It’s come to this. And given the passions of the day, I guess it had to: Even the U.S. Postal Service is now an object of suspicion. Not since the Star Route swindle of the 1880s — a Republican Party stew of graft, bribery, patronage, bid-rigging, sharp practice, and double-dealing — has the post office been the target of so many political accusations. Then, the scandal was a financial one; now, the concern is whether mail-in ballot shenanigans will provide the loser in the presidential contest a pretext to challenge the outcome of the election.
Happily, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a solution to the problem. She recently proposed bolstering the revenues of the post office by encouraging the socialist youth of America to send one another cards and letters. She has labeled the effort a “national progressive pen pal program.”
She’ll do all the work, connecting eager correspondents with one another, giving them conversation prompts so they don’t have to think of anything to talk about, even providing pre-printed postcards so that the pen pals needn’t use a pen at all.
It isn’t clear to me how if we are worried that the post office will be overwhelmed by the volume of ballots sent through the mail, we can solve that problem by sending more mail. That concern notwithstanding, I think we can all agree that encouraging people to write honest-to-goodness letters to one another is far from the worst idea that Ocasio-Cortez has ever had.
We just need to help the congresswoman from Throggs Neck to recognize the possibilities inherent in her own scheme.
First, if we’re going to have pen pals, we should start by acquiring pens. Hard as it may be to imagine, people used to carry pens. The personal choice of nib and ink were part of what made an individual’s handwriting recognizable. Now, of course, carrying a pen is what needlemeyers do, with cheap disposable ballpoints in pocket-protected polyester shirts. We can do better. A proper pen shouldn’t be a hard sell. It’s the sort of archaic, low-tech item that appeals to millennial hipsters and the impossibly proper alike. A good pen doesn’t have to be expensive, but it should cost enough that it’s worth one’s while not to lose it. I keep a Parker Duofold on my desk; it’s just bulky enough to help stop me from scribbling.
Which brings us to the matter of handwriting. Learning to type was once thought to be a task for secretaries and novelists. But now, dexterity with keyboards is universal, and penmanship suffers from the taint of obsolescence. It’s that very rarity, though, that makes something handwritten rare and wonderful. I’m hardly the first to point out that letters make for mementos in a way emails never could. When I went away to grad school, my grandmother wrote me every week. I have every one of her letters still. Now and then, I read one at random to hear her voice. She is alive for me once again.
If you’re going to write something that someone is going to reread 30 years from now, put it on some paper that will last. Good paper, George Orwell pointed out, is subversive, a threat to the inhumanity of fascism. What is the act with which Winston Smith begins his personal war against Big Brother? He puts pen to paper. But not just any paper: A “smooth creamy paper,” Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “a little yellowed by age, [it] was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past.” At first, Smith writes in childish letters — until he gets to the meat of the matter: It “was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals — DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.”
So, by all means, let’s seek out pen pals. With a good pen and some creamy paper, we might even strike a blow for the personal connections on which civilization is built — and against the party-approved sloganeering of prefab political postcards.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
