A case for civility in our politics

When Nancy Payne served a term in the Maine Legislature during the late 1970s, the Falmouth Republican sensed what she describes as “a terrible tone of partisanship” in which the goal seemed to be the wielding of power by the political movers and shakers, rather than an attempt to solve the state’s problems.

Payne was turned off by the divisiveness, even as she was fascinated by the legislative process and a renewed appreciation of the people, places and things that make Maine Maine. Like others before her, she vowed that one day she’d put it all into a book, one that would make the case for a sort of new Maine order featuring civility and cooperation in public life. But unlike most people harboring such a fantasy, Payne, 85, actually produced.

The result is “Phoenix / Maine,” a 346-page paperback novel published by Rathaldron Publications of Falmouth, selling for $12.50 at a bookstore near you.

“I hope you find it a ‘good read,’ a mirror and a plea,” the former Republican national committeewoman wrote on the title page of a copy I received earlier this week. I did, on all counts.

After all, any connoisseur of Maine politics is bound to have his curiosity tweaked by a book in which the take-charge speaker of the Maine House of Representatives – although tall, Irish and red-headed – appears in his inability to suffer lesser mortals gracefully to be patterned after the compact, French and once dark-haired former speaker John Martin, the reigning ayatollah of Eagle Lake. Likewise with the seeming transmogrification of former governor and congressman Joe Brennan from a politically ambitious Munjoy Hill Irishman to an equally aspiring Munjoy Hill Italian. But I’m getting ahead of the plotline…

A jetliner carrying main character Webb Lewis home from an overseas business conference crashes and burns deep in the Maine woods during a raging blizzard shortly before it is due to land at Bangor International Airport. The lone survivor is Lewis, a man who summered in Maine as a kid and developed a lasting fondness for our neck of the woods.

Blown clear of the wreckage through an escape hatch that had not been properly secured, he suffers only minor injuries. Saddled with an unhappy marriage and mindful of the neurotic wife/drudge awaiting him in Chicago, Lewis decides to take this golden opportunity to “die” with the other passengers and begin a new life.

He evades a search party on snowmobiles before passing out hungry and half-frozen in an abandoned building at Harding’s Corner, population zero. A back-to-the-lander from away who lives with his wife in a remote cabin just down the tote road finds our protagonist and takes him in…

Lewis assumes the identity of the couple’s late son and begins researching some of Maine’s nagging problems. With the help of the few people who know his true identity, he forms a foundation dedicated to collaboration and cooperation in Maine’s public affairs. Since he has risen from the ashes like the legendary bird of old to forge a second life, he naturally chooses the name “Phoenix Associates” for his outfit. Thus, the title of the book. (You saw that one coming, now didn’t you?)

The do-good foundation angle is interwoven with the story of recently widowed Patsy Hudson (Nancy Payne?) who gets herself elected to the Legislature from Portland. Turned off by the political partisanship she finds at Augusta, Hudson is determined to work toward the day when cooperation among all political parties in behalf of the people is the norm, rather than an aberration.

Well, now. Readers with any sense of the inevitable understand that this puts the lady on a welcome collision course with the Phoenix crowd. Sooner or later, these forces for doing good will surely hook up and the entire state of Maine will be the better for it. However, only a cad would spill the details, and so my lips are sealed. Suffice to say there are many twists and turns between here and there, plus the fun of trying to identify the real-life models for Payne’s characters.

Which brings me back to her fictitious Speaker of the House Dan Mulrooney, a rambunctious Democrat from a small upstate town. Payne’s Patsy Hudson finds the man “tyrannical and power hungry,” with “an almost regal sense of self-importance.” But she acknowledges his brilliance, his leadership and his courage even as she sizes him up as a guy “whose ambition had never given him the leisure to make personal friends…”

Ouch. Such new Maine order civility notwithstanding, if Dan Mulrooney isn’t John Martin in thinly veiled disguise I’ll eat my hat.

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