Your Dreams Get Decided by People You Don’t Like

A look at shiny prizes, failures of imagination, and what my schemes and fantasies say about schemes and fantasies.

I just applied for the Pulitzer Prize. It’s something I do in the years when I publish a book. It’s $75 to enter. And I doubt it’s $75 well spent.

The book I entered this year is a nakedly self-published volume of 900 aphorisms, with 50 pages of essays about what I hope to achieve with it. The only category that seemed to fit was nonfiction, where it will compete against weighty works on the subjects most people agree matter most this year, which have been reviewed in the Times and the Journal, and discussed on NPR.

Statistically my odds of winning are about 230 to 1, or just slightly better than betting a nine-leg parlay. But it’s not a lottery, exactly. Not all entries have an equal chance to win. And going by the history of the category, it doesn’t seem like I Forget Just This Good Said Thing is their cup of tea. Then again, nothing ever happened until it did. Or to put it another way, hey, you never know.

Dollar and dream

“All you need is a dollar and a dream,” is the old lotto tagline. I have my own feelings about state-sponsored lotto - the entity that can deprive you of your property, freedom and even your life probably shouldn’t operate a gambling operation on the side.

But the tagline, like many of the best taglines, takes something that sounds true and bends it in the surface of a lie. The lie is that a dollar and a dream is what it takes to get rich. First off, the odds against winning are staggering. Secondly, at least a large plurality of the people who regularly purchase lotto tickets have had what we euphemistically call dreams beaten out of them by failure, boredom, indifference and worse. They may have lost the imagination and emotional energy to even properly fantasize. They buy the tickets out of boredom, habit and despair.

As proof, I’d point to the huge proportion of lotto winners who squander their big jackpot on more gambling, and not the “dreams” we imagine them having.

The truth of the slogan is “You all need a dollar to dream.” This is an insult. But it’s likely how a croupier feels about his customers. They’re fools. They have everything they need to know better than to step up to the wheel of chance. But they lack imagination, and they need to dream so badly that they’re willing to empty their pockets for the privilege.

No one dreams of winning the lottery, exactly. It’s just the last plausible happy thought after every other fantasy has been strangled in its crib.

Awards

The Pulitzer Prize isn’t my dream so much as a failure of my imagination.