By Don Hall

Working in a casino just off the Strip means I run into a lot of odd types. It also means I’m pretty much prohibited from responding with my own views on politics when guests decide its time they discuss theirs.

He’s a middle-aged white guy playing keno for a few hours at fifty cents a bet. I ask how he’s doing and if he needs anything. He says he needs the air conditioning turned up because it’s 107˚ outside and he can’t take it today. He starts talking about the science behind the weather and, for awhile, we are in complete agreement. He touches on climate science accurately (in my view), he talks about the tectonic plates in California with a perspective that indicates he knows a few things about geological science, he waxes on about our slow descent into a Garbage Planet.

Then.

“The fucking liberals want this Green Deal and they just don’t care about raising my taxes or what it would take to implement such a mess. Thank god Hillary Clinton lost that election! At least President Trump is a businessman and understands that things have to be paid for!”

I feel myself disembody and float somewhere above the two of us. 

Given the constraints of the job, instead of launching into a litany of “What the fuck are you thinking?” and “Let me school you on the facts!” I am required to listen. In listening, I have to hear this dude’s worldview. A part of my job is to make him comfortable enough to keep playing because, after all, a casino exists solely to take his money from him. So I ask questions. And listen.

Mike is a regular. I see him almost every day. He’s a contractor who comes in for lunch and plays the bar poker machines (usually the one on the far end corner). He’s a nice guy and always has a good story or two.

“Don! C’mere! I wanna show you this!”

He holds up his phone and shows me a picture of a chrome-plated pistol that looks so ridiculously oversized and monstrous at first I think it’s a drawing. It’s not.

“This one is so big, I may only get to fire it at the range!”

“When would you fire it otherwise?”

“You never know. Next time I go to Seattle, I’m bringing it.”

“Why Seattle?”

“You read what the liberals have done to that place? Homeless hippies everywhere, over running the local businesses. It’s like an infestation of fucking social justice assholes who don’t understand the basics of hygiene. Crime has gone through the roof and the cops can’t touch ‘em because they’ll put ‘em on YouTube.”

My brain goes into a tailspin of gun control, the reasons for rampant homelessness in the country, and videos of police brutality. But I say nothing. And listen.

Most of them don’t lead with their right-wingness. I’ve never seen anyone in the casino with a MAGA hat or Trump T-shirt on. They appear to be just like anyone else. Often, as I engage them, the views are benign and interesting but somehow they get around to some nugget of Trumpsterism. I’m always a little surprised when a Latino suddenly pivots and reveals he is a hardcore republican but I’m getting used to it. 

“You aren’t one of those Obama people, are you?”

“Obama people?”

“You said you used to work for NPR. Are you one of those Obama-was-a-great-president kind of guys?”

“I did vote for him — twice — so I guess I am.”

“Fucking Obama. No offense but what the hell were you thinking?”

Oh shit. An invitation. I reign myself in.

“Why don’t you like Obama?”

The common thread is not bigotry, not white supremacy, not xenophobia. The thing that binds these casino-dwellers ideologically is simply a base disgust with liberals. They hate us. They hate our condescension, our moralizing, our expectations that they should have to pay for our comfort or ideas. If I ask the right questions, I find that while we don’t see eye to eye on a host of things, most of them aren’t the monsters the Rage Profiteers paint them out to be.

“Why don’t you like Obama?”

“He tried to take our guns! And that time when he went around apologizing for being American was just too much.”

“Hmmm.”

“What?”

“That’s just not how I saw his presidency. I saw a decent man who did his best to govern our country at a time when the economy was in tatters, when we were at war with an idea rather than a country, who was just trying to make sure everyone had healthcare and food. I can’t imagine those things are easy.”

“He wasn’t even American! He was born in Kenya!”

“Does that matter?”

“So you admit he wasn’t American?”

“No. Just curious as to why that matters one way or another.”

I’d love to say I changed his mind but I was no more successful at changing his mind than I have been at changing Dave Colan’s mind as he states with no irony that if Trump wins again in 2020 it means that Americans are just in favor of bigotry. I’d love to say that I’m finding people of all stripes who are looking for some common ground rather than seeking out at every occasion some reason to be enraged or argue the minutia in order to win the conversation. But I’m not.

I’m finding that despite opposing worldview, I’m more inclined to be more polite in person than I am online. My willingness to listen and respond with a bit of care is heightened in real life than on the internet. Online, people are all becoming dogmatists and assholes and I’m seeing everyone start to see the world as Trump seems to: a sea of theoretical people.

I’m finding that my intolerance for those strident moralists on both sides are almost exactly the same: each one believes without almost any evidence that the Other is out to get him, that the only way through this forest of misunderstanding and vitriol is to burn it down, that this is truly a fight of Good vs. Evil and they are on the right side of things and I find that attitude to be that of the brainwashed and overtly religious.

It’s a sorry circumstance to see those activists on the Left in the same category as the alt-Right because I agree with most of what the virtue-signalers are fighting for. I just can’t get behind the fact that they’re fighting for the right things the wrong way. Without a sense of rationality, compassion, humility, and honor. They’re fighting like Trump and his ilk and, at the end of the story, what you accomplish is only colored by how you got it done.

Working in a casino has its ups and downs. Meeting people of differing points of view has not been a negative aspect.