TWO
MAINES TO PART WAYS!
What would happen
if we took Gov. King's 2002 pronouncements seriously?
King: Two Maines Must Part
(See Lincoln for more about one northern Maine
town.)
BASED ON
BANGOR
DAILY NEWS ARTICLE HEADLINED: KING
URGES LOCAL SELF-RELIANCE
(pages 1 & 7
February 2002)
(WARNING: You may think this is a satire, but if the
governor's comments of February 7 were serious, then so is
this response.)
COMMUNITIES NORTH AND EAST OF BANGOR TOLD TO
"TAKE CHARGE"
As the current legislative session winds to a close, it’s
sad to see that nothing was done about the governor’s
excellent recommendation regarding the two Maines. In
a surprise announcement Thursday, February 7, Angus King,
governor of southern Maine, told an audience at Husson
College that communities north and east of Bangor should
take control of their economic destiny. It’s up to
the leadership in the area to take charge and not the state
government, the visiting governor said, adding: “Don’t tell
me that geography determines your fate.”
Several residents of Washington, Aroostook, Piscataquis,
and Penobscot Counties, polled immediately after King’s
comments, expressed enthusiasm for the unexpected
remarks. Solon Baltier, a potato farmer interviewed
at the Irving Mainway in Ashland, described the remarks as
“...breathtaking! This can mean only one thing: that
all the legislation created over the years to prevent
economic development north of Augusta is going to be
reversed!”
Rick Last-name-withheld, an as-yet undeclared legislative
candidate from Millinocket, sees a more dramatic turn of
events in the King statement: “This pretty much confirms
what many analysts have been predicting. Southern
Maine is planning to secede from the ball and chain that is
the real Maine. Those of us who have been awaiting
this announcement are very grateful to the governor for
this forward-thinking move. One might be reminded of
President Gorbachev when Moscow sensibly relinquished
control of much of Asia to the people who lived there.”
Vernetta Caines, an 82-year-old registered Maine Guide and
owner of Katagash Kamps just north of Chesuncook Village,
hasn’t been south of Newport since 1948. “But I do
read the newspapers that visitors leave behind,” she
says. “It’s funny that Angus King speaks as if the
north and east has isolated itself from the south.
It’s really the south that has spun itself off from the
true Maine. Maine has always been a rough wilderness
with scattered pockets of rugged, self-reliant
individuals. Within maybe the last 50 years, there
has been so much spillover from Massachusetts that southern
Maine has become nothing but a colony of Boston.
Kennebec County down to York County and the rest in between
have isolated themselves from the rest of us.”
WHAT’S IN A MAME
If the south decides to seek statehood for itself, there
will be a few complications. If Millinocket native
Rick’s sources are reliable, the populous southern tip of
Maine will probably pull away as a separate state,
something perhaps the size of Delaware. Less likely,
but worth watching, would be a symbolic re-union with
Massachusetts, which presumed to claim the entire territory
east of New Hampshire as part of itself prior to Maine
statehood in 1820.
To begin with, as a separate state, it will have to choose
a name. This publication would like to propose that
the following two be considered. First,
Nomasome. If each syllable were pronounced, No - ma -
so - me, it would have a nice aboriginal sound to it and
may even have a cognate somewhere in the Abnaki family of
languages. Actually, though, it’s short for NOrthern
MAssachusetts - SOuthern MainE.
The problem, of course, is that few outside of Nomasome
would pronounce it correctly. Perhaps a better
choice, then, would be Mame. It retains, as an
element, the abbreviation for Maine, “me,” and precedes it
with “Ma,” the abbreviation for the area’s cultural
namesake, Massachusetts. The pronunciation is
simple. And it simplifies the new state’s task of
changing highway signs and such: It would be fairly easy
for a [wo]man with a can of paint to change IN to M in
MAINE.
Another challenge will be to define the boundary of the new
state of Mame. The sentiment expressed by President
Bush after September 11 could be paraphrased: “Either
you’re with us, or you’re with the flatlanders.” Each
town along an arc running approximately from Camden to
Gilead and enclosing Waterville, Skowhegan, and Farmington,
would have to choose. If you’re with the eastern and
northern counties taking control of their own economic
destiny, which obviously includes regulating their own land
use and fisheries, taxes, and commerce, then you’ll declare
yourselves part of Maine. If you’re with the southern
counties, mimicking the values of present-day
Massachusetts, you’ll join Mame in seceding from Maine.
Mame will certainly be able to retain Augusta as its
capital. That’s already as far as anyone from
Cumberland County southward is able to drive to attend the
regular exercises in state government, so no one there will
be further inconvenienced. And Mame can continue to
keep the constitution and body of laws that have evolved in
the old Maine. The new, slightly smaller,
in-charge-of-its-own-destiny Maine may use the original
Maine constitution as a framework but will have the
perfectly pleasant task of starting anew to craft
legislation toward the purpose that the visiting governor
proposed.
NEW CAPITAL OF
MAINE
There will surely be a lot of debate, with towns such as
Burlington or T6R12 or Hurricane good-naturedly competing
to be the next capital of Maine, but the odds favor a short
list of major towns. Sure contenders are Machias,
Millinocket, Houlton, Presque Isle, and Fort Kent. It
would be premature, though, to dismiss such prominent
communities as Calais, Lincoln, Caribou, and
Madawaska. Aroostook County, in fact, expects to
claim the capital “hands down,” according to retired
legislator and “King” of Eagle Lake, John Martin. “I tried
for years to make the legislature realize that Aroostook
County is bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island put
together,” he said, “and the result is that maps are now
printed compressing the northern half of the state to make
it look like Fort Kent is no further from Bangor than
Augusta is.” [For more on this, see Maps.]
Bangor city counselor Homus N. Veazie has declared that
“Bangor respectfully declines any suggestion that the
Penobscot County seat also serve as the state
capital. The representatives of The County
[Aroostook] have spent too much time on the road. Let
the rest of us come to them for a change.”
One more idea gaining support is to have twin
capitals. With today’s technology and further
developments sure to come, a “virtual” capital could exist
anywhere. Legislative sessions could even be held by
video-conference, at least during wintertime when driving
is most hazardous in the real Maine.
THE ADVANTAGES
“Southern Maine has spent years binding everything that
isn’t southern Maine in a snarl of regulations. We in
the rest of the state have not done that to southern
Maine,” said Mary X., a former Bangor-area representative
who left the legislature disillusioned after one term and
who now seeks obscurity. “There’s a temptation now
for a contingent from the north to return the favor in some
way: Limit foot traffic on Wells Beach to five people at a
time instead of 50,000, for instance, or require that all
cash registers in the organized towns below Waterville be
hand-cranked, not electric, or make every commuter buy a
license to commute on Tuesdays, or simply contrive to make
random residents from Kittery to Waterville give up their
livelihoods. But, of course, it won’t be our
prerogative to do that, because southern Maine will soon be
another state in charge of its own destiny and not anyone
else’s.”
Mary went on to point out that it will be the earliest
responsibility of the re-formed Maine legislature to
dismantle all of the ill-thought legislation of the past
that gave us LURC and the school funding formula, among
other follies. “It is the heart-felt mission of every
true Mainer to enhance the state’s culture and protect its
natural environment,” she went on. “The nth-degree
regulation that has been imposed from the south has been an
insult to Maine’s people and a shackle on its
economy. At last the state can be taken back from its
‘absentee political landlords’ and returned to its
inhabitants.”
Mame will no longer be saddled with legislative leaders
from the north like Charlie Pray, Mike Michaud, and
John Martin, either, whose intermittent control over
segments of state government has at least somewhat impeded
the south’s predilection for hobbling the economy of the
north and east. And Mame will no longer be haunted by
the perception that it has been shifting revenue to the
north which was collected in the south.
An aide to Governor King, speaking on condition of
anonymity, commented that the north “...can sink or swim on
its own, economically. The southern counties are
tired of propping it up.” [S]he cautioned, however,
against the assumption that control of the real Maine will
be returned to its citizens any time soon. “The
Governor’s remarks were sincere, and yes, it’s safe to
characterize them as indicating a policy that will lead to
a parting of ways,” [s]he said. “It has become clear
that the more ‘primitive’ mindset of northern Mainers, with
their emphasis on ‘traditional’ - I would say ‘quaint’ -
Maine pursuits like building private camps and hunting and
‘getting away from it all,’ is at odds with the more
practical, urban perspective of the southern counties.”
What has taken place is a split between the Maine that
depends on the cultivation of the same natural resources
that have always served as an economic base - the Maine
that is now widely accused of clinging to a dead past - and
the element of the population that has stylized and
sanitized a vaguely-remembered Maine that they think no
longer exists because they haven’t lived where it is still
a reality. Lumberjacks and lobstermen are celebrated
in art and fiction, but God forbid that a tree fall or a
lobster boil any longer in real life, or, more to the
point, in real Maine.
WHAT’S NEXT
Expect a quiet beginning. Don’t look for a
referendum, which is to say, a citizen initiative.
That may come, but later. Remember, too, that a
referendum which doesn’t pass the first time, so long as it
is resurrected regularly, eventually will become a
self-fulfilling prophecy, as the turnpike-widening
experience has shown. Nor will Governor King, (who,
by the way, could return for two more terms as governor of
Mame), propose legislation right away. What we’re
more likely to see is a blue ribbon commission comprised of
representatives from, perhaps, all the 16 counties
involved.
Don’t expect resistance from the part of the current state
that will remain as Maine. But it will be a hard sell
in some quarters of Mame, where almost totalitarian control
of land they don’t occupy is a presumed right.
“Owners of large tracts are vilified if they make a
contribution to the economy by providing Maine-made
products with Maine labor. But a rich person like
Roxanne Quincy - oh, it’s Quimby? - can buy up large tracts
and take a big deduction for returning it to herself as a
public trust and the same crowd shows no indignation,”
observes Kovol V., a resident of Penobscot County and a
1977 graduate of the University of Maine’s College of
Forest Resources with a B.S. in Wildlife Management and a
major in ecology.
Kovol adds: “It’s a dichotomy between those who have
studied the science of ecology and understand the
inter-relationships of living things, and those who
practice the politics of ecology, where the
inter-relationships of living things are secondary to the
inter-relationships of political factions. I fiercely
protect the earth and its life forms from degradation by
those things that will truly harm them. But clear
thinking is opposed by those who fiercely protect their
political agenda in the name of the ‘environment’ and who
behave as if a chain saw among trees or a dry fly on a
stream is as scary as a fire in a museum, when either one
is no worse than scissors in a rose garden. Maine’s
forest products industry has cultivated the forest as a
crop and maintained its ecological integrity. If it
had abused the environment as badly as the politically
indignant allege, why is Maine still 90% forested? If
it were managed by truly greedy people, why were forest
industry wages the envy of the state until Augusta began to
regulate the employers out of business? The shrill
and self-righteous cry that harvesting ‘rapes’ the
‘environment.’ Well, I'll give you indignant: I’m
sick of tree-huggers around logging operations, munching on
smoked salmon, who nevertheless use our inexpensive Maine
paper to print their propaganda. These are the people
in [Mame] who will have the hardest time letting go of what
isn’t theirs in the first place.”
Harsh words, these, rarely heard against the cacophony of
protest against any pursuit that generates a profit in the
north, but indicative of the gulf between the two poles of
the current population over the future of the north and
east. It’s not the rich who provide jobs in the north
and east who are vilified in the area. It’s the rich
who “protect” the land and sea from those regions’ own
inhabitants who are deeply resented there.
As Angus King winds down his second and last term as a
governor, some will say he has taken a bold and wise
step. Others will say he has only tried to create a
new state of which he can return as governor.
PRAISE WITH CAUTION
Dick Noyes, long-time resident of T1R9, had high praise for
one additional element of Governor King’s February 7
comments. According to the Bangor Daily
News, King said the idea that federal or state
governments should come in and rescue Washington County or
any other area of the state is not the attitude to be
taking. “We have created an expectation in this
country that every problem has a government solution and
that’s not true,” King said.
Noyes heartily agrees. “We haven’t even asked for
help,” he said. “All we’ve asked for and needed was
to be left alone. Instead we’ve been regulated out of
business and are now assumed to need handouts from
Augusta and Washington. Give us back our
self-determination and we’ll take charge of our economic
destiny all right.”
Governor King has stated his challenge. He is a
leader known for innovative thinking and one reputedly
unaffected by party politics. Now, will he do his
part and get the spillover from Massachusetts out of the
way so the real Maine’s destiny is its own, or will Augusta
leave the handcuffs on and mock the north for not grabbing
the shovel and getting down to business?
[See related rants, Home to Roost in
Augusta and Make Lawyers
Irrelevant.]
2002
©DamnYankee.com
