Jonathan Last has written a piece about the expansion of gambling in America. As gambling has expanded in America, the attitude toward it has evolved from one of sin to vice to guilty pleasure.
Last writes, Over the past 50 years, gambling has gone from sin to vice to guilty pleasure and has come, finally, to be simply another point of interest on the entertainment map. Today America has 445 commercial casinos and 411 Indian casinos acting as beacons to the lucky. In 1993, 11.6 million Americans visited commercial casinos; in 2004, 54.1 million--26 percent of all gaming-aged adults--hit the tables and slots. In 1993, commercial casinos had $11.2 billion in gross gambling revenue; by 2004 that number had risen to $27 billion. But even this staggering figure--last year Hollywood grossed only $10.2 billion at the box office and $25.95 billion from home video--is just one piece of the gaming pie. Throw in the Indian casinos, state lotteries and horse tracks and you get a gross total of $72.87 billion--before you count Internet gaming.
As gambling has spread, whatever taboos were left about it have fallen away. In a recent survey, 81 percent of Americans said that gambling was an acceptable activity, with 21 percent saying that in the past 10 years gaming has become more acceptable to them.
The extent to which gambling infiltrates nearly every aspect of American culture is hard to fathom--we are so pious and easily scandalized on other culture-war fronts--but easy to measure: Gambling is everywhere. Its sheer ubiquity has made wagering seem banal, a normal part of middle-class life--something that only a prude would object to. But is it really? Isn't there more at stake in the loss of this taboo than the pleasure of risking a little money on chance? Taken in all its forms, the American betting habit looks like a mild form of social pathology. It is certainly one of those nodal points in culture where commerce has trumped settled custom--and maybe even conscience.
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2 comments:
Isn't this the way every sin creeps into everyday life? We change it from a sin to a vice to a guilty pleasure. And, in some (if not most) cases, we not only turn it into a guilty pleasure, but we turn it into a non-guilty pleasure, i.e. completely acceptable and not at all derided for the sinfulness. I think that the gambling culture idea in this piece (with which I agree, by the way) is merely the application of a principle to one aspect of our culture (gambling). The more commonplace a sin becomes, the more acceptable it becomes, the less import we attach to the sinfulness. (I think instead of actually putting forth much of an argument, I merely stated a few trusisms....or maybe the same truism just in two or three different ways :)).
I think you're right. We justify sins as guilty pleasures, where before they were seen as much worse. Sooner or later, that sin becomes commonly accepted. Look at TV standards for another example of this.
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