New and Old #194
Friday roundup and commentary
The Strange Legacy of the Rosslyn Safeway, Ryan’s Substack, Ryan, December 15, 2024
As I read these, I’m reminded of the meeting between “Little Bear” and the ISA agent, whose clandestine meeting would have been much more at home in the claustrophobia of the underground aisles.
I thought this was going to be about grocery stores and development and urbanism or something, and instead it’s a fascinating bit of history that has very little to do with the supermarket itself. It’s a fun “not about anything important” read, which is maybe pretty important.
The “Trad” Movement and the Power of Nostalgia, Unpopular Opinions, Angie Schmitt, November 23, 2024
I’m going to do a long quote from this, but read the whole thing. It’s great, and it captures the real underlying appeal of whatever the “trad movement” is and whatever weird very-online people do with it:
That scene in Cleveland’s Little Italy it gives me a touch of jealousy and awe, at the kinds of communities our parents and grandparents grew up in. And I realize, these were not perfect places. I have watched too many Netflix documentaries about abuse and predation and mental illness (I like true crime and dark topics) to have an illusions that these were perfect or ideal communities or families.
Still, there is a sense of loss people feel that is perfectly natural. To have that kind of social support for your big day, a wedding. How could you top that?
One thing that I’m jealous of about past generations is how much more “people-y” for lack of a better word, their worlds seemed to be. Now we might work alone all day, staring at a computer screen.
By contrast, my parents are both from large catholic families. And they grew up in (sorta) ethnic neighborhoods in Toledo, often very near legions of cousins, aunts and extended family. But in just one generation that changed entirely. I grew up with one sibling, in a city more than 100 miles away from any extended family.
I’m not complaining, my upbringing was happy and my parents are great. But what a change. My dad has photos of his parents, grandparents sitting around tables, 10 or 12 of them, sharing meals and bottles of wine. Apparently they drank just loads of wine, unhealthy levels, which I know is bad but also sounds pretty fun tbh. (Dinner parties like that, we never do that. It’s just too hard with both parents working. The whole idea of “fine china” that was important then, just doesn’t translate.)
My dad has five brothers and sisters (my mom had four siblings, three of whom are still living). And when I spend time with him, they are constantly calling each other. They’re talking on the phone all the time. Those sibling bonds lasting a lifetime. What a benefit it is for my dad to have so many brothers and sisters, I sometimes think.
I have this idea that this was “vegetables” and suburbia is “junk food”—that when it became possible to buy your own detached house and get around in your own private car and have your own private yard, you did it. And as those things got bigger, you wanted the bigger ones. It might be almost impossible to resist the appeal of more space, more privacy, more freedom to breathe and roam.
We gave up something truly valuable, something that on some level we want and even ache for, but which is very difficult to affirmatively choose and impose on oneself once it is optional. The question is, is this behavioral shift simply the evidence of a real preference? Or is it more like a manifestation of something like addiction? I wrote once that the internet was like suburbia, in that it individualizes and even atomizes people. Do we want this loneliness? Obviously, in a sense. But what if we want it in the sense that the laboratory rats want the cocaine?
The Founders never intended the U.S. Postal Service to be managed like a business, The Washington Post, Richard R. John, April 27, 2020
I’ve always liked the Post Office, and disliked the idea that the Post Office should be a corporate efficiency machine. Its old-school, slightly outdated vibe is comforting: something permanent, workaday, useful, big government that does something for everyone.
From the 1850s until the 1960s, Congress routinely covered whatever deficits the Postal Service incurred — no matter how large — and with little controversy, partisanship or debate. Why? Because the Postal Service was a public service, whose rationale was civic rather than commercial. As a New York journalist put it in 1854: The Postal Service’s “benefit to mankind” far outweighed the “pecuniary consideration” of any financial shortfall. In 1958, a federal law made this even clearer: The Postal Service was “clearly not a business enterprise conducted for profit.”…
The Postal Service Act of 1792 changed everything, investing the Postal Service with an expansive civic mission. While the law had no ringing preamble, it was at least as important as the First Amendment in laying the groundwork for free institutions. The act established mechanisms for rapid expansion from the seaboard into the hinterland, ultimately creating a continent-spanning postal network. This information infrastructure facilitated the rise of a nationwide market, the invention of the mass political party and the proliferation of nationally oriented voluntary associations. With the Postal Service, Congress created the world French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville would laud as the world’s first democracy when he visited the United States in 1831.
Most critically, the act subsidized the circulation of newspapers throughout the country on a nonpreferential basis and at extremely low cost. Not only pro-government ideas but also anti-government ideas could circulate throughout the length and breadth of the republic. Before 1792, newspapers had been officially excluded from the mail; after 1792, they circulated in numbers unmatched by any other country in the world.
Yes, the printed page is no longer central to the distribution of information, and so neither perhaps is the mail network. Times change. But not completely, and if even the utterly apolitical, staid Post Office can’t just be left as it is, what can we count on?
Smells Like American Spirit, Slate, Franklin Schneider, December 15, 2024
I know a good salesman when I see one. I was, briefly, the No. 1 telemarketer in the United States. I can’t prove it; this was around 20 years ago, and I haven’t kept any of my framed “top seller” certificates or the daily sales sheets showing me already hitting 350 percent of my weekly quota by Tuesday afternoon. But the company I worked for had one of the biggest telemarketing divisions in the world, and during my hot streak there were several weeks in which I was the top salesperson in the entire company. Believe me or not, but who’d lie about being good at telemarketing? It’s like falsely claiming to have gonorrhea.
Well, you never know.
And this amusing bit:
Salespeople were by definition losers—if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be asking you for money.
This was a very novel attitude. Go back a century, when the margins were fat and the marks were plentiful, and sales was a respectable, even aspirational profession, the salesman as romantic and as quintessentially American as the cowboy. If the cowboy limned the frontiers of America, the salesman pacified its inhabitants by converting them into consumers, just as the salesman’s predecessors had converted them into Christians. The first proto-salesmen in America were the roving evangelical preachers, circuit riders who were paid a salary by the church, had monthly sermon quotas, and tracked how many souls they converted. (One definition of evangelize is “to talk about how good you think something is”—to sell, basically.) For pocket money, many of these preachers sold Bibles and books like the Farmer’s Almanac, and in doing so blazed a trail for the secular salesmen who followed, literally, in their footsteps, traveling the same routes, bearing novelty goods like sewing machines, clocks, smut books, and tin scissors.
It’s a very long, amusing read with a bit of that old-left economic populism that I have a soft spot for. (It calls to mind the story about the lady who gave $50,000 in cash to scammers earlier this year, which prompted me to write this piece.) Enjoy.
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Periscope Films has some old Post Office training films that express the original soul of the service. I especially like the intro on this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?JqwE&list=PLqqqqZrD37h5rF5QN4v3kDecWOqnVFeyG&index=3&ab_channel=PeriscopeFilm
The PO also had an active research department, playing a big part in developing optical character recognition and pre-web email. Like Bell Labs, it disappeared with privatization and globalization.
The problem with the use of "traditional" is that it does not align with social history. While there remain many controversies about the proper demarcations of "pre-industrial" and "modern" or "early modern" and "modern," these are much more sensible categories than "traditional." In my opinion, the modern impulse is one of sorting of people and functions and also an impulse toward an ideal private life. While many people think of robust family gatherings as "traditional," I prefer to think of households, whether composed of related or unrelated people, as being more "permeable" (Modell and Hareven, 1973) and less private. In other words, some things that people call "traditional" are not traditional at all.