Holed up writing here as I have been for some time, I was not prepared
for my household's sudden surge of popularity these last few days. The
phone has been ringing off the hook! Why, Barbara Boxer called me
yesterday, and this afternoon, as I was disentangling a particularly
overwrought sentence, the phone rang, and it was Warren Beatty on the
line. He was very sorry to interrupt , but he wanted to make sure I
would vote against the Schwarzenegger propositions tomorrow.
These recorded phone calls by celebs and pols are scary
enough, but now they're also throwing fever-pitch telephone plays our
way. Over the weekend we got barraged by a robocall minidrama three
times (one, ironically, was recorded on our answering machine -- direct
bot-to-bot communication!). It was a tale told by a parent who says he
watched his daughter die after she took the morning after pill; she
could have lived, maybe, if we only passed a law that said that you
can't get an abortion unless you tell your parents. Or something like
that -- the sound effects were so aggressive I couldn't really figure
out all the details, and I tried to tune it out. In the handful of
amped up seconds this audio spot spat out, there was no way to tell
whether it was supposed to be a true story or a dramatization or
something else. All that came through was pure anger.
I'm sufficiently insulated from mainstream TV that I have
missed out on the worst mutations of political advertising over the
last decade. Now they're coming after me by phone. Yikes! It may be
time to go off the analog grid entirely. At least I can delete spam
from my email account on my own schedule. Can't I sit down to dinner
without being interrupted by hysterical recordings?
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