Sin of the Month • Abby Bardi
	Money

“The cancer on the body politic is money: Money, money, money.”
—Fritz Hollings

If you’ve ever played Monopoly, you know how money works. The players start out with equal resources, and after a while, some end up with huge hotels and others are in jail without having even passed Go and collected $200. When I was a kid, I loved Monopoly, but my mother always used to refuse to play with me. She said it took too long (the longest game on record is 1,680 hours), and worse, it was too much like Real Life.

I didn’t know what she meant at the time, but when I had kids and they started taking me to the cleaners with their huge, Trump-like complexes on Boardwalk and Park Place, I began to agree with her that Monopoly was only fun up to that point when the game mysteriously shifts and then you are Doomed To Failure.

I tend to view the current political scene through the lens of Monopoly; indeed, it’s hard not to view every aspect of American life that way, since its basic supposition is precisely that which underpins Monopoly—that we are all created equal, with equal resources, and if some people end up underperforming, it’s just their bad luck. Of course, in real life, unlike in Monopoly, some people begin the game with a huge stash of cash and property and others with none. As we know, advantages beget other advantages, and soon a kind of economic critical mass is achieved in which the Iron owns most of the game board and the Boot finally quits in a huff.

During this recent election, I often experienced a sickening lurch in my stomach that felt familiar, and after a while, I began to recognize it as that feeling you get when you mortgage the first of your utilities and you know that your inevitable decline has begun. Although the Democrats raised an amazing amount of money for John Kerry and other candidates, the fact is, the right wing had already reached the point where they owned most of the property: they controlled the airwaves, with companies like Clear Channel; the news media, which is dependent on corporate advertising; and perhaps most important, the voting machines. Once the Republicans had built hotels on the best properties, the game shifted, and the results were inevitable.

So it seems to me that the problems in America today all boil down to Money. As I learned as a child from Monopoly, at some point in the game, the social balance shifts, and the people with money control everything. Once you control everything, it’s easy to make sure that the game goes your way.
This is a weird realization for someone who has never felt that Money was important. In my youth, I felt uncomfortable with the whole idea of it. I went to college with people from fairly well-to-do families, and I never understood their need for nice things like crystal and china—I had a kind of deafness to them, a spending disability, as it were. (In recent years, I’ve overcome it and have compensated by buying cheap china on eBay.) It never would have occurred to me to dedicate my life to making money, which evidently is some people’s goal, and as a result, I haven’t got any.

My assumption about life, which I got from my Monopoly-refusenik mother, was that you were supposed to do something Socially Useful if at all possible, and failing that, to avoid anything flashy like conspicuous consumption or, come to that, success.

My assumption about life, which I got from my Monopoly-refusenik mother, was that you were supposed to do something Socially Useful if at all possible, and failing that, to avoid anything flashy like conspicuous consumption or, come to that, success.

It seems to me that perhaps this is the problem with the Left today: by definition, people on the Left care less about Money than they do about liberty and justice for all. The goals of the Left are all other-oriented: we want to eradicate poverty, and not just our own; we want to have a clean environment for future generations, not just for ourselves; we want to avoid the killing of civilians in foreign countries, even when we don’t live in those countries; we want gay and lesbian people to have equal rights under the law, even when we ourselves are not gay or lesbian; we don’t mind paying taxes, even when those taxes are used to help others and not us; and so on.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the goals of the Right are simple: (1) They want to prevent other people from doing things they disapprove of; (2) they want to eliminate regulations that get in the way of corporate profits; and (3) they want to avoid paying taxes so they can have more money. It could be argued that at least #1 on this list, i.e., interfering in other people’s personal business, is somewhat other-oriented, but #2 and #3 are both motivated purely by economic self-interest.
So here’s my reasoning: if people who want Money make more of it and end up controlling everything as a result, the people without Money cannot help but lose the game.

Somehow, the right wing has painted the left as a bunch of chardonnay-slurping elitists, but the fact is, people on the right are the ones with the elitist values: they are motivated by money—big money—and what can be more elitist than that? They may claim that they are interested in “moral values” as a way of tricking one-issue voters to get in bed with them, but the real religious power behind the right wing is the Church of the Corporate Buck. And as everyone who has ever has to sell their last pitiful house on Baltic knows, money is power, and once you control everything, the opposition has no chance whatsoever.
Unless: unlike in Monopoly, where there is only one player per token1, in real life, each token represents millions of people. Let’s say that John Kerry was the Dog (known, according to Hasbro.com, for its tenacity and courage). There were more than 55 million Dog Voters behind him (perhaps way more—as I write, the votes in Ohio haven’t been recounted yet, and the recount won’t capture the numbers of voters who were disenfranchised). Since there is no Oil Can token, let’s call Bush the Car: sure, he has a lot of voters behind his token, but I am willing to bet that at the end of the day, in fact there are more Dog People in America than Car People.

Think about it: some of the Car People are probably already regretting their votes. Some of them voted for Bush because they misunderestimated what the Car Candidate really stood for. And some of the Dog People didn’t get to vote at all, or their votes weren’t counted, or they were harassed and intimidated when they went to the polls. But I believe, as we lick our wounds from this election, that the Dog People are in the majority in America—that America still stands for selflessness, altruism, equality, justice, and goodness, and that we are more than just a nation of money-grubbing, Boardwalk-grabbing, hotel magnates.

So here’s my thinking: perhaps one Dog Person can’t buy a hotel on Park Place, but if there are millions of us, and we continue to give money to Dog Causes, as we did to John Kerry, perhaps we can shift the balance of the game away from the right wing. I personally have vowed to give money to a good cause from every paycheck until the day that playing field starts to level again, and I call upon all you Dog People out there to do the same. Of course, just donating money isn’t sufficient—we have to get out there and bark, too.

Every Dog has his or her day. Let’s take back Boardwalk.

1 To take a quiz on your Monopoly Token Personality Type, go to the official Monopoly website: www.hasbro.com/monopoly/pl/page.da/dn/default.cfm