Wilson also owns the No. 2 spot on that list for the Audible Audio edition of his celebrity memoir. And the No. 3 spot belongs to the Kindle edition of the same book.
So right now, Rainn Wilson stands on all three platforms, wearing the gold, silver and bronze medals for religious humor book-selling, with Amazon playing the Rainn Wilson anthem three times. Probably on the bassoon.
“Come at the king, you best not miss,” Omar Little warned. But still, I want this, and the Bassoon King is all that stands right now between The Anti-Christ Handbook: Vol. 2 and that top spot.
Sure, Rainn Wilson is a funny guy. And his book (in all its fancy schmancy multiple editions) includes a “Foreword by Dwight Schrute,” the character Wilson hilariously portrayed on the hit TV series The Office from 2005-2013. (You know, on the broadcast network NBC, back in the days when broadcast networks still had a chance to win Emmys.) I’m sure it’s a fine book. Very amusing and deserving of all the five-star reviews its garnered there on Amazon.
But still, this is America. We don’t need kings. “When in the Course of human events …” and all that. We shouldn’t be allowing some would be double-reed monarch to assume a triple-throne atop our online religious humor best-selling lists. That’s the same kind of royal sense of entitlement that led to the Stamp Act and the execution of Anne Boleyn.
Allow that sort of thing to go unchallenged and this woodwind pretender will soon be Quartering large bodies of troops among us, imposing Taxes on us without our Consent, erecting a multitude of New Offices, sending hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and doing all manner of other Bad Things requiring Capital Letters.
This is the very thing that Thomas Jefferson warned us about.
Defend your freedom and your homeland before this menace compleats the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a list of online best-sellers in the sub-sub-category of religious humor.
(Seriously, though, I really appreciate any word-of-mouth — or word-of-Facebook, tweet-of-Twitter, gram-of-Insta, etc. — that supporters of this Left Behind series can give to this ebook. Thanks.)
As many have noted, former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin called Denali “Denali” — a word that also served as her Secret Service nickname during the 2008 elections. The Secret Service used that because Denali is a symbol of Alaska, whereas “McKinley” is not. Also, too, “McKinley” would be a terrible Secret Service nickname.
• South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley attacks the police: “‘Black lives do matter and they have been disgracefully jeopardized by the movement that has laid waste to Ferguson and Baltimore,’ Haley said, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington Wednesday.”
She may not realize she’s talking about the police, but they’re the only thing she could accurately be referring to when she says, “the movement that has laid waste to Ferguson and Baltimore.”
• Lauren Nelson takes a trip to Dick Land’s Land o’ Dicks. You remember our old friend Richard Land — former chief “ethics” spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention. He was forced out of that post due to his racist commentary about Trayvon Martin. The SBC didn’t fire him because his comments were racist, but because it turned out his racist commentary was plagiarized.
And Southern Baptists won’t tolerate plagiarism — which is why Land had to step down and become president of a Southern Baptist seminary.
Anyway, Land is apparently perplexed that Kids These Days still regard cheating, betrayal and infidelity as Bad Things, even though they don’t condemn gay people and sex-having womenfolk the way he thinks good Christians should. The man spent 35 years as a professional “ethics” leader, yet he remains utterly baffled by any consideration of consent. That’s pretty much all you need to know about supposedly conservative supposedly Christian supposed ethics.
• I love biblical studies mainly because I love the Bible, but I’m also fascinated by the puzzle-solving detective-work process of it. Making sense of Really Old Texts with partial, inadequate evidence is a challenge that can be, for want of a more academic word, fun.
Consider this, from James McGrath, on “The Gospel of Grondin’s Interlinear.” Remember the s0-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife”? Well, it turns out to correspond a bit too closely with an English/Coptic interlinear tool for the Gospel of Thomas. When the primary source for a fragment of papyrus turns out to be something created on the Internet, that’s a pretty big clue that the fragment is not actually from the first century.
But a man named Ananias, with the consent of his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property; with his wife’s knowledge, he kept back some of the proceeds, and brought only a part and laid it at the apostles’ feet.
“Ananias,” Peter asked, “why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, were not the proceeds at your disposal? How is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You did not lie to us but to God!”
Now when Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard of it. The young men came and wrapped up his body, then carried him out and buried him.
After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter said to her, “Tell me whether you and your husband sold the land for such and such a price.”
And she said, “Yes, that was the price.”
Then Peter said to her, “How is it that you have agreed together to put the Spirit of the Lord to the test? Look, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.”
Immediately she fell down at his feet and died. When the young men came in they found her dead, so they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear seized the whole church and all who heard of these things.
The children, having seen the spectacular defeat of their fathers — having seen what happens to any bad nigger and, still more, what happens to the good ones — cannot listen to their fathers and certainly will not listen to the society which is responsible for their orphaned condition.
What to do in the face of this deep and dangerous estrangement? It seemed to me— I would say, sipping coffee and trying to be calm — that the principle of what had to be done was extremely simple; but before anything could be done, the principle had to be grasped. The principle on which one had to operate was that the government which can force me to pay my taxes and force me to fight in its defense anywhere in the world does not have the authority to say that it cannot protect my right to vote or my right to earn a living or my right to live anywhere I choose. Furthermore, no nation, wishing to call itself free, can possibly survive so massive a defection. What to do?
Well, there is a real estate lobby in Albany, for example, and this lobby, which was able to rebuild all of New York, downtown, and for money, in less than twenty years, is also responsible for Harlem and the condition of the people there, and the condition of the schools there, and the future of the children there. What to do? Why is it not possible to attack the power of this lobby? Are their profits more important than the health of our children? What to do? Are textbooks printed in order to teach children, or are the contents of these textbooks to be controlled by the Southern oligarchy and the commercial health of publishing houses? What to do? Why are Negroes and Puerto Ricans virtually the only people pushing trucks in the garment center, and what union has the right to trap and victimize Negroes and Puerto Ricans in this way? None of these things (I would say) could possibly be done without the consent, in fact, of the government, and we in Harlem know this even if some of you profess not to know how such a hideous state of affairs came about. If some of these things are not begun — I would say — then, of course, we will be sitting on a powder keg all summer. Of course, the powder keg may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.
They thanked me. They didn’t believe me, as I conclude, since nothing was ever done. The summer was always violent. And, in the spring, the phone began to ring again.
Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco — is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover — even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity — quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.
This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.
And yet the same day that I re-read Baldwin’s essay and find it as timely and pertinent as the day it was first written nearly half a century ago, I also read this, from Steve Benen, “Top Senate Republican rejects call for voting-rights fix“:
It was just last month when much of the nation’s attention turned to Selma, Alabama, where Americans saw former President George W. Bush stand and applaud a call for Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act with a bipartisan bill. Many wondered if, maybe sometime soon, Congress’ Republican majority might agree to tackle the issue.
Voting-rights advocates probably shouldn’t hold their breath. Soon after the event honoring those who marched at the Edmund Pettus Bridge a half-century ago, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) dismissed the very idea of working on the issue. “I think Eric Holder and this administration have trumped up and created an issue where there really isn’t one,” the Texas Republican said.
Asked if Congress should repair the Voting Rights Act formula struck down by the Supreme Court, Cornyn replied, simply, “No.”
Yesterday at the National Press Club, another key GOP senator echoed the sentiment.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Monday he doesn’t expect to bring up legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act, because lots of minority people are already voting. […]
“It depends on what you want to fix,” he said. “If you want to fix more minorities voting, more minorities are already voting.”
Cornyn and Grassley sound faint and distant, as though they were speaking from 1966. Today, in this 21st-century spring of 2015, James Baldwin is more urgently relevant than ever. The Senate GOP is not.
The column’s real sin is to mistake symptoms for causes. And Brooks does so because it’s ideologically comfortable to cast stones at the poor for their behavior, and ideologically uncomfortable to admit that their behavior is partly an outgrowth of extreme inequality and social immobility. Blaming the poor for abandoning social norms around reproduction and child-rearing makes our glass houses a bit comfier. It makes it easier to ignore our low tax rates and weak safety net. It makes it easier for us to ignore dramatic inequities in our education system. It lets us blame, and scorn the poor. And nothing gladdens the proud human heart quite like judging the weak.
As your brothers and sisters in Christ, who are also called to lead the body, we are disappointed and grieved by your abuse of the Holy Scriptures. You lifted Hebrews 13:17 out of its biblical context and misappropriated it in a way that encourages believers to acquiesce to an injustice that God hates. That text refers to church leadership, not the secular leadership of Caesar.
Are you also aware that your commentary resonates with the types of misinterpretations and rhetoric echoed by many in the antebellum church? Are you aware that the southern slavocracy validated the systematic subjugation of human beings made in the image of God by instructing these enslaved human beings to “obey their masters because the Bible instructed them to do so?”
I lead primarily white audiences in discussions on race every day, in workshops all over the country. That has allowed me to observe very predictable patterns. And one of those patterns is this inability to tolerate any kind of challenge to our racial reality. We shut down or lash out or in whatever way possible block any reflection from taking place.
Of course, it functions as means of resistance, but I think it’s also useful to think about it as fragility, as inability to handle the stress of conversations about race and racism
Sometimes it’s strategic, a very intentional push back and rebuttal. But a lot of the time, the person simply cannot function. They regress into an emotional state that prevents anybody from moving forward.
The most important clergyman for Christian libertarianism, though, was the Rev. Billy Graham. In his initial ministry, in the early 1950s, Mr. Graham supported corporate interests so zealously that a London paper called him “the Big Business evangelist.” The Garden of Eden, he informed revival attendees, was a paradise with “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.” In the same spirit, he denounced all “government restrictions” in economic affairs, which he invariably attacked as “socialism.”
If you say “hey, would you like a cup of tea?” and they um and ahh and say, “I’m not really sure…” then you can make them a cup of tea or not, but be aware that they might not drink it, and if they don’t drink it then – this is the important bit – don’t make them drink it. You can’t blame them for you going to the effort of making the tea on the off-chance they wanted it; you just have to deal with them not drinking it. Just because you made it doesn’t mean you are entitled to watch them drink it.
If they say “No thank you” then don’t make them tea. At all. Don’t make them tea, don’t make them drink tea, don’t get annoyed at them for not wanting tea. They just don’t want tea, ok?
Last updated on: January 12, 2015 at 10:24 am By Fred Clark
First, let’s be clear — this is a single study from a single location with a tiny sample size. I mention this not as a criticism of the study, but because it’s something I’ve been repeating over and over to try to reassure myself that maybe the world isn’t as horrible as this study seems to suggest.
So keep in mind that these are, at most, initial findings. Before we can draw any solid conclusions, the awful results here will need to be repeated and confirmed with larger studies conducted at multiple locations. That, at least, is what I keep telling myself after reading Tara Culp-Ressler’s dismaying — and potentially disturbing and triggering — write-up of the study for ThinkProgress, “1 in 3 University of North Dakota Men Surveyed Would Rape a Woman If They Could Get Away With It.”
That’s a frightening headline. The details are, if anything, even worse:
But, when the researchers actually used the word “rape” in their question, those numbers dropped much lower — suggesting that many college men don’t associate the act of forcing a woman to have sex with them with the crime of committing rape.
According to the survey, which analyzed responses from 73 men attending the same college, 31.7 percent of participants said they would act on “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse” if they were confident they could get away with it. When asked whether they would act on “intentions to rape a woman” with the same assurances they wouldn’t face consequences, just 13.6 percent of participants agreed. …
“The No. 1 point is there are people that will say they would force a woman to have sex but would deny they would rape a woman,” Sarah R. Edwards, an assistant professor of counseling psychology at the University of North Dakota and the lead researcher for the study, told Newsweek.
So take your pick there as to which part of that is most disturbing. Is it that 13.6 percent of male college students in the study willingly volunteered to identify themselves as rapists? Or is it that an additional 18.1 percent of male college students freely volunteered that they would rape women, but don’t even recognize that this makes them rapists?
Put together, that total of 31.7 percent — nearly one in three — is a staggering finding of pervasive predatory criminality. Here we have one in three UND male students freely admitting that the only reason they refrain from “forcing a woman into sexual intercourse” is that they might be caught and punished.
That suggests one necessary first step in response, which involves blunt, forceful law enforcement. In the short term, and at the crudest level, it tells us that the threat of getting caught must be immediate, tangible and certain, and the punishment must be consequential and severe. If one in three male college students says that they only refrain from attacking women due to fear of a criminal/legal deterrent, then that criminal/leal deterrent needs to be made more forceful and obvious as an urgent matter of basic public safety. We need VAWA on steroids.
But the vast scope of the problem here also suggests that it’s beyond the capability of law enforcement to handle on its own. We can ask the police and the justice system to maintain law and order and public safety when the criminal element in society is a small percentage of the population, but when that element makes up a third of the male population, then a law enforcement response, on its own, will be neither adequate nor sustainable. Law enforcement can’t be asked or expected to work in a context in which legal enforcement is the only deterrent to crime — in which 31.7 percent of the male population freely admits that they’ll prey on others if they’re not stopped by police. Police aren’t equipped to handle such a context — for that we would need prison guards.
What we see here, in other words, is evidence of a complete breakdown at multiple levels of society. These are college students, remember. These are educated young men whose applications included their involvement in all sorts of extracurricular civic activities, and who were able to provide glowing letters of recommendation from mentors and civic leaders, teachers, coaches and pastors. These are young men who have excelled in and been commended by multiple spheres of civil society, with all of those spheres failing to recognize or to respond to the fact that these young men are also fundamentally warped, damaged and misshapen. This is part of what we mean when we talk about rape culture.
Changing that context therefore means fixing what has gone wrong with schools, sports, churches, and every other organization that was involved in the character formation of these character-deformed men.
Culp-Ressler offers a brief, but helpful, discussion of those implications from this study:
The push to address sexual assault on campus has sparked a widespread discussion about “rape culture,” a term once relegated to the feminist blogosphere that has recently become more mainstream. Rape culture refers to the larger societal norms that allow rape to thrive — the lack of consequences for people who commit rape, the assumption that this type of sexual behavior is a normal aspect of gender relations, and the obscuring of rape as a serious crime. Participants’ responses to the University of North Dakota study fit neatly into this worldview.
Previous studies have revealed similar attitudes among both men and women. Asweeping international survey of men conducted by United Nations researchers found that most men who had perpetrated rape simply believed they had the right to take control of women’s bodies. A survey of U.S. teens found that many young men are manipulating their partners into sex and getting away with it. And a study that focused specifically on teenage girls in the United States found that most of them assume sexual coercion and violence is normal, because they think men simply can’t control their sex drives.
In order to reach the population of men who don’t currently associate forcible sex with rape, the lead authors of the new study suggest education programs that focus on defining sexual consent and encouraging healthy relationships. Simply pushing an anti-rape message won’t necessarily reach those men, they point out, because they don’t think of themselves as rapists.
Similarly, the schools, teams, clubs, churches, businesses, etc., that have trained these young men to be sexual predators “don’t think of themselves” as training academies for rapists. But that is evidently what many of them are.
Eleazar Misael Perez Cabrera sleeps in the music room at Shadow Rock United Church of Christ in north Phoenix.
Spiral notebooks lean between shelving cubes along one wall. Black and tan filing cabinets line another. A piano stands opposite Cabrera’s twin bed.
He has stayed there since Nov. 17.
The church has become his home, his sanctuary. But for how much longer? He shrugs. The 31-year-old Guatemalan immigrant knows this at least: He is safe.
Cabrera and Shadow Rock Church are part of a growing movement of activist congregation leaders who believe the United States has violated human rights by deporting millions of immigrants to unsafe countries and separating families.
They have opened spare rooms, kitchens and bathrooms to immigrants who fear deportation and to pressure authorities to pass reform that provides more comprehensive paths to citizenship.
And, generally, those immigrants are safe from deportation as long as they don’t leave the church. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a policy that discourages agents from conducting arrests at places of worship, schools or hospitals.
This has echoes of the Sanctuary movement of the 1980s, when American churches sheltered refugees from the proxy wars of Central America. But the roots of the idea are far, far older than that.
Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara as Quasimodo and Esmeralda in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1939).
The idea of sacred spaces as refuge is an ancient one. We can find it in the Hebrew scriptures, in the laws establishing cities and places of refuge for the persecuted and for the guilty alike. And in medieval times, churches often served as such places of safety for those fleeing death, imprisonment or exile (provided, of course, that those seeking refuge were not fleeing death, imprisonment or exile at the hands of the church).
The idea is embedded in our language, in the way the word “sanctuary” has evolved to mean both a sacred space and a refuge or preserve. Christians gather in the sanctuaries of churches, places set apart for worship. We also establish sanctuaries for wildlife, places set apart to preserve that which is threatened.
The long history of this idea of sanctuary surfaced this summer in Ferguson, Missouri, when police raided a school building adjacent to St. Mark’s Church that the church had set apart as a “safe haven” for protesters following the killing of Michael Brown. That incident raised odd echoes of the ancient practice as reports attached great implicit importance to the question of whether police had ventured into the holy ground of the church itself or just into the proximate property that was not itself a “sanctuary.”
Sanctuary has always been a murky, tangled concept. These places of refuge lack any tangible power to enforce their claim as safe spaces. Thus while the right or rite of sanctuary exists as a challenge to the power of the Powers That Be and a reminder of their limits, that right is also dependent on the consent of the powerful. In the story above, Eleazar Cabrera isn’t protected by law, but by custom. (The name of the church — Shadow Rock — is evocative. The shelter of sanctuary may not be so much from the strength of a rock, but from the idea of its shadow.)
Sanctuary is, in one sense, a powerful expression of the separation of church and state, but it is also, in a sense, a reflection of their inevitable entanglement. The concept also raises a fascinating question of cause and effect: Are sacred spaces recognized as refuges because they are sacred? Or are they sacred because they are recognized as places of refuge? Are they able to stand against the Powers That Be because they are holy? Or are they holy because they stand against the Powers That Be?
At its best, I think, the idea of sanctuary embodies the best of the church. It can be a refuge, a safe place for those who have no where else to turn. It can be a place that defends the otherwise defenseless. The needy and desperate should be able to flee to the church for refuge — to pound on its door, crying “Sanctuary,” and to be welcomed in and given shelter.
But the beauty of that is, sadly, shown more in its absence than in its actuality. The story of Shadow Rock and its rescue of Eleazar Cabrera stands out because it is exceptional.
This hopeful story of sanctuary stands in stark contrast to the heartbreaking story of Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old transgender girl in Ohio for whom the church was anything but a sanctuary, refuge, shelter or safe haven.
The sanctuary that turned away this child was not a sanctuary at all. It was not a sacred space. It was, and is, unholy.
Last updated on: November 14, 2014 at 5:00 pm By Fred Clark
Politically, state lotteries seem as untouchable as they are indefensible. They’re predatory and regressive — a reverse Robin Hood scheme that takes from the poor to give to the wealthy to the tune of $68 billion a year. But they’re guaranteed to endure because they combine two of Americans’ favorite pastimes: gambling and victim-blaming.
State lotteries divide the public into two constituencies: Those who lose money to them and those who do not. Or, more forcefully, Losers and Freeloaders. Neither constituency is likely to support any change in the current state lottery system other than an expansion of it.
It seems almost impossible to persuade the Freeloaders to oppose the lotteries because they’re aware that these crooked games account for billions in state revenue for which, as it stands, they don’t have to contribute a single dime. The lotteries afford them the opportunity for perfectly legal free-riding and they’re not interested in any change that would involve them having to begin paying their fair share. Freeloading is a sweet deal and they’d like to keep it, thank you very much.
But it’s not just about the money for the Freeloaders. State lotteries provide them with something that Americans treasure far more than money. Lotteries also offer them the chance to indulge in the national pastime — basking in moral superiority. Not only do the Freeloaders get to look down on the Losers as their moral and intellectual inferiors, but the lottery also reassures them that this is How The World Ought To Be. It reinforces the just-world mythology that says the poor deserve to be poor because they’re careless with money, uneducated, impulsive, etc.
As for the former group, the Losers, well, telling people “You’re being a sucker” is not the easiest way to win political support. We can euphemize and rephrase that message more tactfully, of course, but there’s no way to change the substance of it.
The problem is not just that such a message is off-putting, but that it triggers a host of cognitive defense mechanisms that prevent it from being heard and accepted. No matter how delicately and cautiously the subject is raised, people who are being taken advantage of tend to deny that is the case. None of us wants to admit that — due to desperation or greed or credulity — we’ve allowed ourselves to be swindled. Con-artists of all stripes count on that. That’s a key tool of their trade. They rely on the fact that most victims would rather continue to be swindled than to admit they’d ever been the victim of a con in the first place. They rely on the fact that their victims are more likely to get angry with someone who sees them as victims than they are to get angry with those who victimize them.
More importantly, though, many of the Losers forfeiting their money in state-run lotteries already know it’s a crooked game. They know that the odds against winning any meaningful sum are astronomical. But when such a microscopically slight hope is the only hope you have, you don’t want to see that taken away. They recognize that it’s very close to impossible to escape their fate with a winning lottery ticket, but they also recognize that everything else is a rigged game too and that the astronomical odds against changing their lives via the lottery are still better than the astronomical odds of changing their lives through any of the work or opportunities they will otherwise be allowed to pursue.
Many of the Losers know the lottery is a lie. But they know that the just-world mythology of the Freeloaders is an even bigger lie. The lie of the lottery may offer them nearly nothing, but the bigger lie offers them absolutely nothing. And choosing nearly no hope over absolutely no hope is a rational choice.
Both constituencies, then, are invested in supporting the status quo. So the politics of state lotteries seems unstoppable. It seems we’re likely to see them expand and grow — siphoning away billions more every year from the poorest people in order to give more free subsidies to the wealthiest.
And this depressing reality, even more depressingly, seems like a metaphor for the whole of American politics. The game is rigged and there’s nothing that can be done.
This is why George Orwell made lotteries such a central theme in 1984. When we speak of “Big Brother” or condemn something as “Orwellian” these days, most of the time we’re talking about intrusive surveillance or “Newspeak” or subservient, incurious media. But everything Big Brother did in 1984 was dependent on the lottery. Of all the lies Big Brother told, the lottery was the lie that made everything else possible — the lie that kept the proles in line. As long as the public loved the lie of the lottery, Big Brother’s reign was secure. The lottery was the lie that ensured he had the consent of the governed — the consent of the oppressed.
Most of that is really good. (Oliver leans a bit too heavily on the troubles that winning a lottery can bring, which is not a compelling argument — particularly not since, as Oliver shows, it’s a problem that it’s ridiculously unlikely any of us will ever have to worry about.)
The strongest aspect of Oliver’s piece, I think, is his focus on the massive and massively misleading advertising campaigns for these state lotteries. That’s important, because those advertisements explain how and why those who play the lottery have come to fall for this con. It’s not because they’re stupid or innumerate. It’s because they’ve been lied to — repeatedly and constantly, on TV, on the radio, on billboards and buses and from the counters of every convenience store. They’ve been lied to about the likelihood of winning. And they’ve been lied to about the purported social benefits of the lottery itself.
The state lotteries are sold with lies. And those lies are told with the full authority and credibility of the states themselves.
Maybe you’re thinking that’s an exaggeration. After all, false advertising is illegal. Those state lottery ads aren’t legally allowed to say things that aren’t true.
That’s true for most advertising. We have strict truth-in-advertising laws that prevent marketers from making false claims about the benefits of their products or from hiding their potential downside. That’s part of why, for example, those long legal explanations are part of ads for an auto leasing offer. Or why those long lists of potential side effects are part of every pharmaceutical ad. Truth-in-advertising laws are also why every other form of legal gambling — from McDonald’s Monopoly Game to mutual fund managers — has to include statements of odds or reminders that no single anecdote should be regarded as a typical outcome or that one example of past performance does not imply future results.
But here’s the thing: State lotteries are exempt from truth-in-advertising laws.
States dependent on lottery revenue aren’t eager to, um, advertise that fact. The same marketing teams who earn billions conceiving and promoting all of that state-lottery advertising have also worked hard to ensure that this fact is not near the front of the public’s mind. So let me repeat that again:
State lotteries are exempt from truth-in-advertising laws.
And this, I think, offers some promise for changing the politics of state lotteries. This is a way of taking them on without prompting a defensive response from either the Losers or the Freeloaders. We don’t attack the lotteries themselves, we attack their exemption from truth-in-advertising laws.
I think that has promise even if such a campaign never succeeds in ending that exemption. Simply increasing public awareness of that exemption would do a great deal to undermine the appeal of these rigged games. It would do a great deal, I think, to increase awareness that the games are, in fact, a very bad bet. (Which they are. A pick-three lottery ticket has a 1-in-1,000 chance of winning, with a payout that’s far, far less than 1,000-to-1. And the bigger jackpot games are even worse.)
Anyone who was forced to defend this exemption wouldn’t have an easy time of it. They would find themselves having to argue, simultaneously, that: A) We are not lying to you! and B) We must fight to preserve our legal right to lie to you. Point B will make Point A much harder for most people to believe.
So right now, Rainn Wilson stands on all three platforms, wearing the gold, silver and bronze medals for religious humor book-selling, with Amazon playing the Rainn Wilson anthem three times. Probably on the bassoon.
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