At dinner with friends, our frightening political moment came up by way of the deluge of messages we're all getting from candidates across the country just a few dollars from a target, fighting to keep their heads above water in the face of slipping poll numbers or dark money filling their opponents' coffers. One has to delete most of them, one friend said, but in order to do that you still have to process volleys of desperate cries for help - it doesn't help to know that they're all sent out by fund-raisers skilled in getting to us. (A fascinating Guardian article found that the messages for presumed Republicans and Democrats are dramatically different.) Another said they make him mad because they communicate a doomed sense of powerlessness - it's never enough, it never will be. An occasional donor but mostly a deleter, I realized the whole thing is abstract to me: all the money goes to ads I never see, leading a TV-less life.
