And the junk mail raged on

Way back before there was any such thing as the Internet, mass marketers were already in the perfidious business of buying and selling lists of addresses.

You subscribe to a magazine or send a donation to a particular charity or organization, and the next thing you know, your mailbox is filling up with begging letters from like-minded outfits and subscription offers from similar publications.

It was, and is, a very low-tech version of what Amazon.com does in a high-tech way today: you buy a book at Amazon.com having to do, say, with chess, gardening or kinky sex, and the next time you log on, you're going to face a screen filled with "suggested" titles on chess strategy, mulching and shoe fetishism. In other words, your purchases are tracked, with an eye to selling you more of the same.

The older, snail-mail version of this does have great possibilities in the tit-for-tat department. Many years ago I got into a heated political discussion with my Uncle Pete. The subject was (incredibly) the future of the Soviet Union. (The discussion took place in 1985, the year Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power in Moscow.) Now, I tend to be politically conservative myself, but my Uncle Pete made me look like Michael Moore channeling Barbra Streisand: he was a flag-waving zealot who saw Communist conspiracy against the free world everywhere he looked except under the refrigerator, which was where he saw atheist conspiracy.

Uncle Pete was convinced that we were losing the cold war, that the Russians were going to conquer the world and there was little or nothing we could do about it. They had so many more missiles, so many more tanks, so many more nuclear submarines. "I don't see how we can win," he said. I counter-argued that it was precisely the missiles, tanks and nuclear submarines that were going to be the Soviets' downfall. "A country just can't go on spending 55 percent of its Gross National Product on military hardware forever," I told him, pointing out that the USSR's satellite states were just waiting for a moment of weakness in which to revolt. "Let's say you're holding a gun on me," I said. "So you have the gun. Sooner or later you're going to fall asleep, and then you may have a problem."

I convinced him of nothing. Like most zealots, he didn't want to be convinced. He wanted to be right.

Of course Uncle Pete was on a lot of right-wing mailing lists, one of the most shrill being something called "The Christian Anti-Communist Crusade."

Some months after our little kitchen debate, I discovered, to my horror, that Uncle Pete had put me on the mailing list for this group. I was getting their borderline-nutty paranoiac's newsletter in my own mail.

I quickly sat down and wrote them a letter, unsubscribing. But I also wanted to "mess back" with Uncle Pete a little bit, give him a taste of his own, so to speak.

It didn't take me long to come up with a cool idea: I wrote a check for $25 to the American Civil Liberties Union, mailed it off to them and said it was a donation in his name. I also included his address.

Uncle Pete never said anything to me about this. Perhaps he never even suspected that I was the culprit. But, although I had a certain amount of admiration for President Reagan myself, I would have loved to have been there the day Uncle Pete opened up his mailbox and found mass mailing material from some left-wing political group asking for a donation to an "Impeach Reagan" fund. The scream would have been heard all the way across California's central coast, where Uncle Pete lived.

But of course they had my return address too. It was on my check. Soon I myself was receiving junk mail from every left-wing group in the country, including some that really get my hackles up, such as N.O.W.

I happen to subscribe to both the National Review, a conservative publication, and The New Republic, its liberal counterpart. As you can imagine, I am now getting junk mail from both ends of the political spectrum: on Monday I might get an invitation from some conservative Washington think-tank to subscribe to its new free-minds-and-free-markets magazine, with the added inducement that if I subscribe now, for a mere $500 more I can attend a banquet next November at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan, honoring Norman Podhoretz, at which William F. Buckley Jr. will be the guest speaker. Then, on Tuesday, I'll get a piece of junk mail with Sen. Edward Kennedy's name in the return-address spot, inviting me to contribute to a fund dedicated to electing more Democrats.

And of course this sort of thing is by no means restricted to the world of politics and opinion. I subscribed to a magazine about surfing--soon I was being courted through the mail to subscribe to two more. I subscribed to IndyCar magazine (I never miss the Indianapolis 500). Someone out there decided I'd also be interested in Nascar (I'm not.) I subscribed to a quarterly of verse, The American Poetry Review. Pretty soon I was getting mail inviting me to enter one (rigged) poet's competition after another, or (I love this one) being urged to submit my own poems for a projected poetry anthology...which I would then have the opportunity to buy.

And don't get me started on the book clubs. Join one, and soon you're hearing from all of them. I've belonged to three or four different book clubs since college: Book-of-the-Month Club, History Book Club, Reader's Subscription, Heritage Club to name just a few. I swear, every time someone somewhere starts a new book club, sooner or later there's something in my mailbox inviting me to join.

With all of this going on, we're suddenly in a tizzy about the government tapping a few Al Qaeda phone calls without a warrant? Wake up and smell the coffee, people. Even if Big Brother does happen to be watching me, I'm grateful that he isn't trying to sell me magazine subscriptions. When it comes to keeping track of you and what you buy, the forces of marketing make the government look like a bunch of off-key drunks on karaoke night.

I heard this story years ago. I'm sure it's apocryphal; such stories almost always are. (See if you find this story on Snopes.com. I'll look too.) The tale is told about the guy living somewhere up in Frozen Nosehole, North Dakota who decided to put the forces of mass-mailing to work to his advantage. The way the story goes, he deliberately went out and got himself on every junk mail list he could possibly find: every magazine, organization, charity, nut group and local shopper he could lay hands on. Soon his mailbox was overflowing, every day, with more and more and more junk mail.

As the story goes, he piled it up behind his house, compacted it into "logs" with a machine, and used it to heat his house all winter.

I like that story. My only problem is, I live in southern California and heating my house all winter isn't such a problem as it would be if I lived in North Dakota.

I wonder if there's a way mashed junk mail could be used to run my house's air-conditioning system in the summertime.