Everyone’s on message (continued)

NEW ZEALAND WEIGHS IN ON BIGELOW (NOT)

One of the more bizarre events so far in this year’s legislative session occurred when arch-lobbyist Severin Beliveau dragged His Excellency John Wood to a State House news conference in early March and then to a legislative hearing on LD 143, a bill to allow a proposed 180-mile-long huts-and-trail system for the Western Mountains to put a machine-groomed cross-country ski trail through the Bigelow Preserve.

Only problem was His Excellency, the New Zealand ambassador to the United States, looked like he had been tricked by Beliveau and huts-and-trail promoter Larry Warren of Carrabassett Valley. Warren’s press release announcing the ambassador’s visit to Augusta was explicit that he was coming to Maine to pronounce on the future of the Bigelow Mountain Range.

But at the press conference, Wood, a bearded, diminutive man who looked a tad uncomfortable, said he was neither for nor against the legislation, adding, "I am not here to stick my nose in domestic politics. It is rather frowned upon" for an ambassador.

He went on to extol the economic merits of ecotourism. Tourism provides 10 percent of New Zealand’s gross domestic product. But he also pointed out that his country has "extremely strict controls" on the use of its celebrated trails and that "most hiking trails in New Zealand don’t involve any fee." Use of Warren’s huts and trail would involve fees.

At the standing-room-only hearing, one of L.L. Bean’s top executives lined up behind Warren’s and Beliveau’s plan, and various unregenerate, old-time Maine hikers and wilderness skiers lined up against it, joining representatives of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, Maine Audubon, and the Sierra Club.

Conservation Commissioner Patrick McGowan, speaking neither for nor against, made the most stir when he asked the Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry Committee to hold the bill until he could work out a deal whereby the trail might only have to cut across a half-mile of the preserve. He made clear he didn’t feel the legislation was needed and it shouldn’t usurp the state’s woodlands planning process. At latest report, the committee had taken no action on the bill.

Full disclosure: I made another exception to not going to news conferences in this case because I have long been active in Friends of Bigelow, the group that got an initiative bill passed in the 1970s to save the mountain from a ski-resort development and is now opposed to intrusions into the preserve. I testified against LD 143 at the hearing, although I support the idea of a huts-and-trail system through the mountains.

IRAQ WAR? WHAT IRAQ WAR?

Once again, a protest rally and march in Augusta marked the anniversary — now the second — of the start of the Iraq War. Held on Saturday, March 19, it looked to me much like last year’s, except the day was sunnier and warmer — and there was about one-sixth the number of protesters, 150 compared to 950 in 2004.

"The support for the war continues to erode," asserted Steve Burke, one of the event’s organizers, as he listened to speeches in a State House parking lot. But, grimacing slightly, he agreed that mass outpourings of antiwar feeling just aren’t occurring these days. "A lot of it is personal," he added, speaking of antiwar emotion.

Nevertheless, 700-plus demonstrations were going on throughout the country that day, he said, and sign-wavers were expected to appear on bridges all over Maine.

Still, it was a small protest. Here were the hardest of the lefty hardcore, a (gray) beards and berets crowd. The messages were hard, too — out of anger and frustration.

"War is terrorism by the rich. Terrorism is war by the poor," proclaimed one sign. The slight suggestion that terrorism may be justified is perhaps not a message with which to reach the mainstream.

On another sign was this easygoing message: "Collins and Snowe: Complicit in War Crimes, Torture."

The biggest cheer arose when one speaker shouted the most hopeless suggestion: "We should be demanding the impeachment of George Bush!" Yes, let’s petition Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.

One mainstream group was represented. On the flatbed truck that served as a stage, a banner quivered: "Franklin County Democrats." Tom Bulger, the Franklin Dems’ vice-chair, refuted claims that his party is moving to the right after John Kerry’s defeat: "We’ve elected Howard Dean [as national chairman]. The grassroots are definitely against this war." He also said his group was trying to make the point to Franklin County’s Democratic legislators that they should push Baldacci back from his proposed massive social-service cuts.

When the speeches and lunch were finished, the protesters politely marched on the sidewalk past the governor’s mansion to the big Memorial Bridge across the Kennebec River, where they waved placards and flashed peace signs. They got a good reception from the cars speeding by.

Indeed, in the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, 50 percent of Americans said the US should not have invaded Iraq, while 46 percent thought our government had done the right thing. Steve Burke seems to be right. Support has eroded. Arguably, more Americans oppose the war than support it. So why doesn’t that fact mean anything?

When I went back to my car and glanced at the front page of the Times, I saw a very different agenda than the effort to stop an unpopular war. It was the Jesusland agenda.

That pillar of Christian virtue, Tom DeLay of Texas, was leading Congress toward an unprecedented intrusion into states’ rights — ironically, for Republicans — by making a federal case out of the tragic medical predicament of Terri Schiavo in Florida. And another page-one story described the success of evangelical Christians in censoring movies that dared to refer to biological evolution. The day’s Iraq War story was on page five.

The next day, the Times carried a page-25 story with the headline "Two Years After Iraq Invasion, Protesters Hold Small Rallies Across US." My edition of our state’s biggest paper, the Maine Sunday Telegram, carried nary a word about the Augusta or any other Maine antiwar event, although it had some mentions of out-of-state protests.

"Who would Jesus bomb?" asked a sign at the rally.

Maybe the blue states?

But maybe not. After all, even if Maine is thought of nationally as a liberal state, its politicians are fairly conservative. The right-wing Cato Institute of Washington has recognized Baldacci as one of the nation’s most fiscally conservative governors. His top aides routinely use Republican reward-the-rich, supply-side, trickle-down economic theory to justify their policies, including slashes to state services and boosts to corporate tax breaks. That ought to mollify the pitiless Jesus of Jesusland.

Maybe the conservatism of our political leaders explains why opposition to the war — as well many other progressive positions held by the majority of citizens — don’t get translated into action. But we elect them.

RAY LEVASSEUR AS A LEGAL-CONFERENCE PANELIST?

As this winter of liberal discontent closed, word came of hope perennial in the progressive breast/beast, like a daffodil sprouting out of the barrel of a gun: The National Lawyers Guild’s northeast regional meeting will be held at the Maine Law School in Portland Saturday and Sunday, April 2 and 3. This is the famous lefty lawyers’ group.

Workshops will take place on immigration detentions, disability law, Taser-type weapons, prison legal issues, labor issues, and political prisoners. The panel at the end of the day on Saturday will include recently-released-from-prison Raymond Luc Levasseur, Maine’s most famous revolutionary, he of the 1970s’ and 1980s’ United Freedom Front or Armed Clandestine Movement or Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit — also former proprietor of Red Star North, a Portland bookstore. The Saturday lunch speaker will be Michael Ferber, who with Benjamin Spock, MD, and others was convicted of organizing resistance to the draft at the height of the Vietnam War.

Maybe these old radicals can inject some needed political methamphetamine — sorry, change that to "some of that old-time religion," just to be more in the spirit of 2005 — into the local Left.

For more information, contact Lynne Williams at LWILLIAMSLAW@earthlink.net: "Activists who wish to attend are asked to make a contribution and may purchase lunch."

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@prexar.com