THE WASHINGTON STATE LOTTERY’S been running TV spots fantasizing about a big winner buying the Space Needle and moving it from Seattle to the remote Eastern Washington town of Moses Lake. Some viewers might see the ads’ computer-animated imagery of wide-load trucks transporting the Needle across Snoqualmie Pass and imagine it represents just another outmoded tribute to individual greed.

But the ads’ clever creators are also tapping into another fantasy—that of transferring wealth and prestige away from Seattle (where the economy’s been horrid lately) to rural Washington (where the economy’s been even worse, and has been for a much longer period of time). It’s a blatant exploitation of what lotteries, and gambling in general, have always exploited—the dream of the futureless underclass citizen finally Making It.

True, the Needle’s fictional purchaser in the commercials isn’t depicted as a country cracker or a world-beaten working stiff, but the implication’s all there: Buy a lottery ticket and, just maybe, you can transcend your dead-town life.