My Two Cents

The psalmist once wrote to God, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers … what is man that you are mindful of him?” That is, given the vast bigness, and by bigness, I mean hugeness, of the farthest reaches of space, what’s the big deal about this whole humanity thing?

If even humans feel hard-pressed to justify their existence when they can do cool things like talk and be sentient, how much more so must a two-cent stamp feel unable to justify itself when it can neither talk nor be sentient? They have no heroic Horton to hear them. Of course, part of the reason is that they cannot speak, but the other part of the reason is that there is no talking elephant. I must be their talking elephant.

A common objection to the two-cent stamp is that it is puny. “Look at you,” the naysayer says, “You are puny. My thumb could squash you.” Yet can it? Stamps are robustly squash-resistant, even more than talking elephants. Even before you’re finished squashing them, they mysteriously bounce back to their original shape, like Mr. Fantastic. This suggests that, far from being puny, they are in fact super-heroes, to whom we owe our very lives. “You are puny, you epitome of musclelessness. My thirty-nine cent stamp could kick your butt,” the other naysayer says. But can it? To the naked eye, as well as to the clothed one, we see that the two types of stamps are virtually identical: both are the same dimensions, both fashioned out of the same crude materials, both have pictures of nouns on them. By denigrating the two-cent stamp, we unwittingly reject the 39 cent stamp, and consequently the very possibility of human communication over distance.

Despite these stamp similarities, a potential counterargument is that the addition of the dinky number 2 on it somehow diminishes the grandeur and rampant potency that would otherwise be the two cent stamp. However, this is ultimately akin to saying that King Kong would be less primal, a less ferocious ball of growly energy, if you gave him two additional heads. In fact, without the two-cent stamp, the thirty-seven cent stamp is nothing better than a fraud. The two-cent stamp is that push over the edge that separates the men from the boys, the tea parties from the Boston tea parties. As noted in This is Spinal Tap, a stereo sound system is not much good if its volume only goes up to ten, not eleven; similarly, what good is a thirty-seven cent stamp if it only goes up to thirty-seven?

At the same time that the two cent stamp completes the thirty-seven cent stamp, it also offers us a way of “sticking it to the man.” “How is this?” asks the naysayer. “Is not adding a 2 cent stamp to a 37 cent stamp offering tacit endorsement and acquiescence to the recent postal rate increase?” Now, it is easy for someone to think this sort of thing. But if we think this way, we miss the truly revolutionary and subversive character involved in using a 2 cent stamp. A 2 cent stamp, you see, used to be the normal cost of sending a letter, back in the olden days. By using the 2 cent stamp, you remind the post office of what it used to be, back before it got expensive and forgot about its responsibilities to the little man. It’s kind of like writing in the top right hand corner of the envelope, “You piece of crap sell-out postal services, I hate you! Drop the cost to 2 cents again right this instant!” I think we can all agree that’s pretty subversive. It’s like a triple-dog dare, saying, “I defy you, monument to postal decadence, not to send this letter,” and at least nine times out of ten, you can cow the post office into submission and delivery of the letter despite your unfettered expression of rage. With that two cent stamp, you not only successfully send a message to your friend, but you send a message to the post office that they are evil. For this reason, I recommend that you never buy 39 cent stamps and horde 37 cent stamps instead. This means that, even five years from now, each letter you mail can communicate your hatred to the post office once, twice, perhaps (given recent rate increases) five times with the same letter!

In closing, I would like to give a shout-out to those places that sell two-cent stamps. I do not know who they are. I do know that they are not Osco or Meier. Here’s a big shout out to places that are not these places!