You've Got Mail

 Democracy in America dodged another bullet for now with the Supreme Court decision stopping the Chaos attempt to mutilate voting- by- mail in the upcoming--and just about in progress--elections. For me one of the depressing details about this effort to use the Post Office to refuse to deliver ballots was the apparently eager connivance of the head of the Postal Service. The function of that office is one of the least political in any administration by definition.  The job is to deliver everybody's mail.  It's the Post Office, one of the earliest bedrock institutions in America.

True, the job of Postmaster General (a Cabinet post before restructuring in 1971) was also a prime patronage position for much of its history, as were the appointments to local post office leadership, though in recent decades the rule of Civil Service exams and hires just about erased that effect.  But the job itself was never political.  I repeat, the job was to see that everybody's mail was delivered, speedily and intact. 

It's also true that individuals, businesses and the country as a whole don't depend on the Post Office as much as they did for most of our history.  But it is still an important institution--including to businesses that sell by mail and delivery companies that use the US Postal Service for at least part of their process.

It is also one of those institutions and traditional functions that held this country together, no matter what else was happening.  The confidence that we have a country at all has depended in part on confidence in the Post Office.  It is possibly the most democratic of remaining national institutions.  The job is to deliver everybody's mail.  And though the cost of mailing has increased, especially in recent years, sending a letter through the mail remains one of the great bargains.  

But there have been two trends threatening all federal institutions.  Starving them of resources and threatening their existence has been high on the priorities of Republican administrations and politicians from Reagan onward.  Hollowing out these institutions has been an ongoing process, both from congressional foolishness and cowardice, and administrative malpractice.  Then came the Chaos blitzkrieg at the start of this presidential term in which important institutions like USAID and the National Science Foundation were suddenly obliterated completely, to a lot of consternation but in most cases no effective pushback.

The second element is the overt and absolutely shameless partisan politization of administrative agencies, mostly to ensure loyalty to Boss Chaos alone, but also to the hidden powers that use his name from the depths of the White House.  Again, to lots of consternation--especially to those of us who can't believe any of this is legal and can't be stopped--but by now a humiliating fait accompli.  

The result is a highly dangerous situation in which these institutions with crucial responsibilities and functions have become as flimsy as stage sets.  We may be living in a fool's paradise at the moment, but the rot is underway, and real crises which are all but inevitable will reveal that unfortunately there is no there there anymore.  They can't do anything.  Even if they still know how, they don't have the resources or the dedication.  And if you live in a blue state, forget them even trying.

There's already talk of more than normal post office bungling of mail-in ballots in this year's primaries, attributed to lack of training of postal employees on how to handle them.  This sounds like a consequence of both factors: shrunken resources and partisan political management.  The result is citizens' votes not being counted, the prime crime of this democracy.

I'm sure that the depressing effect of this Post Office controversy for me is the important role the postal system played in my life, not only as supporting what confidence I had in the fair functioning of American society working for everybody, but in the actual living of my life.

Writing cards for Christmas and birthdays, and then writing letters were rites of passage for us as children.  My first letters were to my cousin Dick.  I wrote lots of things at any early age but eventually writing a letter had those crucial next steps: addressing the envelope and affixing the stamp. This time my scribbles won't die in a tablet--they join the real world. 

The mailman picks up that envelope with the letter inside, puts it with others into a truck, and afterwards it is transported in ways unknown to me from western Pennsylvania to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where an unknown mailman takes it out of his pouch and delivers it to a mailbox at 305 Morris Avenue.  I did all that, with just a 3 cent stamp.

In high school I also wrote letters to Washington, to (for example) the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.  And in the mail came an envelope addressed to me with the White House as return address.  A nice man named Ralph Dungan typed me a note saying how much the President appreciated my support and my comments.  

Among the sadder letters I wrote later was to Jacqueline Kennedy, and I got an engraved reply.  I also wrote to support the naming of the about to be opened National Cultural Center after President Kennedy as a memorial, especially as he spoke so eloquently about the arts.  I wasn't the only one, and that's how Washington got the Kennedy Center.

In between I wrote to the first Americans in space, enclosing a brief article about John Glenn's 3 orbits I wrote for the high school newspaper with a photo clipped and edited from Life Magazine of the three of them.  Two wrote back, and Gus Grissom enclosed the article--but with his signature, plus those of Alan Shepard and John Glenn under their photo.

In college, letters were a lifeline: first, from college to home and friends back there, 900 miles away. Then in summers, from home to fellow students, trying to keep my new self alive.  And then, sending out manuscripts, dealing with rejection slips, corresponding with editors and receiving issues with my work in them--all through the mail.

Mail you got was something new in your life, and much of the time, for you alone.  Anticipating the mail became a reflex, one that I still have.  That anticipation was widely shared.  When just about all the Internet did was email in the early 1990s, AOL (which was pretty much the only email for awhile) knew about that anticipation and took advantage of it by having your computer alert you with a happy voice: You've got mail!

The US mail was delivered in person.  Even city people often knew their regular mail carrier.  In our town we knew his name (and since he read our postcards, he knew about us.)  We knew the postal employees at the counter in the dim hush inside the large brick post office with the high ceilings, the flight of cement steps and the tall white columns outside--it was the county's federal building, built in 1905 and doubled in size as a New Deal project in the 1930s.  

Years later I picked up mail at a post office box at Central Square in Cambridge, Mass.  Years after that I knew the postal employee at the window in the Squirrel Hill Post Office in Pittsburgh, with its Depression era murals depicting the history of the neighborhood.  Even here in Arcata, once in awhile I am like Kurt Vonnegut who made deliberate trips to the post office line when strictly speaking he didn't need to-- just to be there, with others on this ritualistic task.  Or I walk to a blue mailbox to mail the cards I still send, after addressing the envelopes and affixing the stamps.

So there you are: people and places, time and physical things, not the more efficient blankness of cyberspace.  Maybe that's what makes the betrayal of the Post Office and its mythic as well as historic mission feel so personal.