Teaching kids to gamble

Take note: The casino will cater to children.

Approving the one-sentence referendum to establish big-time gambling will force automatic passage of the Maine Tribal Gaming Act (LD 1370), a 20-page masterpiece of self-dealing lawyerly mumbo-jumbo that probably 99 percent of residents haven’t read. The act mandates Maine’s adherence to a sixty-page “Connecticut Compact” and its 230-page appendix. The small print says the Sanford casino can conduct “any and all forms of gambling…without limitation.”

As Las Vegas goes, so goes Maine. Without limitation.

The terse referendum, however, carries no hint that consenting adults are not the sole targets of the campaign to addict people to gaming. Following the models of Vegas, Reno, Connecticut, etc., the Maine bill authorizes a perverse outcome: a gambling house for children.

Embedded in the bill’s tonnage of words is this: “A person under the minimum age for the purchase of alcoholic beverages under the laws of the State may not be admitted into any gaming facility other than facilities limited to the play of bazaar games[,] or be permitted to place any wager, directly or indirectly, other than on bazaar games; except that minors may receive lottery tickets or chances as gifts…” [emphasis added]. The terms “other than” and “except that” carry the sentence.

“Bazaar game” is the official euphemism for “a game, sport, amusement, diversion, scheme, plan, project, contest, undertaking or enterprise in which chance, fortune, luck or lot is the predominating factor in the winning or awarding of a prize.” Schemes requiring “skill, accomplishment, art or adroitness” to win are excluded from the definition. After-school soccer is not a bazaar game.

Children may “place any wager,” on bazaar games only, and “solely for merchandise prizes” (i.e., not for money) … except that (here it comes) minors may receive gift lottery tickets. “[H]olders of winning tickets receive money or something of value.” Will children receive money or not? The gambling bill is artfully ambiguous.

The Maine kiddie casino will function on the proven principle that young children can be trained to want what they don’t need. McDonald’s, for example, creates perpetual consumer demand by employing bells, toys, whistles, clowns, colors and jingles, gimmicks that attract kids to a Happy Meal like lobsters to a dead herring. (Joe Camel of the cigarette industry functioned similarly.) Kids then train Mom and Dad to take them out for French fries. When the children become parents, the cycle reinforces itself, and the demand-unrelated-to-need habit spreads in society.

Typically, casino kids play bazaar games on flashy machines that light up, make honky-tonk noises, and offer other whiz-bang seductions. In the same sense that TV-watching narcotizes kids so moms can get some private time, the kiddy gaming site functions as a mesmerizing baby-sitting venue so parents too can gamble out of sight but remain in the vicinity. There is no connective family experience. Parents and children operate in parallel. Casino children are trained to wager, pure and simple, by the game operator and by parental example.

Casino children learn to relate to machines, not people. They are taught to function in a denatured interior environment devoid of sunlight (no windows), time (no clocks), silence (no shutdown of blaring machines), and earned satisfactions (no sideboards on compulsion). Bazaar gambling involves no mastering of goals through hard-won childhood rites. Its highs are adrenal spikes, it lows depressive troughs. These emotions detach youth from the need to evolve through personal merit, and they impede tendencies toward social responsibility or teamwork. Gambling entails an intensive focus on me.

A children’s casino will add to Maine’s already numerous addiction problems. But if the referendum passes, casino supporters who perhaps harbored qualms about approving big-time gambling for kids and starting an intergenerational demand for it, might nonetheless feel scant remorse for their vote. After all, they will have legalized the concept of casino children, and everyone knows that anything legal is, without limitation, above reproach.

Ken Olson, a resident of Mount Desert Island, works in Bar Harbor.