My conspiracy theory about the right's peculiar obsession with the USPS

Salon's John Tierney overlooks the relative recentness and truer culprit of his otherwise correct observation:

[I]t’s a deeply ingrained part of Americans’ worldview that our postal service is the epitome of inefficiency and bad management, the perfect example of a bungling, poorly run government bureaucracy. That view gets reinforced from all kinds of sources--jaded journalists, editorial cartoonists given more to clichés than to cleverness, free-market economists, and others.

Every Christmas season I recline for yet another viewing of 1947's "Miracle on 34th Street," possibly the schmultziest film ever produced (excepting the previous year's "It's a Wonderful Life"), but, with the adorable Edmund Gwenn, is utterly irresistible to me. And every Christmas season I'm somewhat taken aback upon hearing John Payne's stirring, courtroom defense of the United States Postal Service as a model of government efficiency--a defense the film's producers surely believed would raise not one American eyebrow among its patriotic audiences.

Payne's commonplace, however, predated the rise of the far right, which very much required a widely recognizable symbol of government's gross inefficiency to gin up its campaign of government-as-the-everyday-problem (unless, of course, it's wearing a military uniform). Thus a year's-lost letter found and finally delivered--among the billions of letters delivered promptly and inexpensively--became one of the right's leading and grossest distortions of reality.

I've often wondered if the extraordinarily popular film itself was what triggered the right's peculiar obsession with the USPS, which, it would seem, was vastly respected as late as 1947. 

Comments

[shsavage]

Obviously, the solution is to make the USPS a part of the US Army--that model of efficiency. Except for the Corps of Engineers, who are also viewed as gross incompetents by the far right.

[Adam Simms]

My problems these days are *not* with the USPS, but with UPS and FexEx--not the USPS. Postal Service people, in my experience, always ring the doorbell when delivering packages. Not so UPS and FedEx personnel, who have perfected "drop-and-run" to a fine art, and seem never to heard of doorbells and--Heaven forfend!--would never think of marring their manicures by actually *knocking* on the door. The problem with is *efficiency*: the corporate masters of FedEx and UPS have sped up routes, and so, in order to complete the number of "deliveries" in their quotas, their couriers simply drop their load at *your* stop and off they go to the next victim. Private sector "efficiency" is a matter of maximizing profit for the corporation, and tough cheese if customers suffer. Besides: Go try to hold UPS or FedEx accountable for horrible customer service; but if you've got a problem with USPS, you can call your senator or representative, and a constituent-service staffer will pick up the phone and talk with you. Go try navigating UPS or FedEx's interminable telephone menus; all you'll get is some poorly-paid call-center schnook who gets paid (poorly) to listen to you vent. What's happened to the USPS is a monument to "small government" idiocy.

[Peter G]

I'm shocked frankly. I was prepared when hitting the link to the salon article to find yet another completely innumerate and illogical analysis of the USPS's woes. The oft repeated nonsense on the left is that evil machinations in congress forced the postal service to fund pensions far in excess of need as far ahead as 75 years. These pension contributions, amounting to over 5 billion a year, are supposed to account for last's years 15.9 billion dollar loss. But for this 5 billion dollar pension contribution assert idiots, the post office would have made money. In fact the Salon article has this right. The congressional interference prevents the USPS from undertaking rational steps to make this necessary institution sustainable. And the Democrats are every bit as much to blame as the Republicans.