Cleanliness, G*dliness, Luckiness

Dear Dr. Bones,

The lottery is just as predatory as casinos, is just as regressive, and has all the same harmful effects. Exploiting the desperate and poor is what it is, whatever the plunderer does with the resulting proceeds. It’s like arguing that spouse-beating is [OK] so long as the abuser does good deeds in the community. It would be better for the Commonwealth to raise the taxes on everybody . . . .

Thus do some of the blue-nosed self-censorious [1] mornin’ glories of BMG deplore that "the small people" should specuvest so extensively in Mass. lottery paper, as opposed to in (say) credit-default instruments on the bonds of health-insurance and biotech corporations.






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[1] I should explain that Paddy McTammany and I are experimenting with what you might call the middle-voice reflexive. Narcissus Sinister does not directly censor Narky S.-- I mean, "¿What’s to censure? ¡Don’t be ridiculous!" Rather, he censors othervolks "for his own benefit" as they say in Crosby & Schaefer [1.1]. Or "to make himself feel good," as Paddy wants it put.

"Mornin’ glories" is not, by the way, any form of the Republicanine mood of the verb. Probably you remember that that is is how Comrade G. W. Plunkett worded it originally:

College professors and philosophers who go up in a balloon to think are always discussin’ the question: “Why Reform Administrations Never Succeed Themselves!” The reason is plain to anybody who has learned the a, b, c of politics. I can’t tell just how many of these movements I’ve seen started in New York during my forty years in politics, but I can tell you how many have lasted more than a few years – none. There have been reform committees of fifty, of sixty, of seventy, of one hundred and all sorts of numbers that started out to do up the regular political Organizations. They were mornin’ glories – looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever, like fine old oaks. Say, that’s the first poetry I ever worked off. Ain’t it great?

The hokey-volksy poetry ain’t so great now that the general stylistic _shtyk_ has been expropriated by all those fine, up-standin’ Corporate Citizennesses who only want to friend (_sic_) us organic Lesser Breeds Without. Yet the Plunkettian analysis remains mostly valid, requiring modification only insofar as there are now all sorts of extrapolitical, strictly speaking, props for the Morning Glory Mentality. Nowadays, Narcissus Sinister need not "wither up," there are plenty of hothouses and Tanks of Thought and Palaces of Public Television and suchlike _refugia_ that can take Narky in out of the cold. Why, ¡The Commissariat for the New American Innovation alone must shelter thousands of specimens!

[1.1] I have quoted from memory. And abbreviated. The Urtext (§134 (b), p. 75) says "The subject may act on or with something that belongs to him, or in such a way as to benefit, injure or otherwise affect himself or his interests."