Guilty Pleasures 1.0 -- Flamethrowing

 

I have a lot of guilty pleasures. This is just the first I'm confessing. 

One recent guilty pleasure is responding to the emails I receive from a certain political party soliciting my support (i.e., donations). I get these emails daily. They come from politicians at all levels, in my state, other states, the national organization, et cetera ad nauseum. Literally ad nauseum.

Receiving the emails is not the pleasure. (See “ad nauseum” above.) The pleasure is in replying to the emails.

I get to vent my spleen! I get to use language I wouldn’t use elsewhere! To be clear, I don’t use profanity, but I have a whole store of fifty-cent words that would sound pretentious and arrogant to use with most of my communication. I just want these recipients to know that they are sending emails to someone who is sophisticated and well-educated. That’s because it would appear that whoever they’re targeting must be brainwashed or brainless. (IMHO)

Let me state here that I'm pretty sure my own preferred political party sends out the very same kinds of solicitations and they are no less infuriating. In politics, it's equal-opportunity nauseum. 

The thing is, I see lots of quasi-political posts on my social media. Sometimes the posts are about some profound “issue,” but they express a worldview that is clearly partisan, and not my kind of partisan. Since my social media is confined to people I know pretty well, I just don’t feel right lambasting them when they post something that irritates me.

But the political party that sends me these emails obviously does not know me. If they did, they would take me off their list. So I get great pleasure from laying into them.

I know, I know. The replies I send go into that great electronic dumpster in the cloud. I’m sure if I don’t actually donate—often and lavishly—the politicians don’t actually care what I think.

Furthermore, even if there were some humans that read my replies, I seriously doubt that they would go to their higher-ups and say, “Hey! There’s this wise, thoughtful, erudite, articulate woman in Texas who thinks differently than we do. We should listen to her opinion and change our misbegotten ways.” 

I can dream, can’t I?

Life is short. We should maximize our pleasure while we can. I’m starting to look forward to each day’s biased and incendiary emails from this political party so I can have the guilty pleasure of flame-throwing in return.