Friday, January 23, 1998

Rolling the dice in a once-proud city

By Bob Greene

DETROIT -- When it happens anywhere else in America, you can accept it. You don't have to like what it says about where the country is headed -- but you can shrug, say it's too bad, and accept it.

But Detroit?

It just seems wrong. For all the financial sense that it may or may not make, for all the economic help the city so desperately needs...

It still seems dead wrong.

Detroit is about to get three gambling casinos. The casinos are being held up as the savior of the city. There is great excitement about the coming of the casinos -- the three of them, according to projections, will generate gross annual revenues of $1.2 billion -- and in a city that has often been on the ropes, that means something.

Actually, it would mean something for just about any city. That's why casinos are becoming so ubiquitous in this country. According to statistics provided by the gambling industry's lobbying group, 26 states now allow some form of casino gambling, and at last count there were 950 casinos in operation in the United States. During the last full year for which figures are available, casinos brought in $25 billion in total revenues.

And now, Detroit. As recently as 1995, Michigan state law did not permit casino gambling, but because of a push by gambling interests in Detroit, a gambling initiative was put on the ballot, and prevailed. Two months ago Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer announced his selection of the three companies that will be allowed to open casinos.

Certainly, Detroit could use some sort of economic surge. Once the classic brawny, smokestack-dominated American manufacturing city -- prosperous and muscular and indomitable -- its many troubles in recent years have been well documented. Symbolically, a low point may have come in 1995, when a national publication suggested the desolation of downtown Detroit be turned into sort of a historic theme park of despair: "a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis."

So any industry that promised to bring in $1.2 billion a year in business was certain to be noticed. In 1993 -- before the casinos were even coming to Detroit for sure, before the law had been changed -- more than 10,000 people lined up for casino jobs just on the hopes it would happen.

And now, it will. The Detroit casinos are scheduled to open their doors in 2001.

What's so wrong with that?

The same thing that's wrong with the way the gambling culture is taking over the rest of the United States. This is a country that once derived its economic strength from producing things, from honest labor, from providing goods in exchange for the consumer's cash. The gambling business is the direct opposite of this. Nothing is manufactured, nothing of value is sold. All is an empty, cynical promise -- games of chance, games that the house is guaranteed to win. A legalized way to take money from honest people.

The kind of people who made Detroit a great American city in the first place. For it to happen here -- for the hopeless resignation that the gambling culture represents to triumph here, masquerading as hope -- should make every American citizen a little queasy.

Jobs? Oh, there will be jobs. Men who in the past might have worked in auto plants will put on tuxedos and deal hands of 21 or preside over craps tables. Women who once might have built engines on assembly lines will wear short skirts and serve cocktails to the gamblers or work the Keno parlors.

A city that once swaggered, a city that was proud because of the steel and sweat and clear-eyed labor at its soul -- a city that made things, that produced things Americans needed -- will join all the other cities and states that have thrown up their hands and waved the white flag and embraced legalized gambling because the money was nowhere else to be found.

The president of Circus Circus -- one of the companies that will have a Detroit casino -- told the press that the U.S. gambling market will soon have "four quadrants," four capitals: Las Vegas, Atlantic City, the new gambling haven of Mississippi, and -- now -- Detroit.

Which, as it enters a new century, will be a different city than it ever was -- in a gambling-vanquished country that should be increasingly reluctant to look in the mirror.

Chicago Tribune