We Do NOT Buy Your Votes!! We LEASE Them.
Dear readers,
I am SHAKING.
This morning my son Percival held his telephone up to my monocle and showed me what he called a “mee mee.” It was a picture of a political advertisement: a candidate grinning in front of a flag, with enormous white letters across it: “THEY ARE BUYING YOUR VOTE.”
Percival found it amusing. PERCIVAL FOUND IT AMUSING!! And a great many strangers had pressed the little heart beneath it.
I have not slept. I have rung for tea four times. My clerks are walking past my door very quietly.
This slander strikes at the honor of the family. I must correct it at once.
A slander against the family
We do NOT buy votes.
Buying a vote is a crime. Worse, it is retail. One would have to hand each voter a coin, one at a time, like a grocer. The GALL of anyone who imagines a Featherbottom standing behind a counter.
No, dear readers. We buy something far grander and far more respectable.
We buy the AIR around the voter.
My family has advised serious people on the purchase of air for generations. I count it among our proudest accomplishments.
How the air is purchased (and why it is SO beautiful)
A political advertisement, for those of you who did not attend a proper school, is a short film paid for by someone with an interest in an election. It plays between the programs one actually wishes to watch, and shows a candidate as either a saint or a menace. Which version depends ENTIRELY on who paid.
The genius is repetition. We plant a thought, then return often enough that the voter forgets who planted it.
A person who hears a name over and over, between his cooking program and his weather report, begins to feel he KNOWS that name. Familiarity! Such a respectable substitute for an introduction.
So he walks into the voting booth with an opinion he believes he grew in his own garden. He did not grow it. WE planted it, at great expense, mind you! And we watered it twice nightly during the news.
That is the art! EVERY commercial break! Every billboard on every highway! Every little glowing rectangle in the digital places! We shall be in his kitchen, his motorcar and his waiting room, until the name on his ballot feels like an old friend!!
We are not buying a vote. We are curating one.
And the people are NONE the wiser. NONE!
The bill arrives EVERY season
Note the word in my title: LEASE. A purchased thing stays purchased. A voter, I regret to report, does NOT.
He FORGETS.
Every election, in every town, for every office down to the man who inspects the drains, the air must be bought all over again. The films must be made again. The cheques must be written again. A nation must be reminded, at staggering expense, of what it thinks. Should the reminding stop for even ONE season, he might walk into that booth with an opinion of his own!! And then where would we be?!
We tell the public that this is simply how elections work: natural, eternal and inevitable.
It is the most EXPENSIVE natural order ever constructed. A thing that is truly inevitable does not need to advertise…
I did not write that. My quill slipped. Strike it from the ledger.
And now they are LAUGHING
I return to Percival’s mee mee, because I cannot stop thinking about it.
Anger, we can handle. Anger has a budget line. We simply buy MORE air and point the anger at someone else.
But that picture was not angry. It was a JOKE. Thousands of strangers looked at our beautiful, expensive film and LAUGHED at it, the way one laughs at a magician whose sleeve is showing.
There is no film for that. There is no budget big enough. When people find the advertisement ridiculous, every advertisement after it becomes ridiculous too, and all that money buys us nothing but a bigger audience for the joke!!
IF THEY STOP BELIEVING THE AIR, WE ARE LEFT PAYING FOR NOTHING AT ALL!!!
We cannot let that happen. We SHALL NOT let that happen!!
This passage is not intended for general circulation. If it has circulated beyond the intended readership, I shall know, and I will take it personally. Percival has been sent to his room.
The system is natural. The system is eternal. I have simply had too much tea.
Those who need steadier counsel on this matter than I can give in public may request a Limited-Release Client Memorandum: https://www.lordfeatherbottom.com/confidential-memo
