The Small Institution That Sums Up the Local Faith

October 24, 2022 2:47 PM

If Updike sums up the American tradition that celebrates the US post and the principle of union, Pynchon and Ellison draw on another tradition, just as deeply rooted, that fears and distrusts the post, seeing it as an engine of conformity, a tyrannous system that infiltrates private life and suborns citizens as its empty vehicles. from These Swift Couriers: Postal Democracy and American Literature [LARB, June 2021]
posted by chavenet (7 comments total)

I sometimes wonder what early proponents of the Post office would think of the internet.
Seems like the connectivity between ever remote parts of the U.S. was something they saw as integral to the structure of the union, absolutely necessary to keep us from dissolving.
posted by shenkerism at 3:50 PM on October 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

What's Updike?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 4:13 PM on October 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

Post is sacred and it is a pity that we have to sully it with something as tawdry as American democracy.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 4:18 PM on October 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

De Tocqueville, traveling by stagecoach through the distant and sparsely populated spaces of the Michigan Territory, was startled to discover that its average inhabitant received more “nonlocal information” than the average inhabitant of the Département du Nord."

"The 54th postmaster general, Arthur Summerfield, got the post for having secured the Michigan Delegation’s support for Eisenhower. Foreseeing a golden age of near-immediate communication, he introduced the Mail-Flo Letter Processing System and the Hamper-Dumper internal mail transport system, and oversaw the launch from a naval submarine, on June 8, 1959, of the cruise missile Regulus, bearing a cargo of post-
a swiftly aborted experiment whose most significant trace may lie in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which begins with the conceit that the German rocket bomb, the V-2, is “incoming mail"

There is no irony in Michigan.
posted by clavdivs at 4:40 PM on October 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

Maybe it's time to revisit The Crying of Lot 49 in the current context? It's always been one of my favorite books.
posted by gimonca at 3:34 AM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

I've always thought it noteworthy, that "conservatives" have such issues with one of the few public services that the Constitution is very explicit about authorizing and enabling.

Charles Pierce at Esquire has written about symbolic unifying importance of Post Office buildings, and the way the architecture has been neutered since 1980 or thereabouts.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:53 AM on October 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

I've always thought it noteworthy, that "conservatives" have such issues with one of the few public services that the Constitution is very explicit about authorizing and enabling.

I say it here a lot, but it remains true: The USPS was the single greatest lifter of Black Americans into the middle class in the 20th Century. Remember that every time you hear someone complain about it as an institution.
posted by Etrigan at 10:50 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]