not be seen. Through his window at night it was wholly dark except for the distant stars and planets and spacemen and monsters. Like is normal for a boy he was afraid.

His father heard him cry sometimes and sat with him in bed. What’s wrong, his father asked, and the boy told him that he was afraid of spacemen coming for him. Of taking him away from the little wooden house and the thickety woods and the pond, from his mother and his father.

The boy asked if his father was afraid, and he said that he was not. He said that as far as he has heard the spacemen never steal a person. They always ask, invite a person to go with them to space. He said that if the spacemen come it won’t be scary. The boy listened and thought for a while.

He asked his father if the spacemen came for him, would he go. The older man thought and said finally that he would. To fly through the stars and the planets? To experience the universe? To see things no human ever has or will again? Fuck yeah, he would go, he said after thinking for a moment with his words. How could he not?

At a fire by the pond the boy told us the story and we laughed. He sipped his beer and drew from a cigarette, and his face settled into the creases of an easy smile. You know of course the spacemen never came. The boy’s father came back from the shed with more wood for the fire and we saw him there and laughed again, and the boy’s smile loosened and it could have been the smoke but his eyes were a little bit wet.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail