Take a Chance on Me
I’ve been wanting to write something about the William Bennett, Slot King story, but there are too many angles. Reaction runs the gamut. Some see it as a “pathetic hit job” on “one of America’s most influential moral conservatives”, while others just can’t resist the schadenfreude that comes from seeing a sanctimonious old bluenose turn out to have a vice of his own.
I’m on the side of schadenfreude, myself. Public shame, as I’m sure Bill must have pointed out in a book somewhere already, can provide a strong impulse to live a more virtuous life. But Bennett is digging in, insisting with his defenders that he can “handle it”; that people have always known he’s “been a poker player” and liked “church bingo” when growing up; that he’s never specifically condemned gambling; that he can afford the $8 million he’s lost; that it’s his own business and so on. Much of this implies exactly the kind of narrow, privatized view of morality that Bennett himself has made it his vocation to criticize. Some of it is the bluster of an addict, like that old joke about the cokehead who says “I can handle it! Believe me! I’ve been doing it every other night for the last five years, I know all about this stuff!” And some of it is simple misdirection. The comparison to bingo and poker is especially annoying. The former, at least in its non-industrialized church-hall forms, is harmless. The latter has associations both of a fun evening with the lads and a stylish high-stakes game. Both imply a bit of sociability. But Bennett lost his money on slot-machines, the most rationalized, soulless, and solitary form of gambling, and one where you are guaranteed to lose in the medium to long term. (Given that he plays the slots, Bennett’s claim to have broken about even is either a lie or a pathetic rationalization.)
As Sisyphus Shrugged points out, and Kevin Drum also notes, some of Bennett’s other vices are well-known and indeed visible to the naked eye. (He’s rather more bovi than jovi.) Bennett clearly has a gambling problem, and would be a figure more to be pitied than scorned if it weren’t perfectly clear that he would show little mercy to a political enemy with a parallel vice. As Michael Kinsley says, “Even as an innocent hobby, playing the slots is about as far as you can get from the image Bennett paints of his notion of the Good Life… He is smug, disdainful, intolerant. He gambled on bluster, and lost.” Let that be a lesson to you all.
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