issue 6 special sneak preview + a spiral warning

as i am talking to more people, i’m learning how important media literacy is. it wasn’t intentional, but issue 6 ended up heavily focused on the subject. in researching and reading about atlantic city and realizing that we were never really taught the full, real history — just a history written by those who had something to gain.

i love being silly goofy and carefree and thoughtless but i also love thinking and critical thinkging, too. you can’t safely practice one without the other, i think. i also think it is really important to read things from a humanistic lens…. for every headline and random fact you had to memorize for a test in school, there were real actual people being affected. the people who were working, the poor, the everyday fella were just seldom represented in the press or history in a fair way. i mean, think of how we will be represented in history 100 years from now? and how different the world will be.

but i think i am beginning to learn that maybe not everybody, not even most people, consider other peoples feelings in their decisions and thoughts, and that makes me feel really fucking stupid and gullible and i’m kinda having my own mental breakdown over it. so yeah. anyway. alas. i don’t even wanna walk about it.

but also omg dude like i have this torture ritual now where i listen to the fucking dr. daf show. fuck. if you don’t know what it is don’t watch it im like 99% sure dr. daf is a psyop. lmfaooo. and i’m so convinced the comments in support are bots. omg it grinds my gearssssss. anyway i need to like go touch grass or something. byeeee.

scroll for a sneak preview. also you guys question me, too omfg. go fact check me. maybe i’m missing something. i haven’t even gotten to going to the library for this research yet because i’ve just been spending hours upon hours on newspapers.com.

anyway preorder here:

https://www.divinghorseac.com/

here is a sneak preview:

many (annoying) people describe atlantic city the same way: corrupt, dirty, a money pit, sin city, saturnalia of vice, a place that had it coming, blah blah blah blah. you say the name and people already know what they think about it, which is funny, because most of them have never lived here, a lot of them have never been here, and basically none of them were around for the part they’re so confident about.

the notion that atlantic city is corrupt, that it was always corrupt, essentially corrupt, corrupt as a defining characteristic, that idea was built by people who mostly weren’t from here and wanted to control what happened here. they likely wouldn’t be thrilled about you or be sitting on their precious beaches or lounging in their hoity toity hotels. not a conspiracy btw, that’s just how narratives work when one side has a printing press and the other side has a train ticket, job to be done, family to raise.

and that’s the thing about who was actually using this city. not the hotel owners, not the evangelists filing dispatches for newspapers in san diego. the people using atlantic city were working people, philadelphia mostly, new york, taking the train down on a sunday with five dollars and nowhere else to go. this was before labor laws were really a thing. people worked six days. sunday was it, literally the one day to not be at work, to be somewhere that wasn’t home, to drink if they wanted, to walk around, to sit on the beach, to feel like the week hadn’t completely swallowed them whole.

and on the other side of that were the people who lived here. the saloon keeper on arctic avenue, the woman running a boarding house, the waiter, the cook, the porter, the chambermaid, people whose entire financial reality was built around whether those sunday crowds showed up. the season was short. the margins were thin. a good sunday in july wasn’t just a good day, it was rent in november, school clothes in september, feeding your kids through a winter the city essentially closed up. when stough talks about shutting down sunday cabarets, when the reformers push to clean up the city’s image, they’re not talking about something abstract. they’re talking about pulling the floor out from under people who had no savings to fall back on and no voice in the room where the decision was being made.

i think that when people feel this intense need to control how other people live, it usually says more about them than the people they’re watching. and we have been nosey since the dawn of time. the romans loved it so much they made it a goddess, fama, deity of rumor, fame, and everything in between. wendy williams. atlantic city in 1916 was just the latest venue.

henry stough walks into the city with his mind already made up. not curious, not observing, just confirming what he already knows, by the grace of some god i guess. he moves through with his shiny morals and fur jacket, packs a tabernacle on massachusetts avenue for six weeks, passes the collection plate, then leaves. he always leaves.

and stough wasn’t alone. governor fort issued an actual proclamation threatening to send state troops to atlantic city if the city didn’t enforce sunday liquor laws, a special legislative session, the removal of officials, effectively martial law. over sunday drinking. mayor stoy said publicly he didn’t want bloodshed. carleton godfrey, president of the guarantee trust company, said the governor had lost his head. the grand jury called the whole episode unfair. the locals, across the board, looked at a governor threatening military occupation of their city and arrived at the same conclusion: this isn’t about us. it’s about someone else’s idea of what we should be.

riddle’s at a public banquet the same week stough is filling the tabernacle down the street. he says the city exists to entertain people, always has, what it needs is fifty gamblers, fifty pugilists, and fifty chorus girls. morality, he says, is only vice tired out. the san diego sun calls this bunk. it ISN’T bunk. and this is the same riddle who, two years earlier, fighting the commission over city inspectors, said he wanted men with actual experience, not political appointees, men who can’t be bought for a basket of cantaloupes or a cigar. that’s not a corrupt boss protecting rackets. that’s somebody who knew what the city ran on and who ran it.

edge’s own quote on riddle’s casino proposal tells you everything: the class of people who frequent that resort is not the class atlantic city is seeking to entertain. they are undesirable people. the class of people…. that’s the whole argument in one sentence. riddle wanted atlantic city to work for everyone who actually lived and visited there. edge and the reformists wanted it curated, the right kind of visitor, the kind that doesn’t embarrass anyone. and there’s a pretty good chance that didn’t include you or me.

the bosses weren’t saints, and nobody’s pretending. but the reformers weren’t offering anything better. they were offering a different city that served different people and calling it morality.

and that word — morality — is worth sitting with for a second, cuz it didn’t come from nowhere. the people leading these campaigns were operating out of a specific theological tradition that had politics baked into it from the start. the protestant reformation gave anglo-american culture a particular idea about labor, leisure, and what a person owes god with their time. work is virtue. rest is suspect. pleasure, especially communal, public, loud pleasure, is where the devil gets in. which means a city whose entire reason for existing is to give people a good time isn’t just inconvenient to that worldview, it’s a direct provocation.

so when stough shows up and governor fort threatens martial law over sunday drinking, it’s easy to read it as sincere religious conviction, and maybe some of it was. but it’s worth asking who benefits when you run a protestant morality campaign through a working class city full of people who didn’t look or pray like the people running it. the answer is pretty much always the same. the people who wanted fewer of those faces around suddenly had god on their side. there’s no control more absolute than a man who figures out how to make his own agenda sound like the word of god, and once that happens you genuinely cannot tell where the faith ends and the politics begin, because the people running it literally don’t want you to be able to.

and honestly, given alllll that, i don’t think a saturnalia of vice sounds all too bad.