THE BELL CURVE:

I have on my desk a substantial pile of mailing pieces created and distributed by the people who would put a new city hall on ground set aside for a park and those who wouldn’t.

They represent an outlay of money that raises questions of both size and motivation that would seem to merit closer examination. And they also represent one colossal example of stupidity.

The money is clearly with the people who would build the City Hall in the park.

I find five expensive pieces for that position and only one for the opposition. And, ironically, that one may turn out to be a potent argument for the “Yes” supporters by offering them a fat, juicy opportunity to claim “foul” with considerable legitimacy.

That’s because the people running the “No on B” campaign chose to use a prominent place on the front page of their flier to run the logo of the Daily Pilot in juxtaposition to a quote that was directly opposite to the Pilot’s stated editorial stance.

It brought back immediate memories of the cheesy tricks of questionable legality used to oppose a commercial airport at El Toro. Those tricks were effective then because no serious outraged campaign was put up against them. But this time the muscle — and the money — is on the other side, where it can exploit such a mindless gambit.

There are a lot of valid reasons why the city hall in the park might be voted down — including the position that this is an issue that should never have been settled by the initiative process.

Offering gratuitous ammunition to the “Yes” side with hoked-up quotes only casts doubt on the validity of legitimate opposition arguments. And that is just plain stupid.

From stupidity, we regressed last week to arrogance, which is always a concomitant of power and comes to mind locally with announcement of the release from prison of Gregory Haidl, whose father, Don, is expected to be the chief prosecution witness in the corruption trial of Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona.

Young Haidl, you remember, was convicted — along with two local friends — of a sexual assault, which they arrogantly videotaped to enjoy later. While Haidl was free on bail awaiting his assault trial, he continued to show his contempt for the law with an arrest for marijuana possession and conviction in an unrelated case of having sex with a 16-year-old girl.

The only possible explanations for such behavior while he was facing the real possibility of prison and should have kept a very low profile were stupidity or an arrogant sense that he wasn’t bound by the same rules the rest of us live by and thus had nothing to fear. Since there has been no suggestion that he is stupid, it seems clearly to have been an advanced case of arrogance.

Some substantive media look into the lifestyle of Gregory’s father in the aftermath of the charges against Carona suggest an environment to support such a conclusion. As one of Carona’s hand-picked buddy appointments to a post as assistant sheriff, Don Haidl was a sizable contributor to Carona’s political campaigns. He was also a charter member of the insider group around Carona who operate by their own set of rules and seem surprised when they are challenged. That’s arrogance. It remains to be seen whether it is also criminal.

Meanwhile, Gregory Haidl will spend the rest of his life as a registered sex offender. What he has learned about the perils of arrogance in prison also remains to be seen.

Now from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Tom Wilck is one of my Republican friends with whom I can have civil discourse. So it was both good and proper that I found myself at the Orange County Volunteer Center in Santa Ana last Tuesday afternoon to witness his coronation as this year’s “Man of Character” by the Boy Scouts’ Orange County Council.

In keeping with her public relations roots, his wife, Nadine, planned for a batch of Tom’s close friends to surprise him at the event.

I was offered a ride by Barbara and Robert Shelton, but a knee operation felled Robert, so Barbara and I carried the flag. We were both so convinced of impenetrable traffic that we arrived early, really early — a cardinal sin in Southern California. And so we found ourselves with 20 minutes to kill in a tiny anteroom with a dozen Boy Scouts carrying large flags and clearly wanting to get on with this.

And both of us realized that we didn’t know how to kill time. We had lots of talk to catch up on, but it didn’t work in this crowd or vacuum of time. So we finally occupied ourselves by considering two possibilities: that we would be the only ones to show up or that we were paying a price of discomfort for violating the politically correct rule of arriving properly late.

That’s what finally came down. Everyone else in the Wilck party arrived properly late, the ceremony went off splendidly before the Volunteer Center Board of Directors, Tom had an appropriate reservoir of one-liners to offer in response, and we went home for a drink that wasn’t offered with all of those Eagle Scouts standing around.

Oh, yes. And I’ll never again arrive early for anything.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.