Security planning provides grist for the complaint mill

One of the great things about living in Maine, as we have been reminded this week, is that you can mow your lawn one day and plow freshly fallen snow from your dooryard the next.

If nothing else, it gives us something to complain about, which should ease the concerns of at least one elderly midcoastal gentleman I encountered recently. Out of the blue, while getting his ears lowered in the chair adjacent to the one I occupied at the Jones Boys’ Barber Shop And Politically Incorrect Debating Society at Camden one day last week, the customer asked his barber, “Have you noticed that there’s nothing to complain about nowadays?”

That, of course, opened the floodgates, as the old boy well knew it would. There was plenty to complain about, he was assured from several quarters, beginning with the sorry state of our social security system, on through welfare cheaters and illegal immigrants to politicians who never met a tax they didn’t absolutely love. Plus 20-something motorist babes (most generally blond) who ride your bumper with their 10-ton sports utility vehicles while simultaneously talking on a cell phone and primping in their review mirror. And things that come wrapped in impenetrable plastic that a jolt from a Star Wars laser ray gun couldn’t crack. And Jane Fonda, of course.

I came away happily reassured that yes, Virginia, there is still plenty to grouse about, if we will but apply ourselves to the task. All’s right with the world, after all.

Further reassurance came when I picked up my morning newspaper a couple of days later to find that Gov. Angus King’s announced desire to come up with a secret plan to end the war on terrorism had pushed the complaint button of such heavy hitters as the president of the Maine State Senate, a Republican, and the majority leader of the House of Representatives, a Democrat. Bipartisan grousing. Just what the doctor ordered to divert our preoccupation with the state of the weather in these trying times between the last snowfall and the first blackfly.

Bennett and Rep. Patrick Colwell of Gardiner were exercised about the governor’s scheduled four-day conference at Bangor’s Air National Guard base next month to develop a homeland security policy for the state. The work sessions will be closed to the public. Bennett, a Norway resident, likened the secretive conference of 70 to 80 hand-picked Maine citizens to Hillary Clinton’s disastrous closed-door attempt to shanghai national health care policy nearly a decade ago.

“It didn’t work,” Bennett said of Hillary’s well-chronicled folly, in an interview with Mal Leary of the Capitol News Service. “This idea of getting the best and the brightest into a room to decide what is best for the rest of us just does not work.” One of only two legislators invited (the other is House Speaker Mike Saxl, D-Portland), Bennett has said he will not attend. “It’s important to have a policy,” he said. “But I am not sure this is the way to do it…”

That sentiment was echoed by Colwell, who said there should be broader participation from members of the Legislature, as well as the public. Acknowledging that there are some security aspects that should not be discussed in public, Colwell said, “I think we are talking about developing broad public policy here, and that should involve the public.”

Herding the best and the brightest into a room to decide what’s best for you and me and all the other dim bulbs would seem to be cause for legitimate complaint, all right. But were most card-carrying former ink-stained wretches of the news business in a protesting mood regarding the governor’s secretive security conference I suspect they would complain about another aspect of the deal.

That would be the insulting part where news reporters get locked out of the substantive portions of the conference – ostensibly because their appearance at the work sessions would intimidate participants from discussing the issues openly – but are expected to turn cartwheels at the prospect of being allowed to cover the contemplated appearance of National Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge in order to crank out favorable publicity for the event. (Practical Politics 101: When it is to your advantage, use the news media to a farethewell. When it isn’t to your advantage, toss them a crumb in lieu of a bone and they’ll follow you anywhere.)

Who in the world could possibly be dumb enough to fall for that old dodge? For former ink-stained wretches of the news business, to pose the question is to answer it. (Investigative Journalism

101: Never ask a question for which you do not already know the answer.)

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.