Bain's letter: the outsourced-emotion stationery

The whole letter's register is set by its letterhead. Marlon Bain writes to Steeply on "Saprogenic Greetings" stationery — a greeting-card company whose motto perfects the theme's nightmare: emotion so pre-packaged that caring itself is outsourced to a hired professional. The footer completes it — "a proud member of the ACMÉ Family of Gags 'N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises" — filing sincerity in the same catalogue as gags and disguises. It's the manufactured-affect thesis rendered as retail: a card that says the thing you can't be bothered to feel, sold beside the wacky disguises that hide the face you can't be bothered to show. That Bain, a man whose own "withdrawal from competitive junior tennis and contemporary life" is total, chooses this stationery to conduct a letter dismantling Orin's fake sincerity is the register-joke doubled: the diagnosis of pose arrives on the most posed medium available.