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?
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.