A dubious hand

Dear Professor Clyde Barrow: First of all, you’ve got guts. It takes a rare kind of fortitude to throw yourself behind the proposition of casino gambling here in Massachusetts while having the same name as the bandit -- the two-armed bandit, that is -- played by Warren Beatty in that movie where Faye Dunaway was young Bonnie Parker. (Given how deftly the Patrick administration thus far has handled this issue, I’m surprised we haven’t seen an earnest disquisition on the morality of gambling from Father Jesse James, SJ.) Now, I don’t wish to cast aspersions about your academic work at UMass-Dartmouth on behalf of the Fleece the Suckers Act of Whenever. Others have done that, of course, most notably the people who noticed you were also in the employ of a gaming proponent who wants to build a casino in New Hampshire. However, this does present something of a conundrum. You have long maintained we need casinos here to keep our local sheep in the pen, rather than sending them off to get shorn in Connecticut. So now the Patrick administration has embraced your study as a means to help it build casinos, while you’re helping other folks build one north of the border. It seems logical, therefore, to conclude that you could find an economic reason to build a casino almost anywhere, up to and including the bottom of Cape Cod Bay. Perhaps that could be the plot of the upcoming thriller: Oceans 1, or Deval and Clyde.