FREE MONEY

Just this year, on the Fourth of July, I attended a barbeque in Las Vegas. It was a fairly traditional occasion by all accounts. There were burgers. There were fireworks. There was beer. There was the requisite backyard, except this being Las Vegas, in lieu of grass, the ground was surfaced with sharp rocks. And there was a stripper pole in the living room.

At one point during the evening I adjourned to the front porch for a smoke. When I had finished with the now socially unacceptable habit break, as I stepped back into the condo, I was somewhat surprised to discover that I did not recognize anyone I saw. My friends, all in their mid-thirties, had repaired to the rear rock patio to lounge in the shade at the end of a long day; while inside, a newly arrived contingent of four early twenty-something's were gathered. They were standing in the kitchen -- still light on their feet at this waning hour -- snacking on chips and salsa and drinking Coronas with lime, just as I had done that very day, and many July Fourths before that.

I approached them cautiously, not wanting to be particularly noticed with my burgeoning paunch and balding head, which was partially burnt from its rare exposure to the hot desert sun. But as I tried to sneak by on the far side of the stripper pole, to my considerable surprise, one of the unknown youths spun around to confront me. It was one of the males. He sported a short, spiky blond hair-do, and his paunch-less torso was adorned in a cool, black "Killers" concert T-shirt. A thick, silver, Goth earring punctured the lobe of his left ear, and brand new, state-of-the-art, two-hundred dollar sunglasses that looked like they could burn holes through solid steel covered his eyes.

I was truly shocked by his acknowledgment and all the more startled when he -- as the first words I had ever heard him speak -- posed to me a rather odd question.

"Do you know what the Berlin Wall is?" He asked with an accusatory air -- like I'd better not know or there would be trouble.

I hadn't the foggiest idea of what he was talking about. His tone was surprisingly earnest, like this wasn't a joke of any kind, which made the situation all the more perplexing. I ran through several options in my mind. My initial instinct was to respond, "No, I have no idea," for obviously, I didn't. Obviously The Berlin Wall was some new, young, hip, punk-rock band -- or possibly the latest happy-hour cocktail special at Rain, or Jet, or Pure, or other such single-syllabic establishment boasting a twenty-dollar cover charge and a dress code I would never be able to decipher.

But then I examined his face and realized there was another possibility. By the seemingly indignant expression he was emoting, combined with the sincere, almost overtly angry tenor of his voice, I realized that there was a good chance that he may be talking about the actual Berlin Wall. The one in Germany. The one that supplied those demolished bricks that were hot items on E-bay for a while. The one those very enthusiastic European kids persistently tried to knock over with utterly ineffectual sledgehammers -- so excited by the prospect of being able to buy Levi's and Coke, they were unable to wait for the required heavy machinery.

The three seconds I took to ponder this conundrum served to somehow offer me a pane of universal clarity, which led to the eventual overwhelming and disconcerting understanding that this twenty-four year-old kid standing before me -- looking like he just walked off the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine -- didn't know what the Berlin Wall was. Indeed, the hard, vacant truth of the matter began to settle roughly in my mind like the quick-drying cement they were using to slab down yet another new batch of million-dollar, yard-less, pasteboard condos across the street.

"Yeah..." was all I replied to his query. I was wholly prepared to expound on my brief response, but apparently no further explanation was warranted. My interrogator simply frowned and spun back around. Facing his gang once more, he attempted to rationalize his ignorance, or rather, my lack thereof.

"Yeah, well, he's old." He said. "That question was like, history, not current events. It shouldn't count."

"It's the wall that separated East Germany from West Germany," I blurted out over his shoulder, unable to stop myself. "It fell in the early nineties. Roger Waters performed The Wall concert there..."

"See," he snapped. "No way that's current events. That game is rigged."

I glanced at the kitchen table and for the first time noticed that a board game was spread out on top of it. It was called Cranium. I had never heard of it, but this game, I gathered, was where the question he was referring to had originated from.

"It is not," replied one of the scantily clad, stripper-bodied females in the group. "I told you there was a Berlin Wall. I didn't know about that water stuff, or where it was, but I knew there was one."

"After World War Two Germany was split into sections..." I attempted to continue, but no one was listening. No one cared. They had moved on. The information was only important in the context of winning or losing a game of Cranium, which was only important because we were in Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in America, and they had wagered on the outcome of the game.

Later in that same trip I met a professional on-line poker player. I had come to Vegas primarily to visit friends, but also to witness first hand -- along with many thousands of others -- the now monumental World Series of Poker Tournament being held that week at the Rio Hotel and Casino.

The on-line player in question had come for the WSOP as well, his trip funded by winnings he had earned by playing several, single-table, hour-long, on-line poker tournaments at the same time. These mini-tournaments are called "sit-n-gos" because of their small size and short length, and this kid in question played a thousand of them a week. Sounds impossible, right? Yes, it does, but somehow it's not -- not if you are a nineteen year-old, college dropout math genius who has forsaken the pursuit of any sort of a real career, anyway.

With the right computer set-up, and the right monitors, and the right kind of brain, or cranium, it is possible for one person to play -- and apparently do very well in -- up to twelve single-table on-line poker tournaments at the same time. If you play twelve hours a day, seven days a week, that's eighty-four hours a week times twelve tournaments an hour for a total of one thousand and eight tournaments a week. If each tournament has a one hundred dollar buy-in, and you can make a fifteen percent return on your investment, as a good pro can, well that's not a bad gig, financially speaking. Not bad at all. It adds up to fifteen grand a week, or sixty thousand dollars a month, or over 700K a year. Nothing to shake a stick at -- or even a sledgehammer.

Of course, only the best and the brightest can accomplish this. And so it is they -- the ones who would have gone on to engineer, and invent, and research and develop, and cure, and solve, and accomplish -- who are instead choosing a fleeting, fickle path down a pixilated road that in the end manufactures nothing, services nothing, contributes nothing to the world at large, and, in fact, doesn't actually exist.

And this young gentleman I met isn't alone. Not by a long shot. Since that July Fourth weekend I have since personally met no less than fifty more kids just like him -- almost all of them multiple scholarship winners with perfect SAT scores -- who have been drawn out of the pursuit of a degree by the intoxicating scent of raw cash, gobs of it, all derived from playing what amounts to a video game you can gamble on -- though most of them are still years too young to legally gamble.

These fifty or so I have met so far, of course, are just the very tip of an ever-growing iceberg. There are right now thousands more out there just like them, with their numbers increasing every day.

So, if we are interested in where the future of our fair nation is headed, and we examine this by attempting to discern what the young people of today are interested in, well, I'm no expert, and certainly no genius, but I think the answer is fairly obvious.

They are interested in sex, fame, drugs, booze, movies, gambling, sex, television, music, fashion, hot girls, hot guys, magazines, sex, gadgets, fame, new and expensive clothes, new and expensive cars, new and expensive drugs, new and expensive watches and jewelry and sunglasses, fancy restaurants, trendy bars, exotic vacation spots, X-Box, Play Station, Game Cube, pornography, being waited on, alcohol, drugs, sex, the Internet, hooking up, getting wild, going down, e-mail, text messaging, IMing, PMing, MP3, DVD, CD, IPOD, IPAQ, etc.

But that is all incidental, Clarice, to quote a favorite line of my own, now apparently only semi-disconnected generation. All of that matters not one little bit, for what they're really interested in is what allows them to be interested in all those other things. What they're interested in is unlocking all the doors and drawers they believe will swing open wide with the fast turn of a platinum key and usher them directly to the V.I.P. room bottle-service corner table deep inside the plush plastic womb of the New Millennium.

What they're interested in is knocking out the fortune and glory early, and without the use of heavy machinery or sledgehammers.

What they're interested in, in a nutshell, is exactly what we have taught them to be interested in -- the very same thing Americans have always been interested in, whether we admit to it or not -- the very same thing that I was interested in at their age, and to a slightly lesser extent, still am.

They're interested in free money.