The Economy as a Drinking Game
February 26, 2020
Do the kids still play “Asshole,” these days? Back in my college years/binge drinking summers at the Jersey Shore in the early `90s, that was the most popular way to spend the hours as we emptied many, many kegs and Coors Lite beer balls. The game consisted of dealing out the entire deck of cards (or several decks, depending on the number of players). The goal was to be the first person to get rid of all your cards, in which case you would become “President.” When one person threw down a card, the next person in line could only throw a card of equal or greater value (throwing a card of equal value would automatically skip the turn of the person next in line). For the most part, the cards were valued in traditional order, with Ace, King, Queen, Jack, Ten, etc. being the highest in descending order, but the Two was the magic card, which would give the person who threw it the ability to clear the deck and start fresh with whichever card or cards he/she wanted to throw.
Players’ ranks in the game were determined by the order in which they could get rid of their cards. We didn’t have names for all of the positions, but in general there was the President and Vice President at the top of the pecking order, with the “Asshole” at the very bottom. (Sometimes we called the second-to-asshole the “Shithead,” but that might’ve just been my group of friends.)
This is where some of the drinking came in—anyone in the game was allowed to tell anyone below them in rank to drink. The President was also able to make silly rules during his/her term. Drinking penalties could be incurred if anyone said the word “drink” (forcing everyone to get creative with synonyms) or maybe for picking up their glass with their right hand. The President might force some kind of silly humiliation on the Asshole, so that he/she would spend the term/hand wearing a colander as a hat, speaking in a funny voice/accent, or something similar. Creativity was encouraged.
The structure of the game made it a little easier for the President and Vice President to stay in positions of power, and made it a little more difficult for the Asshole and Shithead to climb upward. When the cards were dealt, the Asshole had to surrender two of his/her best cards to the President in exchange for the worst, and the Shithead and VP had to exchange one card. This gave the people at the top the perks of power, but upward mobility was still possible, and with a little luck and strategy, it wasn’t unusual for an Asshole to rise through the ranks to become President even within one or two hands.
I think the Asshole game, with its original rules, can serve as some kind of analogy for the way society was in the `50s and `60s, those “great” decades when the middle class was more robust and secure. Back then, even though the wealthy had perks, upward mobility was possible. But the society we’re living in today seems to be the result of a world in which the President and Vice President have been allowed to actually change structure of the game itself, further monopolizing the good cards with every term in power—and the President and VP have somehow convinced the rest of us playing the game to let them.
(Please note that for the sake of this essay, “President” will refer to the wealthiest Americans in general and not specifically to the current impeached occupant of the White House. Well, “occupant” is being used loosely…I mean when he’s not siphoning taxpayer dollars into his coffers via his weekly golf vacations.)
So now, instead of just making silly drinking rules, with every term the President and VP have insisted on rules that automatically gave them all of the good cards. As a result, we’re now playing a game where the Asshole is automatically dealt all the worthless threes and fours, the Shithead has nothing but fives and sixes while the President and VP hoard all the twos and face cards. The players in the middle have to divvy up whatever is left. This leads to predictable results. With no chance of ever losing, the President and VP can amuse themselves during the game by dreaming up any number of humiliations to inflict upon the rest of us who will never have the chance to initiate payback. Instead of merely enacting silly, fun rules, the President and VP become even more greedy and cruel, and insist that only they can quaff the quality beer, while the Asshole and Shithead have to drink the dredges of a week-old skunky keg. (Yes, yes…let’s just pretend for the sake of this argument that any of my friends were drinking decent quality beer in the early `90s.)
This obviously becomes a very tedious, frustrating game for the Assholes and Shitheads, as well as for the people like myself stuck somewhere in the middle. So the logical thing to me, is to go back to the original rules. Right? If the majority of the game players would have a better time playing a more fair and fluid game, then why can’t we just overrule the President and Vice President? But much to my surprise, the President has managed to convince many of my fellow middle-dwellers that they should be OPPOSED to going back to the old rules. The suggestion of changing the rules back to when they were more beneficial to everyone has been successfully twisted into the lie that in doing so, everyone would be dealt cards that are all the SAME. The President has tricked many of the game players into believing that reverting to the game’s original rules would result in nothing but sixes and sevens for everyone. Or, the President convinces the Middles that by reverting to the game’s original rules, what would REALLY happen would be that people in the middle will have to trade places with the Asshole and Shithead, giving up relatively comfortable middle spots for ones at the very bottom.
I understand why this argument works. After all, when people in the middle are effectively prohibited from any upward mobility, the only thing they can really do is fight tooth-and-nail to not fall to the bottom. Plus, throughout the terms of more and more power, the President has been successful at encouraging those in the middle to look down on the Asshole and Shithead, and take out their frustrations on them. With no chance of upward mobility, many in the middle have learned to take joy from the power they have over the people who have been dealt even worse hands. The President has cultivated a culture in which many in the middle feel scorn for the Asshole and laugh at the increasing drunken debilitation, as if they themselves would surely comport themselves with much more dignity if they were the ones being forced to drink by everyone else at the table and being dealt the worst hand.
Instead of changing the rules back to when they were fair, the President and his cronies assert that those in the middle should REALLY watch out for the more pressing danger of the Asshole cheating. That is truly what hurts the middle’s chances for upward mobility, they say. They even promise to reward those who are extra vigilant against Asshole cheating by eventually giving them a face card for their allegiance, but they never actually fulfill that promise.
This Asshole drinking game analogy comes to my mind in the real world when I hear the vehement pushback against Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s proposal of a marginal tax rate of 70%--less than it was when America was “great,” back in Eisenhower’s Day. Those under the President’s spell equate proposals like AOC’s with a desire to replicate Soviet-era breadlines throughout the U.S. They excoriate AOC as a pinko commie, when all she is really advocating is a return to rules that were successful in the past in terms of being more fair to those both in the middle and the bottom of the pecking order.
Analogies are never perfect (and how perfect would one expect a drinking game analogy to be?) so I understand that things like universal healthcare don’t present a clear correlation to putting things “back” to the original rules. But the world has changed, and those of us in the middle have a lot of new expenses that those in earlier hands of the game didn’t have. I’ve recently seen footage of JFK approximately 60 years ago, talking about how far behind the U.S. was even then in terms of providing healthcare for everyone, so the idea is neither new nor radical. It’s really only the Presidents and VPs who are convincing the Middles that the idea of universal healthcare is somehow new and “radical” even though it has been successfully implemented in every other first-world country on the planet.
“bUt vENeZUelA!!!” is the Pavlovian response the President has trained his allies in the middle to belch out at this point, as if that country’s problems were the result of providing healthcare instead of a series of complex issues. The President and Vice President have conditioned their followers to equate any measure that would give them a chance for better cards with scary and foreign-sounding concepts like socialism and communism, when really it would still be capitalism, but a form of capitalism that was more restrained from exploiting and devaluing the middle-dwelling workers who fuel the economy.
The main reason for the failure of Venezuela and various third-world countries is not because of any universal healthcare, but because one way or another, their people ceded too many of their cards to wealthy oligarchs and gave them the sole ability to set the rules of the game—much like what we in the U.S. just did by telling our current impeached president that he is above the law and will face no consequences for cheating in the upcoming election. What we all should remember that in any country/game, it doesn’t really matter whether the wealthy ruler is called “president,” “king,” “dictator,” “chairman” or anything else—the more we give the ruler all the good cards and cede our ability to have a say in the game’s rules, the more likely we’ll all end up being Assholes.
