Step right up, suckers

LITTLE ROCK — WHY IS it that the latest, bumper crop of embarrassments rolled out by the state lottery, or rather by the state auditors who have to go over its confused books, neither surprises nor shocks? One might as well be shocked-shocked!-that gambling is going on here. As shocked as Captain Reynaud was to find that roulette wheel in Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca.

Imagine the outcry in the state legislature, in the press, in the never easily shocked public, if it had been any other state agency that had produced a dozen screw-ups in just one auditor’s report.

This time the discrepancies in the lottery’s records ranged from the usual, highly questionable travel expenses to not completing a required background report on a new hire in time. A mere detail for this feckless crew.

The missing documentation, the usual assortment of administrative foul-ups, the standard excuse about the distinguished director’s being too busy getting the lottery off the ground to worry about paperwork . . . . All this is just par for the twisting course for His Grace Ernest Passailaigue, aka Big Ernie, the lottery’s hot-shot director and his coterie of confidants out of South Carolina.

After all, the man is only paid $324,000 a year. And for that piddling sum you want a responsible operation? Please. Basic accountability is too much to hope for at those rates, or even just simple shame. And forget about the sincerest form of apology: resignations all around. That would be too honorable.

THINK OF the state’s reaction if this kind of sloppy bookkeeping or just general irresponsibility had turned up on the highway commission, or at a state university (Arkansas has lost a college president or two in the wake of such misaccounting) or at the Game and Fish Commission, which would be much improved by a coupla-three resignations, especially among its law heads. Yes, just imagine the outcry then.

You don’t have to imagine. It’s already happened. Just mention the Game and Fish Commission to any of the state’s myriad hunters and wait for the jokes and snickers.

But the lottery gets a pass. It gets away with its outrage du jour with scarcely a raised eyebrow. Just as long as the money keeps rolling in, especially from the state’s poorest and most desperate. They make the best suckers. And the rest of us accept all that. Our conscience is bought. “Your winnings, sir,” to quote another line from Casablanca. The police captain from Vichy can express the appropriate indignation at finding gambling at Rick’s, but everybody knows it’s just show as long as he can cash in on it himself.

How is it that the lottery’s managers can get away with the kind of mismanagement that wouldn’t be tolerated in any other state agency?

Here’s our theory: It’s because all of us on some level realize that state condoned and even state-encouraged gambling is a corrupt and corrupting enterprise by its very nature. Like every other enterprise built on the dubious theme/scheme of Something for Nothing. So why be surprised when the lottery we voted for routinely produces reports like this one out of the state auditors’ office?

Weren’t we told this would happen when We the (grasping) People went into that voting booth and gave it our blessing? Did we really expect a poisoned tree not to produce poisonous fruit?

NOT UNTIL we return Arkansas to that prelapsarian state when there was no state lottery, and gambling was legally confined to a few race tracks-cum-casinos, can we be spared regular news stories like these. And the whole pretense of being shocked-shocked!

Not until then will there be any hope of restoring respect for “generally accepted accounting principles” and, even more important, respect for ourselves.

But you, Gentle Reader, have to know the political odds against that kind of reform and reformation. It won’t happen because we love the money the lottery brings in. We’d rather soak the least among us than raise our own taxes to provide college scholarships.

So we tacitly approve all this incompetence or worse. We grow used to thinking of it as just another cost of doing business. Call it overhead.

Want to see who’s responsible for the continuing messes at the Arkansas Lottery? All we need do is take a long, hard look at our own moral standards. The sight is about as elevating as spotting a losing lottery ticket somebody’s thrown in the gutter. And we won’t be clean till we throw away the lottery itself.