The US Postal Service as crisis or farce? Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett

 So.  Have you been hitting "refresh" on the USPS tracking tools a lot lately?  Um... fun, right?  What's your record right now?  For domestic mail, I have a nice, little out-of-print book that I thought I had found, at a great price, that supposedly went out for delivery, never made it, and has been sitting somewhere in my general urban area for over a week.  Just... sittin' around.  That's not counting international, which... oy.  So this is fun, right?  Let's talk Terry Pratchett.  His best book, in my opinion.  Going Postal.

First, there's that title.  Gather 'round, young'uns, whilst I tell you a tale.  This was a term that people started kickin' around in the 1980s when a series of postal workers went nuts, and then went on shooting sprees, which is the more common order of operations.  (Shooting spree, then nuts means you're looking to plead insanity, which is a dicey proposition.)  We called these people, "disgruntled postal workers."  Eventually, the English language adopted the phrase, "going postal," to refer to the total loss of one's temper and sanity.  Often, but not necessarily, with the use of an implement of destruction.  Here.  Let me use it in a sentence for you.  "Donald Trump cannot deal with the fact that he lost an election, so he is going postal, and considering a martial law declaration."  I wish that were a joke, but you've seen the Michael Flynn clip, right?

Anyway, moving on.  We're doing Pratchett today.  And don't worry, he won't do it.  Or rather, worry that people are crazy enough to consider it, but don't worry that it'll happen in the next month.  Worry that someone may do it years down the road.  That's better, right?

Fuck.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  Pratchett.  Going Postal.  Our story takes place in Discworld, like most of Pratchett's books.  Discworld is a flat world-- you know, as worlds are...-- resting on the backs of four giant elephants, standing on the back of a giant turtle.  What's beneath the turtle?  Don't ask.

Discworld has a variety of interesting locales, but the most "metropolitan," such as it is, is the city of Ankh-Morpork, in which our tale takes place.  Ankh-Morkpork is ruled by The Patrician, Havelock Vetinari.  What kind of man is Vetinari?  He is brutal, ruthless, brilliant, and the kind of man who does whatever needs to be done with cold calculation.  Imagine the kind of man that Trump thinks he is.  That's who Vetinari is, although I regularly reference another Going Postal character to explain Trump-- Reacher Gilt.*

Back to Vetinari, though.  Vetinari needs to save Ankh-Morpork.  He does so by going to the gallows, and finding our true hero.  A con man.  Moist von Lipwig.  Yeah, that's his name.  Vetinari saves Moist from the gallows, and offers him a job.  Running... the post office!

The post office has been left to rot.  There are a few employees who do very little except act out their own eccentricities, but the mail stopped getting delivered years earlier.  And why does Vetinari care?

The clacks.  What the hell is that?  It sounds like a disease, doesn't it?  It is basically a Rube Goldberg-style telegraph/Morse code thing.  People started using the clacks instead of the mail, the postal service was left to rot, and the company running the clacks-- the private company-- was doin' fine.  Then, some corporate raiders came along.  That'd be Reacher Gilt and the idiots stupid enough to trust him.  Their philosophy-- don't bother to maintain the clacks.  Just extract the money they could in the short term, and then sell it for parts.  Standard corporate raider stuff.

Vetinari sees this coming.  The thing is, communication is necessary, and while Vetinari is far from altruistic, he is pragmatic.  If the clacks are fucked... what then?  The postal service!  Someone needs to revitalize it.  Why Moist?  Well, because Pratchett made that funny.  Regardless, Vetinari saw a need for the postal service because Gilt was going to let the clacks go to shit.  That's the short version, anyway.

So.  The USPS.  What's goin' on these days?  Aside from my obscure Louis Armstrong album not showing up, or rather, to explain that...  Well, lots of things.  Normally, you could tell this by going into the outside world, but we're not doing that this year.  It is, however, pagan tree-worshipping and expansion of usury to buy stupid shit you don't want or need season.  (Yes, I need that Louis Armstrong album!)  That'll increase stress on the USPS.  There is an increase in use because of COVID.  A lot of employees are out sick.  COVID again.  DeJoy, and his shenanigans.  Cutting back hours, and eliminating sorting machines.  Why?

Well, Trump.  What's his deal with the USPS?  In case you forgot about this particular side of his corruption and idiocy, here it is.  First, as a basic point about the USPS, it is not taxpayer funded.  It runs on service fees.  That means postage costs.  Now, Trump is both stupid and vain.  These two traits interact.  The Washington Post is what we call a "newspaper."  (Fun Pratchett book:  The Truth).  Unlike Trump propaganda organs, the Post actually publishes these things called, "facts."  Trump doesn't like that.  Facts don't make him look good.  So, who owns the Post?  Jeff Bezos.  Who... also owns Amazon.com.

Does Bezos tell the Post how to write?  No.  That's Murdoch and other such assholes.  But Trump is an idiot.

Anyway, though, Trump doesn't like how the Post covers him, because it deviates from the one, accepted storyline.  Constant, fawning praise.  He blames Bezos.  He then looks at Amazon.  He believes, falsely, that Amazon gets some special deal on postage rates.  This is, of course, doubly false.  First, Amazon pays the same bulk rate that any business pays, and second, they mostly use their own shipping service, so they are less subject to postage rates than most businesses anyway.  Remember:  Trump is the dumbest motherfucker in the history of politics.  Still true.

So Donald Trump, supergenius, concocts a plan to get back at the Washington Post.  Kill the USPS.  'Cuz... 'ya see, Amazon relies on its special deal, and Amazon is owned by Bezos, who owns the Post, so you see...

Yeah.  Donald Trump really is that stupid, petty and vain.

Was DeJoy also trying to fuck with absentee ballots and the 2020 election?  Probably.  His misconduct was overdetermined, though, and Trump's war on the USPS predated COVID.

Of course, the perversity here is that Amazon's competitors are the ones who would go out of business if the USPS got slammed that hard because they don't have their own shipping services.  But that'd be a thing called "logic," and Trump doesn't do logic.

So instead, we have the combination of COVID, the holidays, attempted election interference, and Trump's idiotic plan to "get Bezos" colliding with the USPS already running on narrow margins to create a nightmare scenario.

And here's what happens in Going Postal.  The mail gets to a point of backlog.  Once it backs up to a certain point, they just stop delivering, period.  What's the point?  And one of Pratchett's most fun twists in Discworld is that when enough samples of the written word pile up together, they take on life.  Libraries, too, are dangerous...

So the post office is just filled with piles, and piles, and piles of mail upon which everyone has just given up, because it reaches a point at which their capacity to manage has been surpassed anyway.

Inflow, and outflow.  In order for the USPS to catch up on delivery, the inflow has to slow to the point that they can get mail out faster than it is coming in.  Right now, there is a daunting backlog, from their perspective.  And it's growing.  Of course, the rate at which parcels enter the system will slow, very soon.  Like, in a few days.  But this is a thing that you face in many circumstances, whether as a student, in your job.... your email inbox, whatever.  Inflow, and outflow.  In order to get the shit out the door... all of it, you need the inflow to slow enough to manage the outflow.  'Cuz if it doesn't, you are in the territory of the post office, before Moist gets there.  Piles, and piles.  Eventually, to take on life, but never to be delivered.

And no, Trump is not Vetinari.  He's Reacher Gilt, but stupid.  He is actively attempting to tear down what he can, for the purposes of extraction.  While those piles just grow, and grow.

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*Gilt is a corporate raider who dresses like a pirate in order to make it absolutely clear to everyone that he is the bad guy, and not to be trusted, and Gilt marvels that anyone is stupid enough to trust him.