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02/19/10 - (2)
Chips
I still remember my only visit to a casino. It was Harrah's, in Lake Tahoe, the snowy spring of 1968. I was in graduate school, at San Francisco State College. An old friend from St. Louis Was attending IBM computer school, in nearby San Jose, Learning how to operate the new System/360 mainframe computer. On one of his weekends off, we drove into the Sierra Nevadas.
For two days, he played blackjack, poker, roulette, craps, Stayed drunk, never slept, lost a couple thousand dollars. I played the slots, just to keep myself occupied, Squandering a mere thirty bucks, in nickels. My lesson ended up being at my friend's expense: The continuous conversion of cash into chips masks money, Makes one lose track of reality, altogether.
Just recently, on reading an article in Smithsonian Magazine Describing the author's visit to now-dilapidated Auschwitz (Where 1.1 million people were exterminated, in two years), To commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary Of its liberation by the Russian army, on January 27, 1945, That lesson rematerialized vividly, viscerally, made me wince. I envisioned my friend clicking his chips, casting them away.
Just as they disguised his money, made it unreal, easily expendable, The terms "Third Reich" and "Nazi Germany" Deflect the murderous hatred of individual perpetrators, Agglomerate their fungible faces into one faceless institution That never dropped a single prussic-acid crystal into a gas chamber, Never shoved a single corpse into a roaring oven, Never hid behind the words "I was simply following orders."
02/19/10 - (2)
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