Category: Viewpoint

I recently turned 60. I didn’t hit the lottery again last month. I tend to miss the sun this time of year. I thought these were the reasons I was down in the dumps. Then the true explanation hit me: I am suffering from George Bush Syndrome.

GBS, as it shall henceforth be known, is rooted in the fact that Bush may be the dullest president since Calvin Coolidge. In the month or so he’s been in office, Bush has pledged to do better by education, raise the pay of our brave servicemen and women, and give us all the tax cut we so unarguably deserve. I know all this stuff is important, but I can hardly write these words without falling into a stupor.

Is it any wonder that Bill Clinton — wonderful, newsworthy, controversial, hated, loved, polarizing Bill Clinton — still dominates the news? We journalists cannot let go. It’s true, of course, that Clinton continues to provide material — the pardons, the gifts, the office rent, the move to Harlem. My heart leaped when the always creative Senator Arlen Specter said that Clinton could still be impeached. Oh, yes: news! Bring back Henry Hyde and the boys.

But Bush? He’s an abstraction, the genial face of an issueless time. He wants to get along, go along, and, of course, get his own way. Sooner or later, he may get into a real fight with the Democrats in Congress, but at this moment it’s hard to see what the issue will be — and whether anyone will care. Bush cannot make news.

Last month Bush went to war against Iraq — for a day. A bomb here, a bomb there, and then it was over. Purely routine, he said — and a day later there was nothing more to write. In contrast, when Clinton did something similar — bombed an Osama bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons facility in the Sudan — he broke off his Martha’s Vineyard vacation and winged it back to the White House. Bush undoubtedly would have stayed where he was. He’s not going to let something “routine” break his routine.

Bush is for faith and against crime. He wants every kid to read. Math would be a good idea, too. He’s for chastity, charity, and, probably, chocolate. This is not the stuff of table-thumping columns.

I have been through this before — and survived. I lived through the Ronald Reagan era. He was frustratingly agreeable, too. Once, when I was writing a column of such blistering criticism the words fairly smoked on the page, I got a message from Air Force One. It was a birthday greeting from the president. I walked around the newsroom trying to get my dander up. It was hard. Reagan was such a nice guy.

I survived Reagan, I’ll survive Bush. But I was younger then, more confident in my judgment, wisdom, and, yes, brilliance.

I just knew Reagan was wrong about everything. Looking back, I can see that here and there — such as the way he handled the Cold War — he was just possibly right, but what’s more important is that he made news. He fired the air traffic controllers right off. Maybe Bush will fire the forest rangers. I call this “faith-based optimism.”

I despair. It’s been a couple of days since Bill Clinton last made news. Maybe something will break soon — an armed robbery or something his aides talked him into at the time. I know I can’t count on Bush. Mr. Nice Guy! Mr. Routine. I’m counting the days. Less than three years until the presidential campaign starts up again. Only one person can lift my depression.

C’mon, Hillary.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.

The state lottery in Georgia, upon which Tennessee’s constitutional provision is modeled, has been hailed as the finest scholarship program in the country and the best constitutional lottery provision as well. Tens of thousands of Georgia students have tuition paid through the HOPE scholarship and then join the state’s work force, which fuels Georgia’s economic engine for the 21st century.

Seventy-five percent of the best and brightest students in Georgia now attend Georgia universities rather than the 25 percent prior to the establishment of the HOPE program. SAT scores have risen by 11 percent since the inception of HOPE, and pre-kindergarten programs have provided an early start to children in reading and learning — and a great start toward a HOPE scholarship.

Critic Nell Levin, a state income-tax advocate, missed the point when she wrote in the Flyer last week that “a lottery creates few jobs and no useful product.” It creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and better workers who enter the work force debt-free because of the proceeds of the lottery. Further, when people go out of state to buy lottery tickets they often purchase groceries, alcohol, and gasoline. If those people buy their products in Tennessee, they contribute to Tennessee’s economy and pay Tennessee taxes.

Levin suggests that the lottery will not solve Tennessee’s revenue problems. On this she is right, of course; it will also not cure cancer, malaria, or whooping cough.

It took 17 years to get the lottery on the ballot in Tennessee. Its failure to do so did not help the cause of those who advocate tax reform, and its passage this year will not hinder them either. A lottery isn’t a tax. It is a voluntary form of funding scholarships and participating in a game, which is a form of entertainment. People play the lottery in approximately the same proportions as their income levels. In fact, the typical player is middle income and a high school graduate.

Tennessee’s program has not yet been developed, but I would advocate not allowing Pell grants to be used, as they can be in Georgia, as a credit against lottery scholarships. This would benefit lower-income families while not disadvantaging students from other income levels.

Ours will be one of only three states whose constitutional provision for a lottery mandates education spending on new and specific programs. The amendment requires that the money supplement, not supplant, education funding.

Tennessee may be late getting into the lottery game, but a study by the state’s Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations estimates we will net $300 million for college scholarships and post-secondary technical and educational improvement opportunities, in addition to pre-kindergarten and after-school programs and K-12 capital construction improvements.

We might have made more had we started earlier, but for right now and the past 17 years we have gotten nothing. It is like buying a stock for a penny a share, which climbs to 300 million in the first year. If it should fall to 250 or 200 million, we still bought it for a penny. That is a pretty good investment for Tennessee shareholders whose dividend will be a better-educated work force and citizenry.

I have always played the lottery wherever I go and have won a few small returns. I enjoyed picking the numbers and look forward to seeing the winning numbers. My only regret is that I have helped other states meet their needs rather than my own state.

I look forward to making a voluntary contribution to a Tennessee lottery game and know Tennessee’s future will be better for it. It is a sure-fire winner.

It says yes to Tennessee, it says yes to young people with ambition and ability, and it says no to Tennesseans traveling to Kentucky, Georgia, Missouri, Virginia, and other states — as they have done with more than $200 million — to play the lottery in those states. Lottery yes!

State Senator Steve Cohen is the sponsor of the statewide lottery referendum, coming in 2002.

(BOMBAY) — India is driven by commerce. Despite its widespread poverty, Indians buy and sell everywhere — on the streets, in their homes, in stores and tiny stalls, even in the middle of traffic.

Once the doorbell rang in the Bombay apartment where my family and I are staying with relatives. It was after 10 p.m. When I looked out the peep hole and described the old woman in a sari I saw in the hallway, the people inside just laughed. Apparently they had encountered her before. She was selling sleepwear — lingerie — door-to-door.

Every morning we are awakened by a cacophony of sounds, which includes car and truck horns, crows cawing, and the sing-song shouts of hawkers outside the apartment selling fruits and vegetables from push carts. In the amazing tangle that is Bombay traffic we are offered toys, flowers, books, magazines, and miniature Indian flags (January 26 is Independence Day). Outside the most upscale stores, vendors set up shop, selling everything imaginable. There are even people on the street who will shine your shoes, give you a shave, or clean your ears.

Then there was the rat trap salesman in Hyderabad.

My father-in-law operates a liquor store that was owned by his father before him. One day during our stay in Hyderabad, I noticed a man outside the shop with some unusual wares. On closer inspection, I saw that he was selling all kinds of rattraps and rodent poisons. He had humane traps (both wooden and metal) for catching the rats alive and the more traditional metal traps that break the rodent’s neck.

It was an impressive array of goods and I stopped to look more closely. The man, who had very dark skin and appeared to be in his 30s, smiled at me. I returned the smile. By this time I had learned to avoid the frustrating dance of two people who don’t speak the same language. Since I don’t speak Telugu or Hindi and he didn’t know English, we were confined to smiling at each other and making the universal signs of greeting. We nodded a lot.

I found myself watching the rattrap salesman as he went about his daily chore of laying his rug down on the sidewalk and then putting out his display in an orderly fashion. He didn’t hawk but waited for an interested customer and then began the inevitable haggling. We continued to smile at each other as I went to and from the house (which is above the store).

The night before we left Hyderabad to return to Bombay one of the relatives who works in the store told me at dinner that the rat trap salesman wanted to come back with me to the United States. He had assured the relative that he would be no trouble to me and that he would be available to do any chores I wished him to perform both at my home and in my office.

Because there are so many people in India and so few jobs available, there are people who do all kinds of work. A middle-class family can easily afford someone who will come to their house and cook, another person to clean the floors and make the beds, and another to wash the clothes. (This man is called the “dobhi.”) Likewise it is affordable to have someone drive your car (or wash it), bring you a newspaper, or run your errands. This is the world the rattrap salesman visualized; this is the world he knows.

The next day, I gave him a 100 rupee note — about two U.S. dollars. (I had originally wanted to buy one of his wooden traps, but decided it would be too cumbersome to bring back.) He smiled. I smiled.

When it came time to load the cars for the trip to the train station, I shook his hand before getting into the car. From the front seat, I could see him deliberating. Finally, just before the car pulled off, he handed me a note. It read:

Respected Sir,

I wont to go to America with you. My passport is ready. I shall feel oblige if you kindly arrange for a “visa.” I can work at your office or at your house also.

Thank you.

He did not include his name. He obviously had gone to great lengths to get the note written. He couldn’t have known many people who could write English. Still at the last minute he could not decide whether or not to present it to me.

I wish I could have talked to him, explained the many reasons why he could not go back with me. But the car was pulling off. There was only time for one more universal sign. I shrugged.

That night as dusk settled on the countryside along the train tracks, as shepherds drove their goats wherever it is goats go at night, I thought about the rattrap salesman and how different his world is from mine. I felt sad — for both of us. n

You can e-mail Dennis Freeland at freeland@memphisflyer.com.

1. Lotteries are a sucker game. In a typical state lottery you have to guess six two-digit numbers out of a possible 49. None of the six numbers is used more than once and you must guess the winning numbers in correct order. The odds of hitting the jackpot in this system are one in 14 million.

You are three times more likely to be killed in an auto accident on the way to buy a lottery ticket than you are to win the jackpot.

Fran Lebowitz quips, “As I figure it, you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play it or not.” Or as John Warren Kindt says in his book Gambling, “The only way to win is to never buy a ticket.”

2. The state of Tennessee will need to use blatantly false advertising to lure you in. The Publisher’s Clearinghouse contest is required by law to publish your odds of winning. The lottery is exempt from this requirement. If lotteries made plain your odds of winning, the game would be over.

3. The state will waste an obscene amount of the revenue collected from the lottery on advertising. The Washington Post calls lottery ads “the foulest of gambling lures. And they lure the poorest and most vulnerable among us through publicly sponsored, shamelessly misleading advertising.”

4. A lottery is a regressive tax. During the first year of the Georgia lottery, the lottery sold $249 worth of tickets per resident in ZIP codes with average household incomes below $20,000, compared with $97 in ZIP codes with incomes exceeding $40,000. Per-capita ticket sales were also twice as high in minority areas compared with white areas.

5. Lower-income people will pay for the education of wealthier people. Georgia’s HOPE scholarship program mostly provides scholarships to students from middle- and upper-class families. Of the 16,376 students who received HOPE scholarships for the 1994-95 academic year, the average family income was $44,876 while the average state income was $32,359.

By requiring students to apply for a battery of federal grants and scholarships, poor and minority students are diverted into Pell grants. They receive a $150 book allowance per semester from HOPE while wealthier students receive the bulk of the HOPE money.

6. A lottery will not solve Tennessee’s revenue problems. After payouts and advertising, a lottery typically provides 1 to 3 percent of a state’s revenue. It will be two years before the lottery referendum is held and another year before the lottery is up and running. Meanwhile, Tennessee will sink deeper into the hole. A lottery creates few jobs and no useful product. Compulsive gambling will create a host of social problems, which the state will pay for in the long run.

7. A lottery will not make Tennessee’s tax system any fairer. A lottery is a diversionary tactic that our legislators are using to keep from reforming our antiquated, unfair tax structure.

8. Tennessee is late getting into the lottery game. Lottery revenue has peaked in many states and is dropping off. Virginia has had a lottery for 10 years and is now hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole. How long will it take for Tennesseans to catch on to the sucker game and stop playing? Lotteries are one of the most unstable sources of revenue.

9. The state will decrease the general revenue for education by the amount the lottery makes. Educational spending tends to decline once a state puts a lottery into operation. According to one study, states without lotteries maintained and increased their educational spending more than states with lotteries.

10. The state of Tennessee has a social contract with its citizens to protect them from fraud. This contract is null and void when it comes to lotteries.

Nell Levin is a social activist living in Nashville.

A line of attack frequently pursued by Vice President Al Gore‘s Republican adversaries in this year’s presidential race has been that he is only a nominal Tennessean, that he is actually a son of Washington, D.C., and that his contacts with home-staters are only superficial and occasional.

Whether fair or not, the approach has evidently succeeded in sowing doubt in the minds of some Tennessee voters and may be partly responsible for Gore’s recent second-place showing, behind Republican rival George W. Bush, in a variety of pollsters’ samplings of Tennesseans.

The vice president did himself little good in this regard when he appeared Tuesday night on NBC’s Tonight Show with host Jay Leno.

At one point, discussing the annual habit that he and wife Tipper engage in of dressing up for Halloween in elaborate custumes, he noted that members of the press corps surprised him Tuesday at one of his rally stops by showing up in Halloween getups of their own.

One of them was disguised, Gore noted, “as Elvis Prez-ley”– giving the name the pronunciation favored by members of the national media. But not by Tennesseans.

And certainly not by residents of Memphis, site of an eleventh-hour stop this weekend by candidate Gore, who is counting on a Shelby County turnout to give him a chance for victory in Tennessee over Bush.

The late entertainment icon Elvis Presley pronounced his name “Press-ley,” never any other way, and the difference in pronunciations has historically been regarded as one of those divides that distinguish the local sensibility from the national one.

The gaffe is only symbolic, but it prompts two thoughts, neither of which is flattering to Gore. Does he not know the right way to say the name of this late home-state eminence? Or does he know the right way and prefer to accommodate himself to the prevailing error elsewhere?

For those who would consider the incident insignificant, this question might be considered: what would it say of Gore’s home-state savvy if he pronounced the first name of a latter-day artist “Shan-ia,” which emphasis on the first syllable? Or “Shan-ee-ah” or some other wrong guess? This is, after all, a time in which Gore, Bush, and all other major candidates for office make a practice of taking an active part in popular culture and flaunting their knowledge of it.

As the vice president digs in for his last stand in Tennessee and elsewhere, some other moves of his (or of his campaign staff’s) have threatened to backfire. Early Wednesday morning, a Memphis radio reporter was awakened from slumber by a call from the Gore-Lieberman campaign urging him to conduct an interview with former state Attorney General (and current Gore CEO) Charles Burson, who was then placed on the line. (This came a day after someone from the Gore-Lieberman campaign had called the station and carried out a lengthy interrogation concerning its demographics Ñ the idea seeming to station personnel to be, ‘Are you worthy of being the medium for our message?’)

Somewhat grumpily, the reporter obliged by havng a conversation with Burson, a highly personable man but one whom he did not know personally. The reporter made no effort to record it for later broadcast purposes.

To the reporter, the episode– which no doubt had its counterpart in Bush’s campaign here and there– smacked of the artificial and the peremptory.

For all that, it is a fact that Gore has his share of long-term home-state relationships, real ones, and he will be calling on all these during his weekend sweep of Knoxville and Memphis (where a Court Square rally Friday night will be followed by Gore’s appearance at a Democratic prayer breakfast Saturday), to be followed by a return to his headquarters site of Nashville to get the last word from the voters.

“I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” is Gore’s song, and any wrong notes here at the end of things could easily create unwanted dissonance instead of the playback he’s looking for.

(You can write Jackson Baker at baker@memphisflyer.com)