Smarmy junk mail too often misses the mark

The post-holidays junk mail glut is upon us. “Dear Friend: We are offering you this special Professional Courtesy Voucher because we believe you are uncommon in your intellectual interests,” begins the smarmy letter from The Washington Post in attempting to butter me up sufficiently to part with a check for “just $39” for a year’s subscription to the newspaper’s national weekly edition.

As befits one with uncommon intellectual interests, I decline the offer, despite the 62 percent savings off the newsstand cover price and a rate only half that of a regular subscription, and despite the Post’s assurance that the special weekly edition “is read widely with the same high regard as our daily paper…”

A letter from the National Arbor Day Foundation’s president addressing me as a “dear electee” offers congratulations. Turns out that because of my unusual awareness of the role of trees in our society I have once again given him the unmitigated pleasure of informing me that his board of directors has authorized him to nominate me for membership (disregarding, I suppose, advice to the contrary from the board’s more rational faction), and he wishes to reciprocate by allowing me to send him 10 bucks for dues.

If I’m searching for a familiar source that I can count on for great advice about the best books to buy, I’m in luck, according to Mel Parker, the editor in chief of the Book Of The Month Club, because he’s looking for exceptional former members just like me. With my remarkable appreciation for the better things in life and his unrivaled ability to produce the biggest bang for my buck we could make a formidable duo, indeed, if I would but give him the honor of signing me up again.

The very same day, the folks at another book club, recognizing me as an extremely valued former member who has always begged to be “challenged with new information,” make a similar pitch to my vanity. Come home, oh wayward one, they implore. All is forgiven. On top of which, if I don’t dilly-dally until this amazing offer expires I can save up to $252 on the books I “really want to read…”

Your unsolicited mail no doubt runs to similar postings. Seemingly, each day brings more overwrought prose from the mass mailers for whom unadulterated flattery – that popular junk food of fools – is the ultimate marketing tool. The more shameless rhetoric comes from the charitable outfits seeking repeated handouts in exchange for simultaneously pumping us up and laying on one massive guilt trip, along with more address labels and greeting cards than any 12 people could use in a lifetime. The Say-Buddy-Can-You-Possibly-Spare-Another-Dime tenor of their stuff half convinces us that were it not for great humanitarians such as you and me life would hardly be worth getting out of bed for. The realization that we are obviously high on every list of easy marks ever compiled mitigates the resulting warm and fuzzy feeling only slightly.

The people who crank out the unctuous cover letters that accompany these missions to extract cash from your wallet may actually believe that they aren’t laying it on a bit thick, I suppose, though I’d sooner wager that they’re operating on P.T. Barnum’s time-honored theory that there’s a sucker born every minute and he who trolls long and hard enough will net his share. I doubt that any business plan has ever gone belly-up as a result of taking this principle into consideration.

It may be true that one can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Still, it would be refreshing to open the occasional piece of junk mail to find a less saccharin approach. Not one with as cruelly blunt an opening line as “The War Department regrets to inform you” favored in those old government-issue telegrams, perhaps. Nor one steeped in such fantasy as this year’s federal income tax instruction booklet cover letter which assures us that the IRS “continues to make tangible improvements in the way we serve you.”

A good junk mail letter should have an opening hook that is not too gushy and not too bland, but just right to knock our socks off and compel us to read on, despite our better instincts. You may not have received such a solicitation lately, but based on the daily deluge of angry letters to the editor from campers unhappy with Maine Public Radio’s recent change of format, I have a hunch you will be getting one from the public broadcasting outfit prior to its next never-ending Fund Drive From Hell. Careers could rise or fall on the prose in this one, and although it may not be a keeper it should be a doozy.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.