Betting against hypocrisy’s fall

The sudden and dramatic descent of William J. Bennett into the ranks

of us run-of-the-mill sinners last week was timed perfectly to our

monthly neighborhood poker game.

Since I have found Bennett’s best-selling literary preachments

extremely irritating, I was delighted at his fall from grace. So, it

seemed, in varying degrees, were the other players, even though two

are openly Republican and several others are suspect. But reaction to

hypocrisy, it appears, even crosses party lines.

In case you’ve been too involved in the search for weapons of mass

destruction to notice, Newsweek broke the story of Bennett’s

high-rolling in which he has dropped -- or recovered, depending on

whom you choose to believe -- some $8 million, give or take a few

thousand, in Las Vegas slot machines.

This would be significant for the simple exercise of will required

to spend that much time pulling the handle of slots. But it becomes

much more significant because Bennett made a good deal of the money

he poured into the slots by writing books telling us to shape up

morally and stop contributing to the creeping decadence that is

dragging down our society.

His defenders, most of whom entertained themselves for years by

castigating the personal excesses of Bill Clinton, would have us

believe that gambling is a perfectly legitimate pastime that

challenges the risk-taking penchant of good Americans and therefore

cannot be regarded as a black mark against Bennett. I thought about

that during beer breaks and bad hands in our poker game last Friday.

It’s true that gambling is deeply programmed in many of us. In the

midst of the Depression in junior high school, I was playing poker

for pennies with my friends. One of our main sources of income was to

draw the father of a household into the game, tell him the stakes

were higher than they really were, and then gang up on him and split

the loot later. I’m sure every father knew he was being had, but

found this an amusing way of getting us movie money.

In the military service, we played everything for money. When we

attended compulsory chapel at Pre-Flight School, we used to bet on

whether the next hymn would be an odd or even number.

High-stake hearts was more often than poker the game of choice in

the ready-room. So was bridge. We used to welcome visiting Pan-Am

pilots overseas because they had lots of money and thought they were

better bridge players than they were. I remember running into two of

our pilots on some remote island waiting for repairs on their plane.

They had been sitting morosely for a week in a tin Quonset playing

gin rummy, and one owed the other $140,000.

There were always two quite disparate elements involved. The first

was winning. The other was the exhilaration of the game. When winning

became all-encompassing, then gambling turned compulsive and,

finally, deeply troublesome. I finally had to meet that head-on in

Las Vegas, set myself a limit that wasn’t critical to our well-being,

and stick to it.

When I hear Bennett telling a Newsweek reporter that over this

10-year wallow in slots he broke even, it reminds me of what amateur

gamblers tell their wives when they drag into their Vegas hotel room

at 4 a.m. after an all-nighter in the casino. Bennett may need to

believe he broke even, but I don’t believe that for a minute.

Our neighborhood game is nickel-dime-quarter three raises. A

20-buck turn either way is a big evening. It is also the equivalent

of one bet at a blackjack table. But though it is impossible to bluff

in such a game, we fight like gangbusters to be on the right side of

that 20 bucks -- and resist suggestions to up the stakes.

So why is our gambling something Norman Rockwell might paint as

heart-warming Americana and Bennett is catching all this heat for

his?

The first difference is the most obvious: the size of the stakes.

The distance between 20 bucks and $8 million dramatizes the

difference between the common folk and the very rich, whose tax

break, in this instance, is coming back into the economy through a

slot machine.

The second is that seven guys sitting around a table over a beer

sweating out a $10 pot contrasted with a white-haired guy sitting

hours on end in solitude hunched over a slot machine.

But still, if he can afford to risk $8 million as comfortably as

our risking 20 bucks, where then is the sin? Not in the gambling,

surely, but in the hypocrisy.

None of the players in my poker game have had the arrogance to

tell other people how to lead moral lives. If you are going to write

books titled “The Book of Virtues,” “The Death of Outrage” and “The

Broken Hearth,” and appear all over TV talk shows critiquing debased

morals by exhuming our private lives, then yours had better, by God,

be squeaky clean.

To steal a page from a favorite Bennett source, Jesus once said:

“Judge not that you be not judged Why do you see the speck that is in

your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own

eye?”

Bennett might better understand the log in his eye by checking out

a current art house movie called “Owning Mahony.” It’s about a banker

who almost destroys his life through compulsive gambling, while all

the while denying that he is addicted. It made me very uncomfortable

because I recognized some of the signs, and it could perform the same

service for Bennett unless his level of denial has become

impenetrable.

I suppose the next time Bennett is in town for one of his $50,000

speeches, we could invite him to a special session of our poker

group. We might even up the stakes, just for him, of course. I don’t

think he’d notice.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.