A time when apologies are running rampant

In Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar” a fortune teller issues his famous warning to Caesar. “Beware the ides of March, Big Guy,” the soothsayer advises, hinting at a vast right-wing conspiracy to do in the statesman general.

But Caesar, never keen on taking direction from the little people, especially those who run around making predictions on the basis of having gazed into a crystal ball, ignores the warning. Sure enough, on March 15 – the ides of March – he gets assassinated by a gang of conspirators, as advertised, which is not so good for Caesar but is presumably a shot in the arm for the struggling fortune-telling business.

The ides of March, which, broadly speaking, includes the seven days prior to the date, subsequently became associated with sinister aspects of life. Today, the sinister seems to have devolved into the merely bizarre.

Consider the attempt earlier this week by a Georgia woman to palm off a fake $1 million bill on a local Wal-Mart store in payment for $1,675 worth of merchandise. A pretty dumb stunt, for sure. But it was by no means the dumbest of the week.

If the vote were held today, that honor would likely go to Michael Heath, head of the Christian Civic League of Maine, for his ill-advised – and short-lived – proposal to collect information on the sexual orientation of legislators and Augusta bureaucrats in retribution for the Legislature’s rejection of a proposed constitutional ban on gay marriages.

Granted, the Georgia lady was clueless in trying to pass a bill in a denomination that doesn’t exist. Not to mention naive beyond words to suppose that the Wal-Mart cashier might have $998,325 in change in the till to complete such a transaction.

Still, her numbheadedness pales in comparison to that of Heath, who, acting like some sort of modernday Sen. Joe McCarthy, posted a message on his organization’s Web site asking for “tips, rumors, speculation and facts” about the sexual orientation of legislators and state political leaders. Since the gay marriage thing figures to be a continuing political issue, “It is only appropriate that all of us here in Maine understand the sexual orientation of our leaders,” he told his constituency in a message that had the faint whiff of potential blackmail about it.

Talk about a legislative lobbyist burning his bridges behind him.

Heath’s hardball ploy never got off the launching pad before the entire lashup came crashing down around his persona non-grata neck and he was forced to apologize. In swiftly denouncing Heath’s grand plan to compile the queen mother of all lists, the Legislature displayed a solidarity of outrage rarely seen in Augusta. Gov. John Baldacci characterized it as “an offense of the highest order deserving all the condemnation I can muster…”

The governor didn’t specifically cite Joe McCarthy’s infamous career-wrecking, Communist witch hunt debacle of a half-century ago, but he may have had McCarthy in mind when he told reporters “history has shown what damage can come from developing lists of people based on who they are. The intent of any such list can only be to destroy careers – the most insidious form of discrimination.”

Apologizing through the news media and on his Web site, Heath said that in the heat of battle he had written and spoken things better left unwritten and unspoken, and he felt just terrible about it.

It hadn’t helped a whole lot, he told a reporter, that Baldacci aide Lee Umphrey had characterized Heath and several hundred supporters as “a collection of cuckoo clocks” when they had participated in a State House demonstration protesting the demise of the proposed ban on gay marriages. Heath objected to Umphrey’s colorful turn of phrase. And the cuckoo clock industry reportedly wasn’t all that happy, either. Umphrey subsequently acknowledged he might have made a better choice of words to describe the protesters, but Baldacci refused to apologize for his aide’s rhetoric.

Counting Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s implication that it would be a cold day in Hell before he apologized to the Bush administration for suggesting the Bushies are a bunch of crooks, apologies and non-apologies were running neck and neck and pretty much getting lost in the shuffle. Except for one well-chronicled Vancouver mea culpa that took the prize for its incredibility quotient.

After a National Hockey League player was suspended for the remainder of the season for clearly hunting down and sucker-punching a rival from behind during a hockey game, breaking the man’s neck and ruining his career, he apologized at a press conference. “I had no intention of hurting you,” he assured his hospitalized victim.

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