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| Symbol of a still-reliable service? |
I do believe the ex-governor is in a legal pickle now. I remember when the state tried announcing that the National Guard was being implemented in response. What an assuring pronouncement. I remember Maddow of MSNBC revealing that the move really involved just a handful of Guardsmen who lived in Flint already. What a tangled web we can weave, eh?
But Flint isn't the point of what I'm thinking about on this early-winter day, 2022. Looking out my picture window to the north, you'd think it was mid-January. We're not even to Thanksgiving yet.
So for one thing, I'm thinking about our venerated old U.S. Postal Service today. I went through an episode in the last couple weeks that made me wonder if I was an exhibit for the suffering under the Post Office's retrenchment. This is a headache: we had a Republican president from 2016 to 2020. It is a defining feature of Republicans that they do not want people to like government.
For sure there is largesse in government.
People were much more dependent on paper mail in the pre-digital times. However, paper mail continues to be important in many ways to many people. For sure those in small business. And, Republicans are supposed to be sensitive to the needs of business, right? Isn't that a defining feature too? We see a clash of objectives: oh how Republicans would like to see the Post Office be self-sufficient and self-sustaining. You hear that rhetoric and your impulse is to say "it sounds great." Please peel below the surface of that. Please consider if the Post Office is really cut out to work like a private business. Maybe not.
So Republicans need to weigh, however painful it might be for them, the idea that a government-subsidized competent Postal Service is really important for America. Republicans have had no problem spending money on wars. And look how they have reacted to the "farm bill" through the years. Let us wax nostalgic? The farm bill once came up against the vaunted principles of the GOP. It was big government. It was excessive. After railing over an extended time, Republicans got existential about this. "Hey, if we keep raising protestations about the farm bill, we'll lose," Republicans conceded while trying to avoid any admission about compromising principle.
I suppose they applied sugar coating with talk about how hard-working and virtuous farmers are. It can conjure up a Normal Rockwell painting. But do you realize: the farmers of today face no risk? So it turns out the system has "over-corrected" for them. "Hey, what do you have against farmers?" Well, nothing, I would state in response to that.
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| Worthy of "cartel" privileges? |
So now I'll move on to another subject with close relevance to my own life. It's newspapers, where I made my home for nearly 30 years.
Everyone recognizes their own self-interest, n'est-ce pas? Everyone tries to plead poverty and desperation to a certain extent. We started hearing about 15 years ago that newspapers were on a rapid slope toward extinction. Obits were written for the business. Well, what happened?
Not that there haven't been closures, but the print media still seems to be a staple in our lives. We have the Star Tribune of the Twin Cities, plus our local paper which purports to serve "Stevens County."
The Stevens County name gives them an excuse to go out of their way covering Hancock. Hasn't this been a long slog of hearing complaints out and around about too much Hancock stuff in the Morris paper? Hancock did have its own paper, the Record, for which I was sportswriter for 15 years. I don't want people to forget that. Maybe I ought to be grand marshal for the July 4 parade. OK that's a light comment. Has Katie Erdman ever been grand marshal? It's an oversight if she hasn't been.
Newspapers are looking around for special favors just like farmers have been, and just like everyone naturally does. What a tangled web that the newspaper industry is putting before us now. You are a mere child if you believe all their sheep-dip. Just like you're a child if you buy the Postal Service pronouncements about how their changes are really a grand/glorious thing.
Trump appointed this fellow named DeJoy to do what I'd call the dirty work with the P.O. Hey, they're Republicans. They will wake up only when they realize that the business world wants no part of a "self-sufficient" Postal Service.
Fast and loose talk
So what are the newspapers after? Ahem, pay attention to this proposed "Journalism Competition and Preservation Act." You might think the idea is to promote competition among newspapers? No. The effect would be to carve out a "cartel" which is un-American. Newspapers still think they're so special after such a long history when it was easier to make such an argument.
Newspapers are after what we are all after: money. If they pull levers to get a little extra, would it really be applied toward better journalism? Could we rule out more stock buy-backs?
A newspaper is a finite product - "x" number of pages - which tries to pretend it can be all things to all people. That's ridiculous. People interested in sports can go to places within the new media to find endless material. How often have you even bothered to read anything in the "business" section of the Star Tribune? If you really are interested in timely business coverage, would you rely on a newspaper anyway? So get your heads on straight, knaves. Do not fall for this special interest ploy.
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act amounts to a government-sanctioned local newspaper industrial policy. What it does, is force a transfer from Big Tech to a favored industry whose revenue was eaten into by the rise of targeted online advertising. The CATO Institute argues that the proposed bill is "incompatible with free markets and voluntary, mutually beneficial negotiations."
So don't fall for it.
As for my recent experience with the U.S. Mail, I was waiting for a semi-annual interest payment from a bank. The longer you wait, the more you are forced to worry about how there may have been a Postal Service screw-up. My check arrived yesterday after a much longer wait than usual for this.
A Postal Service slowdown? I'm smarter than the average bear, so I looked at the postmark date. Based on that, I could not blame the Post Office at all. We're talking a regional bank. The local branch evidently had nothing to do with this. I deposited the check in a different bank yesterday (Thursday), then drove immediately to the bank in question, which is in Stevens County, and withdrew all my funds.
I'm not mad, just doing what I had to do. I put the money in a certificate of deposit special offered by one of the Morris banks - a happy ending actually. So let's keep just a little faith in the U.S. Postal Service. I have long felt the P.O. employees union was too powerful. Similarly, I think teachers unions have had way too much power. I support workers everywhere. But unions within government? That's an issue.
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| Elizabeth Raths |
I just got the heads-up about how the Chokio-Alberta band was in last night's very cold Parade of Lights in Morris. A part of me wants to congratulate them, but I'm not sure it was wise to perform under such cold conditions. But let's be glass-half-full and congratulate the C-A kids and their director Elizabeth Bartholet-Raths. She was formerly in the Morris system. Kind of a contentious situation when she left Morris. I attended just one concert where she was involved and I felt she did fine.
Elizabeth's C-A band got a superior rating in large-group last spring. Hancock did not achieve that. Hail the Spartans! (A friend told me the Hancock parents only care about having a loud pep band.)
I photographed the Parade of Lights for the Morris Sun Tribune in a past time. I would have several leftover photos to use in our Christmas greeting edition. Newspaper work is only in my memories now. I wish it hadn't turned out that way.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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