ABSTRACT
Gambling, like all forms of popular culture, has its stories. Some of them recount adult fairy tales of the plumber or secretary who becomes an instant millionaire with a winning lottery ticket or a slot jackpot. ‘I almost didn’t buy the ticket’, she says. ‘It was my last coin and I just dropped it in and prayed’, he says. Other stories resemble the cautionary tales we once told about comic books, crime fiction, and movies, and that today we tell about television, rock and roll, and pornography. These moral fables describe lives ruined by the ‘sin’ or ‘pathology’ of gambling. ‘He was a good man, worked hard, and took care of his family until he started gambling’, we say. ‘It was just like heroin. She just couldn’t stop’, we say. Nestled in these stories, gambling calls out to us as something we should do or as something we should control or stop.1 We dramatize consensus and conflict in this dialectic of the stories we tell in order to live and the lives we live in order to tell stories.
