Death of the Post Office

By Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine

13 May 12

ast Tuesday, for reasons we need not go into here, I happened to be in the U.S. Post Office in Geneva, New York. It is in an old, brick building downtown, just up from the lakefront. It was constructed between 1905 and 1906 in the Colonial Revival style, with four white columns out front arranged, so the architects say, in a Doric entablature. There are huge, arching windows arranged on either side. It is one of 13 post offices throughout New York state that were constructed by the Office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department under the direction of James Knox Taylor, a man who was not beyond some political chicanery. (Taylor got into trouble when he picked his old partner to design the customs house in New York City.) In 1989, the Geneva Post Office was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Inside, it was cool and a little dark and it smelled sweetly of old varnish. The woodwork was polished and the brass finishings shone brightly. The marble countertops were cool and clean. There is a mural inside called "The Vineyard" that was painted in 1942 by a magical realist named Peter Blume. (Blume raised no little happy hell himself; in one of his paintings, he portrayed Mussolini as a jack-in-the-box.) This is a place, I thought, where you come to do business. This is a place, I thought, where you would feel confident in doing so.

There is a reason that post offices were once built this way. There is a reason why, during the New Deal period alone, the country built 1100 post offices, and why it commissioned murals like "The Vineyard" to be painted in them, and why there were marble countertops and brass fittings and glistening woodwork. Authors Marlene Park and Gerald Markovitz, who wrote about why post offices were built the way they were, explained that "The New Deal sought to make the national government's presence felt in even the smallest, most remote communities.... The post office was 'the one concrete link between every community of individuals and the Federal government' that functioned 'importantly in the human structure of the community.... [The post office] brought to the locality a symbol of government efficiency, permanence, service, and even culture."

Well, we certainly can't have that, can we?

Post offices were built this way to give the people using them a sense that their business was safe for them to do. And it wasn't just the government that built its buildings with this in mind, either. Think about all the little towns in America that have huge old bank buildings looming over the town square. While today they're mostly cut up into office space that is in turn cut up into little cubicles, back when they were built, they were built to proclaim solidity, dependability, and a place where someone would need a tank to come and steal your money. They were built this way because they were built by people who lived in those same towns, who walked to work every day across the town square and into the monument of stability that they had raised to demonstrate to their fellow citizens that there was a great stability to the lives of everyone who lived in the town. Not that some of these guys weren't cutthroats. Not that farms were neve auctioned or homes never foreclosed upon, but, even then, there were the huge buildings downtown, and people knew that the business of their towns was being conducted in that place, for good or ill. They were monuments to community, to a political commonwealth, and so were the courthouses, and so were the post offices.

As has become clear over the past five years, conservative politicians have decided that we don't need a post office any more. Under cover of technology, and using the rise of e-mail as an alibi, the Congress quite deliberately has engaged in a campaign to make the United States Postal System an unsustainable concern. They've done it quite well, actually. In 2006, when nobody was paying attention, a lame duck session of Congress, in which there was still a Republican majority, passed a neat little poison-pill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required the USPS to pre-fund 75 years worth of health-care benefits over the next 10 years. (No other government entity ever has been required to do anything like this.) Among other things, this prevented the USPS from raising rates, or doing anything else that would lift the weight of the fiscal millstone that had been hung upon it. That this was a deliberate act of sabotage was revealed by the fact that a report indicated that, absent this pre-payment requirement, the USPS would be running a profit of $2.5 billion. With the requirement, the service is $24 billion in the hole.

In addition, consider how often the USPS is used as a punchline for the failure of government services. This became particularly acute during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, when "Do you want to hand health care over to the people who run the post office?" became the go-to comedy bit for opponents of the reforms. Of course, all the service problems you see in the USPS are a result of cutbacks forced by the poison-pill the service was fed six years ago, but god bless Bill Maher anyway for pointing out, "You mean the people who, when I put a 35-cent stamp on a letter to my sister in San Francisco, get it to her in New York in two days?" So why are conservative politicians breaking so much rock trying to rid us of the curse of government mail delivery? Go back to that quote from Park and Markovitz:

The post office was 'the one concrete link between every community of individuals and the Federal government' that functioned 'importantly in the human structure of the community.... [The post office] brought to the locality a symbol of government efficiency, permanence, service, and even culture."

The entire modern conservative movement consists of an ongoing attempt to sever the relationship of a self-governing people to their government, to break down the concept of a political commonwealth. Many of the conservative attempts to wedge people apart through the use of an Other to be feared and despised — whether that was black people, or empowered women, or immigrants, or gay people — have been framed to attack the government's attempts to ameliorate discrimination against the groups in question. In modern conservative thought, then, and in the mindset it seeks to ingrain on the people of the country, the government is the ultimate Other.

In doing so, the corporate masters of the conservative movement are good with all of this because they seek a wary, frightened and insecure people. Those people are too cowed to make waves, too spooked to assert their rights as citizens, too confused to demand accountability. That huge local bank in the middle of your town is chopped up into office space. If any part of it is still a bank, it's owned by a megabank based in New York, where things are being done to your money that you won't even know about until the registered letters from the bank start showing up in the mail. Or maybe there isn't a bank there at all. Just an ATM cut into the great sandstone wall of the place.

There is a reason why we used to build buildings the way we built the post office in Geneva, with its mural and its marble, and its great arching windows and its Doric entablature. It wasn't because we were profligate. It was because we considered self-government, for all its faults, to be something precious that belonged to all of us, and that it should be housed in places that looked as though we valued it enough to celebrate it and protect it at the same time. They were monuments we raised to ourselves, because we deserved them.