Hildegarde

So, yesterday, after writing the blog, I went in to school.  I stopped in at the division office to check up on some paperwork, and the secretaries took one look at me, turned me around, and sent me back to my car. 

Which was how I managed to be lying on my couch at three o’clock yesterday afternoon with the remote all the way across the room and the television somehow stuck on E!  You know  I’m sick when the TV is on E! and I’m too tired to do anything about it.

At any rate, what E! was showing was something the channel info bar called a ‘documentary,” which I suppose it actually was, technically.  The name of this thing was Curse of the Lottery, and its supposed premise was that people who win the lottery are worse off because of it, terrible things happen to them that wouldn’t have happened if they’d never won the money.  I say this was the “supposed” premise because, like a student paper, the damned thing changed its subject about three quarters of the way through.

About the first three quarters, though, a couple of notes.  First,  I’ve got nothing against people playing the lottery if that’s what they want to do.  I tend not to bother unless we get into one of those things where it’s the biggest news at six and the jackpot is in the ridiculous range, but I don’t see what’s wrong with it if you’re not getting stupid about it.  This means, however, that I also don’t know anybody who plays regularly, and the only time I did was in the first stages of my mother’s dementia, when she became for a while a Powerball fanatic.   Then she forgot about it, the way she forgot about most things.

I make these points to provide a caution–I have no way of knowing, or judging, whether the stories presented in this program are typical of people who play the lottery.  In fact, there was an interesting difference in the people profiled in the last quarter of this thing that makes me think that the people in the first three quarters were not necessarily typical at all.   That said, a number of observations:

1) It was remarkable how many of the people who won big and then got into enormous amounts of trouble seem to have spent most of their lives before the win being close cousins to my most passive students.  Some of them were drifters literally, living on disability checks or not much at all.   Some of them were convenience store clerks and factory workers and janitors.  It didn’t matter.  All of them, from the testimony of their friends, had been floating for years.

2) I found it really surprising how many of these people seem to have had “substance abuse” problems long before they won money.  Is it just me, or does everybody have trouble figuring out where people like this get the money to indulge their tastes in chemicals?  So-and-so has “a five hundred dollar a day habit”? If you’re working behind the counter at the local  Dairy Queen and can come up with five hundred dollars a day to buy God knows what, you should be able to put aside money for a house.  Where do people like this get all their cash?

3) It’s really, really remarkable how many of these people don’t seem to be able to add and subtract.  To be fair, I notice this same thing when MTV or somebody highlights the lifestyles of various pop and movie stars.  If you’re Paris Hilton, you probably have a trust fund and lawyers who restrict what kind of cash you can lay out, and they’re probably very careful to make sure you only spend income, not capital.  But a lot of the lottery winners were like a lot of the pop stars–as soon as they got a few million, they went out and spent five times that and then, of course, in no time at all, most of the money was gone. 

4) The craziest thing about the money spent as above, was the amount of it that was spent on complete silliness–collectable plates, six cars (why does anybody want six cars?  why?),  whatever.  And, of course, lots of it was spent on houses, which would be all right except that the houses were then tricked up in ways that I found it hard to take in–plasma TVs as big as movie theater screens hung on bedroom walls, for instance.  The houses were all absolutely huge, and they all looked incredibly uncomfortable to live in.  They also got foreclosedon at a really impressive rate.

5) A fair amount of the trouble these people got into involved violence.   Not spectacular violence, mind you, mostly the same penny-ante stuff that shows up every week in the Police Blotter section of my town’s (weekly) newspaper, but violence even so.   There were the usual round of domestic violence calls, but one woman was involved in a DUI that killed her passenger, walked away from it and ended up in jail for hit and run.   Another man’s granddaughter died of a drug overdose just before he himself was mugged for half a million dollars he was for some reason carrying around in his pockets.

6) The press attention never seemed to go away.  There were clips from press conferences several years after the lottery win, as if once these guys won money the local newspapers and television stations were watching their every move.  I have no idea if this is typical.  I admit to never having seen a story about a local lottery winner on the local news, or to have heard of any of these people except one, who was rather a flamboyant sort to start with.   Maybe I’m just not paying attention, but I don’t know the name of a single lottery winner, not even the flamboyant one.  There did seem to be lots of attention, though, with plenty of headlines reading things like “Lottery  Winner Jailed for  DUI” and “Lottery Winner In Divorce Shocker.” 

I said at the start that the last quarter of this thing changed subject, and it did–to highlighting people who had done well with the money they won and giving advice on how, if you won, you could be lucky with it instead of unlucky.  And there were a few things the doing-well people had in common.  One was that they were all culturally middle class–they had decent jobs, they already owned houses, they had functional educations, they had no histories of run-ins with the law or substance abuse.  The other thing was that they could add and substract.   Instead of buying million dollar houses and stuffing them full of the products of the Franklin Mint, they paid off their own mortgages and those of their children, put grandchildren through college, and did all the things most people would do if they go a bit ahead.   In one case or two cases, the win having been very big indeed, they bought “nice” houses that were nowhere near the kind of MTV cribs things the “tragic” lottery winners couldn’t stay away from.

The last thing they had in common was this:  there didn’t seem to be anything in the way of headlines about them.  Obviously, people knew who they were–otherwise, they couldn’t have been profiled for this program–but they didn’t seem to generate the kind of interest the disasters did.

I don’t actually know if I’m going anywhere with all of this.  Part of me wishes I understood the dynamic of the publicity.  Why would people be interested not just in hearing that so and so won the lottery, but in what such a person was doing afterwards, often for years afterwards?  Why would such a person be a continuing object of interest  for total strangers?  And why is what people want to hear about most the disasters and the failures and the general bad news?

There was something else that was only alluded to once or twice that I found fascinating, but that I see no way to research:  apparently, once your name has been in the paper as winning a lot of money, people not only approach you looking for handouts, they go on approaching you, for years.   The begging requests never stop.

All of this makes me wonder about the entire phenomenon–the people who play, the people who win, and the problems a certain segment of the population seems to have with good news. 

And it’s just possible that I may have had to have a decent fever to be interested in this at all.