The New Gettysburg Address

[This was delivered by Michael Feldman on his "Whad'Ya Know?" show on National Public Radio. It concerns the building of a casino in Highland Township, Pennsylvania.]

GETTYSBURG'S NEW ADDRESS, 2005

Four score and seventy million in expected grosses from now, our
fathers will have brought forth in this county a new casino,
conceived in greed and dedicated to the proposition that there’s one
[sucker] born every minute.
Now we are engaged in a great media war, testing whether or not that
casino or any casino so detached from a race track can succeed. We
are met on a great battlefield of that war. We will dedicate a part of it
to property tax relief but get it back at the slots. Attracting Wayne
Newton to the lounge is not out of the question. This we may, in all
likelihood, do. But in a larger sense we cannot fleece, flim-flam or
bilk the public. Only the public can do that. The world will little
remember what we say here, but the bucks will roll in indefinitely.

It is for us, the patsies, to be dedicated to the great task of ramming it through the Highland Township planning commission so that the developers who’ve already sunk a pretty penny into this thing shall not have spent in vain, that this county shall have a new stream of revenue, and that gambling of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the county.

written by Michael Feldman