The Weekly Screed (#527) 27 January 2011

Bachmann’s Twilight Zone
vs. Bill Mauldin’s America
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — In the run-up to Tuesday’s State of the Union address,
Sarah Palin, and acolytes like Michelle Bachmann, kept invoking “We
the People,” an effort to implicate all of us into a weird right-wing
minority. This reminds me of the foremost left-wing slogan of the
equally weird Sixties, “Power to the People” (although my favorite
variation, posted on a utility pole in Cambridge, circa 1969, read:
“Power to the Collective Imagination!” I still don’t know what that
means).

Common among today’s Palinolithic populists is a visceral contempt for
“public” institutions. The glaring irony is that the words “people”
and “public” derive from the same Latin root, “populus.” According to
Webster’s, anything deemed “public” belongs to (we) “the people as a
whole” not just some self-anointed spokeswoman shouting on America’s
behalf without anybody’s permission. Webster’s further defines
“public” as “for the benefit of all,” not just those who’ve decided to
hole up in the Twilight Zone, where they can hug their hoard and hang
a “Do Not Disturb” tag on the doorknob.

Today’s populists are dogmatic about the perils of the public sphere.
They deplore the ideal of public service, the promotion of the public
welfare, the egalitarianism of public schools, the sanctity of public
lands, the democracy of public enterprise. Suggest that you seek the
“public good” and they’re likely to jeer you off the podium.

Anyone who works on the “public payroll” is by definition a parasite,
a goldbrick, a walking, breathing economic rathole. My friend Oren,
for instance, spent his “public” career counseling addicts and
alcoholics, returning hundreds of them to their jobs, their families
and self-respect. By the revised standards now in effect, Oren was a
grifter and a sponge, ripping off taxpayers and wasting his time on
human trash. As was Patty, his wife, who worked in a superfluous
public office called “children’s services,” where she tried to rescue
kids from abuse, neglect, hunger and ignorance — kids that any
up-to-date conservative would have left in the gutter where they
belong. Patty never accepted the Calvinist reality that some people,
even in infancy, are already damned.

Back to the dictionary (actually the Oxford American Writer’s
Thesaurus), where the noun, “public” has these synonyms: “citizens,
subjects, general public, electors, electorate, voters, taxpayers,
residents, inhabitants, citizenry, population, community, society,
country, nation, world, everyone.”

Everyone.

The lexicon says what’s “public” is for “everyone.” All of us. We’re
in it together. We do for one another, and what we can’t do
personally, we do — uh oh — publicly.
No can do, say the Palin/Bachmann populists. All “public” works are a
waste of tax receipts. It is a far far better thing, they say, to
slash the “public” payroll by, say, 15 percent. God knows how many
people that number means. A lot! With unemployment already pushing
double-digits, pink-slipping that many breadwinners — for the sake of
ideological purity — would be… wow! Spectacular. Like lemmings over
the cliff!

I worry that this proposed purge might reach David, Veronica and
Wendy, who work out of my local post office on Myrtle Avenue. Wendy,
my mailcarrier, does her job not just well, but cheerfully. Lately,
when there’s no queue, I’ve been dropping in at the Myrtle Avenue P.O.
to chat with the crew. Veronica seems stern, but inside she’s
butterscotch. David, the postmaster, is the anti-Cliff Claven. One
day, he saw me passing by and dashed out the door to catch me, and
hand me an overlooked package.

My fondness for the oft-reviled personnel of the Post Office goes back
to my grandma, Annie, who lived next door to Tillie Fredericks, whose
son, Rollie, was the postman. The mail would always get to Annie 20
minutes late, because Rollie would stop first at Tillie’s for coffee
and a little family news. Annie never complained, or thought of it. I
doubt she ever saw Rollie as a “public employee.” Even if she did, she
wouldn’t have thought the less of him. Rollie performed a vital
service — brought the mail — that nobody else could do, at least not
for the price of a three-cent stamp.

Even today, although FedEx and UPS deliver mail, they don’t deliver
all of it, and they could never do it as cheaply as the Postal
Service. And if they could, they still wouldn’t have stamps — which is
the best thing about mail. Stamps are art, history, astronomy, botany,
ornithology and the Olympics. They’re a trip around the world, with
stops from Hollywood to Upper Volta. Through all its changes, the USPS
still designs a dozen new, beautiful stamps every year. Right now, I’m
going through my Audrey Hepburns. But I just got my Rube Fosters,
honoring one of baseball’s great pitchers and co-founder of the Negro
National League. Also, I got a whole sheet of Bill Mauldin stamps,
featuring his two iconic World War II GI’s, Willie and Joe. This is
cool.

Willie and Joe were draftees, the hardboiled essence of “public service.”

One classic Mauldin panel from 1944 depicts Willie and Joe crouched
knee-deep and mud-miserable in a sodden foxhole while — above them —
the night sky is lit with bomb-bursts. Joe’s comment: “Wisht I could
stand up and git some sleep.” In another ’44 panel, an unshaven and
exhausted Joe stands gazing at a ragged little girl, who is
“liberated” but starving. Bill Mauldin’s caption: “The Prince and the
Pauper”.

Willie and Joe, a breed of men whom Stephen Ambrose called “citizen
soldiers,” are extinct. Now, we recruit cock-eyed patriots and
tenth-grade dropouts from village and ghetto, bribing them with perks
and bonuses. We send them into combat side-by-side with “private
contractors” who wear better body armor and get higher wages. This
“volunteer” band of mercenaries leaves most of us blissfully out of
touch. Our wars aren’t really “public” anymore. And we have no Bill
Mauldin to prop open our eyelids, make us look and squeeze from our
parched hearts even one sincere drop of empathy.

Willie and Joe were complainers, but they never questioned their
mission. They knew why they were killing strangers and they knew that
they — not private contractors, nor the “free market” — were the right
guys for the job. Without thinking much about it, Willie and Joe knew
that some services — like saving children or fighting Nazis — must be
public, either because there’s no profit in them… or because there’s
too much.