~a column by Colleen O’Brien
First, I read Bag Man by Rachel Maddow. It was a quick overnight read about Spiro Agnew – remember him? At the time he was in the public eye, I thought he was merely laughable, but the PR for Maddow’s book explained Agnew’s life as “The wild crimes, audacious cover-up, and spectacular downfall of a brazen crook in the White House.”
He was President Richard Nixon’s vice-president from 1967 until he resigned in 1973 rather than be indicted for being a bag man.
A bag man is a person who collects the proceeds of illicit activities – literally receives cash in a bag. It is not earned cash, but “you give me cash and I’ll give you the job, the contract, the appointment.” It is illegal.
Maddow has indeed written the Spiro act as the prototype for Donald Trump, who acted just like him; one for instance being Spiro’s propensity for taking potshots at the media for “witch hunts” against him . . . among other lies and corruption of serious consequence.
~~~
Then I read Too Much and Never Enough: How my Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary Trump.
Mary Trump is Donald’s niece, daughter of his older brother Fred, who committed suicide in his forties.
The book is a tell-all, and it’s a fascinating one worth a night’s read. The things the Trump family got away with are legion, and still happening. Mary’s a good writer and has no compunction about outing relatives as crooks, exposing her father’s sad life, even telling on herself. You’ll probably like it if you weren’t a fan of her uncle’s.
~~~
And now I’m reading a good book, a joy of a book: How the Post Office Created America by Winifred Gallagher. It is wonderful in so many ways: the writing, the tidbits of history I’d never read before, the unusual concept itself of the theme of the book announced in the title.
I have always loved the Post Office because my dad was a rural mail carrier in Jefferson most of his life, my grandfather a postmaster in Perry for 40 years, and my husband a city mailman when he was in college.
And for other reasons: the institution that gets snail mail to us can only be revered, for there is the receiving of friend letters, Gramma Grace postcards, grandkid drawings and the best of all, love letters. I still have all the love letters ever sent to me, and stellar examples of the others, so many of them written to me by people long dead. These missives are a connection much more intimate and easily wept over than files of old emails.
Author Gallagher has a way with her words about her love affair with the P.O. She is simply an unusual thinker and a good writer who has published several books appealingly named: House Thinking, Working on God, and Power of Place: How our Surroundings Shape our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. The Post Office book is a revelation of history, it is facts heretofore unheard of by me about my founding fathers, it is excitement of the carriers on horseback, in canoes, plunging on foot along forest trails in fear of Indians and wild animals.
Gallagher considers the U.S. postal service the “least remarked and most misunderstood of the nation’s original great institutions.” She thinks it the institution that guided the nation into a communication wisdom via connections by roads and waterways just to get the mail to where the people were already going; the most willing institution to forward literature, newspapers and market prices for people’s needs, for information on political happenings and for fulfilling the longing for word of faraway family. She considers the P.O. the original “technology” that made the first tracks into our “communication-oriented culture.”
The book’s significance is in Gallagher’s argument for the importance of the institution remaining in our government. She knows it as a public need that cannot fall into the maw of privatization, cannot be plagued with cutbacks and should never have to endure bullying laws that demand it be funded 75 years in advance for pensions of its retirees. No other agency of the federal government has to do this.
I laughed through the funny stories of the “post” over the centuries, worried through its trials and tribulations because of annoying Congress and Presidents and cried for the late 20th-century and early 21st-century neglect and misleading propaganda.
I do hope the people we elect from here on out have the brains to keep our mail system intact, take care of it, help it if it needs it. Forty percent of postal usage throughout the world is carried on right here in America. Our postal service held the original colonies together and helped foster the “constantly moving westward edge,” as the author called the Westward-Ho migration. The post made communication of ideas a service available inexpensively for everyone, not just the wealthy, as had been the norm for centuries here and in western Europe.
The book is as worth the read as is our attentiveness to saving the institution itself. If we can pay for the military, surely we can pay for the post office. We all use it. During the pandemic, many people took to snail mail – writing letters to one another rather than emailing. Receiving a personal letter in my mailbox has always made for a lighter feeling in my heart. Write a letter to a friend – with any luck at all, you’ll be rewarded by a beloved who will answer you in her own handwriting.
