The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here

Well, Brian C. Clark I stand corrected. Clark is the public relations, communications coordinator at Washington State University in Pullman, Wash. and last week he gave this old, has-been editor his comeuppance in a letter to the editor about a column I wrote on May 4.

He said I didn’t know what I was talking about when I blamed Osama Bin Laden for delaying a manuscript I sent in a prepaid postal package. The package was returned to me because of a U.S. Postal Service requirement that an over-16-ounce manuscript, or any other kind of package weighing 16 ounces or more, needed to be handled by a postal clerk due to heightened security measures. Since it was prepaid, I had avoided long lines at the post office and dropped it in the nearest U.S. Postal Service mail box. That made sense to me, but it was from there that it boomeranged under the heightened security regulations.

Clark said I must not have much experience in mailing manuscripts.

He is right there, since the last book manuscript I mailed was in the 1970s, when all we had to worry about was the Russians nuking us. Those were gentler times, weren’t they?

Clark said I blamed the wrong terrorist for the U.S. mail regulation. He said it was Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber — a home grown terrorist. He said, if I’d had more experience in mailing manuscripts, I would have known the regulation had been in effect since 1993.

Damned if I knew that. But then I am an old has-been who had been sending boxed manuscripts in more rational times when neither rain nor hail nor sleet nor snow nor heat of day nor dark of night kept the postal person from the swift completion of his or her appointed rounds.

That heady motto has been part of the U.S. Postal System promise since William Kendall in 1876 sort of rewrote what Herodotus said in about 500 B.C. as the official inscription for the frieze of the New York Post Office.

But apparently that saying doesn’t apply when you live in Winnipeg, Canada where the mailwoman refused mail delivery to a family because their eight-year old cat, Shadow, "attacked" the carrier, a news report said.

When you get to thinking about the logic of all the heightened security measures, there is little wonder that postal employees are going postal. Just for openers, the government is asking its postal employee to handle what it labels as a "suspicious" package like the one that I had first dropped into a U.S. Postal Service mail box. It had to be handled by several postal employees, including my own mail lady who returned it to me.

If it had been a dangerous package wouldn’t something have happened before it got back to me?

The lines at the post office are already long enough, but if this is a real danger, the post office had better have us take off our shoes before entering the post office and then putting the shoes, letters and packages through bomb proof X-ray machines before the mail is sent out in the rain, snow, sleet and ice and all those other things that will not keep the postal person from the swift completion of his or her appointed rounds.

Okay, Clark, I stand corrected on which terrorist caused all this, but in truth, I don’t care if it was Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber or Timothy James McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber or Osama Bin Laden, the 9/11 mastermind, I want my freedoms back.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)