Winning the lottery
Jan. 24th, 2004 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
likethebeer"What would you do with a million dollars. A billion dollars. What would you do if you won one of those Powerball lotteries that got up to the triple digit hundred million?" Those are fantasies that I can spend many hours thinking about. Pay off my house, the car, all of our bills. Create an endowment for Taliesin. Give x-amount of money to each of my close relatives. Allow my boyfriend to quit his job. Give a bucketload to the Democratic nominee, public broadcasting, the Human Rights Campaign, Habitat for Humanity, and on and on.
These fantasies keep me (most of the time) from actually buying lottery tickets. That, and damned George Orwell. Among the images that I remember from 1984--the rats, the phrase, "a boot stomping a human face--forever," "He loved Big Brother"--are the proles. The proletariat. And Winston Smith watching them, realizing that the proles's existence is a meek and stagnant one filled with gin and talk of lotteries. No one ever seems to win the lottery in Europa, but at the same time, someone always does. It's just not anyone that the proles know. But they spend their time speculating and talking about the prizes and what it would mean to their pathetic lives. Smith knows, due to his heightened position or his amount of cynicism, that the reason for the lotteries is to simply keep the proles down. To keep them from rioting, or taking back the government in any organized fashion.
I remembered Orwell a few years ago, when the Powerball lottery figures began regularly creeping up over 100 million dollars every few months. At these times, I am increasingly tempted to purchase one, or two, or five tickets just for the chance at that much money. But Orwell keeps getting in the way. Him, and his proles.
Is this a mark of great literature, I wonder? That something I read twenty years ago provided an insight into power that influences me today? I know that the image of the proles takes over where another phrase (perhaps akin to Orwell's underclass) has no effect: that gambling is "the tax on the stupid."
These fantasies keep me (most of the time) from actually buying lottery tickets. That, and damned George Orwell. Among the images that I remember from 1984--the rats, the phrase, "a boot stomping a human face--forever," "He loved Big Brother"--are the proles. The proletariat. And Winston Smith watching them, realizing that the proles's existence is a meek and stagnant one filled with gin and talk of lotteries. No one ever seems to win the lottery in Europa, but at the same time, someone always does. It's just not anyone that the proles know. But they spend their time speculating and talking about the prizes and what it would mean to their pathetic lives. Smith knows, due to his heightened position or his amount of cynicism, that the reason for the lotteries is to simply keep the proles down. To keep them from rioting, or taking back the government in any organized fashion.
I remembered Orwell a few years ago, when the Powerball lottery figures began regularly creeping up over 100 million dollars every few months. At these times, I am increasingly tempted to purchase one, or two, or five tickets just for the chance at that much money. But Orwell keeps getting in the way. Him, and his proles.
Is this a mark of great literature, I wonder? That something I read twenty years ago provided an insight into power that influences me today? I know that the image of the proles takes over where another phrase (perhaps akin to Orwell's underclass) has no effect: that gambling is "the tax on the stupid."
