In praise of political mailers

Michael LaReaux, special to the Houlton Pioneer Times, Special to The County
3 years ago

Nobody works harder in an election year than the men and women who produce campaign mailers. This army of graphic designers and writers toil night and day to put together succinct, meaningful messages  crucial to voters looking to make an informed choice. 

Reading through this treasure trove of truthful insight will give any undecided voter a great deal of information about the candidates who will potentially be representing Maine in the upcoming years.  Thanks to the generous supply of political mailers that show up in our mailboxes every day like Manna from heaven, we can all form a clear picture of the people who so ardently wish to serve the citizens of Maine as our representatives.

The mailers come in such abundance that trying to absorb all the information is like trying to drink from a firehose. In fact, one cannot truly take it all in at once, which is why the mailers must be savored like little bits of truth-flavored candy. 

If the mailers are to be believed, and there’s no reason to suspect that the people who produce these beautiful missives are anything but truthful, then the average voter can surmise that Sara Gideon is a horrible, misshapen monster with sallow skin and a penchant for eating small, adorable household pets.

In fact, she isn’t a person at all, but a very large, lifelike marionette whose strings are being pulled by a shadowy cabal of puppet masters who sit behind a black curtain on piles of tax money and devise new ways to strip citizens of their rights so that they can more easily be exploited as servants of the State. All of this sounds perfectly reasonable, and we should all believe it, because when someone sends you nine hundred mailers with the same message, they couldn’t possibly be trying to mislead you.

Thanks to the mailers, the average voter can also surmise that Susan Collins is only a County Girl because she was grown in a secret laboratory located somewhere north of Houlton, funded by the unholy alliance of Big Oil and Big Pharma, bred and trained for the express purpose of turning every citizen into a glassy-eyed, open-mouthed consumers of drugs and petroleum products. 

And everyone knows that if someone repeats a thing often enough, it is undoubtedly true, which means that all the warnings in those mailers must be as true as Newton’s Laws of Motion. Susan Collins gives us the security of knowing that if we’re going to be on the road to Hell anyway, at least we’ll be able to drive on that road in a car with a really big, powerful engine.

The mailers don’t stop there, however, They have helpfully reassured the average voter that the only difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is that Trump is an evil dictator bent on enriching himself at the expense of others, while Biden is an aspiring evil dictator bent on enriching himself at the expense of others. Thanks to the mailers, we can rest easy at night, knowing that no matter how we vote, the world is going to plunge into a horrible, dystopian hellscape complete with plenty of screaming and pools of burning brimstone as soon as the winning candidate is sworn in. There won’t be any trees because the people who make mailers  cut them all down, and also used up all the fossil fuels to distribute them. After all, why bother worrying about the environment when the Great Day of Doom is at hand?

Maine voters owe a great debt of gratitude to the people who have worked so hard to ensure that we are able to make rational decisions about who will inevitably lead us into an apocalypse that will make the Book of Revelations look like a travel brochure.

At least we’ll know who to blame.