We all seek escape be it with arts, culture or at a gambling table

Blaring from our front page was the headline "HOOKED on gambling," followed by Statistics Canada figures detailing the province's growing reliance on the devil's pastime.

Then, if you flipped a few pages, there on our Arts & Life front was an interview with country singer Glen Campbell, carrying my byline and promoting his Monday night concert at that den of iniquity, McPhillips Street Station.

Sigh. Some of us are part of the solution. And some of us are part of the problem.

The Manitoba Lotteries Corp., the public body that runs the province's numbers rackets, has obviously been using an effective strategy with its two big Winnipeg casinos.

The idea, hardly original, has been to normalize gambling as entertainment: surround the VLTs and poker and blackjack tables with upmarket attractions, such as classy restaurants, dance floors and exotic aquariums. And, of course, concerts.

There were 500 such events at the McPhillips Street Station and Club Regent in 2007-'08, according to the MLC's most recent annual report.

Among the name acts were David Cassidy, Brent Butt, the Oak Ridge Boys, Air Supply and Richard Marx.

Marx and Cassidy are returning in the coming weeks. Also on the schedule are Terri Clark, Marty Stuart, Davy Jones and April Wine.

If you've attended one of these shows, you know they offer good value. The ticket prices are reasonable, the seating and sight lines are excellent, and there's even bar service to your table.

In offering a mere 400-500 seats for each show, the casinos use these concerts as loss leaders. They get you inside the doors, wow you with their bells and whistles, and hope you'll gamble away some of your discretionary cash.

The touring acts, many of them on the downhill trajectory of their careers, love playing casinos.

The facilities are first-rate and so is the paycheque, because it's subsidized by that "tax on idiots" that gambling is said to be.

It is easy to sneer at gambling as a form of entertainment, and the pastime does come with risks that are no laughing matter. Especially risky is the conflict that comes with letting the supplier, the government, serve as the police officer for the fallout.

But as the cliché goes, one's man meat is another man's poison.

You can shiver at the transcendent beauty of a Bach concerto or gasp at the emotional truths contained in the pages of a literary novel. You can appreciate the athletic and esthetic grace displayed on the baseball diamond or football field.

But isn't all entertainment, at some level, about escape from one's daily cares?

Many people do this by chasing the momentary thrill that comes from gambling.

Is spending $200 at a VLT any sillier than dropping the same amount on a Fleetwood Mac concert ticket at the MTS Centre?

In 2006, the British literary academic John Carey addressed this issue in a provocative book, What Good Are the Arts?

Carey's answer is disheartening to all highbrows who believe they are ennobled by their particular interests. He pounds into mince meat the logic that says, for example, that listening to opera makes one smarter than listening to country music, and he notes that sensitivity to the finer arts hardly correlates with finer behaviour.

Yes, gambling addictions are terrible things. The Vancouver doctor Gabor Maté talks about the psychological roots of addiction in his recent book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

In it he confesses that his addiction to buying classical music CDs filled the same void in his life that shooting crack cocaine does for the drug addict.

Earlier this week I ran into an acquaintance at the fringe festival, a fellow who treats this brilliant theatrical event with a certain zealotry.

This year, he told me, he was aiming to see 40 productions in 10 days. To accomplish this, he was surely avoiding his wife and spending his children's inheritance.

When you see 40 plays in 10 days, they run together.

What would he take away from the week, except the blissful memory of temporary escape, not unlike that of the gambler's?

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 25, 2009 C8