A couple three years ago my best girl and I had to go to Atlantic City, New Jersey for some forgotten reason. There was a sign there on a road that piqued my subconscious, and was the original fodder for this piece.
Now, we probably all know that at one point Nevada was the only state that allowed legalized gambling. Then maybe 40 years back the good people of Atlantic City decided that their town had fallen into such disrepute that it needed something to perk it up again, and then almost immediately there were casinos across the boardwalk there, too.
A fellow named Donald Trump made a few bucks building casinos in Atlantic City; I'm kind of wondering what he is up to these days. If you've heard, please let me know.
But I digress.
Until the American Indians won a court case and the right to build casinos on their tribal land (or, in the case of Connecticut, where the tribe had long since dissolved into the New England gene pool but no one could say them nay, "vaguely tribal land"), Atlantic City had the casino business east of the Mississippi. It boomed before it went bust.
At any rate, I recall us driving to Atlantic City and taking note of the billboards as you got within 50-60 miles or so of the place. "Casino X, voted best slots in Atlantic City." Or "Casino Y, voted best buffet within 25 miles." That sort of thing.
At first, I just semi-processed the information, as I didn't really care what anyone else thought; I was a big boy and could make decisions on my own. Well, that, and I'm a little guy and don't patronize buffets and other feeding troughs. They're a bit creepy to me.
But then, after a while, I did start thinking about it. Atlantic City is not a place a lot of people actually live; in fact, a block or so outside the boardwalk it's a pretty seedy place. It didn't seem like the residents of the place were the ones who would be voting on what casino had the best slots or the best food, right? The slots and the food were patronized by people outside the area who had come there -- including busloads of little old ladies brought down to drop nickels in the machines.
Who actually, then, conducted whatever "voting" took place that decided that Casino X was best? In order to be a reasonable and informative output, someone voting would have had to have gone to pretty much all the casinos in town -- and there are a lot -- and cast an educated vote. Other than that, what would it even mean to have been voted "best slots"? What was even the question they were asked? If people loved the environment but dropped a grand, would they vote the place high or low? I mean, you stay long enough and you're going to lose everything, it's the odds.
I assume also that if you ate at all the buffets at every casino, you may not be the exact person whose opinion, cast by vote, would be one I'd like to trust, if you know what I mean.
So interestingly, I probably mentioned that mental wandering to the missus, who probably responded with a sound that translated to "Sure, can we change topic now?". And then I never thought of it.
Well, I never thought about it again until I was heading on a long stretch of Route Some-Number toward South Carolina, and saw a sign in front of a storage unit place that rents various sizes of lockable units, the kind of place you see on TV on "Storage Wars." The sign said "Voted best storage unit place in XXX County."
I'm sorry, but the whole casino thing came up all over again. I have rented a storage unit exactly one time in my life. That was this past year while we were renting until our house was completed, and stuffed our worldly belongings in the unit, what we had not already given to Salvation Army. I was never asked, when we emptied the unit, what we thought of the place. No vote asked, none given.
Naturally, I said to the missus as we drove by, "So who voted on that?". The more you think about it, the odder it gets. I'm expected to value the opinion of the quality of a storage unit facility based on whom? Who uses multiple storage units from different locations in XXX County, so as to have an opinion that we should value? And when were they asked to vote?
A storage unit is a room with four walls and a sliding door. It is either climate-controlled or not, and it is a specific size, one of maybe 3-4 size options available for various prices, proportionately. What could possibly affect your opinion to say that storage company X is better than Y? How easy to use the little device where you punch in your code to get in? I mean, aren't they all pretty much the same?
I hope that all made sense. Last week I wrote about the capacity for critical thinking, and the above, meaningless as it was, is simply an exercise in the critical thinking that so many people today, including our precious campus snowflakes, simply cannot do.
And if they don't know how to think about the trivial, like casinos, well, it's no wonder that Bernie Sanders did so well in the primaries last year.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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