David McElroy

I was checking out at a store Friday when I handed the cashier a box containing individual items that she needed to count in order to charge me for. I told her there were six of them and she rang it up without checking.

“Well, if you’re going to take my word for it without looking, there were really only two,” I jokingly said to her.

“Oh, you wouldn’t lie to me,” she said quite seriously and confidently. “I can tell. Most people would, but you wouldn’t.”

My first reaction was to be grateful that someone could see my sterling character all the way through the fat and ugly exterior. It’s kind of nice to be trusted, isn’t it? And to be honest, this is something I’ve heard strangers say to me all my life. I seem to have a trustworthy-looking face.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that her reaction wasn’t really that great. In fact, it’s the sort of poor judgment people use all the time when they turn their lives over to politicians who they’ve decided they can trust.

Have you ever heard someone say — of a politician or actor or someone else they’ve never met — “I really like him”? We all seem to make instant, intuitive judgments about people, and we’re oddly sure that our judgments are correct, even if it’s absurd for other people to make such silly snap judgments.

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It was almost 1 a.m. by the time I came out of Walmart Wednesday night. I didn’t have many items, but I rolled my purchases out to the car on a shopping cart because I had a huge bag of dog food that I didn’t want to carry. It had been raining hard while I was in the store, but there was a break in the rain while I walked out and loaded the car. Then the rain started again.

The parking lot was virtually deserted and there were shopping carts left abandoned in various places, presumably by people who didn’t want to take the time in the rain to put the carts in the places where they belonged. But I found myself walking the empty cart over to the cart corral — or whatever they call it these days — as the rain came pounding down on me.

As I ran back to the car, I laughed at myself for going to the trouble of putting the cart in the right place in the downpour. I briefly wondered why I bothered. After all, there were plenty of other carts all over the parking lot. Mine would have been just one more. There was nobody out there to see me, so nobody would have even known I hadn’t put it where it was supposed to go. Despite those things, I immediately knew why I’d done it.

I’d returned the cart to the proper place simply because I had decided — at some distant time in the past that I don’t even recall — that I was the kind of person who always put the cart up. I’d seen — and disapproved of — many people over the years who left carts in random places in parking lots. So I’d unconsciously programmed myself. I had decided that I wasn’t like that — and that programming gently led me to walk with a cart in the rain when others wouldn’t.

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“These defendants are guilty,” federal prosecutor Kendall Day told jurors in Montgomery, Ala., Wednesday morning. “It’s time for you to tell these defendants that the government in Alabama is not for sale.”

Federal prosecutors have been on a righteous crusade in Alabama for the last year or so. They arrested about a dozen people who were either politicians or involved in the gambling industry in the state and charged them with bribery. It was all about good government and keeping crooks out of the public’s business, they said. Unfortunately, the story is a lot more complicated than prosecutors want us to believe.

What’s the difference between a campaign contribution and a bribe? What’s the difference between giving someone money to get elected in exchange for supporting a certain position — which is illegal — and delivering a block of votes to a candidate in exchange for supporting a certain position — which is legal? If a union leader says, “If you support this law that we want, my 10,000 members will vote for you,” why is that legal — if it’s illegal to say, “If you support this law that we want, I will give your campaign a million dollars to help you get elected”?

The guy in the picture above is Milton McGregor. He’s been the leading figure in the gambling industry in Alabama for decades. He’s owned greyhound racing tracks and huge bingo operations. Because most gambling is illegal in Alabama — for reasons that have never been clear to me — he has had to fight hard for the right to be left alone by the government to run his businesses.

I don’t mean to paint him as a saint or a do-gooder. He’s not. He’s a hard-nosed businessman who’s willing to cut corners and bend the rules to get what he wants. He’s been known to make illegal cash contributions to candidates, but that’s never been legally proven. Two years ago, the state government was trying hard to shut down his bingo operations. The governor at the time was making it a big deal. He had a task force that he was using to raid many of the operations and claim they were illegal. (For complicated reasons that I won’t bore you with, the bingo operations were operating in a gray area of the law. The governor was interpreting the law one way. The operators interpreted it another way.)

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