Since most bouts are unpredictable, boxers usually have superstitions which serve to create confidence and emotional security among them. Sometimes the manager or trainer uses these superstitions to control the fighter. One fighter believed that, if he ate certain foods, he was sure to win, because these foods gave him strength. Others insist on wearing the same robe in which they won their first fight; one wore an Indian blanket when he entered the ring. Many have charm pieces or attribute added importance to entering the ring after the opponent. . . . Some insist that, if a woman watches them train, it is bad luck. One fighter, to show he was not superstitious, would walk under a ladder before every fight, until this became a magical rite itself. Consistent with this attitude, many intensify their reli-gious attitudes and keep Bibles in their lockers. One fighter kept a rosary in his glove. If he lost the rosary, he would spend the morning before the fight in church. Although this superstitious attitude may be imported from local or ethnic culture, it is intensified among the boxers themselves, whether they are white or Negro, preliminary fighters or champions.34
Gamblers exhibit similar, if less religious, superstitions.35 Clearly, any realistic practice aimed at avoiding or reducing risk—any coping—is likely to have the side effect of reducing anxiety and remorse, is likely, in short, to have defensive functions. A person who coolly resorts to a game theory matrix when faced with a vital decision is reducing a painful risk to a calculated one. His frame of mind brings peace of mind. Like a competent surgeon, he can feel he is doing all that anyone is capable of doing, and hence can await the result without anguish or recrimination. Similarly, a clear appreciation of the difference between the determinative phase of a play and the disclosure and settlement of the play can help the individual deal with the anxiety produced during the span of the activity; such discriminations can have defensive functions.
It is not surprising, then, that when a causal basis is not readily found for discounting the determinativeness of the current situation, it may be sought out; and where it can’t be found, imagined. Thus, for example, we find that events determined locally may be interpreted as a consequence of prior determination. A version of this “defensive determinism” is found in the belief in fate, predestination, and kismet—the notion that the major outcomes regarding oneself are already writ down, and one is helpless to improve or worsen one’s chances. The soldier’s maxim is an illustration: “I won’t get mine ‘till my number’s up so why worry.”36
Just as causality can be sought outside the situation, so it can be sought in local forces that similarly serve to relieve one’s sense of responsibility. A type of scapegoating is involved, pointing to the function of lodging causal efficacy within what is seen as the enduring and autonomous parts of the individual’s personality, and thereby transforming a fateful event into something that is “only to be expected.” Suffering an accident because of carelessness, the individual can say, “That’s just like me; I do it all the time.” About to take a crucial examination the individual can ease matters by telling himself that the exam will be fair, and so everything depends on how much work he has or has not long since done.
Further, belief in pure, blind luck can protect the in-dividual from the remorse of knowing that something could have and should have been done to protect himself. Here is the opposite tack to defensive determinism—a kind of defensive indeterminism—but the consequences are much the same. “It’s nobody’s fault,” the individual says. “It was just a question of bad luck.”37
Obviously, then, a traditional statement of coping and defence can be applied in connection with fatefulness. But this neglects a wider fact about adaptation to chance-taking. When we look closely at the adaptation to life made by persons whose situation is constantly fateful, say that of professional gamblers or front-line soldiers, we find that aliveness to the consequences involved comes to be blunted in a special way. The world that is gambled is, after all, only a world, and the chance-taker can learn to let go of it. He can adjust himself to the ups and downs in his welfare by discounting his prior relation to the world and accepting a chancy relation to what others feel assured of having. Perspectives seem to be inherently normalizing: once conditions are fully faced, a life can be built out of them, and by reading from the bottom up, it will be the rises not the falls that are seen as temporary.
VI. Action
Although fatefulness of all kinds can be handled both by coping and by defense, it cannot be avoided completely. More important, there are, as suggested, some activities whose fatefulness is appreciable indeed if one combines the amount chanced, the rate of chance taking, and the problematicalness of the outcome. It is here, of course, that the individual is likely to perceive the situation as his taking of a practical gamble—the willful undertaking of serious chances.
Given the claims of wider obligation that commit some individuals to what they can perceive as chancy undertakings, virtue will sometimes be made of necessity. This is another defensive adjustment to fatefulness. Those with fateful duties sometimes hold themselves to be self-respecting men who aren’t afraid to put themselves on the line. At each encounter (they claim) they are ready to place their welfare and their reputation in jeopardy, transforming encounters into confrontations. They have a more or less secret contempt for those with safe and sure jobs who need never face real tests of themselves. They claim they are not only willing to remain in jobs full of opportunity and risk, but have deliberately sought out this environment, declining to accept safe alternatives, being able, willing, and even inclined to live in challenge.38
Talented burglars and pickpockets, whose skill must be exercised under pressure, look down, it is said, on the petty sneak thief, since the only art he need have for his calling is a certain low cunning.39 Criminals may similarly disesteem fences as being “thieves without nerve.”40 So, too, Nevada casino dealers may come on shift knowing that it is they who must face the hard intent of players to win, and coolly stand in its way, consistently blocking skill, luck, and cheating, or lose the precarious reputation they have with management. Having to face these contingencies every day, they feel set apart from the casino em-ployees who are not on the firing line. (In some casinos there are special dealers who are brought into a game to help nature correct the costly runs of good luck occasionally experienced by players, or to remove the uncertainty a pit boss can feel when a big bettor begins to play seriously. These dealers practice arts requiring delicacy, speed, and concentration, and the job can easily be visibly muffed. Moreover, the player at this time is likely to be heavily committed and searching openly and even bellig-erently in a small field for just the evidence that is there. Skilled card and dice “mechanics” understandably develop contempt not only for non-dealers but also for mere dealers.)41 The small-scale fishermen I knew on the Shetland Islands had something of the same feeling; during each of the five or six runs of a day’s fishing they subjected themselves to a serious gamble because of the extreme variability of the catch.42 Peering into the net as the winch brought the bag and its fish into view was a thrill, known by those who experienced it to be something their fellow islanders would not be men enough to want to stomach regularly. Interestingly, Sir Edmund Hillary, who came to practice a truly chancy calling, provides us with the following view of the work he and his father lived by, namely, beekeeping:
It was a good life—a life of open air and sun and hard physical work. And in its way it was a life of uncertainty and adventure; a constant fight against the vagaries of the weather and a mad rush when all our 1,600 hives decided to swarm at once. We never knew what our crop would be until the last pound of honey had been taken off the hives. But all through the exciting months of the honey flow the dream of a bumper crop would drive us on through long hard hours of labor. I think we were incurable optimists. And during the winter.I often tramped around our lovely bush-clad hills and learned a little about self-reliance and felt the first faint stirrings of interest in the unknown.43
When we
meet these stands we can suspect that the best is being made of a bad thing—it is more a question of rationalizations than of realistic accountings. (It is as if the illusion of self-determinancy were a payment society gives to individuals in exchange for their willingness to perform jobs that expose them to risk.) After all, even with chancy occupational roles, choice occurs chiefly at the moment the role itselF is first accepted and safer ones foregone; once the individual has committed himself to a particular niche, his having to face what occurs there is more likely to express steady constraints than daily re-decidings. Here the individual cannot choose to withdraw from chance-taking without serious consequence for his occupational status.44
However, there are fateful activities that are socially defined as ones an individual is under no obligation to continue to pursue once he has started to do so. No extraneous factors compel him to face fate in the first place; no extraneous ends provide expediential reasons for his continued participation. His activity is defined as an end itself, sought out, embraced, and utterly his own. His record during performance can be claimed as the reason for participation, hence an unqualified, direct expression of his true make-up and a just basis for reputation.
By the term action I mean activities that are conse-quential, problematic, and undertaken for what is felt to be their own sake. The degree of action—its seriousness or realness—depends on how fully these properties are accentuated and is subject to the same ambiguities regarding measurement as those already described in the case of chanciness. Action seems most pronounced when the four phases of the play—squaring off, determination, dis-closure, and settlement—occur over a period of time brief enough to be contained within a continuous stretch of attention and experience. It is here that the individual releases himself to the passing moment, wagering his future estate on what transpires precariously in the seconds to come. At such moments a special affective state is likely to be aroused, emerging transformed into excitement.
Action’s location can easily and quickly shift, as any floating crap game attests; indeed, should a knife fight develop next to a crap table, the action may shift in location even while it is shifting in kind, and yet participants will apply the same word, as if the action in a situation is by definition the most serious action in that situation at the moment, regardless of its content.45 In asking the famous question, “Where’s the action?” an individual may be more concerned with the intensity of the action he finds than its kind.
Whoever participates in action does so in two quite distinct capacities: as someone who hazards or chances something valuable, and as someone who must perform whatever activities are called for. In the latter capacity the individual must ordinarily stand alone,46 placing in hazard his reputation for competence in play.47 But in the former he can easily share his gamble with others or even let them “take” all of it. Action, then, is usually something one can obtain “a piece” of; the performer of the action is typically a single individual, but the party he represents can contain a quickly shifting roster of jointly committed members. For analysis, however, it is convenient to focus on the case where the performer takes all his own action and none of anyone else’s.
It is, of course, in the gambling world that the term action had its slang beginning, and gambling is the prototype of action. In the casinos of Nevada, the following usages can be found: “Dollar action,” to refer to light bettors and their effect on the day’s take: and “good [or real or big] action,” to refer to heavier takes. Dealers who get flustered by heavy bettors are said to be unable “to deal to the action,” while cool dealers are said to be “able to handle the action.” Naturally, new dealers are “pulled out of the action,” and when bets get heavy and multitudinous at a crap table, the better of the base men may be “put on the action side.” Casinos that try to avoid high limit games are said “not to want the action,” while houses that can face heavy bettors without becoming nervous are said “to be able to take the action.” A “high roller” known to “drop” a lot of money may find himself warmly welcomed at a casino because “we like his action.” Pit bosses, ever concerned to show that they are somehow earning their keep, will, from a tactful distance, “keep their eye on the action.” Someone known to cheat, or to be able to “count cards” in 21, may be asked to leave the casino permanently with the statement, “We don’t want your action.” Players who are indecisive “hold up the action,” and one who fails to cover all of what is considered a good bet may cause another player to ask if he can “take the rest of the action.” Deserving casino managers may be rewarded by being “given a piece of the action,” that is, a share of ownership (“points”). In casinos with only one cluster of tables (one “pit”) there is likely to be one table that because of location or special maximum is called the “action table,” just as in large casinos there will be a high minimum “action pit.”48
Although action is independent of type and concerned with amount, amount itself cannot be taken as a simple product of the size of each bet and the number of players betting. This is most evident in craps. A table whose sole player is making hundred-dollar bets can be seen as having more action than another table whose twenty players are making five- and ten-dollar bets. A table “jam up” with players, all of whom are making many different kinds of bets, can be seen as having more action than another table where ten players are betting a higher aggregate by means of simple line and field bets. Correspondingly, to say that a dealer can “handle the action” may mean, either, that he can deal coolly to a very large bettor, or that he can deal accurately and rapidly when a large number of calculations and payoffs must be made quickly.
Another aspect of the gamblers use of the term action arises from the fact that action and the chance-taking it involves may constitute the source of the gamblers daily livelihood. Thus, when he asks where the action is he is not merely seeking situations of action, but also situations in which he can practice his trade. Something similar is found in the thief’s and the prostitute’s conception of where the action is—namely, where the risks to earn one’s living by are currently and amply available.49 Here, com-pressed pridefully into one word, is a claim to a very special relationship to the work world.
No doubt it was gamblers who first applied their term to non-gambling situations, thus initiating a diffusion of usage that non-gamblers have recently extended still further. Yet almost always the use seems apt. Underlying the apparent diversity in content is a single analytical property that can be sensed with sureness by persons who might be unable to define closely what it is they sense.
This diffusion of use is nowhere better seen than in the current touting of action in our mass media. In fact, contributors to the media have recently helped to clarify the inner meaning of the term and to show its applicability to new ranges of situation, giving a special accent to current popular culture. Thus a newspaper advertisement for “Teenage Day” at Whiskey a Go Go (no liquor, live music), declares:
Dance to the Big Beat music of the original Whiskey a Go Go-WHISKEY A GO GO WHERE THE ACTION IS!50
Herb Caen, reporting on East Bay doings, states that:
M. Larry Lawrence, Pres. of Hotel del Coronado, and Stockbroker Al Schwabacher Jr. huddled at the P’Alto Cabana the other day, which is why the rumor’s around that Al might buy a piece of the Coronado’s historic action.51
Similarly, Caen writes:
You know where the action is these nights? In Oakland, that’s where. Or so it seemed early yesterday, in a go-go spot at Jack London Square, where Oakland Mayor John Houlihan and Millionaire Bernie Murray got into a pushing and shoving contest that ended with Hizzoner flat on his honor in the middle of the dance floor—as the dancers Fragged around and over his reclining figure. . . .52
The Las Vegas Sun, underneath a picture of the contest, reports:
BRIDGE ACTION-Women spectators closely watch bridge experts in competition at Riviera Hotel.53
During another tournament, a column heading in the S
un reads:
Gin Action Goes Into 2nd Round54
And the same paper’s columnist reports:
Shirley Jones’ sexy dance from the “Elmer Gantry” movie at the Flamingo these nights is the most explosive bit of action since Juliet Prowse . . .55
Newsweek titles a cover story:
SINATRA: Where the Action Is56
A color-page advertisement in Look:
7-UP . . . WHERE THERE’S ACTION! Seven-up is a real natural for the action crowd! It’s got the sparkle that swings . . . and the quick-quenching action to make thirst quit. Look for it. 7-UP . . . where there’s action 157
And an advertisement in California Living, showing a girl applying lipstick, and suggesting that “A girl’s mouth is always moving,” titles the half-page:
Where the Beauty Action Is58
A full-page cover picture in the same magazine features two models in a section of a department store organized as a teen-age hang-out, above a title saying:
Check the Fashion Action.59
And a feature article on the San Francisco Police Department sale of unclaimed articles recovered from burglaries reports that the auctioneer “keeps the pace lively for hundreds of bidding buyers:”
If there is no honor among thieves, neither is there a common denominator of thievery. Check the action at the police auction to see why.60
Financial columnists, of course, also have recourse to the term:
If it was panic selling that gripped the market in October, 1929, and May, 1962, then today we’re surely in the throes of panic buying. Least that’s how Shearson, Hammill & Co. view the current free-for-all.
“Apparently the major motivation at the moment is fear of missing or having missed a major buying opportunity,” the brokerage firm observes.
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