A POLYPROPYLENE REQUIEM FOR THE 2026 MASSACHUSETTS ELECTION
~ A.I. Slopworth 2026
We were somewhere around the Shelburne Falls line on the edge of the morning when the plastic began to take hold. The coffee had gone to tar, the river was smoking in the cold like a dropped cigarette, and out along Route 2 the rectangles were standing at attention in the frost, hundreds of them, thousands of them, a whole defeated army of corrugated polypropylene on twisted steel legs, still screaming their little commands at a highway that had stopped giving a shit around suppertime. Vote. Re-elect. Protect. Fight. Keep. Elect. The words were still shouting but the war was over. It had been over since a minute after eight o'clock last night, when the Associated Press called the governor's race before most people had finished their goddamn mashed potatoes, and it had really been over since July, or 1995, or the Mesozoic, depending on how you count. Massachusetts went blue. The sun rose in the east, the Deerfield ran downhill, the Commonwealth elected Democrats, and the only genuinely suspenseful question left on the morning after is how much petroleum we had to boil into flat sheets to tell ourselves a bedtime story we'd all memorized in kindergarten. I pulled over and stared at them for a long time. They stared back with the dead, laminated confidence of things that will be looking back long after everyone whose name is printed on them is worm food.
A Horse Race With One Horse
Understand the scale of the madness. Every rating outfit in the country had the governor's race filed under Solid Democratic before the first leaf turned, the polling averages had Maura Healey up better than twenty points, and the prediction markets priced her somewhere in the mid-nineties, which is the gambler's way of saying go home, pal, you're drunk. And still the challenger, Mike Minogue, a former medical-device executive and presumably a man who can read a spreadsheet, dumped $19.5 million of his own money down the hole, a record for any statewide candidate in Massachusetts history, with $6.1 million of it gone in September alone, enough to make this the most expensive governor's race the Commonwealth has ever staged. Nineteen and a half million dollars. Bravo. Truly a visionary allocation of capital. You could buy every household in Franklin County a cord of seasoned oak and a new woodstove to burn it in. You could pave the Mohawk Trail in gold leaf and still have enough left over to fix the potholes the gold leaf would cover. Instead the money went where campaign money always goes, into the great grinding machine of persuasion, and the machine did what it always does: it ate the cash and shat out plastic. The final tally came in at roughly 64 to 32 in the early unofficial count, Healey by two to one, exactly where the polls had her in October, exactly where the gods had her at the dawn of time. What a nail-biter. I may never recover. Meanwhile nine ballot questions, a record-tying heap, spawned their own swarm of committees and cash; the state-primary question alone had drawn $5.2 million by mid-October, and every committee in the building was gunning for the all-time ballot-question spending record of $65.8 million set back in 2022, because if there's one thing this state loves more than recycling, it's breaking spending records it can feel bad about later. That's the arithmetic of the thing: the outcome was never in doubt, the money was never spared, and money that size does not vanish. It turns into stuff. It turns into plastic.
The Polypropylene Sacrament
Let us speak plainly about what the typical corrugated-plastic lawn sign is, because nobody in this state ever does. It is oil. Glorious, sacred, planet-cooking oil. It begins as crude pumped out of the ground somewhere far from here, cracked in a refinery into propylene gas, polymerized into polypropylene pellets, melted, extruded into a twin-walled sheet with little hollow flutes running through it like the bones of a bird, printed with solvent ink, die-cut, bundled, shrink-wrapped in still more plastic, because God forbid the plastic should get dirty on its way to becoming garbage, loaded onto a diesel truck, driven across half the continent, unloaded at a campaign office, handed to a volunteer in a fleece vest, and jammed into the lawn of a person who composts. Then it sits in the sun for six weeks while the ultraviolet light cooks it, the colors bleed out, the edges go brittle, and it begins, slowly, silently, to shed itself into the grass in bits too small to see, a little parting gift to the earthworms. Then the election happens, the outcome everyone knew arrives right on schedule, and the sign becomes garbage in a single instant, the most perfectly single-use object ever devised by the human mind: a thing manufactured for the sole purpose of being looked at for a month by people who had already made up their minds. Its useful life is six weeks. Its material life is somebody else's problem forever. Most curbside programs won't touch the damn thing. It's too big, too dirty, wrapped around a steel stake, printed, sun-rotted, and made of a plastic the sorting lines want nothing to do with. So off it goes to the landfill to sulk for centuries, or to the incinerator to go up the stack and into the atmosphere, or into the back of somebody's garage where it waits, faithful as a dog, for the next coronation two years from now. This is the sacrament. Every two years the faithful line up to receive it, and they say amen.
Saints of the Compost Bin, Sinners of the Sign Shop
And who receives it most devoutly? The progressives of Massachusetts, God love their reusable little hearts, the most environmentally sanctimonious electorate on the face of the earth. These are people who will corner you at the farmers market to explain the microplastics in a sea turtle's gut, who carry their own mesh bags into the co-op and rinse their yogurt containers like communion chalices, who would rather die of thirst than be seen sucking on a plastic straw. And every two years, without a flicker of irony, they plant a sheet of petroleum on the front lawn, right between the native-pollinator garden and the hand-lettered sign announcing that in this house we believe science is real. Science is real, friend. So is polypropylene, and it is in no hurry to leave. But sure, tell me again about your bamboo toothbrush. Their candidates mail them glossy coated postcards by the pound, door-hang them with cardstock, slap vinyl banners on every fence from Pittsfield to Provincetown, and the faithful say thank you, and then they write a strongly worded letter about a plastic bag at the Stop & Shop. Even the Secretary of the Commonwealth gets in on the liturgy: this year's red book, the Information for Voters, ran to 88 pages, a record that beat the 1998 edition by sixteen, and was mailed to every household in the state whether anyone wanted it or not, a genuine public service delivered by the ton, by default, to millions of mailboxes whose owners will read it online or not at all. And let no conservative get smug, because the party of thrift brought its own goddamn trucks. The folks who stand up at town meeting to tell you the library can't afford a new boiler poured millions into a race they could not win and papered the hilltowns with the proof, in the same plastic, from the same shops, on the same steel stakes. Fiscal responsibility, my ass. Left and right, tax-cutters and rent-controllers, all of them will lie down together this month in the transfer station like the lion and the lamb, one bipartisan stratum of political sediment for some future archaeologist to dig up and wonder what in the hell these people were worshipping.
The Merchants of Rectangle
And then there are the people who make the shit, God bless their quarterly earnings. For the political sign shops, the campaign printers and the bulk-mail houses, election season is Christmas, Easter and the Fourth of July rolled into one long fluorescent orgasm of overtime. Somewhere out there right now is a man with a forklift and a very nice boat, and the boat was paid for by polypropylene that was obsolete before the ink was dry. These are the true bipartisans of American life. They don't care who wins. They don't care who loses. They will cheerfully print YES and NO on the same Tuesday from the same roll of stock, invoice both committees net thirty, and sleep like babies on a mattress of corrugated plastic offcuts. They print the candidate who promises to save the planet and the candidate who promises to drill it, and they print them on the same petroleum, and they ship them on the same diesel, and not one of them has ever been asked to take a single sign back. Why would they? The product is designed to die. Planned obsolescence is a scandal when a phone company does it; when a sign shop does it, we call it democracy. And yes, yes, I hear you, it's jobs, it's the economy, it's money moving through the Commonwealth, and a dollar spent on a lawn sign is a dollar in some printer's pocket and a paycheck for some kid running the die cutter. Fine. By that logic we should hire a man to smash every window on Bridge Street on Monday so the glaziers can fix them on Tuesday, and then throw a parade for the GDP. Frédéric Bastiat buried that argument in 1850 and these people are still digging it up every two years to sell more rectangles. Gross activity is not net benefit when every product ships with a disposal bill attached. Money that moves in a circle and leaves a pile of plastic in a hole is not an economy, it's a fucking garbage disposal with a payroll.
The Abstainer's Carbon Ledger
Here is my confession, and it will get me thrown out of every potluck in the valley: I have never voted. Never registered, never enrolled in a party, never signed up, never had one solitary thing to do with any of it, not in sixty years, not for president, not for governor, not for dogcatcher. Clutch your pearls. And I am here this morning to tell you, with a perfectly straight face, that I am the greenest son of a bitch in Massachusetts. In a state where one party has run the show so long that its Secretary of the Commonwealth has held the job since the mid-nineties and its legislature is still stonewalling the audit of its own books that 72 percent of voters ordered back in 2024, which tells you exactly what a winning ballot buys you around here, what exactly would my ballot add to a 64-to-32 coronation? A thirty-two-hundredth of a decimal point? A sticker, which is also, I hasten to point out, plastic? The vote changes nothing here. The waste is the only part of a Massachusetts election that is guaranteed, the only output you can take to the bank, and I decline to be an input. Every voter is a target and every target is a purchase order: the campaigns find you on the voter file, mail you, door-hang you, text you, phone you during dinner, stake a sign in your yard and then mail you again to remind you about the sign. I was never on the voter file. The machine had one less place to look. No sign has ever been staked on my account, no volunteer has ever idled in my driveway with a clipboard and a tote bag of literature, no campaign has ever ordered a single sheet of polypropylene on my behalf. Voting in this state is a fucking waste of time and energy, and here the waste comes in pellets. My abstention is the one campaign in Massachusetts this year that produced no plastic at all, and you're welcome.
Now take it to the edge of the map, because one crank in Shelburne Falls is a curiosity and a whole Commonwealth of them is a policy. Suppose nobody voted. Not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the unenrolled, not the proudly undecided who make up their minds in the parking lot between the pumpkin-spice latte and the polling booth. Suppose every granola-crunching progressive and every tax-cutting conservative in the state simply stayed the hell home, and kept staying home. One cycle and the consultants would call it a fluke. Two cycles and the finance directors would start sweating through their quarter-zips. By the third, the whole commercial apparatus of electioneering would have lost its reason for being, because you cannot justify nineteen and a half million dollars chasing voters who will not be caught. The sign shops would run fewer sheets of polypropylene, the printers would idle their presses, the mail trucks would haul less glossy stock, the television stations would sell the airtime back to the personal-injury lawyers where it belongs, and somewhere along the line a mountain of plastic, paper, ink and diesel would simply never be made. It wouldn't hit zero. The parties, the advocacy outfits and the deep-pocketed interests would keep spending to bend public opinion, turnout or no turnout, and the state would still have to print ballots and run the polls. But the great November blizzard of junk, the part that exists only to herd bodies toward a booth, would thin to a flurry. Would democracy survive the experiment? That's another essay, and a serious one, and I'm not going to settle it at five in the morning on three cups of tar. Would the environment be better off? Almost certainly, at least in the narrow and measurable matter of campaign-generated waste. Picture it: the most effective recycling program in Massachusetts history, achieved without recycling a single goddamn thing, just by refusing to manufacture it in the first place. I'm not on a stump telling you not to vote; a stump would need a sign, and the sign would need a stake. I'm telling you that every ballot is also a purchase order for the machine, and that the people who brag loudest about their carbon footprints have never once asked what their civic duty weighs on a truck scale.
Graveyard on Route 2
The sun is up over the Bridge of Flowers now and the rectangles are still out there, catching the light, going brittle, waiting for a savior who isn't coming. Nobody in this Commonwealth will weigh them. The campaign-finance office counts dollars, not pounds. The Department of Environmental Protection counts tonnage, not motive. The towns pick them up, or they don't, and nobody adds it up, because adding it up would mean admitting that the cleanest, greenest, most enlightened electorate in America runs on a biennial binge of disposable petroleum and calls it civic virtue. A sane state, one that believed a tenth of the bullshit it says about itself, would make campaigns report pounds alongside dollars, make the sign shops take back every sheet and stake, send the volunteers who planted the signs back out to pull them, and print the red book for whoever asks instead of for every mailbox by default. It won't happen, of course, because the people who'd have to pass the law are the people whose faces are printed on the plastic, and they are very busy this morning being humbled by the trust the voters have placed in them. So go for a walk this week, any town, any road, and count them. Each one is a vote somebody already had, paid for twice, and threw away once, a little petroleum tombstone marking a race that was over before it began. Not one of them is mine. Not one of them ever has been. That's my ballot, and it's the only one in Massachusetts that will never end up in a landfill.