THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE

Watching Rachel Maddow reporting about the clumsy, malevolent, Republican shutdown of our beloved Post Office, watching her expressions of grief, reminded me of Joan Didion’s passionate lines when her husband John Gregory Dunne died. She saw his body slump over the arm of his chair. “I want to scream. I want him back.”

We’ve seen Liberty’s arm full of abandoned letters, prescriptions, checks for beloved people. Liberty’s neck, strong as Rachel’s, is bowed.

I want to scream when I hear every report of a new gang rape of America by the lunatic fascist Republicans—I want America back. Rachel shows that depth, that force, that grief, as we all do, watching them shred our Nation’s Constitution.

During World War Two, the Nazis raided the American Army’s overseas Post Office where mail to and from home was to be kept. They jammed 55,000 letters in a burnt-out warehouse. It was snowing then. After the battles with freezing weather, the letters were found iced together. Thousands of families had assumed their sons were lost, or not, and no young soldiers had heard from people they loved. Eleanor Roosevelt discovered that the letters to these young men who served in the Army had been abducted. She arranged for teams of women in the American Postal Department to care for the letters, gently letting them defrost, placing them in properly addressed and stamped envelopes, and handing them over to the leaders of the U.S. Post Office Department to be mailed home.

This, you see, is just one extraordinary story about why Americans love our Post Office and will not let any haphazard primitive traitors mess around with this particularly cherished heritage.