The bill that should be kilt and other misspellings

One of the nice things about the Maine Capitol is how well and often it is used as an educational resource. Go to Augusta any day the Legislature’s in session and the place is crawling with kids, squealing with glee as they steep themselves in history and civics.

How a Bill Becomes Law, How a Bill Becomes Hopelessly Stalled in Committee, What the Well-dressed Lobbyist is Wearing – the curricular possibilities are endless.

It was with a certain degree of schoolboy anticipation that I pulled into the Capitol parking lot early Monday. Reason one: I was going to a public hearing in the State Office Building, my first peek at the $32 million renovation to the State House/SOB complex. (Don’t blame me for the SOB thing – the ugliest public building in the Free World was thrown up, literally and figuratively, 45 years ago and nobody’s ever bothered to call it anything else.)

Reason two: The hearing was on what is, with 400 bills now printed, easily the worst bill of the session. More on that in a moment.

Crossing the parking lot, I am stopped in my tracks. There, forming a barrier to all who approach the good old SOB, are four spanking new signs. In tasteful green and white, they warn that the only form of parking allowed on the strip of curb they guard is of the “parrallel” variety.

I don’t know about you, but “parrallel” is one of those words I’m always having to look up, so it’s good to have this definitive spelling, the best spelling $32 million can buy.

Tough luck for all those dead wrong dictionaries, thesauri and geometry textbooks, but nobody ever said education was easy.

On to the hearing. (By the way, the interior of the made-over SOB, at least the three floors now open for business, looks great. The committee meeting rooms are bright and airy, the new atrium reception area will be, once the tunnel to the State House is complete, a delightful improvement over the dungeon that used to connect the buildings. The sparkling new cafeteria, in pleasant contrast to the old Bay of Pigs, seems an inviting place for colleagues to chat over coffee and pie.)

The bill in question is LD 40, An Act to Designate the Dirigo Tartan as the Official State Tartan. With the state’s lawmaking needs few, clear and pressing, and with more than 2,000 bills up for consideration this session, I first saw LD 40 as just one more example of the kind of irrelevancy that clogs the process and distracts the attention. The “official state” stamp is fine for things found freely in nature – trees, birds, flowers, dirt (Maine does have an official state soil) – but to grant that elevated status to man-made items, like fabric patterns, seems to be asking for trouble. To grant it to an item closely associated with one particular ethnic or cultural group is really asking for trouble. There are some things the state just ought to butt out of.

Looking into it further, talking to sponsors, advocates and opponents, a far more disturbing picture emerged. The Dirigo tartan, it turns out, is a knock-off of the Maine State Tartan, a copyrighted design produced and marketed by the epitome of the small business Maine claims to cherish. The business is the Maine Tartan and Tweed Co. of Plymouth; the owners, David and Jane Holmes, have spent the last 13 years building something from nothing.

The Dirigo mimics the Maine State color scheme of light blue, dark blue and dark green squares with a red stripe. The description of what the colors represent – sky, waters, forests, bloodline – is pure plagiarism. The copyright infringement is blatant and the attempt, with a half-dozen sponsoring legislators as accomplices, to make the state party to this rip-off is driven, it seems, by elements within the St. Andrews Society of Maine. St. Andrews Societies in other states are casual social organizations that get together occasionally for haggis, pipes and plaid. Maine’s, it seems, has a faction with a personal grudge against the Holmeses and deep suspicion of the concept of property ownership as it pertains to copyright law. This socialistic streak comes as a shock to many of us free marketers with Scots roots.

With this information out there for a couple of weeks, I fully expected to arrive at the State and Local Government Committee hearing to find LD 40 had been, so to speak, kilt. Not so. The show went on, for nearly an hour and a half. A capacity crowd turned the room into a riot of conflicting plaids. Some committee members seemed to understand that Maine doesn’t need an official state tartan any more than it needs an official state pizza, some seemed unsure. For those lawmakers, and in keeping with the educational theme, I offer the following pop quiz:

Math: If 23 citizens, two journalists, 11 legislators (two were absent), one legislative analyst and one committee clerk spend 82 minutes at a public hearing on a pointless and harmful bill, how many people hours could have been better spent having coffee and pie in the new cafeteria?

Social science: This Legislature has a few serious issues with which it absolutely must deal this session – a huge revenue shortfall, the use of technology in education, low college attainment and incomes, the out migration of its brightest young people, the continuing decline of struggling rural areas. Citing at least three sources from your readings in psychology, philosophy or theology, explain why Maine lawmakers would chose to amuse themselves with irrelevancie when they have work to do.

Economics: The Holmeses testified that they have tried to boost Maine’s declining textile industry and to promote the “made in Maine” concept by having their product woven only in Maine and that a temporary supply problem was caused by the sudden closure of a Maine mill with which they had a contract. Explain how granting “official” state status to a non-copyrighted tartan that could be woven in a sweatshop in Sri Lanka fits in with this economic-development strategy.

Fine Arts: Several sons of St. Andrew wore kilts to the hearing and testified that a cheaper, more readily available tartan would result in thousands of Maine men doing the same. Combine your knowledge of aesthetics and the physiology of Maine men and discuss why this would be a bad idea.

Extra credit: You’ve got a couple of extra R’s on your hands. Come up with a decent name for the State Office Building.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.