Atdtda22: [42.1i] Gas, 607

[Monte Davis]

Laura sez:

> When I read COL49, it was the pre-internet age and W.A.S.T.E. 
> seemed, well, totally cool.  I've wondered whether 
> post-internet readers find it quite as subversive and 
> enthralling.  Any younger folks care to comment?

Not younger here, I fear, but that won't stop me from parsing it a bit more
finely:

It wasn't just W.A.S.T.E. that seemed totally cool. Until the day in winter
1967 when classmate Dick Feith shoved the college library's copy of COL49 at
me and threatened my life if I didn't read it *right now*, I'd taken postal
service as a public monopoly for granted. I'd never put together bits and
pieces I knew about the Pony Express, kindly old Ben Franklin, Inca runners,
the Penny Black, etc., etc. into the "simple" historical fact that postal
service *hadn't* always been that way.

So what was beyond cool in the book was the implications: that specific
political and economic contingencies of history had gone into making it that
way (Thurn und Taxis)...

That therefore power relationships, as convoluted as those in the Trystero
saga if perhaps not quite so colorful, must been involved (Comstock's postal
censorship, rates for "classes" <ahem> of mail, the largest patronage system
in most modern nations)...

That the superficially persuasive economists' description of mail service as
a "natural monopoly" might be a tad ingenuous...

That it all *could have gone other ways.*

All I remember of our excited conversation that night is how we jumped among
analogies: how urban fire-fighting had started out as competing private
services, too... and education, come to think of it... A-and what about
*armies*, y'know!? Mercenaries and _condottieri_ and all that...

So: does COL49 come in at a different angle for those who have grown up with
not only the Internet, but FedEx and DHL and the now semi-quasi-independent
USPS furiously marketing itself, with software to let you print out barcode
postage at home? I'm sure it does.

But it's still just as subversive and enthralling once those implications
start flowering. Once Oedipa's journey along the margins makes you realize
that it's about not that one semi-real, semi-fictional historical process,
but about *all* the excluded possibilties, *all* those who have reasons to
ensure that some messages get through and others don't.