Under the subject line “Checking in, Don,” I just received this e-mail from someone named Jeanette Rubio, who I presume is the wife of a politician named Marco Rubio. Here’s the opening line of this e-mail:
Don,
I didn’t tell Marco that I was going to send you this email, but I felt it was so important to reach out to you today.
Now I did meet Marco Rubio once. (He’d not remember me and I was so unimpressed with him that I wish that I didn’t remember him.) I’m quite confident that I never met his wife. And yet here I am, getting from her an e-mail as if I’m a close, trusted confidant of the Rubio family.
This crap is insulting. Not only am I (and the upteengazillion other people who, I’m sure, received this same e-mail [with only the names of the addressees changed]) asked to pretend that Marco Rubio’s wife has made a personal decision without his knowledge to solicit funds for his presidential campaign, we’re also supposed to be fooled into feeling that we have some special, confidential connection to this now-famous aspirant-for-power.
People who I call by their first names, and who I write to in such a manner, are people who I feel comfortable asking to meet me for coffee, lunch, a drink, or dinner. They are people who, when I call them, they answer my calls or return them soon. They are people who invite me to their homes and who I invite to mine. They are, in short, loved ones, friends, colleagues, or close acquaintances. I never presume to cold-contact a stranger and address that person by his or her first name. And I would never make that person feel uncomfortable by being pressed by my impertinence into playing a game of “pretend reality is different than it is.” (I’m quite sure that, should Sen. Rubio become Pres. Rubio, I’m unlikely to be able to call Mr. or Ms. Rubio to suggest drinks at The Capitol Grille. [“Hey, J & M: Don here! Let’s meet up after that Rose Garden event for dinner. It’s been too long!”])
The falsehoods, pretenses, duplicities – nay, multiplicities – and lies that are the stock-in-trade of the typical politician are things that every decent person finds revolting and wishes to have nothing at all to do with.
