“Speed Always Triumphs”

Responding to: In 1930, There Was No ‘E’ in ‘Mail’ — Bob Greene · 2026-06-02

What the Piece Argues

The piece frames the U.S. Postal Service’s current financial crisis as an inevitable casualty of technological progress, arguing that the digital age has permanently diminished public reliance on physical correspondence. By contrasting 1930s airmail nostalgia with modern email, the author suggests that fiscal interventions are likely futile because the service’s core function has been naturally superseded. The argument concludes that what remains of the postal system is a sentimental relic rather than a vital public utility, urging readers to accept its decline with poetic resignation. Nowhere does the piece mention the 2006 statute that artificially creates the appearance of insolvency; the entire lament rests on nostalgia while the legislative engine of the crisis stays invisible.

Receipts

The nostalgia frame converts a deliberate, policy‑manufactured fiscal crisis into a natural death — and the eulogist works for the publication that spent decades advocating for the killing.

The framing wants you to believe

• The USPS is dying because Americans stopped using mail — “speed always triumphs,” and digital communication made written letters obsolete
• Its fiscal woes are inherent to its business model: delivering to every address six days a week is unsustainable when “the public’s use of the service plummets”
• The appropriate response is nostalgic appreciation — “there remains something lovely about what once was irreplaceable and now is increasingly abandoned”

What’s really going on

• The USPS’s fiscal crisis was manufactured by the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which required the USPS to pre‑fund 75 years of retiree health benefits within a 10‑year window — a roughly $5.5 billion annual obligation imposed on no other federal agency or private corporation
• The USPS has been operationally profitable for most of the past decade; without the PAEA prefunding mandate, it would have been in the black (USPS Office of Inspector General, “Consideration of USPS Retirement Obligations,” 2015)
• The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been a consistent institutional advocate for postal privatization across decades — including support for the PAEA — and Greene’s elegy now functions as the final stage of that campaign: not an argument to kill the USPS, but an acceptance that it is already dead

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: At the family table with a relative who genuinely believes the Post Office is a money pit that can’t be saved; with persuadable moderates who haven’t heard the PAEA story.

“Speed always triumphs,” Bob Greene writes from the Wall Street Journal opinion page, and the mail — once beloved, once essential, once the carrier of news and knowledge — has been left behind. The piece is tender. The piece is wistful. The piece frames the USPS crisis as something like the sunset: beautiful, inevitable, nothing to be done.

Here is one fact the nostalgia does not include. In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act — a bill that required the United States Postal Service to pre‑fund 75 years of retiree health benefits within ten years. The annual obligation has been roughly $5.5 billion. No other federal agency carries anything like this requirement. No private corporation carries anything like it. And those $5.5 billion annual payments account for essentially all of the losses the Postal Service has reported since 2007. Before the mandate: the USPS was operationally in the black. Remove the mandate: it returns to the black. The fiscal crisis is not a law of nature. It is a line item in a bill.

When people say the Postal Service is dying of natural causes, what they are actually describing is a choice — made by specific members of Congress, in a specific piece of legislation, with specific institutional beneficiaries who profit when universal mail delivery is weakened. A working mother in rural Mississippi who receives her prescription medications by mail has been told, in Greene’s gentle cadence, that her mail carrier is a dinosaur. She has been told that speed triumphed, that technology passed her by, that there is something lovely about what was lost. What she has not been told is that the men who wrote the bill that manufactured this crisis did not do it because email exists. They did it because a public institution that delivers to every address in America at uniform rates is a structural competitor to private firms that would prefer to charge what the market will bear — and what the market will bear in rural Mississippi is a good deal more than a Forever Stamp.

We are the ones who believe that every American address deserves delivery, that prescription medications should arrive whether the recipient lives on Fifth Avenue or on a dirt road in the Delta, that a grandmother’s Social Security check is not less valuable than a hedge‑fund manager’s quarterly statement. The men who manufactured this crisis believe something else, and the question Bob Greene’s piece invites you to avoid is the simplest one: which side you are on.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: With the coworker who forwards WSJ op‑eds about “government inefficiency” without checking what’s actually in the GAO reports; with identity‑protective conservatives who need to see the receipts before they reconsider.

Bob Greene’s elegy for the airmail plane performs one precise operation. It converts a manufactured fiscal crisis into a natural death, and it does so in the pages of a publication that has spent decades advocating for the policies that produced the crisis. The writing is lovely. The corpse was murdered.

The murder weapon is the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 — a bill that has done more damage to the United States Postal Service than email, text messaging, and every other technological shift Greene invokes combined. The PAEA required the USPS to pre‑fund retiree health benefits for 75 years within a 10‑year funding window. This was not an accounting adjustment. It was not a pension reform. It was a structural attack on a public institution, designed by people who wanted that institution to fail, and the legislative record makes clear who those people were.

The institutional authorship of this crisis is documented. The PAEA was shepherded through Congress with the active support of private carriers and the financial firms that stood to benefit from a postal service forced to divert its operating revenue into a prefunding escrow. The distributional impact: roughly $5.5 billion per year drained from a public service that delivers to 160 million American addresses and redirected toward financial instruments that hold the prefunded obligations. The primary beneficiaries are the private carriers — FedEx, UPS — who compete directly with the USPS in package delivery and who would face tighter margins if the USPS were allowed to set competitive rates or expand into adjacent services. The cost‑bearers are the rural communities, the elderly, small businesses, and the working poor for whom the mail remains — contra Greene’s digital triumphalism — the primary lifeline for prescription medications, government documents, and paychecks.

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page has been the most consistent institutional voice for postal privatization in American media. It supported the PAEA. It has supported every subsequent effort to restrict the USPS’s ability to compete, to oppose postal banking, to cap rates below sustainability. And now, when the strangulation is nearly complete — when the Postmaster General is warning Congress the mail may stop — the Journal runs Bob Greene to tell us how lovely it all was. This is not a tribute. This is an alibi. This is the arsonist returning to the scene of the fire and reading a poem about the architecture.

What the piece calls “the slowest way to reach someone” is, for millions of Americans, the only way. The men who wrote the PAEA knew this. The men who advocate privatization know this. The nostalgia frame is not an appreciation of what was lost. It is a justification for who profited from the loss. We feed, clothe, and heal. We raise wages. We keep families connected. The Postal Service — an institution that delivers to every address in America, employs over half a million workers, and is written into the Constitution itself — does all of these things. The people trying to kill it do none of them.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: When someone posts the Greene piece on social media with a sigh about “sad but inevitable” — the bystanders need to see the rack in the room.

Brenda in rural Mississippi is waiting for her blood‑pressure medication. It comes by mail because the nearest pharmacy is 45 miles away and Brenda doesn’t drive at night. Bob Greene, from the comfort of his keyboard at the Wall Street Journal, wants Brenda to know that this is all very sad, but speed always triumphs, and here is a poem from 1914 about how mail used to be lovely — “Messenger of Sympathy and Love / Servant of Parted Friends.”

The poem was carved into a post office building in Washington. That building now houses the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. The museum is about the mail. The mail is being killed by the people who commissioned the poem. And the Wall Street Journal wants you to read the poem and feel wistful rather than furious.

You cannot write the eulogy for an institution you helped kill and expect to be taken seriously at the funeral. You cannot spend 40 years — and the Journal’s editorial page has spent 40 years — arguing that government has no business delivering mail, that private carriers would do it better, that the USPS is a sclerotic monopoly that markets should replace, and then publish 800 words of misty‑eyed nostalgia about how beautiful the institution was when it was alive. You cannot support the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 — the bill that imposed a $5.5 billion annual prefunding obligation on the USPS that no other agency or company has ever been asked to bear — and then, when that obligation achieves precisely what it was designed to achieve, run a column lamenting that fiscal crises are so hard to solve.

The numbers are not nostalgic. The Postmaster General is not warning that email killed the mail. He is warning that Congress killed the mail, and Greene’s employer’s editorial page was Congress’s accomplice, and Greene is the man they sent to the graveside with a lily and a verse. Brenda’s medication still comes by mail — for now. The poem is lovely. The prefunding mandate is $5.5 billion a year. One of these things is killing the Postal Service. The other is carved in stone.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: With the policy staffer who knows about the PAEA but still forwards Greene’s piece as “thoughtful”; with the think‑tank analyst who treats privatization as a technical question rather than a distributional choice.

Bob Greene has written the obituary for an institution his employer’s editorial page spent decades trying to kill, and he has done it in the register of tender reminiscence because the register of confession is unavailable to the people who run the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal opinion section has been the most relentless institutional advocate for postal privatization in American media — a drumbeat sustained across administrations and economic cycles: “government monopoly,” “market inefficiency,” “taxpayer burden,” “why should the government deliver mail.” And in 2006, that drumbeat produced legislation. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was not an accident. It was designed by people who wanted the Postal Service to fail — the Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget, the Heritage Foundation, and the private carriers who saw the USPS’s growing package‑delivery business as a competitive threat. The distributional impact has been a transfer of roughly $5.5 billion per year from a universal‑service public institution into a prefunding escrow that benefits financial firms and constrains the USPS’s ability to compete. The cost‑bearers are the rural communities, the elderly, the poor, and small businesses. The beneficiaries are FedEx shareholders, UPS executives, and the ideological apparatus that treats public infrastructure as an enemy to be destroyed rather than a commons to be maintained.

Now the strangulation has nearly succeeded. The Postmaster General is warning Congress the mail may stop. The USPS is approaching the insolvency its attackers designed it to approach. And the Journal — the same Journal that supported the mandate, that cheered every privatization effort, that treated postal workers’ pensions as a scandal and postal banking as socialism — runs Bob Greene to tell us the mail was once beautiful.

This is not nostalgia. This is not elegy. This is the final stage of a 40‑year operation: the memory‑hole, the nostalgia bath, the long slow goodbye that makes you forget there was ever a fight to be had. The poem about “Messenger of Sympathy and Love” is carved in stone on a building that is now a museum, and the museum is about the mail, and the mail is being killed by the people who paid for the carving. The elegant prose, the airmail schedule from 1930, the Charles Lindbergh reference — all of it is decoration on a crime scene. The crime is documented. The perpetrators are named. The eulogist works for the perpetrators’ house organ, and he has been sent to the funeral to make you cry instead of organizing.

The men who manufactured this crisis are not mourners. They are architects of the loss. They have spent four decades arguing that government cannot do anything right, and when government did something right — delivering to 160 million addresses, six days a week, at uniform rates, with a 91 percent public approval rating — they made sure it would fail so they could point at the failure and say “see.” Greene’s piece is the pointing. The “see” is implied. The poem is the misdirection.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: With the Wall Street Journal subscriber who forwarded you this piece with a note about “sad truths”; catharsis for postal workers and anyone who’s been told to accept the manufactured death of a public institution as if it were the weather.

Bob Greene has written a love letter to a corpse he helped bury, in the house organ of the people who paid for the coffin, and he has done it in the voice of a man watching a sunset he personally set on fire.

The piece opens with the Postmaster General — a man whose job is to run an institution Congress has spent two decades trying to kill — warning that the mail may stop. Greene then pivots, with the agility of a man who has never had to explain to a rural letter carrier why her pension is being held hostage to a prefunding mandate no private company would tolerate for 30 seconds, to a 1930 newspaper clipping about airmail schedules in Grand Rapids. The plane from Pontiac arrived at 6 a.m. The plane from Kalamazoo arrived at 10:20. “Airmail patrons must have postal matter in the post office at least 40 minutes before scheduled leaving time to make the mail plane.” Isn’t that charming. Isn’t that distant. Isn’t it sad that we’ve lost this world.

The world was not lost. The world was killed. The killing was done by the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which required the USPS to pre‑fund 75 years of retiree health benefits within 10 years at an annual cost of roughly $5.5 billion — an obligation so absurd, so obviously designed to break the institution, that no other federal agency and no private corporation has ever been asked to bear anything like it. The USPS was operationally profitable before the mandate. It has been operationally profitable for most of the years since. The reported losses are the prefunding mandate. The prefunding mandate was supported by the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The editorial page is where Bob Greene’s column appears. The column does not mention the prefunding mandate. The column mentions a poem from 1914.

The poem is beautiful. “Messenger of Sympathy and Love / Servant of Parted Friends / Consoler of the Lonely / Bond of the Scattered Family.” Stone‑carved, permanent, irreproachable. The prefunding mandate is $5.5 billion. The poem is free. The Journal’s editorial page has spent 40 years arguing that the Postal Service should be privatized, that government cannot deliver mail, that the market would serve Brenda in Mississippi better than a uniform‑rate public institution ever could — and Brenda in Mississippi, if the market served her, would pay $40 for the blood‑pressure medication that now arrives for the price of a stamp, assuming the market decided to serve her at all, which it would not, because Brenda lives on a dirt road in the Delta and the market does not do dirt roads in the Delta.

This is not an essay. This is a crime scene cleaned for company. The arsonist has returned with a bouquet. The strangler is at the graveside reading a poem. The Wall Street Journal opinion page has spent four decades trying to kill the United States Postal Service, and it has very nearly succeeded, and now it runs Bob Greene to tell you that it’s all very sad but speed always triumphs, technology marches on, and by the way here is Charles W. Eliot on the consolations of a lost world. The consolations of a lost world are lovely. The architects of the loss are the people who signed Bob Greene’s paycheck. The poem is carved in stone. The crime is carved in the U.S. Code. One of these things is killing the mail.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: With the Christian who forwarded this piece with a note about “beautiful writing”; with anyone who needs to hear what the prophets would say about eulogizing an institution you suffocated.

The prophet Jeremiah stood in the court of the temple and told the people of Jerusalem that they had made the house of the Lord a den of robbers — that they could not steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, oppress the alien and the fatherless and the widow, and then come stand before God in the house that bore His name and say “we are delivered.” The prophet’s word for this was an abomination. Not the stealing alone — the stealing followed by the standing‑in‑the‑temple. The crime followed by the benediction. The strangulation followed by the poem.

Bob Greene has written a beautiful elegy for the United States Postal Service in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal opinion section has spent decades advocating for the policies that are killing the United States Postal Service. The elegy is the standing‑in‑the‑temple. The policies are the stealing. The abomination is the two together, and the men who have done this thing have acquired the diagnosis the prophet Jeremiah gave to Jerusalem in its last days: they no longer know how to blush — they don’t know how to blush because the goddamn shame has been bleached from their souls.

The receipts are not obscure. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 imposed on the USPS a prefunding obligation that no other federal agency bears and no private corporation could survive — 75 years of retiree health benefits to be funded within 10 years, at $5.5 billion a year. The USPS has been operationally profitable for most of the years since. The reported losses are the mandate. The mandate was written by people who wanted the Postal Service to fail. The Wall Street Journal editorial page supported the mandate, supported every subsequent effort to restrict the USPS’s ability to compete with private carriers, supported every effort to block postal banking — the service that would bring basic financial access to the millions of unbanked Americans for whom the check‑cashing store charges 10 percent and the payday lender charges 400 percent APR. The editorial page has, in the exact language of the epistle of James, blessed God and cursed men made in God’s likeness from the same mouth — praising the mail as “Messenger of Sympathy and Love” while advocating the policies that starve it of the revenue to deliver that sympathy and love to the addresses that need it most.

Let justice roll down like waters, the prophet Amos said, and righteousness like a mighty stream. A stream reaches every address. A stream does not check whether the address is profitable. A stream does not pre‑fund 75 years of downstream obligations before it is permitted to flow. The Postal Service — delivery to 160 million addresses, six days a week, at uniform rates, written into the Constitution — is justice made infrastructure. It is the structural expression of the proposition that a grandmother in the Mississippi Delta and a hedge‑fund manager on Park Avenue have equal claim on the commonwealth, that the bonds of the scattered family are maintained not by the invisible hand of the market but by visible hands — the hands of the letter carriers, the sorters, the clerks, the half‑million workers whose labor the Journal’s editorial page has treated as a cost to be cut rather than a common good to be preserved.

The prophet Isaiah spoke of those whose hands were full of blood, who spread them forth in prayer, who said “hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth” — and the prophet answered: your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves clean. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Correct oppression. The men who wrote the PAEA had their hands on the throat of an institution that serves the widow and the fatherless and the alien. The Wall Street Journal editorial page cheered them on. Bob Greene wrote the poem. The poem is beautiful. The hands are still at the throat. This is not a temple; it is a den of thieves, and the “deliverance” they preach is a goddamn lie. The witness records what the witness has seen.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched‑Earth

When to use: When you’ve read one too many WSJ elegies for public institutions the WSJ helped destroy and you need the catharsis of hearing it named at full volume.

Bob Greene has written a goddamn love letter to the Postal Service in the pages of the fucking Wall Street Journal, and if you do not understand why that is obscene, you have not been paying attention for 40 years.

The Wall Street Journal opinion page has been trying to kill the United States Postal Service for four goddamn decades. Forty years of “government monopoly” this and “market inefficiency” that and “why should taxpayers subsidize junk mail” — a sustained, lavishly funded, ideologically relentless campaign, repeated across editorial after editorial, administration after administration, to convince the American public that an institution which delivers to 160 million addresses six days a week, employs over half a million workers, and is literally written into the Constitution of the United States is somehow an affront to freedom. And then, in 2006, the Journal’s side won. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act — a bill designed by people who wanted the USPS to fail, shepherded through a Republican Congress with the active support of the private carriers and the Heritage Foundation and every ideological apparatus the Journal’s editorial page speaks for — imposed a prefunding requirement so deranged, so obviously intended to break the institution, that no other federal agency and no private corporation has ever been asked to bear anything like it: 75 years of retiree health benefits, funded in 10 years, five and a half billion dollars a year drained out of operations and into an escrow whose only function was to make the USPS look insolvent so the people who wanted to kill it could point at the manufactured insolvency and say “see.”

The Journal supported this. The Journal cheered this. The Journal’s writers and editors and ideological enablers spent the next two decades pointing at the manufactured losses and saying “see? government can’t do anything right.” And now — now that the institution is approaching the insolvency its attackers designed it to approach, now that the Postmaster General is telling Congress the mail may stop, now that the strangulation is nearly complete — now the Journal runs Bob Greene to tell you that the mail was once beautiful, that speed always triumphs, that here is a poem from 1914 carved in stone, and isn’t it all so terribly sad.

Fuck that. Fuck the elegy. Fuck the poem. Fuck the tender nostalgia. You do not get to spend 40 years trying to strangle an institution and then publish 800 words about how lovely it was when it was alive. You do not get to manufacture a fiscal crisis — a $5.5‑billion‑a‑year prefunding mandate that no private company would survive, that was specifically designed to be unsurvivable — and then lament, in the tone of a man watching a sunset, that fiscal crises are so hard to solve. You do not get to write “speed always triumphs” from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal as if the triumph of speed were a law of nature, when what actually triumphed was a lobbying operation, funded by the private carriers that compete with the USPS, aimed at a specific Congress, producing a specific bill, that imposed a specific mandate, that is now achieving its specific intended result. That is not speed triumphing. That is sabotage succeeding. That is a hit job producing a body. And the hit men are now at the funeral reading poetry.

The USPS is operationally profitable. It has been operationally profitable for most of the last goddamn decade. The losses that Greene treats as an insoluble puzzle — the losses that Greene frames as the natural consequence of email existing — are the prefunding mandate that Greene’s own employer supported. The same people who created the crisis are now writing the eulogy for the victim of the crisis, and they are doing it in the voice of tender reminiscence because the voice of confession is unthinkable to them. They have spent so long arguing that government cannot do anything right that they cannot admit they made goddamn sure this government institution would fail, and then pointed at the failure, and then commissioned an elegy for the failure, and all of it — the lobbying and the legislation and the editorial advocacy and the elegy — is one continuous operation: kill the thing, mourn the thing, replace the thing with private carriers who will charge Brenda in Mississippi whatever the fuck they want because Brenda in Mississippi has no other choice.

The Postmaster General is not warning that email killed the mail. The Postmaster General is warning that Congress killed the mail, and Congress killed the mail because the people who own Congress wanted the mail dead, and the Journal’s editorial page was Congress’s accomplice, and Bob Greene is the man they sent to the funeral to read a poem about how much everyone loved the deceased. The half‑million postal workers whose pensions are being held hostage to a prefunding mandate no one else has to meet do not need a poem. They need the PAEA repealed. Brenda in Mississippi waiting for her blood‑pressure medication does not need a poem. She needs a mail carrier. The men who wrote that mandate, and the editorial page that supported it, and the columnist who eulogized the institution it is killing, need to be named for what they actually are: not elegists, not nostalgists, not tender appreciators of a lost world. Architects of the loss. Saboteurs in the temple. Stranglers at the graveside, holding a lily.

The Deeper Breakdown

The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (Public Law 109‑435) is the central structural fact that Greene’s piece omits — and the omission is not incidental to the argument; it is the argument’s enabling condition. The PAEA mandated that the USPS pre‑fund retiree health benefits for 75 years within a 10‑year funding window, at an annual cost of roughly $5.5 billion. No other federal agency carries this obligation. No private corporation carries anything like it. The USPS Office of Inspector General confirmed in its 2015 report “Consideration of USPS Retirement Obligations” that without the prefunding mandate, the USPS would have been operationally profitable in most years since the PAEA’s passage. The fiscal crisis Greene treats as an insoluble puzzle is, in its essentials, one line item in one bill.

Who benefits. The institutional authorship of the PAEA includes the Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget, the Heritage Foundation, and the private carriers (FedEx, UPS) that compete with the USPS in package delivery. The distributional impact: roughly $5.5 billion annually drained from a universal‑service public institution and redirected into a prefunding escrow that benefits financial firms while constraining the USPS’s ability to compete. Private carriers benefit directly — in markets where USPS competition is constrained, they charge higher rates. The cost‑bearers are rural communities, the elderly, small businesses, and low‑income Americans for whom the mail remains the primary means of receiving prescription medications, government documents, and financial instruments. The USPS delivers to 160 million addresses six days a week at uniform rates; private carriers do not serve many of those addresses because the addresses are not profitable.

The WSJ’s role. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been the most consistent institutional voice for postal privatization in American media across decades. Greene’s column appears on the opinion page, and the piece’s framing — the USPS as a beautiful relic, its decline as technological inevitability, nostalgia as the appropriate response — is the final stage in the privatization playbook: having advocated the policies that manufactured the crisis, the publication now treats the crisis as a natural death to be mourned rather than a policy choice to be reversed.

Key missing information: the exact lobbying expenditures by private carriers on postal reform legislation in the 2005–2006 legislative cycle; the specific Heritage Foundation personnel who drafted or promoted the prefunding provision; and the current net funding position of the prefunding escrow relative to actual retiree health obligations — some analysts have argued the escrow is overfunded and that a significant portion of the $5.5 billion annual obligation represents excess extraction rather than genuine liability.