I'm Not Wild About Harry

The Postal Service has done it.  After nearly two decades of an increasing number of frivolous stamp subjects having little to do with American history and having way too much to do with American popular culture, the Postal Service has completely trivialized its stamp program by issuing commemorative stamps dedicated to . . . Harry Potter?

Yes, love, you heard right.  The characters of the Harry Potter books, created by a British author, have been honored on U.S. postage stamps in a spectacular attempt at pandering to young people who, as Sam Cooke once sang, don't know much about history.  To add insult to injury, the stamp designs use photos of the actors who appeared in the Harry Potter movies.  So, not only does this stamp issue honor a non-American subject, it features famous recognizable living people.

To respond to the inevitable point that the Postal Service honored the Star Wars saga on its thirtieth anniversary in 2007 with stamps depicting characters played by actors who were still living, I would insist that the drawings used on those stamps did show Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa, but that their features were altered enough so that they did not resemble Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, who respectively played those characters.  Not so with the Harry Potter stamps; Daniel Radcliffe, for example, is clearly identifiable on the stamp depicting a photo of him in the title role.  Also, the Star Wars saga was the product of an American, George Lucas.  The Harry Potter stamp issue is quite different from the Star Wars issue , and also quite different from the 1990 Classic Films issues that honored four Hollywood movies from 1939, an issue that caused Ralph Nader to accuse the Postal Service of "creeping commercialism" that were causing postal rates to go up.  Back in 1990, first-class postage cost a quarter and was roughly the same as today's 46-cent first-class rate when adjusted for inflation.  Those stamps, like the Star Wars stamps, at least honored America's cinematic heritage.  Imagine what Nader might say about the Harry Potter stamps!

Actually, he'd probably be sympathetic to the Postal Service.  Because, in 1990, the Postal Service wasn't required to pre-pay its retirement health fund at 100 percent, which the agency has had to do since a law forcing it to do so was passed in 2006 and which no other federal agency has had to do ever.  The Postal Service has been losing money as a result of this stupid law, and the Republican House of Representatives won't do anything about it, so how does the Postal Service try to make money?  Issue frivolous stamps that have nothing to do with America and violate time-honored stamp traditions, and hope that people who buy them don't use them.

I've already carped about the idea of living people on U.S. stamps in this blog entry from October 2011, so let me now carp about the idea of pop-culture subjects, irrespective of whether or not living people are honored.  A lot of people blame the 1993 Elvis stamp for the decline of intelligence and relevance in the U.S. stamp program, but other 1993 stamps honored worthy individuals such as research chemist Percy Lavon Julian and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson (and come on, Elvis Presley was just as important a figure, he probably did as much for American influence abroad as Acheson did), and the rest of the 1990s saw issues for subjects as various as James Thurber, inventors, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Air Force, and the Spanish-American War.  Sure, there were frivolous subjects included - Classic Movie Monsters, for example - but the frivolity was kept within tolerable limits.  But in the twenty-first century, such frivolity has gotten worse.   Disney stamps, Marvel Comics superheroes, the Simpsons . . . but this Harry Potter issue takes the cake.  We should have known it was leading to this when the Postal Service started issuing Looney Tunes cartoon stamps and overlooked an important quadricentennial (400th) anniversary regarding the Spanish settlement in 1598 of what is now New Mexico.  Then-Senator Pete Domineci of New Mexico had to complain about the Postal Service's willingness to issue a Bugs Bunny stamp and not even consider a stamp honoring a settlement that pre-dated Jamestown in Virginia.  Domenici got his stamp; the Postal Service quickly created one for the anniversary of the settlement for its 1998 stamp program.  But now the USPS is back to its old tricks.  Where were Republican Senators Richard Burr and Lindsey Graham of North Carolina and South Carolina, respectively, when the Postal Service failed this year to mark the 350th anniversary of the Carolina Charter, which began the colony that became the two current states of North Carolina and South Carolina?  (The old Post Office Department did mark the Carolina Charter's tricentenary in 1963.)   

You know, President Franklin Roosevelt, a stamp collector himself, pushed hard for stamps honoring the oldest anniversaries in the nation's history, such as the 350th anniversary of the 1587 birth of Virginia Dare, the first child of English parents born in North America, in the lost Roanoke colony in what is now . . . North Carolina.  Because Roosevelt, in 1937, noted that European countries went back a thousand years, and, seeing as our nation did not, our post office could not ignore 350th anniversaries in its stamp program.  Also, it would have been in bad taste to honor FDR himself while he was still alive, as his place in history had not been determined yet.  The U.S. Postal Service, pandering to a mass population of people who don't care about history and care more about who wins on "American Idol" than who's running the country, has forever debased the U.S. stamp program.  I'll continue to buy U.S. stamps I like for my collection, but I will never include the Harry Potter stamps in it, and I'll never look at the U.S. stamp program the same way again.

So, Congress, relieve the Postal Service of its obligations to pre-pay its retirement health fund and let it be able to issue stamps that don't honor living people and non-American popular culture just so it can stay in business.