“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’”
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
These days, the eminent Mr. Dumpty could be earning an excellent living giving seminars to bureaucrats and legislators in Augusta on how to alter dictionary definitions that might otherwise hinder their political objectives. Under his tutelage, a scary phrase like “tax hike” would be transformed into the comforting cliché “tax reform.” The unpleasant implications inherent in “suppressing free speech” are easily eliminated when the same process is referred to as “public campaign financing.” And how much less negative it sounds to call a collection of our elected leaders “The Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee On Business, Research, and Economic Development,” rather than “an assortment of blithering idiots and incompetents.”
Hmmm, maybe that big boiled egg is already on the state payroll.
Nowhere is the Dumpty Doctrine more prevalent than in the debate over Governor John Baldacci’s plan (as altered by what used to be known as “a conglomeration of weasels, snakes, and bloodsuckers,” but is now to be referred to as “The Joint Standing Committee on Appropriations and Financial Affairs”) to reduce the number of school districts and administrators. The spokesman for the Maine Department of Education, David Connerty-Marin (his friends call him “Jabberwocky”), recently sent an e-mail to supporters in the business community explaining how to shape the discussion in ways most advantageous to the administration. As is so often the case with embarrassing ideas that somebody was dumb enough to enter into a computer, a copy of that message was leaked to the news media.
“The time has come,” [the e-mail said,] “to talk of many things. Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax — of cabbages — and kings — and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”
Well, almost.
What Connerty-Marin actually wrote in explaining how advocates of the governor’s proposal should address concerns that reducing the number of school districts from 152 to 80 would shift authority from cities and towns — with their elected school boards — to the state — with its unelected autocrats — was this:
“Q: What about local control?
“A: Yes, what about local control? What do you control locally? ‘Local control’ simply means ‘status quo,’ and the status quo is not sustainable or acceptable.”
Lewis Carroll, your royalty check is in the mail.
Connerty-“Mock Turtle”-Marin was on a roll: “Don’t say ‘school consolidation’ — it’s not accurate, and it creates fear about schools being closed. This is about school administration restructuring (or reorganization or reform).”
As for the experience of other states in “restructuring” schools, “reorganizing” districts and “reforming” administration, the education department’s Cheshire Cat smiled and turned to “The Hunting of the Snark” for advice: “There was silence supreme! Not a shriek, not a scream,/Scarcely even a howl or a groan.”
Or to put it in Connerty-Marin-speak: “Don’t point to other states as examples. There are good examples from other states, but people in Maine do not want to hear about other states; they see Maine as unique and do not want to turn to other states as examples; also, they will pick apart performance in other states to show it is a bad model.”
