Bonfire of the Inanities

Bevis resident Tim Nolan’s cheeky Your Voice column in Tuesday’s paper is something most voters can relate to after last week’s election. He takes an irreverent view of this fall’s nasty, nearly-out-of-control campaign, and proposes to “maximize marketing efficiencies for all potential candidates" for 2008 with an organization he has “founded,” the Bevis-based Center for Research and Advanced Political Processes. Figure out the acronym yourself.

Nolan proposes to print 2008 brochures in Shanghai and deliver them direct-to-Rumpke-dumpster, never to land in your mailbox. The methane they produce when they rot – assuming they aren’t already rotten – will help ease the energy crunch. He has other creative ideas involving call centers in India, but his brochure idea sounds most tempting.

I don’t know about you, but I have a stack of about three dozen mailers – from candidates in both parties, by the way – lying around at home. That doesn’t even count the probably couple of dozen I threw out immediately. I don’t know why I’m keeping them. I don’t have a bird cage to line. Then on my desk here at work, there’s the 10-inch stack of press kits from candidates who came in for endorsement interviews.

So what do we do with this stuff? It would be tempting, but probably illegal, to have everybody take their stacks of “candidate communications” to a central location – say, on the riverfront where the Great Sea of Surface Parking we all joked about a decade ago is still there instead of the promised Banks development – and set them on fire. Maybe you could piggyback this event with a pep rally for the Bengals defense.

And call it a Bonfire of the Inanities.

That’s one idea. Do you have any suggestions – publishable, please – on what to do with all this political detritus? Go ahead. Post them. Put forth your most venomous ideas.

After all, the candidates did.