You never know where discord might emerge in political Washington, but even The Scrapbook was surprised—and disheartened, really—to learn about the bruised feelings at the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee of the U.S. Postal Service.
What is the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee (hereafter CSAC), you ask? Appointed by the postmaster general, it’s a panel of interested players—graphic designers, political types, museum curators, advertisers, artists, a sportscaster (Donna de Varona), and, of course, Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard—charged with advising the Postal Service on the selection of commemorative stamps.
Most of CSAC’s deliberations, in its history, have been comparatively placid; and so far as The Scrapbook is aware, no great controversy has ever embarrassed the Postal Service on the issue of commemorative stamps. Until recently, that is.
Americans who still affix stamps to envelopes may have noticed, in recent years, that commemorative issues have acquired a certain commercial character. This may have begun as long ago as 1992, when the Postal Service issued its 29-cent Elvis Presley stamp and, during the selection process, invited interested citizens to choose between different versions. At the time, of course, The Scrapbook’s preference was for the bloated, jumpsuited, 1970s, he’s-the-king version; but Americans ultimately voted for the hipper, trimmer 1950s model Elvis. Since then, deceased pop culture icons, seasonal favorites (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), sports stars (Wilt Chamberlain), and blockbuster images (Harry Potter) have joined the ranks of the commemorated, along with the usual secretaries of state, poets and novelists, and Black History Month favorites.
No doubt, among stamp collectors and post office customers, opinion is mixed on this trend; but for Cary R. Brick, an ex-congressional staffer and former CSAC member, it is an occasion for outrage. Writing in a recent issue of Linn’s Stamp News, Brick complains that the struggling Postal Service has sold its soul to “pie-in-the-sky marketers” and commercial interests at the expense of “traditional” stamp themes. In the breathless words of the Washington Post, “the cloistered world of postage stamps is roiling again with public airing of dissent in the ranks of the secretive [CSAC].”
At this point, The Scrapbook should declare its position. We, too, like “traditional” subjects—we cherish, for example, our dwindling supply of 23-cent F. Scott Fitzgerald (1996) stamps—and would draw a line somewhere on blatant “commercial” themes. But we like the oddball, humorous, ever-so-slightly surprising ones as well, and don’t feel especially ashamed about it. Moreover, as a practical matter, if the survival of the U.S. Postal Service is at stake, then let us have more of what postal customers evidently want.
And less of Cary R. Brick’s attitude. For in his furious Linn’s essay, Brick betrays a certain bias that is all too revealing. The Postal Service and its CSAC, he declares, may be choosing new stamps “with the same profit motive as Big Macs, Slurpees, jeans or neighborhood tattoo parlors,” and those unseen, unnamed, unabashed marketers “come from the corporate world of soft drinks and Wal-Marts.” (Cary Brick, by contrast, “care[s] deeply about the stamp program.”) So, in Brick’s view, the American economy, and our varied, unconventional, and astonishingly benevolent market, is essentially a huckster’s paradise, a back-alley scheme for turning a buck, an unrefined neighborhood of Big Macs, Slurpees, tattoo parlors, and Walmarts.
Come to think of it, a commemorative Slurpee stamp might not be such a bad idea.
