The landlord's game
As a kid I loved to play Monopoly. Loved it. Friends and I would have marathon games, fighting over close readings of the rules, bargaining for half an hour while the dice and younger siblings sat idle, the whole deal. My sisters still talk about the time I prematurely ended a game I was losing by flipping the board over and scattering the pieces everywhere. (I maintain that I did this as an ill-conceived joke, a wouldn’t-it-be-funny-IF-I-did-this-stereotypical-thing-OOPS-even-done-ironically-it-ruins-the-game type of move. I was never an angry-outbursts kind of brother; patronizing lectures were more my speed.)
I bet I haven’t played Monopoly in ten years. Partly because I’ve lost any taste for complicated games with lots of parts and rules—give me something that takes five minutes to learn and years to master (hearts, Scrabble, sets, the dictionary game). But also because the more my political conscience developed, the more Monopoly became a thoroughly appalling pastime.
This is well-traveled territory, but I appreciate the way Christopher Ketcham captured it this fall in Harper’s:
