Downeast Mag - part 2 of Jeff Clark pimps for MDOT re Sears Island .

Last week's entry noted the bizarre juxtaposition of "veteran journalist" Jeff Clark, with an article about Sears Island bearing his byline that is so saccharine, so one-sided, so distant from the truth, so determinedly ignorant of the impacts such a port would have on Penobscot Bay's fishery and tourism industries, that one could only assume that when Jeff  found out he was getting the boot from Downeast Magazine, he decided that in harsh economic times the best employer would be Uncle Baldacci.

Hence the hymn-like quality of Clark's  paean to the Great Governor. For in centuries past, the Lords of Power would indeed occasionally reward such inspired syncophancy with a meaningless but well paying slot in the royal administration.  

Why not me? must have occured to the unemployed scribbler. Surely a veteran with chops like me can pen an ode to the governor that will lift me out of this squalid scramble for column inches that the new Downeast demands I enter into.

But to do that, the old Clark, the one who formerly  "...did the tough stories"  as one admirer said, who formerly "captured issues' complexities in a way that readers could understand, but without condescension..."  

had to vanish.

NeoJeff went casting about for something to pangyricize about. His eye must have fallen upon a Maine Coast Heritage Trust media release praising itself for snatching away 600 acres of Sears  Island from the public and condemning the rest, including the bay's more important groundfish nursery to degradation and outright destruction.

The rest is history - at least a flawed, cracked, mirror image of history, which conveniently leaves out every thing that would counter Downeast's Maine-as-funhouse carnival spin. Shall we count the ways?

* The headline: "How Sears Island was Saved".  Even Clark at his grovliest wouldn't have stooped THAT low, so we shall assume a copyeditor spat it out in a moment of cynicism that caught the publisher's eye. Saved indeed.

* "For decades the largest undeveloped island on the U.S. eastern seaboard has been a source of controversy."   Ah Jeff.... T'was not the island that was a source of controversy, it was the various industrial schemes that tried to squat upon her wild face.  Wassumkeag - pronounced like "blossom keg" - was not controversial to the people of Searsport and the surrounding region at all.  Why should it be? It was absentee-owned land that allowed for light recreation. People married there. Had their ashes strewn there. Fished, hunted and hiked there.

Occasionally Big Money showed up and tried to industrialize it, but conservationists always rallied round the people of Searsport and the island, and the threat was thrown back.  That was, until Angus King's doomed industrial sprawl attempt on the island's life left Wasumkeag sorely wounded and parts of the bay's ecosystem in disarray.   

* "As one of the last remaining sites suitable for a deepwater port in Maine, business and government officials have long seen it as the key component of an industrial revival in the Penobscot Bay region."

The Penobscot Bay region keeps wondering just why it is that the "revival" schemes these do-gooder wannabes in Augusta keep hatching have everything to do with enriching big absentee industries, and little or nothing to do with enriching the extant thriving decentralized industries that have driven Penobscot Bay's economies for centuries.

Have in fact, everything to do with destroying several of the keystones of those economies that Downeast usually fawns over: the commercial fishing industry - though this is something Jeff Clark has but dimly heard of, for the volumes writ about the irreplaceability of the habitats that must be dredged away for this "key" port,  is freely available - on the internet, at the agencies headquarters,  indeed from the archives of quisling Maine Sierra Club - the federal and state memos and reports, the EIS, the SEIS, the maps, all of it is available.

The shining sands of Sears Island's nomenclature are as much those rich sandy shoals off her western shore, gleaming with phot0plankton phosphorescent in the summer night.

But Clark feigns ignorance of such detail; the vision he would spread across Downeast's pages must (and does) sing the praises of Wise John, so loudly that he must be hoping that the proposed darkening of Wasumkeag's shining sands is  well nigh invisible under the radiance of Baldacci's gleaming visionary pate.

Time presses. We'll return to our discussion soon, but what Jeff Clark has done is  held up the two bloody halves of the baby that Governor John has split apart  and declared them to be tasteful and even, as in his article's coup de gras - one must make sure the nursery side of the island has ceased its annoying cries, - declared that what was best for big industry was best for Maine

To Be Continued

Former Downeast Mag writer pimps Baldacci/Damon port plan

Downeast Magazine recently laid off seven writers from its staff. The ghost of one of them, Jeff Clark, lingers on, and has exuded a strange poisonous final downeast article, "How Sears Island was Saved" appeared in the May 2009 issue.

A slapback against getting the Downeast boot, Clark's article (editorial? or...consider the publication: puff piece) is a lengthy paean to MDOT (and to Governor Baldacci and his understudy-who-would-be-governor Senator Dennis Damon,) as they gaily bent state law, mocked the Maine Constitution and trampled over hundreds of small businesses over the last three years in an effort to rush installation of a supersize container port onto 940 acre Sears Island - including dredging away the nursery shoals at the headwaters of Maine's most lobster-rich bay,) Clarks missive-by-any-name stands head and shoulders above the rest of the Sears Island fantasies spun by other dogs on other laps.

A marvel of, no, what must be a purposely grotesque parody of Downeast's shameless chamber of commerce huggerism, Clark manages through dint of great labor to carefully get every fact wrong, and to reach precisely the wrong conclusion.

This may seem puzzling in the light of pronouncements by his admirers, such as a recent one calling him "a reporter with real news sense and serious writing chops" , Indeed Jeff was considered the Voice of Downeast Maine

Ah but that was the old Jeff Clark. The new Jeff Clark, cast adrift from his Downeast mooring, would much rather, it appears, find a public affairs slot in a Damon administration. Government public relations - the only media field that grows as the economy contracts.

A versatile scribbler, he would be as much at home flacking the Department of Corrections as he would the Governor's office. While DOC's Asst Commissioner for PR Denise Lord would not willingly give up her slot spinning happy faces onto reports of institutional mayhem at the state prison, it may be that Dan Cashman at the Governor's office has tired of spinning his Nibs' doings and little machinations.

There, Clark's obsequiousness to the aforementioned politicos trying to force a container port and railyard onto Sears Island would pay off. Notably the way this "reporter with real news sense and serious writing chops" tried to conceal the fact that it was Governor Baldacci himself who almost sneaked a Liquid Natural Gas port and plant onto Sears Island during his first term;
saddest and worst, that Jeff Clark couldn't trouble himself to contact or even once directly mention any of the opponents of the island splitting plan; and in a hundred other ways, played fast and loose with the facts in that inimitable hazy opium dream style that this suddenly former Downeast Magazine writer Jeff Clark perfected.

To be continued.