Today in perambulating the city we came past the great and solemn facade of the U.S. Post Office at Eighth Avenue and 34th Street. Its long neoclassical visage stares rather grimly at the Madison Square Garden's I'm-Just-An-Arena stylelessness. A huge American flag hangs in front of the central columns; above them the famous legend about neither-rain-nor-snow-nor-gloom-etcetera-will-yadda-yadda-appointed-rounds. Stirring stuff, save that no one stirs beneath them. The place looks monumental in the very worst sense of the word.
The decay of the post office (like the failure of American mass transit) is one of those national shames which we brood on darkly; the inefficiency Wombat File staffers have put up with in sleepy southern burgs is nothing compared to the spectacle of a dying institution that any visit to a New York P.O. can offer. And it bugs us all the more because the idea of the postal service, like that of the national ritual of Election Day, is one of the hoary institutions of American democracy of which we are hopelessly fond. There is something about the uniformed post-person which seems basic to the idea of a Good Country to Live In. When politicians and free-market visionaries propose that we simply finish the work started by FedEx and privatize the entire postal system, we hear the death-knell of the idea that government ought to do...hell, something, anything really.
So we've never wanted to give up on the postal service, always cherished a silly dream that one day there will be a renaissance of professionalism in the mail-carrying class, that the Brezhnevesque aura around the clerks at the Grand Central Station will diminish eventually. That others will realize that it is important that the market not directly dictate whether a person can afford to send a letter to his family from across the country.
But after the government lets them down like this, we don't know how much of a recovery is possible. A thousand and one things about the current crisis make us nervous. Looking at that oft-derided (but hard to forget) "Neither rain nor sleet..." line, highlighted by the Indian-summer blaze of the afternoon -- we felt too deflated to remember to worry.
Posted by B T at October 24, 2001 11:51 PM