This story appeared this week in the New Yorker, and tells of Derek DelGaudio a sleight of hand artist who got roped into an informal gambling den in Hollywood. He was the only dealer there who wasn’t “straight”. His job was to bilk players using his card tricks.
Finally came the last straw
As he tells it, one night he was dealing to a sad-sack guy who was one of his regular “donks.” DelGaudio had cheated him of every poker chip he had. It was customary to tip the dealer in chips, but, as the man stood up, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill, which appeared to be all he had left. “Here you go, dealer,” the guy said. “I wish it was more.”
Seeing the man’s generosity—and his cash—made it all too real. “At that moment, I realized the absence of humanity in what I was doing,” DelGaudio recalls. It wasn’t just that he was cheating people of their money; he was cheating them of their reality. As he writes in “Amoralman,” “I thought that the donks were losing because I was the one rigging the game. But it never was a game; it was a simulation of a game.” He continues, “They weren’t poker players. They were prisoners, trapped by an illusion, unable to escape because they believed they were already free.” He was so disturbed by his role in this charade that he returned his tray of chips and walked out, never to return. “I didn’t tell them I was quitting,” he told me. “I just left. And hoped there would be no repercussions.” A year later, he heard from Ronnie that the whole operation had fallen apart.
A touching story all in itself, but the sting in the tail comes later
He also began to think about the world differently, including politics, a perspective that persists to the present day. In August, 2018, he tweeted, “I used to rig card games for a living. I’d watch people sit down and lose everything, again and again. But they didn’t lose because they ‘played by the rules’ and we didn’t. They lost because it wasn’t a game. It just looked like one. Democrats think it’s a game.” At the time, the U.S. Senate was approaching the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, after the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, had stalled the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland into oblivion using a specious justification that he later abandoned. In other words, the rules of the game were for donks. As time went on, DelGaudio continued to see how Democrats held to norms while Republicans stacked the deck using techniques like voter suppression. “They’re not better at playing the game,” he told me. “They’re better at simulating the act of playing the game.”
I can’t think of much to add to that, but to suggest looking up the article itself