The Growlery (August 2003) Essays by Michael Gilleland "Sit down, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce. "This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here." Charles Dickens, Bleak House, chapter VIII
Gambling Patriotic Songs How to Do Things Most Recent Essays Archives

Gambling

William Bennett, author of The Book of Virtues and former Secretary of Education, is a high-rolling gambler. He supposedly lost as much as eight million dollars at casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas over the past ten years. This revelation has provoked a lot of predictable moral outrage, excoriation, and at least one good pun -- Joshua Green called Bennett the "Bookie of Virtue."

The Bible doesn't mention gambling specifically. Those who want to find a Biblical sanction against gambling are forced to rely on more general scriptural condemnations of greed (e.g. 1 Timothy 6:10: "The love of money is the root of all evils") and laziness (e.g. 2 Thessalonians 3:10: "If any one will not work, let him not eat").

Even if Bennett's habit doesn't directly violate any Biblical norms, he's surely sinning against the ancient Greek virtue of moderation. The Greeks carved the words "Nothing in excess" (meden agan) into stone at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Eight million dollars is a bit excessive. But maybe to Bennett (who charges $50,000 per speech) it's mere chicken feed. Mahatma Gandhi compiled his own catalogue of deadly sins. At the top of his list is "wealth without work," which seems to be the chief goal of gamblers and stock market speculators.

I've never bought a lottery ticket in my life, and I wouldn't know what to do with a pull-tab if you gave me one. Once a year I go to a bingo fund-raiser at church. That's the extent of my gambling. If it's a sin, it's one that doesn't strongly tempt me. When I read about a gambler in a novel (like Little Nell's grandfather in Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop) or encounter one in real life, it's with little sympathy or understanding of what makes him tick.

One good thing about gambling is that it has led to advances in mathematics. In 1654 a gambler named the Chevalier de Mere asked Pascal how the stakes should be divided if a game of chance was interrupted prematurely. Pascal's correspondence with Fermat on the question is a milestone in the serious study of that branch of mathematics known as probability. Probability is one of the least intuitive or obvious branches of mathematics, and a simply-phrased question can sometimes lead even professionals astray.

Durango Bill (aka Bill Butler) has analyzed the odds of many popular games. He shows that the probability of a single Powerball ticket holding the winning numbers is 1 in 120,526,770 (say one in a hundred twenty million). Let's compare that to the probability of some other events.

• Aviation safety expert Arnold Barnett of MIT looked at airplane crash records for the decade from 1987 to 1996 and concluded that the death risk on "First World" airlines over that period was one in eight million. As he put it, you could likely fly once a day for 21,000 years before you died in a crash. But it's still much more likely that you'll perish in an aviation accident than that Powerball will make you rich.
• There's a 62% chance that a major earthquake will hit the San Francisco Bay area sometime in the next thirty years, according to a United States Geological Survey report. That's better than 1 in 2 odds. A gambler who consistently faced those odds would beat the house.
• The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's web site has a concise table of severe weather fatalities since 1940. In 2000 there were 51 deaths by lightning. The population of the United States according to the 2000 census was 281,421,906. If you lived in the United States in 2000, your chances of being struck dead by lightning that year were roughly one in five million, a lot more likely than winning the Powerball.

So even if gambling's not a sin, its popularity is at least a symptom of widespread mathematical ignorance, especially about probability. I don't know how many times I've heard people say, almost as if they're bragging, "I've never been any good at math." If it's true, they should conceal the fact as a shameful secret, not parade it as a badge of honor. You seldom hear anyone blithely admit, "I've never been any good at reading."

Dartmouth College's Chance News is excellent reading for the layman interested in probability. In the most recent issue there's a fine article by Brian Hayes on the notorious 2002 election in Comal County, Texas. The election is suspect because, in three separate races, the number of Republican votes totalled 18,181. Hayes concludes that the odds against a coincidence like this are 2500 to 1. By the way, if "a" is 1 and "b" is 2, then 18181 18181 18181 is "ahaha ahaha ahaha". Is that a coincidence? Who's laughing?

I'm no political economist, but the increasingly widepread reliance on revenues from gambling as a way to fund public projects smells like a bad idea to me. There's a long history of it in the United States. Even before there were any United States, Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography, chapter 42) proposed a lottery to defend Philadelphia against Frenchmen and Indians, and starting in 1776 the Continental Congress authorized a lottery to help defray military expenditures in the war for independence from Britain (photos of some of the tickets can be seen here).

But those were extraordinary lotteries for unforeseen circumstances. Nowadays government lotteries are an accepted fact of life.

Patriotic Songs

One place in the world where there's a veritable flowering of patriotic songs these days is North Korea. Some representative titles are:

• No Motherland without You
• Pledge Made Looking up to Jong Il Peak
• Reunification Rainbow
• Long Trip for Army-Based Leadership
• The Song of the Dear Comrade Kim Jong Il

We don't need to look so far afield to find this musical genre flourishing. The United States Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, in addition to his other talents, is an prolific composer and performer of patriotic ditties. There's an entire web site devoted to his music, where you can hear the Senator singing such songs as:

• Freedom's Light
• Morning Breaks on Arlington
• Everyday Heroes
• America Rocks!

But if patriotic sentiment is wanted,
I've patriotic ballads cut and dried...

There's no accounting for tastes, however, and I have to confess that the Senator's effusions leave my heart unmoved. Ditto for Attorney General John Ashcroft's hit patriotic song Let the Eagle Soar.

A political song isn't necessarily the same as a patriotic song. Glasgow Caledonian University is the home of a Centre for Political Song, which claims to be "free from any political bias in its collecting," but their selection of modern-day political songs is definitely left-leaning.

I personally prefer old-fashioned patriotic songs with a martial flavor. One of my favorites is "Chester," by American composer William Billings (1746-1800), popular during the American Revolutionary War. The tune is stirring, and the lyrics rousing:

Let tyrants shake their iron rods,
And Slav'ry clank her galling chains.
We fear them not, we trust in God.
New England's God forever reigns.

Howe and Burgoyne and Clinton, too,
With Prescott and Cornwallis joined,
Together plot our overthrow,
In one infernal league combined.

When God inspired us for the fight,
Their ranks were broke, their lines were forced,
Their ships were shattered in our sight,
Or swiftly driven from our coast.

The foe comes on with haughty stride,
Our troops advance with martial noise;
Their vet'rans flee before our youth,
And gen'rals yield to beardless boys.

What grateful off'ring shall we bring,
What shall we render to the Lord?
Loud hallelujahs let us sing,
And praise his name on ev'ry chord!

The United States didn't have a national anthem until 1931, when Herbert Hoover signed an act making the Star-Spangled Banner (words by Francis Scott Key, melody by John Stafford Smith) our official national tune. Maryland congressman J. Charles Linthicum first introduced the bill in 1918, at the instigation of Baltimore socialite Mrs. Reuben Ross Holloway, famous for her foot-high hats.

Everyone knows that the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner is hard to sing, mostly because of its unusually wide vocal range. If you want to hear just how horribly it can be mangled, check out the cacophonous rendition by so-called celebrity Roseanne Barr, performed at a San Diego Padres/Cincinnati Reds baseball game on July 25, 1990. Another gaffe occurred when baritone Robert Goulet tried to sing the Star-Spangled Banner at the Clay-Liston fight in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965. He forgot the words and ended up humming the tune.

You seldom hear all four stanzas of the Star-Spangled Banner, although the first stanza ends in a question, and you really have to read the rest of Francis Scott Key's poem (originally entitled The Defense of Fort McHenry) to find out the answer to the question.

"Popular" singers murder the Star-Spangled Banner with their scoops, quaverings, twangs, and other ill-advised ornaments to such a degree that it's a relief on occasion to hear a town band play the tune straight, without any singing at all. I had the pleasure of hearing the Brewer, Maine, town band open their outdoor concert on August 7, 2003, with a straightforward performance of the national anthem. They were even better than when I used to play with them many years ago, although I didn't recognize any faces among the current band members. Here's a photo, nearly a century old, of the Brewer town band -- don't ask which one I am!

Proposals are sometimes made to replace our national anthem with something kinder and gentler. America the Beautiful or God Bless America are the usual candidates. Former Indiana congressman Andrew Jacobs more than once proposed a bill to make America the Beautiful the national anthem, but God didn't shed His grace on Jacob's proposal. Some even suggest Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land, but the final stanza might make some squirm:

In the squares of the city -- In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office -- I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

How to Do Things

An electrical blackout hit the eastern part of the United States and Canada a couple of days ago. In the midst of all the finger-pointing and proposals to repair the system so that a calamity like this doesn't happen again, it's salutary to reflect just how fragile our modern life is, how completely dependent on complex technology.

My wife has an old book published by the Farm Journal in 1919 entitled How to Do Things. Among the things it tells how to do are shear sheep, castrate colts, caponize cockerels, skin, stretch, and dry pelts, make a septic tank, tie corn shocks, build a chicken coop, tether a cow, etc. Although rural electrification was proceeding apace in 1919, there's hardly any discussion of it in the book, except for a couple of pages with the optimistic heading "The New Farm Helper -- Electricity." Here's an excerpt from that section (p. 248):

There is a strong appeal in the possibility of electricity to the farmer and to those who labor with him. They have been accustomed to accomplish things by the outlay of actual strength, by toil that tries the muscles and oftentimes oppresses the spirit. To be able to accomplish the tasks merely by turning a switch and then watching the mysterious electrical force go ahead and do that task silently, tirelessly, efficiently and well, has a fascination for the farmer just the same as it has for the man in any other line of business who realizes that there is a benefit to him in letting a machine do all the work that does not have to be done by hand.

Even a decade after the publication of How to Do Things, there were many farms still without electricity. In my aunt's memories of life on an Arkansas farm during the Depression, there's mention of kerosene lamps, but not of electricity.

I suspect that the future of the human race will be something like that depicted in Mel Gibson's Mad Max movies. When those days come, and the Internet is defunct, an old copy of the Farm Journal's How to Do Things may be a more prized and valued possession than the rusting metal carcass of a personal computer. The Luddites who still know how to do by hand the things that matter may survive better than the technocrats suddenly at a total loss without their vital electricity.