Smudged envelopes hurtling through the letter box are partly illegible. A dog barks. "Pence, psychiatry, princess", says the upper right corner, or ought that be "puce, psychotic, precipice"? Not sure. The slogan "Fianna Fáil, The Republican Party" reads clearly, whatever the claim, but what's the blob in the corner - a hand gun; a medical drawing of womany bits? On second glance, it may be a reverse map of Africa (Acirfa).
Somebody in Fianna Fáil is trying too hard. Somebody in An Post is trying too little. Meanwhile, their mutual decision to extend GUBU marketing to the humble, traditional envelope is so camp it's lethal.
No boundaries respected, no sense of the personal, ever precious, divide between public space and private communications. Not since Narcissus was narcissism more plainly on view.
Whatever happened to private space? Overnight, personal mail will take on the public, unconsensual qualities of a billboard sold to the highest bidder, except we've unwittingly endorsed it. An old technology some of us, perhaps naively, still embrace is defaced as rudely as if a stranger spat on our shoes.
Uninvited, unwanted, the slogan-bearing messages slip into homes and offices as stealthily as a stomach bug, infecting the post we send in return. This is supposed to be smart.
Political advertising on envelopes is not the new black. It is the old grey, and a washed-out hue at that, replete with shades of brown. No space will be sacred if we adopt this pseudo-fashion, no scale too big or small to exploit.
Might Michael Woods's name be engraved on every new school desk commissioned between now and the general election? Might every patient who gets to the top of a hospital waiting list be obliged to wear a secular scapular saying "thank you, Minister Martin, thank you very, very much".
Imagine love letters adorned by political slogans: Mother's Day cards arriving in time for Sunday; birthday cards, St Patrick's Day cards, sympathy cards to a bereaved friend. Picture writers' archives bought for the nation, with future generations of scholars trying to puzzle out whether the FF slogan represents late post-modern irony or sub-textual cultural messages suggesting, in Noam Chomsky's words, "a devil's gift".
Where will a line be drawn, if a line ever is? Think slogans that could make An Post lots of money: "Warm to Sellafield: It Warms You." Or "Smoke More for a Faster Life". Political and religious advertising are strictly controlled in other media, for good reason. Letters stamped with claims that "God is dead" or "Moonies - make friends for life" will never be desirable mail, nor will "Vote National Immigration Platform: your genes, your choice".
And even if money can't buy you love, how fair is it if money buys you an intimacy few recipients would invite or could afford? Commodity beats community, because it has the cash. "Jim McDaid: come swim with me in Waterworld" could be next, or "Michael Noonan - bald men need love and affection too".
Letters are popular speech, not corporate speech. Even junk mail should be immune from certain slogans. Fianna Fáil may scream blue murder about attempts to censor them and restrict their freedom of speech, but whose envelopes are they anyway? Who buys them, who addresses them, who decides individually or professionally what to say on the inside and the outside?
Remember years in school learning how to write letters and address them correctly, the ages it took to draw stamps on the envelope and stagger the name and address neatly down the middle. Little girls personalise their letters by putting puppy dog or Barbie stickers on the envelopes. Older ladies sometimes use a rose.
It's not a lot to give them, but they deserve their space.
This attempt to expand the political sphere right into the personal cynically emulates the way the private sphere does work - one-to-one, friend-to-friend, man-to-man. But the freedom of speech it infringes belongs to people, not parties.
Silent in the midst of this aesthetic attack is An Post's stamp advisory committee, which spent years trying to create a sense of beauty and excellence in the national mail, commissioning artists and ornithologists to bring us a blackbird in winter, an artwork in summer and a sense of Ireland to all who get letters overseas. Their comments on FF graphic design might be instructive, if they made any: old-fashioned, visually inferior, born to smudge? You got mail - but do you want it?
Read the cultural messages and a far more disturbing story about Ireland Inc. appears. Naked as the day those executives who dreamt it up were born is a chilling commentary about the self-enclosed, self-promoting enclave who can't distinguish between politics and state, and don't notice the smudged lines because they still don't know where to draw them.
There's no space in this Ireland Inc for slogans such as "conflict of interest" because all available space is being colonised by its flat-footed brand.
All changed, changed utterly, for no better purpose than gobbledygook about puce, psychoses and the horn of Acirfa. Wag the dog.