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| Illustration by Anita Stevens Rundles |
Americans all seem to want to win
the lottery, even though the idea is a ludicrous waste of time and a
distraction from anything that might improve their actual lives. What they don’t
realize is that they’re already living inside a “lottery” — Shirley Jackson’s.
At Joseph Bryan Judd’s book store
yesterday, I bought a book of Jackson’s stories, including The Lottery, because I realized that it’s Trump’s America summed up
— happy small-town families selecting innocent people to torture to death in a
ritual that satisfies their smug tribal traditions and vanities. Then they go
shopping.
The now-classic tale inspired surprisingly
violent denunciations from New Yorker readers when it was published in 1948.
“It had simply never occurred to
me that these millions and millions of people might be so far from being
uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared
to open,” Jackson said. “Of the 300-odd letters that I received that summer I
can count only 13 that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends.
Even my mother scolded me: ‘Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The
New Yorker,’ she wrote sternly; ‘It does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of
story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write
something to cheer people up?”
Those stones struck too close to
home, didn’t they?
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