Going Postal

A professional pool hustler I once knew told me that he didn’t play poker because, in not so many words, he didn’t know how to cheat at cards.

That memory surfaced as I was thinking about Trump’s wanting to ban voting-by-mail and to take down the U.S. Postal Service. Computers are easily hacked by almost any nine-year-old—even Russian nine-year-olds—but hacking the mail is really difficult.

Trump doesn’t know how to cheat at mail. At least not yet.

Initially, I thought Trump thought the USPS needed an overhaul because it was poorly run, inefficient, and unprofitable. But I thought better of that because Trump’s own businesses were poorly run, inefficient, and unprofitable. His many bankruptcies are testament to that. I mean, really, how do you fail running a casino? A casino’s basic operating premise is that people come from all over to willingly hand over their money. They seem happy to get free watered-down drinks as they pull down on the one-armed bandits and watch their children’s futures disappear.

Then I wondered if Trump might have had a bad experience with the mail. Maybe he thinks that everybody gets the same kind of mail he routinely received: divorce papers, bankruptcy notices, liens, lawsuit filings, overdue bills, collection notices, warrants, etc. Imagine how different things might be had somebody just written him a nice letter, or sent him a birthday card with a crisp $10-bill enclosed.

As is typical of Trump, when things go awry for him it is always somebody else’s fault. The news is fake if it doesn’t flatter him; the polls are rigged if he’s not showing on top. Now, of course, mail-in voting is fraught with untold dangers, except in Florida, and he’s even filed a suit against the state of Nevada asking the courts to overturn the mail-in voting provisions it recently enacted.

His lawyers should have told him that voting procedures are established and administered by the states. On Friday, Gov. Steve Bullock, of my home state, allowed that each Montana county can opt for mail-in voting. Or not. As contrast, consider that Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) voted against calling lynching a hate crime because he thought it was government overreach. And yet, the Trump sycophant doesn’t believe that overreach would apply to states’ voting rights.

While voter fraud is not a good thing, it’s also not a prevalent thing. It just doesn’t happen very often, except maybe in Illinois, which is solidly blue anyway, so who cares? And it’s anybody’s guess why one political party would be more likely than another to commit fraud. (Not really.)

In March, during one of his love fests with Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” Trump said that the Democratic Party’s efforts to make voting easier and more accessible would be the end of the Republican Party. I’m OK with that.

“They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” he said.

Of course, that’s not an example of voter fraud. That is an example of voter suppression. His statement implies that without voter suppression, the Republicans face certain doom. Once again, I’m OK with that.

But voter suppression tends to be targeted in areas with high concentrations of minorities and the poor, many of whom vote for candidates offering some measure of hope for a future that just might include them.

It’s just sickening to see how selfish some people can be.

I happen to like the Postal Service. I also like going to the polling stations to cast my vote. What they have in common is the fact that in small-town America you’re bound to run into people you know at both places. You get caught up on the news about the grandkids, the wild guessing about the approaching winter, the plans for Thanksgiving, a little gossip. Because of the pandemic, I’ll be voting by mail this year. So I’ll miss going to the poll, but I will probably run into a few folks at the Post Office when I mail my ballot.

Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist, once wrote a brief essay defending his walking to a stationery store to buy an envelope. It had been suggested to him to buy a box of envelopes, to which he said that if he did, he would miss the opportunity to enjoy the human interactions he might enjoy along the way. I like that. A lot. For the same reasons, it’s why I buy stamps one-at-a-time, why I buy magazines at the newsstand, and why, pre-pandemic, I go to the grocery store every day.

I like the human interaction that goes with our daily commerce. I recognize no sense of community from an Amazon purchase.

Many years ago there was a government-initiated movement to shut down post offices and replace them with modern, efficient structures on the edges of towns. Livingston was targeted and we fought hard to stop it. We have a beautiful, stately post office made of granite, and those of us who wanted it preserved spent weeks on the steps outside the building to collect signatures to preserve it. Max Baucus, our Senator at the time, joined in the protest.

We won.

My maternal grandparents ran a newspaper in western Nebraska, in a town named Imperial. I believe the town had mail delivery, but my grandmother went to the post office every day to collect the newspaper’s mail and that which was personal.

The building, as I remember it, was a low-slung, corrugated steel structure with a red brick façade. It was next door to the two-lane bowling alley. It was there that many of the 1,200-or-so inhabitants of Imperial ran into each other and exchanged some gossip. It was a highlight of any day.

Over the years, downtown post offices in small towns have shuttered, replaced by modern structures on the outskirts. Some of those towns have withered, many of the elderly no longer able to access their mail without assistance. And they don’t get to visit with those they once met.

It is a sorry state of affairs.

In 2006, the Republican-held Congress passed a bill that required the USPS to fund its employee pension plan for 75 years. The act was unprecedented. It was designed to bankrupt the postal service so it could be acquired by private interests who then would not have to worry about pensions. The postal system, whose first Postmaster was Benjamin Franklin, would cease being a significant cog in the wheels of democracy and become a profit-driven enterprise that would compete with UPS and FedEx.

And along comes Louis DeJoy, a major Trump supporter and donor, to become the new Postmaster General. Along with his wife, Aldona Wos, who has been nominated to be the next ambassador to Canada, he has stock holdings up to $70 million in USPS competitors. Both nominations were made by Trump, who, if you recall, doesn’t believe that the postal service can deliver him re-election.

Remember: Trump doesn’t know how to cheat at mail.

But he’s learning. On Friday DeJoy, whose investments alone suggest he doesn’t need a job, fired twenty-three of the top executives/managers and re-vamped a hierarchy he knows nothing about. Overtime is gone. Many of the nearly 700,000 employees have been put on notice to figuratively deny the long-heralded motto that “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

In a slowdown created to not show how the service can fail, but how to make it fail, DeJoy has orchestrated changes that will assist, if not guarantee a November vote that will be tarnished—at the least.

As undelivered mail piles up on the floors of post offices throughout the country, we watch a part of our democracy arrive at the dead letter office.

In Trump’s continuing effort to dismantle and destroy so much of what is a part of our national heritage, we can only be thankful that he’s never read a book. Otherwise, our libraries would be shuttered by that pitiful excuse of a man.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Zucchini Pickles

During her ordeal with the cancer that killed her, I gave my mother the task of finding a great pickle for my restaurant. She found this one from an early edition of “The Joy of Cooking.” She might have tweaked it a bit. The pickles are delicious, and just in time for that moment in August when you need to lock your car doors lest somebody leave a box or two of zucchini on the back seat.

2 # zucchini
2 small yellow onions
4 Tbs. kosher salt
4 cups cider vinegar
2 cups sugar
3 tsp. dry mustard
3 tsp. mustard seeds
2 tsp. turmeric

Wash and trim zucchini, slice thinly. Slice onion. Place in iced water. Add salt. Combine brine ingredients and bring to a boil; simmer for three minutes. Cool completely. Drain vegetables. Add to brine.