When the kids were little a favorite movie for a saturday afternoon was Pete’s Dragon. At some point the movies villain, a snarky purveyor of tonics, elixirs, and hokum raphsodizes about the wonderful fortune to be made by selling the dragon bit by bit:
I’ll bind him up, grind him up
Lop him up, chop him up
Can’t you hear that jingle, jangle sound?
It’s money, money, money by the pound
Well, the spirit of Doc Terminus is alive and doing well, thank you. The new racket is also a dragon of sorts, and it’s being diced and sold by the ounce every day in a flood of political newsletters.
A flood in my mailbox
It started quietly. I had somehow gotten on some conservative organizations email list. Soon a conservative college was sending me a weekly newsletter on conservative causes. Being politcally progressive I merely assigned them to the spam locker and emptied them out once a week with the adds for unwanted enhancements, medications, technical marvels and investment opportunities.
Of course, during the election cycle, the number increased. And increased. Living in the spam locker, I pretty much ignored them until after the election. They did not seem to slow down, in fact they became more numerous. then I noticed they they were pretty blatant appeals for funds under the cover of promising to support, pay for or lobby for ultraconservative programs.
Without getting my fingers too soiled by handling them, I began to see that many of the pieces purported to be written by prominent members of the current administration. It occurred to me that the volume these folks were supposedly writing needed a full-time dedication. At last, the light dawned. All the stuff was ghostwritten.
Doing Well
The places sending the mail claim to be conservative action groups fighting for the American Way, as they see it. They are not altruistic, not for profits. They are straight-out businesses with political interests.
OK. That’s in the great American Tradition of political hucksterism – keep the pot boiling, while making a tidy profit as well.
Then, recently, I noticed something new. My spam filter was now receiving similar material, but with a liberal or progressive bent. Being an equal opportunity disposer of spam, I disposed of these right along with their conservative cousin. I’m pretty selective about how I receive my news.
My perverse mind latched onto an idea then. All of these could easily be coming from the same publicity or public relations company. I could see it now. A long corridor with doors marked for the political persuasion they produce yellow journalism for. To work there, one does not need to be any particular type of true believer, just capable of writing stirring diatribes in particular styles.
But hold the presses! That’s just the beginning! This stuff is going out to us regular civilians. What about the wide range of target groups, including Veterans, people interested in conservation, Mickey Mouse fans, or the general run of conspiracy theorists dedicated to saucers and slim, grey aliens? It can stagger the imagination.
It’s capitalism at work folks – Doing Well, While Doing Good!
Doc Terminus Lives.
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And scaring the living shit out of me!
Me too!
My husband gets emails like that. Only they always start their message with, “Hi Linda.” Screwed up as ever.
I”m just tired, Lou, and we’re only 4 months in.
I keep telling myself there is no way in hell he makes it to four years.
Yeah. I just wish the people who are so enamored of him would wake up. Every time I see that one of his minions has spoken (kristi noem comes to mind) I wonder, “Who qualified YOU?” None of them are qualified at all. halffastcycling club wrote a right on post about that today.
Edsall wrote an intersting article on corrupt admins in the NYT this week. HWSNBN is in the company of Johnson and Buchanan. I was surprised not Grant?
Interesting. I seriously just don’t know. I keep thinking of some lines from a poem my grandfather recited and I didn’t know the man, really. It’s James Russell Lowell. I read the whole (very 19th century) poem today. My grandfather recited, “Truth forever on the scaffold; wrong forever on the throne.” But the stanza that hit me was this:
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
I happen to think goats are great, but that’s beside the point…
He wrote it in 1845 because the annexation of Texas would have meant the expansion of slavery (I had to look that up). I think I’ll go design another t-shirt now 😜
https://poets.org/poem/present-crisis
Well, he was right. Many could see the downward spiral to the Civil War, but couldn’t stop it.
Also Edsall mentioned that if you considered Jeff Davis an American President, he’d rank among the worst.
Let’s find a good Bookie and see what odds he offers !
I know, the worast part for me is that for most of his cabinet it’s not ideological, it’s transactional.
Totally transactional and completely disinterested in running the country responsibly. These are trivial, greedy, unserious people. They disgust me.
But perhaps the worst part is how Congress is sitting back and doing nothing. I am reasonably sure that they see no downside for themselves if they let every thing crash. I guess they’ve got bunkers to hide in.
They don’t give a rat’s ass. The “best” they can do is give their constituents what they think they want in their brainwashed, entitled, idiocy (c’mon, Martha. How do you really feel?)
At UPS we used the formal form of the curse the “dead rat’s ass”…no need to be polite, MAK.
I can’t help it. I was well-raised.
Tsk tsk tsk.
Lou you managed to get the perfect AI image generated for this new horror concoction that is probably not far from the truth. I have to laugh when I realize I asked for even more of those mailers, by accident. Back in 2005 I was so proud to register with the Cherokee tribe, and I am even prouder to actively research the issues and people and vote in each Cherokee Nation election in Oklahoma. But…along the way, the Indians got in on the mega-advertisement wagon, and now I get ferociously bombarded with mailers for the Cherokee elections! *sigh*
Politics has come to be about transaction now regardless of your ideology.
I’m assuming a lot of it is churned out by AI, at the behest of whatever organization(s). Even more money that way, and even less work for it. There’s always a market for it somewhere…
You are probably right – same vocabulary, grammar, sentance structure. I hadn’t thought about that. Great Point.