Throughout its seventy plus years Monopoly has taught the basics of money: debit, credit, acquisition, and renting. Generations of children have learned the hard lessons of spending, saving, and pay-as-you-go economics. Kids find out that in the end, it's not always the guy with the most toys who finishes the winner - it's the one with the most cash. Several generations have followed this business model in one form or another, building an America that was strong, eager to work, financially independent and secure.
By the mid-thirties the board game that is based upon the genteel streets of post-Victorian Atlantic City was in millions of households across the world. With its pastel shades of green, pink, yellow, and blue big bucks, its money would travel across the board passing from player to player, until finally only one savvy kid had enough clout to stay in the game.
This time of year TV loudly and repeatedly screams that happiness is stuff--newer, more, bigger and better sparkly stuff. Never mind that gasoline is at an all-time high, the dollar at an all time low, and China only gets fatter from America's plastic holiday spending spree. Heck, it's Christmastime, and junior deserves everything. More stuff makes the kiddies smile. It's all just the price of America's annual joy, and a yearly rite of the evergreen American dream.
This Christmas there's a new, improved version of Monopoly, with a decidedly 2007 twist. It uses no cash, just a VISA branded debit card and reader. Gone are the days of winning the game by hiding your stash of cash, no more flaunting your stack of paper. It's swipe and go, just like the real world, but watch out for those teaser-rate mortgages.
The mortgage meltdown illustrates that people often listen more to pitch than look at the small stack of cash in front of them. Americans are stuck with homes that they could never afford. Adam Smith's invisible hand is throwing the dice and forcing the middle class to go live under the Boardwalk. This all comes at a time when Bush's Iraq wastes 275 million dollars a day.
Americans have bought the warm and cozy rhetoric the Bush administration has pressed forward; the war and the cost of servicing the debt are just the costs of keeping us "free" and "safe." America is neither free nor safe as long as we owe this huge unserviceable debt to the rest of the world. Still, there is no shouting in the streets. Presidential candidates on the Republican side are more intent on finding the bigger Christian among them than finding a way to solve America's economic issues. Eventually America is going to have sell out or do something drastic to service Bush's huge faith-based debt.
In the mid-'seventies when one American town found itself at wit's end, it sold itself to the industry the state didn't want, but the city desperately needed for another sandy, salty chance. Louis Malle's 1980 film Atlantic City shows a town that has cashed in its chips and given into desperation to improve its future. Gone are the days of romps in the surf and strolls down the Steel Pier. The film opens and closes as one, then another of the city's great Victorian hotels fall under the wrecking ball. Urban blight and financial mismanagement have forced the entire town into economical expulsion.
Burt Lancaster plays Lou, one of the last of the old-timers, who meets Sally, played by Susan Sarandon. Sally craves the new life the casino gambling is offering, and Lou just wants to make sure all the old timers are out of their buildings before they are blown to bits.
The film captures a time and place in America when the realities of one generation were running into the ambitions of the next. In the end, people are still just trying to make it through the game to financial health, but most haven't even passed 'GO.'
Atlantic City was Lancaster's swan song and a fitting way for a grand Golden Age star to be remembered by a new generation. The film captured America's eternal promise--that with a little luck and a lot of cash you can buy your way out of any problem. Just don't try to use a credit card.