LOTTERY MADNESS

 

When  the payoff for the interstate lotteries reach more than a billion  dollars, people who can least afford it, bet large sums of money. The prize grows to such totals only because the vast amount being wagered and the creators are  increasing the odds of winning. 

At a time when credit card debt is a more than one trillion dollars and growing at the rate of more than  ten billion dollars a month, there are people financing ongoing expenses, food and utilities, that should be paid out of  present earnings.  

This cannot end well.

Almost a hundred years ago, in worst conditions, there was a song that offered some sage advice:

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Song of the Lottery Agent / AKA The Money Lender's Song

OR

Lied Des Lotterieagenten/Song of the Lottery Agent [ AKA The Money Landers's Song]

From the Kabrett Jazz Opera:  Der Silbersee / The Silver Sea [Germany 1933]

Book and Lyrics: George Kaiser

Music: Kurt Weill

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What will you pay for advice

on how to use your money wisely?

If you’ve got money, don’t leave it in your pocket.

Go to the people and sow it.

They are a field, fertilized with blood,

Something grows there, something’s coming up.

That produces the cream of your profit:

Interest

and compound interest.

One thing comes first, nothing comes second.

Close your picture book on life.

Just open your calender punctually,

read the “due dates” and you have read enough.

That’s how you calculate the cream of your profit:

Interest

and compound interest.

If you’ve got a human heart, harden it into stone

and don’t be surprised if it’s not successful straight off.

Just once be firm when faced with great need:

Soon you’ll be able to watch them leap to their deaths.

That guarantees the cream of your profit:

Interest 

and compound interest.

Build a tower of stone around yourself,

You won’t hear the agonizing screams outside.

Be blind, be deaf, forego no debt,

Or you’ll forfeit money and money’s benefit:

Interest

and compound interest.

Learn by this how one can make

Compound interest and the joy of interest to smile.

[Coda – spoken: menacingly]

You are now a rich man.

You have vast sums of money 

You are a millionaire.

Now you can do ----ANYTHING----YOU—WANT!

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My translation from the German. I have followed, where possible,  the available singing translation – only making alterations that more accurately convey the original German. ( Singing translations must make the words fit the notes.)

“The Silver Sea,”  following  the incredible success of Die Dreigrosschenoper / The Three Penny Opera, and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagoney / The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagoney opened in the three cities of  Leipzig,  Magdeburg,  and Erfurt, on the same night, in spite of attempts at disruption  by the SS. Ten days later Hitler declared a “state of emergency” following the Reichstag fire and suspended all civil rights. All three productions closed, and within a month cast and crew members surfaced in Paris.  Since then, the play has seldom been performed.

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When the iconoclastic playwright Bertolt Brecht teamed up with the classical composer Kurt Weill a new dimension was created. The lyrics were bloodthirsty and the music beautiful. This soon came to be  referred to as  Brechtian Dissonance

You  can listen to the original German to understand the flavor here from the leading interpreter present day Ute Lempe

Weill: Der Silbersee - Lied des Lotteriagenten (Was zahlen Sie?)

https://youtu.be/y4LCtZhrlyM_