We make it to the Speedway, chain our bikes to a fence near Turn 2 and then head our separate ways. Some of us like to watch the race from Turn 2; others at the start/finish line. There are more traditions to come: the singing of “Back Home Again in Indiana,” some second-tier celebrity saying, “Drivers, start your engines,” the parade laps, and the race itself. Tradition is a way of being with people, not just the people you’re observing the traditions with now, but also all those who’ve ever observed them.
* * *
I’m able to write all of this in the present tense because these traditions function as a kind of continuity—they happened, yes, but they are still happening, and will go on happening. The rupture of that continuity was part of what made May of 2020 so difficult for me. As the pandemic took hold, I felt as if I was being unmoored from what I thought was reality. So much that had recently been extraordinary—wearing a mask, being conscious of every surface I touched or every human I walked past—was in the process of becoming mundane. And so much that had recently been mundane was becoming extraordinary.
The Sunday before Memorial Day of 2020, I packed my backpack as usual, and Sarah and I got on our bikes as usual. Near Bob’s Food Mart, we met up with our friends Ann-Marie and Stuart Hyatt. We wore masks as we biked down to the Speedway, where the gates were locked shut. It was so quiet, so impossibly quiet as we sat in a vast and empty parking lot. When the race finally did happen, in August, it was held without fans for the first time. I watched it on TV, and found it interminably boring.
But I’m thinking back to 2018. Dozens of us are locking our bikes to the chain-link fence and scattering about to our various seats in the crowded grandstands. In four or five hours, we will meet back at the fence, unlock our bikes, and repeat the rituals on the way home. We will talk about how this happened or that happened, how we are happy for Will Power, who is such a good guy and finally got his Indy 500 victory. I’ll tell my Will Power story, only to learn that many of my friends also have Will Power stories. Speedway is a small town after all, even on this day, and we are in it together.
I give the Indianapolis 500 four stars.
MONOPOLY
WHEN MY FAMILY AND I PLAY MONOPOLY, a board game in which the goal is to bankrupt your fellow players, I sometimes think about Universal Paperclips, a 2017 video game created by Frank Lantz. In Universal Paperclips, you play the role of an artificial intelligence that has been programmed to create as many paperclips as possible. Over time, you produce more and more paperclips, until eventually you exhaust all of Earth’s iron ore, whereupon you send probes to outer space to mine paperclip materials from other planets, and then eventually other solar systems. After many hours of play, you finally win the game: You’ve turned all the universe’s available resources into paperclips. You did it. Congratulations. Everyone is dead.
In Monopoly, you land on various properties as you move around a square board. In the original game, the properties are from a fictionalized version of Atlantic City, New Jersey, but that changes depending on region and edition. For instance, in the Pokémon version of the game, properties include Tangela and Raichu. Regardless, if you land on an unclaimed property, you can purchase it, and if you establish a monopoly by purchasing related properties, you can build houses and hotels. When other players land on places you own, they must pay you rent. Acquire enough properties, and the rent becomes unsustainable for your fellow players, and they go bankrupt.
There are many problems with Monopoly, but maybe the reason the game has persisted for so long—it has been one of the world’s bestselling board games for over eighty years—is that its problems are our problems: Like life, Monopoly unfolds very slowly at first, and then becomes distressingly fast at the end. Like life, people find meaning in its outcomes even though the game is rigged toward the rich and privileged, and insofar as it isn’t rigged, it’s random. And like life, your friends get mad if you take their money, and then no matter how rich you are, there’s an ever-expanding void inside of you that money can never fill, but gripped by the madness of unregulated enterprise you nonetheless believe that if you just get a couple more hotels or take from your friends their few remaining dollars, you will at last feel complete.
To me, the worst thing about Monopoly is its convoluted, self-contradictory analysis of capitalism. The game is essentially about how acquiring land is literally a roll of the dice, and how the exploitation of monopolies enriches the few and impoverishes the many. And yet, the point of the game is to get as rich as you can.
Monopoly’s mealymouthed take on economic inequality is also like life, at least life in Monopoly’s home nation of the United States, where many of us think of billionaires the way I thought of the popular kids in middle school. I despised them, but also desperately wanted to be them. In Monopoly’s case, the thematic inconsistency of the game is largely a product of its complicated origin story, which turns out to say far more about capitalism than the game itself does.
Here’s the creation myth as it gets told by Monopoly’s current owner, the toy company Hasbro: In 1929, in the wake of the great stock market crash, forty-year-old Charles Darrow lost his job in Philadelphia and was forced to scratch together a living as a door-to-door salesman. But then in 1933, he invented the board game Monopoly, eventually patenting the game and licensing it to the company Parker Brothers. Darrow became the first board game millionaire, a proper rags-to-riches story of an American inventor succeeding via the sweat of his Randian brow.
It’s a great story; so great, in fact, that many copies of Monopoly have been printed with Darrow’s biography alongside the rules. Today, there’s even a plaque in Atlantic City celebrating Charles Darrow. The only problem with the story is that Charles Darrow did not invent Monopoly.
Almost thirty years earlier, a woman named Elizabeth Magie created a board game called the Landlord’s Game. As detailed in Mary Pilon’s wonderful book The Monopolists, Magie was a writer and actor who supported her artistic pursuits with a career as a stenographer and typist, work that she hated. “I wish to be constructive,” she once said, “not a mere mechanical tool for transmitting a man’s spoken thoughts to letter paper.”
In her lifetime, Magie was best known for a newspaper ad in which she offered herself up for sale to the highest bidder. She described herself as “not beautiful, but very attractive,” and a woman of “strong bohemian characteristics.” The ad, which made national news, was meant to call attention to the discrimination against women in every aspect of American life, which forced them out of the workforce and into subservient roles in marriage. She told a reporter, “We are not machines. Girls have minds, desires, hopes, and ambitions.”
Magie also felt that no feminist movement could succeed without larger changes in the economic system. “In a short time,” she said, “men and women will discover that they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller have more maybe than they know what to do with.” To help show this to the world, in 1906 Magie created the Landlord’s Game. Magie was a follower of Henry George, an economist who believed, as Antonia Noori Farzan put it in the Washington Post, “that railroads, telegraphs, and utilities should be publicly owned, rather than controlled by monopolies, and that land should be considered common property.”