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You can’t play if you don’t win

By G.D.

By G.D. Maxwell

Racing down to the liquor store, still dazed and not entirely capable of sorting the real from the unreal, I grabbed the most expensive bottle of champagne I could find, an undistinguished vintage of Dom whose provenance aside, still carried a price tag north of $250. For good measure, I grabbed its six siblings and left a gaping hole in the store’s soldierly display.

"Celebration?" the clerk asked as she rang the bottles through.

"Sorta," I answered without elaboration.

Mustering all the presence of mind possible, I grabbed a bottle of aspirin from the pharmacy next door for what I knew would be a rugged morning after the night before. At the cash, I shot a furtive glance one more time at the numbers that would change my life in mysterious ways I couldn’t fully comprehend.

A monstrous SUV with, of course, Washington plates nearly clipped me as I stepped, not looking, into the parking lot. I smiled and waved at the perpetually perplexed driver. "Wonder if I oughta get me one of them?" I wondered. But maybe not. Having the dough to be an environmental terrorist and having the will are still two different things.

But then a sleek something or other caught my eye. "Italian," I surmised, guessing anything looking that fast standing still and having the haughty pretension to omit any sort of identifying nameplate or badge must cost a fortune and be fringe, the working definition of any noteworthy Italian car. "Look good in that, Jefe," envisioning tooling down the Killer Highway with the wind blowing in my hair.

Thoughts of vaguely sexual Italian cars gave birth to thoughts of a stable of vintage motorcycles which segued into thoughts about new motorcycles which spawned thoughts of taking delivery of a new Beemer and two-wheeling through Europe which brought me to the ultimate fantasy, pulling up next to some slack-jawed kid and tossing him the keys with a haughty, "You keep it; it’s almost out of gas." Blow the dude’s mind.

Jabbing myself with the working end of a knife hiding in the dishwater, I snapped back to reality. There was no Dom, no Italian stallion in the driveway, no fleet of old Bonnies and Black Shadows. There were more dishes to wash and the television in the other room admonishing me, "You can’t win if you don’t play."

Lotteries. Sucker games. A tax on the stupid. Or is that attacks.

The lottery, some lottery, is into real money this week, a couple of million or a couple of zillion dollars. Funny money altitude. The kind of money that puts a reasonably normal person into the ironic position of considering money worthless or at least meaningless, so much of it flows through their hands.

Who has never played the What Would I Do If I Won the Lottery game? It is, in many ways, far more salving than actually laying down your hard earned Loonie and buying a ticket you know doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Lillooet of winning. The free-flowing fantasies of conspicuous consumption, the philanthropic gestures, the over-the-top Magic Christian mind-blowing excesses of largesse that come naturally to mind when the proposition of having more dough than even your pitiful imagination would know what to do with are a rich indulgence. The odds of weaving a good fantasy, even hamstrung with a mediocre imagination, are way better than fourteen million to one.

There are, of course, exceptions. I’ve always believed lotteries, like other contests, should require the putative winner to answer a skill-testing question. The question I propose is the one lottery officials usually ask anyway, "What are your plans for the money?"

If you answer something like "Party ’til my eyeballs bleed." or "Found a charity to bring Gameboys™ to the Third World." you’d pass, get your winnings and dive into the world of unlisted phone numbers, aliases and garish disguises.

But if, as some real lottery winners have, you answer something like, "Oh, it won’t really change my life. I’m still planning to work at the shoe factory," you’d forfeit it on the spot. There is nothing so disheartening to the lottery ticket buying public than for a big winner to tell us he’s going to take a Florida vacation in the middle of July. Sorry, you’re just too dumb to be that lucky.

Which somehow, mysteriously but naturally, brings this all around to Ralph Klein.

Ralph, it turns out, is rolling in dough. It’s not his, all appearances to the contrary; it belongs to the Alberta treasury which, notionally, belongs to Albertans. Ralph’s rolling in dough because the world price of oil has spiked, due in large part to the never-ending War on Terror waged by the USofA and Coalition of the Unquestioning. High oil prices are what might be thought of as collateral damage… or a gift from the Prez to "his kind of people," to wit, oilmen.

Regardless, Alberta has reaped the spoils of war to the tune of $8 billion bucks this year, double what they thought they’d be swimming in from oil and gas royalties. That’s $8,000,000,000 in case you’ve never actually seen it written out. And that’s just this year’s haul.

Ralph announced a couple of weeks ago Alberta would be eliminating their hotel tax. He announced a month or so before that they’d be debt free by March of next year, the only province in Canada to manage that trick.

And with so much oil money pouring in, Ralph, in a rare moment of democratic thinking, is mailing a questionnaire out to all Albertans asking them what they think should be done with the surplus after the debt is retired.

Blatantly stealing a page from Whistler’s own brush with illusory democracy, Ralph’s even calling the campaign It’s Your Future . Being understated, he’s left off the exclamation mark.

In a similar vein to Whistler: It’s Your Future! , the people of Alberta are being asked to rank their preferred spending priorities in areas such as health, education, social programs and reduced taxes. Only time will tell if their preferences are given anything like the rapt attention and subtle massaging Whistleratics’ preferences were. But given Ralph’s disdain for public input, one can safely guess they’ll be carefully collected, compiled and ignored.

Absent from the choices is anything along the lines of conserving the resource for future use or lowering prices for domestic consumption.

The results of the survey will be posted sometime in October which is, oddly enough, just before Ralph’s expected to call an election and seek, like so many tired politicians serving under a system lacking term limits, re-election.

Wait a minute… you don’t suppose? Naw.