Gambling with the Myth of the American Dream

Aaron M. Duncan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317512462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the rise and increased acceptance of gambling in America, particularly the growth of the game of poker, as a means for examining changes to the American Dream and the risk society. Poker both critiques and reinterprets the myth of the American Dream, putting greater emphasis on the importance of luck and risk management while deemphasizing the importance of honesty and hard work. Duncan discusses the history of gambling in America, changes to the rhetoric surrounding gambling, the depiction of poker in the Wild West as portrayed in film, its recent rise in popularity on television, its current place in post-modern America on the internet, and future implications.

1
Introduction to Gambling America

In The Color of Money, Paul Newman’s character Fast Eddie Felson proclaimed, “Money won is twice as sweet as money earned” (De Fina & Scorsese, 1986, 58:42–58:46). This iconic character seems to summarize the feelings of millions of Americans who risk their hard-earned money every year in hopes of winning more. Of course, unlike Fast Eddie, most Americans do not win at gambling. Despite this well-known fact, Americans still put down their hard-earned money at games of chance. Gambling has been present in America since the country’s inception, but today gambling is more popular than ever. In the 1970s, gambling revenue totaled about $3 billion, but by 1999, the total had risen to $54 billion (Volberg, Gerstein, Christiansen, & Baldridge, 2001). According to the American Gaming Association, gambling revenues peaked in 2007 with receipts exceeding $92 billion (American Gaming Association, 2009). Gambling numbers declined slightly during the recession, but revenues were increasing by the end of 2012 (American Gaming Association, 2013b). The annual revenue generated from legalized gambling in America exceeds the amount spent on movie tickets, recorded music, cruise ships, spectator sports, and theme parks combined (Volberg et al., 2001). The goal of this project is to examine the forces behind America’s fascination with gambling. I contend that the rise of gambling in the U.S. is due to a combination of economic, political, technological, and social forces that impact America on a mythic level.

These forces challenge existing mythologies and have created changes in collective consciousness. Kasen (1980) explained that myths are essential to the functionality and preservation of a society. Changes to American mythologies are the result of challenges to their efficacy as legitimators for the nation’s economic and social systems. In the case of the United States, the myth of the American Dream works to rationalize our class system, social structure, and culture. However, problems occur in legitimization when a myth is found to contain contradictions and when it ceases to adequately explain the functioning of the society that created it. Rushing (1986) explained that in response to these challenges, myths evolve over time and reflect changes in societal consciousness.

I examine the changes to the myth of the American Dream through the lens of gambling in general, and the game of poker more specifically. I contend that poker’s current cultural status is representative of gambling’s larger place in the culture. I examine poker because I believe that it is the form of gambling that is most emblematic of contemporary American culture. Poker is not completely a game of luck, like craps or roulette, but also contains the element of skill. Thus, I argue that it is more representative of modern economic entities such as the stock market, which require knowledge and skill, but are also governed to some degree by unpredictable chance. In order to make this claim it is important that I discuss gambling as a whole, before delving more deeply into the subject of poker. The rhetoric surrounding poker is a sub-discourse of America’s ongoing cultural conversation about gambling and we must examine both in order to grasp the differences between the two and the changes taking place to America’s mythology.

It is important to begin by attempting to understand the cultural significance of gambling and its role in the history of America. Next, in chapter two, I explore the various rhetorical markers that surround gambling and work to construct our view of the game of poker. In chapter three, I discuss the ways that myth, narrative, and ideology work together to shape our collective consciousness and build the American Dream. The next three chapters explore the American Dream and gambling’s relationship to it through a series of case studies. Chapter four is an examination of poker’s relationship with the American frontier as told through the Western film genre. Chapter five discusses poker’s rise on television and its relationship to the myth of the self-made man. Chapter six focuses on internet poker and how it utilizes elements of both the myth of the frontier and the self-made man. Finally, I end the project by drawing conclusions and implications for future research about gambling in America.

This project examines the rhetoric of gambling as it evolves and changes along with the myth of the American Dream. I examine the depiction of gambling in the Wild West Frontier, its rise in popularity during the modern age, and its current place in post-modern America. At different points in American history, the mythology of the American Dream has delegitimized gambling as a form of irreverent and immoral behavior. Today, gambling and the game of poker are both widely accepted and endorsed forms of behavior (Schwartz, 2006). I believe that this is the result of substantive changes to the myth of the American Dream caused by the rise of the risk society. Important aspects of the traditional American Dream such as the Protestant ethic, the need for social and individual virtue, and our definition of the American frontier have been adapted over time. This new dream emphasizes the importance of wealth and luck and calls into question how we define work, play, and democracy. The rise of gambling ought to be understood as both a symptom of and a reifying force to changes and amalgamations taking place in America’s collective conscious. Thus, I proceed from the premise that gambling is a culturally significant activity, and its transformation from an immoral vice to socially acceptable activity ought to be examined to understand how American mythology is being adapted to resolve contradictions resulting from changes in modern society.

Perhaps more so than any other form of gambling, poker has flourished during this time. I choose to focus on the game of poker because I believe that it best represents the changes taking place in America. Although all forms of gambling have flourished at different times in American history, poker has always held a special connection to the spirit of America. McManus (2009a) contended that whereas baseball has been said to be America’s pastime for many years, poker has replaced it as the game Americans truly care about. I argue that throughout history, America’s attitudes toward poker parallel wider social trends in the country, and thus the game serves as a good barometer of American culture.

America’s attitudes toward gambling in general and poker specifically have experienced dramatic shifts in a short period of time. According the National Gambling Impact Study Commission’s final report (1999), gambling has not only become increasingly common in American society, but it has also become increasingly socially acceptable. However, little research has looked into why these changes have occurred. This project seeks to uncover the forces reshaping the American Dream. Gambling has been deemed immoral and repudiated at different points in American history; gamblers fit well within our current cultural climate, which prizes easy success, material wealth, and winning at all costs while still believing in the principles of democracy and equality.

Poker’s rise has also paralleled the rise of a variety of technologies and new communication media. Over the course of this project, I explored these media and their impact on gambling and society. Film, television, and the internet have all played important roles in poker’s growth. Gambling, like all of American society, has been shaped by and forced to adapt to technological changes. Media such as film, television, and the internet have created popular images of poker and gambling in American culture. On television, shows like the ESPN’s World Series of Poker and World Poker Tour have become popular programs while films like The Cincinnati Kid (1965), The Sting (1973), Maverick (1994), Rounders (1998), and Casino Royale (2006) have all used poker as a central plot device. The images from these shows and films have helped to define our views on poker and gambling, and the evolution of these media have also altered both activities in important ways. One goal of this project is to explore the ways poker and gambling interact with technology and to understand how technological changes in mediums of communication have helped create changes in America’s public consciousness.

The Risk Society

At the center of America’s evolving public consciousness is the concept of risk. Modern scholars have noted that we are living in a society increasingly driven by and obsessed with risk and gambling. Although uncertainty and risk have always been a part of human existence, “a society increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety),” as Anthony Giddens (1999) noted, “generates the notion of risk” (p. 3). Ulrich Beck (1992) went so far as to claim that we are living in a “risk society” and that risk has come to dominate our thinking and behavior. Beck (1999) believed that radical modernization made risk central to contemporary society: The Industrial Revolution and technological advances of the 20th century managed some persistent risks, but introduced new, sometimes more dramatic risks like climate disruption, global economic meltdowns, and transnational terrorist threats (Beck, 2002).

Because news media construct stories around risk and audiences interpret stories using the same lens, risk has become the dominant frame for understanding the social world (Cottle, 1998; McCurdy, 2011). Danisch’s (2010) connection between Beck’s work and the shift in the television news media’s coverage of risk showed how our collective preoccupation with risk has resulted in political rhetoric becoming increasingly focused around the concepts of uncertainty and contingency. Beck ventured that a societal shift from a tradition-oriented to future-oriented perspective bolstered the role of risk. As Beck (2002) explained, we live “[in] an age in which faith in God, class, nation and the government is disappearing… in which the apparent and irrevocable constants of the political world suddenly melt and become malleable” (p. 1). The new risks introduced by technological advances could not be satisfactorily addressed by the institutions people traditionally looked to for guidance. The risk society, by contrast, creates an obsession with the future: What crisis will happen next? This focus on the future is problematic because the future is both socially constructed and unknowable (Beck, 2006).

Poker is either a microcosm or metaphor for the risk society, emphasizing as it does both the individual nature of success and failure and the importance of the concept of reflexivity. First, our need to predict the future and the failure of traditional institutions to provide us with guidance creates what Beck (2006) called, “tragic individualism” (p. 336). No longer capable of trusting in the social institutions, which used to explain and protect them, individuals are now left to “cope with the uncertainty of the global world by him- or herself” (p. 336). Hall (2002) concluded, “An enhanced awareness or consciousness of risk, therefore, forms an essential part of the background or context in which we move through our everyday lives” (p. 176). It is this context, I will argue, that allowed the game of poker to grow and flourish. Poker is an individually-based game in which competitors attempt to control risk and bet on unknowable future outcomes. Poker succeeds in this environment because it has an audience that understands the importance and value of managing risk and which must deal with risk in their daily lives. Professional poker players’ ability to manage and embrace risk makes them entrepreneurial role models for the risk society.

Second, Beck (1992) identified the concept of reflexivity as vital to the risk society. As a society examines itself, the very act of examination produces change within it. In poker, too, players are constantly reflecting on the game and adjusting to the changing play of other players, while their opponents do the same. This constant state of reflexivity accounts for the dynamic nature of the game. However, as Beck (2006) explained, not everyone in society benefits from the reflexivity of risk. He contended that only those with the power to define their own risk have true reflexivity. Furthermore, he claimed that exposure and control of risk is replacing class as the chief inequality of modern society: “In risk society relations of definition are to be conceived analogous to Marx’s relations of production. The inequalities of definition enable powerful actors to maximize risks for ‘others’ and minimize risks for ‘themselves’” (p. 333). Similarly, in poker, the goal of strong players is to minimize their own risk by betting when they have the best hand and maximize their opponents’ risk by maneuvering them to bet with the worst hand.

Beck (1999) noted that to understand the risk society, better attention needed to be paid to the construction, manipulation, and distribution of symbols. Indeed, how we understand risk, how we deliberate about risk, and how we draw upon tradition and speculate about the future are all essentially communicative activities. However, despite recognizing the importance of communication to the risk society, Beck has yet to investigate formally the communication practices of the risk society or connect his work to the discipline of communication (Danisch, 2010; Heir, 2008; Cottle, 1998). This omission is unfortunate, for, as Dansich (2010) observed, the rhetorical tradition has the ability to answer many of the questions Beck’s work raises about the rise and future of the risk society, suggesting that “rhetoricians can profitably mine Beck’s work for useful resources” (p. 190).

This book uses the rhetorical tradition to register the importance of understanding how changing cultural myths undergird the movement from a tradition-oriented society to future-oriented risk society. In taking this path, I follow Alexander and Smith’s (1996) critique of Beck’s failure to acknowledge how cultural variables influence the perceptions of risk by ordinary members of the populace. They argued that Beck does not have a proper understanding of the role of culture, and in particular the power of myth, in shaping social understanding of risk. Alexander and Smith examined how sacred myths shape our understanding of technology and its place in the risk society. Because cultural myths are often conveyed in popular culture, attending to the kinds of myths that prevail in film, television, and on the internet can show how the pokerization of America took root. I extend Beck’s (1992, 1999, 2002, 2006) claims by arguing that the creation of the risk society has led to changes in our public mythology that have worked to change the way we view gambling.

Gambling’s Cultural Significance

Christiansen (1998) stated, “Gambling is perhaps the most misunderstood activity of economic significance.… Gambling remains shrouded in ignorance compounded equally, to judge from its manifestation in the news media, of unreasoning optimism and nightmarish fears” (p. 36). Christiansen’s comments highlight the conflicting views of gambling that seem to be ever present in cultures around the world. Gambling is simultaneously charged with degrading humanity and praised for being its economic savior. What all sides can agree upon is that gambling is growing all across the globe and that its growth creates important implications for culture, commerce, and communication. In order to understand the significance of poker in American culture, we have to first understand the complex relationship America has with gambling which works to frame and contextualize our feelings towards poker.

The activity of gambling is of course nothing new. Sauer (2001) wrote, “Whether legal or not, many people gamble in various forms, and suppliers seek profits by offering them gambling opportunities, the practice has deep roots, and references to it date across cultures to ancient times” (p. 2). Sifakis (1990) found that gambling was present in even the earliest of civilizations. Archaeologists have located four-sided gaming cubes in prehistoric graves in North and South America, Af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction to Gambling America
• 2 Rhetorical Markers of Gambling
• 3 Myth, Narrative, and Ideology
• 4 Saloons, Six-Shooters, and Mythos of the Old West: Gambling and Poker in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine
• 5 A Self-Made Moneymaker: The World Series of Poker and the Self-Made Man
• 6 Shifting the Scene to Cyberspace: Internet Poker and the Rise of Tom Dwan
• 7 Conclusions and the Future of Gambling
• Index