A bridge by any other name sounds better than an echo

Even by Portland standards, this bridge-naming brouhaha is stultifying.

In case you do not follow news from the City of the Bland, your state tax dollars are going to build a $160 million bridge over the Fore River, connecting Portland and South Portland.

Left to their own devices, Department of Transportation officials came up with this snappy moniker for the project: “The Portland-South Portland Bridge.” (It was a narrow intradepartmental winner over “The Portland-South Portland Elevated Trans-Waterway Road-Connecting Infrastructure.”)

Some Portland pols, however, complain that the DOT name is a dud. They want something more original. They want to call it “The Joshua L. Chamberlain Bridge.”

Heard that somewhere before?

That’s right, long before repeated showings of “Gettysburg” had transformed our southern neighbors into the Chamberlain Cheerleaders, the state had already given a span over the Penobscot River that very name.

Names, as I understand them, are supposed to identify and distinguish, not echo. Names are supposed to prevent the possibility that two people might agree to meet by the Chamberlain Bridge and end up three hours apart.

To make matters worse, Chamberlain was born in Brewer and lived his adult life in Brunswick. Granted, Portland runs pretty thin on notables, but does the City of Trendy Shoppes need to steal a used hero?

Hands off, Portland. And while you’re at it, “Veterans Remembrance Bridge” is taken, too.

Try something that better reflects the character of your cute minimetropolis. So you don’t have many heroes. So you are not overloaded with statesmen and artists and humanitarians.

Play to your strength: Portland and its sprawl have generated nearly half the 1994 gubernatorial gaggle.

Tom “Beige” Allen and Joe “Retread” Brennan come from Portland proper. Dick “Sustainable, whatever that means” Barringer teaches at the University of Other Maine, while Smiling Bob Woodbury made his name there. Judy “Better Late than Poor” Foss hails from Yarmouth, Portland’s boudoir; Donnell “Who?” Carroll lives just up the pike in the colorful town of Gray.

At least five of them will not win the race, but that’s all the more reason to cement and steel-reinforce their place in history.

Call it the “Candidates Remembrance Bridge.”

Meanwhile, in the Queen City, the city manager was paging through the ordinances when he came upon some archaic instructions to the fire department. In the name of housekeeping, he has asked the council to eliminate, among others, a section that would allow firefighters:

“To compel and require the assistance of all persons present at any fire in extinguishing the fire and removing furniture, goods and merchandise from any building on fire or in danger thereof … or suppressing tumults and disorders.”

Granted, you don’t see the Fire Department handing bystanders a hose and pushing them up a ladder anymore. Probably there is some sissy legal problem with forcing untrained, unwilling citizens into burning buildings.

But before Bangor consigns this ordinance to history’s wastebasket, councilors should think about a few of the benefits the ordinance might provide.

Crowd control: Think how few gawkers the Fire Department would have to contend with if every rubberneck who slowed down was handed an ax and a helmet.

Community spirit: It is almost embarrassing that Bangor would have to mandate this sort of shared effort. Why, in some of our larger cities, at the first sign of a fire or pro sports championship, volunteers swarm out of their homes to remove furniture, goods and merchandise from every building they can find.

Civil discourse: If the Fire Department could enlist the citizenry to suppress tumults and disorders, just think how that might benefit the smooth flow of City Council meetings.

Several dozen Camden residents recently found handwritten messages on their cars proclaiming, “Be born again or burn in Hell forever,” or the somewhat less speculative, “Hell is hot.”

Camden Police Chief Terry Burgess decided the author had crossed the line, however, when the man reportedly confronted a 13-year-old girl at her home. “Obviously, it would be frightening to have a stranger at your front door telling you you’re going to hell,” the chief explained.

True, Chief, but it’s great training for the newspaper business.