A week ago our Total Fuckhead Governor, Deval Patrick (a Democrat and an African-American), announced his Big Economic Plan to bring Wealth and Prosperity back to Massachusetts by authorizing the state's first three gambling casinos, one of them on a Native-American reservation.
I would really enjoy seeing him arrested, convicted and sent to prison for a couple of years before he gets a chance to do much more damage to the people of my state and community.
He studied the question of licensing casinos for months before announcing his decision. I guess nobody whispered the news to him -- that casino gambling doesn't add wealth to a community, it sucks wealth, growth and prosperity out of the community. Most of the jobs go to outsiders, and the cash profits likewise get promptly trucked away to other wealth centers. And casinos are always accompanied by hard drugs and underage prostitution because that's what "the sports" always want.
Do you live in or near a city like this? I do. First I lived in it for three years -- downstairs from a motherbeater -- and then I moved away, but it's still a ten-minute drive south of me.
A wonderful old-style amusement park, Mountain Park, went out of business, and a dream to replace it on the mountainside overlooking the failed mill town is a casino, a Magickal Money-$pewing Fountain which will bring Lotteryland back to its former days of glory, before the mills closed.
There are enormously high rates of hard-drug addiction, illiteracy, alcoholism, infant mortality (a former governor had to threaten to yank the licenses of pre- and post-natal doctors who wouldn't treat Welfare mothers and kids) and violent crime in Lotteryland. A storefront tire shop turned out to have not been selling tires at all, but was really a walk-in crack store.
A federal judge had to order the public schools to racially desegregate in the mid-1980s (Brown v. Topeka was 1954). The public schools are an illiteracy factory.
One man heard he could get to the top of the better public-housing list if he was a fire victim, so he burned down the tenament he lived in, killing a few of his neighbors, leaving a hundred homeless.
Through the 19th and first six decades of the 20th century Lotteryland was a thriving, prosperous paper manufacturing town. Since the mills closed around 1965, leadership -- if you can call it that -- has degenerated into systemic corruption and racial polarization and hatred. Its famed, huge annual festival and parade, slavishly covered live by the local NBC affiliate, is a celebration of public drunkenness and street violence. Onlookers like to throw beer cans and rocks at high school bands marching by.
Lotteryland
by Richard Thompson / Beeswing Music BMI
from "Industry" / Hannibal HNCD 1414
by Richard Thompson and Danny Thompson
vocals: Richard Thompson and Christine Collister
that's the place i used to work
when i was a wild young Turk
it's now the Museum of Industry
schoolkids get in for free
brickworks smelled of rotten eggs
rubber works poured out the dregs
now it smells of Dettol and pee
Lotteryland's the place to be
where the steel mill used to stand
there's a park in Lotteryland
be a pram pusher on parole
go windsurfing on the dole
they can put you right to sleep
better than Brookside or The Street
play lucky numbers one two three
Lotteryland's the place to be
we don't care who runs the shop
left wing right wing curse the lot
a million quid talks sense to me
Lotteryland's the place to be
now gone is dirt and gone is strife
and gone is struggle and gone is life
shove it mate i'm busy see
Lotteryland's the place to be
now we triple lock the doors
streets are full of thieves and whores
in a padded-cell eternity
Lotteryland's the place to be
Lotteryland's the place to be
Lotteryland's the place to be
