Anthony Pignataro

Small Island: What A Novel Idea

2011-08-17T09:36:00.002-10:00

Well, I've gone and finally gotten my novel published. It's called Small Island, and it's and old-timey noirish tale of intrigue, violence and sex set on contemporary Maui.

I actually wrote the novel back in 2008-09, immediately after I resigned from MauiTime but when I was still living on island. I wrote it, edited it, showed it to some people, edited it more, queried some agents, licked my wounds, edited it more, showed it to more agents, became frustrated (my favorite criticism was that the story wasn't enough like Magnum, PI) and put it away.

Then not long after I returned to Maui and to the MauiTime editor's office (mid-June, 2011), I received a press release from Event Horizon Press, a small book publisher located in Palm Springs, California, asking for action/adventure manuscripts that could become ebooks. I remembered mine and sent it off.

Joseph Cowles, the publisher, and Barbora Cowles, the owner, both read it and apparently loved it. Within days I was signing agreements and scrambling to find a high-res image of myself and filling out detailed questionnaires. A Kindle version of the novel is now available for sale at Amazon and you can get a Nook version at Barnes and Noble. Both versions sell for $3.99.

A trade paperback version is in the works, and should be available for sale in late October or early November.

The novel was a lot of fun to write, but if you intend to read it, please keep in mind that it is kinda, well, trashy. There is sex and violence and foul language in it. Maui is a beautiful place, but I felt the old noir theme of such beauty being a facade, masking ugliness and evil, to be apt for this place. Also, though the novel is written in the first person, it is NOT in any way autobiographical.

Well, that's that. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do happen to read it, I would love to know what you thought of it.

Thanks!

Maui and Creation

2010-12-05T13:41:00.007-10:00

I drove by this West Maui mountain for months when I first moved to Lahaina in 2003, never giving it a thought. I still don't know its name. Then one day I was talking to a local small business owner who was active in local historical restoration.

"That's where Polynesians believe the universe was created," he told me.

"Indeed," I said, or something like that.

He smiled. "What does that look like to you?"

Now I smiled. "Well..."

"It looks like a vagina, doesn't it?" he asked.

I told him that yes, it did.

"Makes sense?" he asked.

I never checked out what he'd told me, but what would have been the point?

Wailea Beach

2010-12-03T16:39:00.004-10:00

Here's where I spent part of my afternoon today, which is just a few minutes from the house where I'm staying. As you can see, it wasn't too crowded, and though the wind was blowing, it was quite warm and the water was pretty sweet.

This is the beach where in 2004 California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently saved some guy who was drowning. He was staying at the Four Seasons, which isn't visible but just to the right of the ridiculously green grass.

All the big celebs stay at in Wailea. I know a photographer who's banned from the grounds because he's shot so many of them from the shrubbery. And I've heard stories, too -- of big-name stars doing unspeakable things to hotel rooms -- from former resort housekeepers...

One night years ago Ron, Rennie, a couple chicks and I were walking on Wailea Beach. It was a warm, mellow night, until I saw a crab. I'm not normally afraid of crabs (or other such creatures) but this one freaked me out, and I must have jumped five feet. Everyone thought it was hilarious, and we still laugh about it, though thinking back it's a pretty lame story. Later, we all lounged on some beach chairs on one of the resort's lawns, until some security guard somewhere saw us and turned on the sprinklers.

Sitting on that beach this afternoon, feeling the warm sun dry me off, it was hard to imagine that there's a war in Afghanistan or 10 percent unemployment or even that I have a job and life 2,500 miles away on part of the mainland that is fairly cold and rainy right now.

Back on Island

2010-12-02T16:40:00.005-10:00

So yeah, I took a break from work and the rain and the bitter, absurdly early winter cold and flew to Maui for a week. I arrived yesterday afternoon, and so far have done a few things. Somewhere between San Francisco and Maui I lost my Ray-Bans. Then I ran into an old friend at the Honolulu International Airport inter-island terminal. Once on Maui, I drove around in a Nissan Altima with the window rolled down and Hawaiian music on the radio. Wednesday afternoon another friend and I sat at WokStar in Kihei and ate pot stickers and fried rice, which was loaded (the fried rice was) with eggs, pineapple chunks and actual bacon. I'm staying with friends (it's cheaper than a hotel) who are graciously letting me crash in their guest room, though they did warn me that I always need to keep the guest room door closed because they have cats and one of them is not shy about "marking her territory" on any new luggage, computers or even clothes that happen to appear in said guest room. Anyway, then we walked over to the Tiki Lounge (about 10 feet away) and saw a great guitar player named Wolfe play a few songs.

This morning I got up early and went to Little Beach (see photo) in South Maui and jumped in the water with a beautiful girl I know (I kept my shorts on, though she got topless). Then I went to Wailuku Town in central Maui and talked Hawaii (and California) politics with a state legislator I know over lunch (I had fried chicken, which was slathered in this delicious sweet Thai chile sauce).

Seriously, my life was never this interesting when I actually lived here.

More Useless But Funny Memories

2010-10-31T12:07:00.006-10:00

So yeah, lately I've been trying to find this old Maui Time Weekly column I once wrote in which I explain my view that Ray Parker, Jr.'s song "Ghostbusters" was actually a hard-hitting anti-lynching song, but I can't find it. Such is the case with a lot of what I wrote, sadly... Anyway, during my search, I did find this column I wrote under the name Mick E. Finn, which I used occasionally because my byline was appearing too much in the paper. Anyway, the version online is in pretty poor shape, so I reformatted it and pasted it below. Enjoy!

Getting To Know The Maui Time Family

By Mick E. Finn

September 21, 2006

Whenever people find out I work for Maui Time Weekly, they all jump at the chance to ask me questions. What’s it like working there? Is working on the paper fun? How do you guys come up with stories? Can I get a date with Holoholo Girl?

Mostly, people want to know what the staffers here are like. They want to know all about the people behind the news—the hard working, dedicated minions who spend their days putting the paper together. So in the interests of answering some of those queries—and hopefully getting many of you people off my back—each week I’m going to chat with one of our hard working, dedicated minions, as long as space permits and I don’t get fired. This week I’ll start with Andrea Feliciano, who just walked into my office so she gets to go first:

MAUI TIME WEEKLY: Good afternoon, Andrea.

ANDREA FELICIANO: Good afternoon to you.

You know, we’re always happy to see such bright, intelligent people in the office. Just looking at your face I can tell that you’re thrilled at the opportunity to be here, Maui Time Weekly, where we can inspire people each week to better their communities.

Sure, okay.

What’s your background, Andrea?

Well, I was born and raised on Maui, but I moved to the mainland to go to college at UCLA.

Fascinating.

I think so.

What did you study there?

Law. I graduated Summa Cum Laude.

Outstanding! See, I always tell our many, many fans that our people are just brilliant.

Thanks.

Anytime. So what brought you back to Maui?

An airplane.

[Hysterical laughter for 35 seconds] That’s a good one, Andrea! An airplane!

Thanks, but you know it’s not that funny.

Says you! Anyway, seriously, how come you moved here?

Oh, about three years ago my husband got this really great job offer to come out here and do public relations at one of the resorts. We thought about it for about three seconds before we decided to drop everything and get out here as soon as possible.

That’s fantastic. So how long have you been here?

Here?

Yeah, here—Maui Time.

In this office? Oh, about seven minutes, I guess. Is that how long we’ve been talking?

[…]

I’m sorry, you just started working here seven minutes ago?

Work here? I don’t work here. I work next door at the law firm. I just came over to ask if anyone drives a beige 1973 Volkswagen beetle with the back window shot out.

What? I drive a beige 1973 Volkswagen Beetle with the back window shot out.

Oh, then you might want to run out to the parking lot.

How come?

Because it’s on fire.

[...]

Riiiight. Okay. Well, hey Andrea, thanks for chatting with me. It’s been really informative. And folks, stay tuned next week when I interview one of our island’s many brave firefighters. Take care, and keep reading! MTW

Hearing Voices

2010-07-12T07:11:00.003-10:00

So the other night a friend and I were milling about Sacramento's Second Saturday (It was Zombie Night!), walking down the street among throngs of people and catching completely random snippets of conversation, which we then tried to figure out and explain. "I was drunk off my ass!" one woman said as we walked by. Why she had been in such a state is a mystery, though we had fun trying to come up with reasons why.

It was then that I recalled this piece that I wrote for OC Weekly back on May 28, 1999 on this very phenomena. The story was for the paper's "Beach and Beer Guide," one of the many, many special issues we put out a year. The piece isn't part of the Weekly's online archives anymore, so I'm reprinting it here for your enjoyment...

VOICES AT THE BEACH

Don't even say anything about this fuckin' faggot shirt -- I was cold.

-Unknown man speaking to another unknown man outside my apartment, summer 1998

Sometimes when I'm alone in my apartment, I hear voices. They're always fragmentary--disjointed pieces of conversations that when heard in isolation, make almost no sense. They're clearest and greatest in number during June, July and August. And there's nothing I can do about them.

It would be easy if they were just schizophrenic hallucinations or restless ghosts--I could get help for those. But these voices come from something far more plentiful and far, far more insidious.

Tourists.

It's all because I live in an apartment. All people who live in apartments hear their neighbors showering and talking on the phone and doing all those dreary things we spend most of our lives doing. It's something people who live in apartments accept. And get used to.

But I live at the beach--Balboa Beach. And not in one of those big gated complexes either, where grass lawns and trees separate the apartment rows from the world. I live in one of the quaint bungalows on Balboa Boulevard--a big, four-lane road that's heavily traveled by cars and pedestrians. All that separates my bedroom from the endless rows of tourists, bikes, skateboards, Miatas and SUVs that line Balboa Boulevard are three inches of plaster, stucco and fiberglass insulation.

So I hear stuff. Like that midnight last July when I couldn't sleep. My neighbor (who has since moved) apparently couldn't sleep either, so he and his buddy were yakking up a storm outside my window. That is, until some girl and her dog walked by. That's when I realized my neighbor was an idiot:

Him: That's a nice-looking dog.

Her: Thanks.

Him: You're not so bad yourself.

Her: . . .

After a while, it all becomes background clutter. You hear it, but you're not listening. For most of the year, this isn't a problem. The days are cool, so the sidewalks are barren. But then the heat turns up in June. Then the bikes start racing by day and night. Imagine a quiet moment concentrating on a Dodgers game momentarily interrupted by a couple of middle-aged men on bikes, one breathlessly informing the other that "it felt worse than what happened when it was paralyzed." Or the last moments of consciousness after a long day's work broken by a teen yelling to his friend as they jump the curb by my front door, "When I turned around, she grabbed my ankle!"

Many of the conversations, or snatches of conversations, or whatever is smaller than a snatch, rise to me Dopplered into meaninglessness. The conversations of the thousands of meandering pedestrians who swarm down Balboa Boulevard in the summer arrive like a passing train. First, there's the incoherent but unmistakable rumbling of conversation. Then a word or two--"mom," "Drano," "colon," "tomato." Then an entire sentence to consider:

"I'm 33 years old, and it's time to start making some money."

"Sunday morning, I was in Arizona, and I got supersick this morning."

"Well, guess what, Liz? You have to ride with me in the trunk!"

And then the words turn to aural mush, and I'm left wondering what the hell they were talking about. And I'll never know because they weren't talking about anything I could possibly know. People talk about intimate personal stuff while walking down the street. I guess they figure no one's listening.

Well, I'm not listening. Why would I want to listen to two women standing outside my window as one asks the other, "Is that my car?" What could I gain from hearing a little boy ask his father, "Is Mom going to get another tattoo?" Should I lie awake at night speculating on the old man's answer, since he uttered it out of my earshot? People, I don't want to hear about it! I don't care!

So why do I put up with living so close to a major street at the beach during the summer? Lots of reasons, really, like the fact that many of the voices belong to beautiful women in string bikinis. And their dogs aren't bad, either. I love living at the beach.

Happy Father's Day, Dad

2010-06-20T14:44:00.007-10:00

I'm feeling unusually narcissistic right now, and since it's Father's Day, I'm going to write about my dad. He and I were close, always good to each other, though because I lived on Maui at the time I wasn't there for him when he died of cancer in October 2007, which is probably one of those things that I shouldn't really feel bad about, but part of me always will.

Anyway, that's him on the left (which makes me the goofy looking urchin on the right). I'm guessing I was about two or three in that shot, which means the photo was taken in 1974 or 1975, which would make my father 35 or 36 in this shot -- in other words, a couple years younger than I am right now.

He had that flattop haircut my whole life. That blue shirt, too, now that I think about it. Though I never thought much of it at the time, my dad had really gentle eyes. His parents and family had been good to him, and he (and my mom) passed that down to my sister and me.

My dad was an engineer, one of the last who was able to do so without a bachelor's degree. He wasn't into sports, though near the end of his life he suddenly got interested in Formula One Racing. He was like that all his life, taking up hobbies and interests with great determination, only to move on from them after a few months or even years and never look back. When my sister and I cleaned out our old house after he died we found the detritus left behind (my dad was also a pack rat) from his interests in martial arts, UFOs, creative writing, self-actualization, key-making, ancient mythology, jazz, astronomy and fishing.

For the most part, my dad worked. He was a good engineer, but he was a cog, and he knew it. My dad liked to think for himself, and he wasn't allowed to do that at work. But he was paid well, and that meant he was able to support his family quite comfortably -- nice house, cars for everyone, college tuition and retirement savings. So every Monday through Friday he left the house around six so he could leave work at the earliest time possible in the afternoon so he could come home and see my sister and me.

I don't know if my dad knew he had cancer when I moved to Maui in 2003, but he must have known something was wrong. Anyway, he kept it to himself. Above all else in life, he wanted his children to make a living doing what they wanted to do, and maybe he thought if I knew I wouldn't have gone. If he did, he was right.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. I miss you.

The photo

2010-06-17T16:46:00.008-10:00

A number of you (okay, four) have noted or made inquiries or even laughed uproariously (alright, exhibited bemused expressions) at the sight of this photograph. It was taken back in February by my friend Elaine at the Sacramento Community Theater, which was then running the Sacramento Opera's performance of La Traviata.

And yes, it is a put on. If you look carefully, you'll see that I'm smirking. I do that, but only on special occasions. Also, I own that suit. Picked out the tie myself, in fact.

I had no idea Roseville was so famous...

2009-08-16T07:53:00.007-10:00

So the other night I'm flipping through channels when I came upon this History Channel rerun. And right at the perfect time, too, when the program--which details famous incidents when toxic or explosive cargo went awry--was showing footage of pretty much the biggest thing ever to happen in Roseville: on the morning of April 28, 1973, a train carrying U.S. military bombs exploded in the Roseville switchyards. Eighteen boxcars blew apart. The blasts rained debris on houses up to two miles away and, according to the Roseville Historical Society, "destroyed" the nearby town of Antelope.

Somehow, apparently, no one died, though 48 were injured.

Wanting to know more (the program dealt with Roseville for about three minutes), I went online and found this really cool photo of the blast and this really scary AP story saying rail officials were still finding unexploded bombs from the incident as late as 1998.

Still hungry for more information (I sometimes patronize this bar, which overlooks the switchyards), I visited the Carnegie Museum, which houses the Roseville Historical Society. And I wasn't disappointed: inside I found a big, highly detailed N Gauge scale model of the switchyards at the time of the blasts, complete with a column of gray cotton smoke pouring from the pile of boxcar rubble. Near the model were the remains of the one of the exploded artillery shells.

The museum, like Roseville, is pretty small and quaint, so I walked around a bit. In addition to tons of toy trains, the museum also displays many, many models of World War II aircraft (your guess is as good as mine as to why--Roseville played no discernible role in aviation during the war, and there were no displays explaining why the museum housed so many model warplanes), a bunch of small, upright pianos, a whole display case full of old, moldy medicines that would have been sold at the Roseville Drug Store during the 1950s, shelves crammed with old video cameras and a silver model of the Starship Enterprise.

So yeah. Roseville has an explosive past. Cool.

Court is in session

2009-08-05T11:50:00.007-10:00

Spent part of an otherwise lovely afternoon today watching arraignments over at Placer County Superior Court's Department 13, located in the less than lovely Auburn Jail in Auburn, California. I was there to see if I could get an update on this kid, but as is typical in these types of criminal matters, all I ended up scrawling in my notebook was a new court date that's more than a month away.

Getting that new court date took about three minutes--a tenth of the time I'd just spent watching more than a dozen of Placer County's most recently accused listen to the charges against them and answer Judge J. Richard Couzens' questions about whether they wanted him to appoint a Public Defender to handle their cases. The men were all clad in the same orange jumpsuits; the two women wearing dark red.

A few asked polite questions, but most were quiet as the judge mentioned drug abuse, assault, petty theft and drunken and disorderly conduct charges. One man said "thank you" a lot, even after the judge said he'd be alerting Contra Costa County as to his whereabouts, since that county's justice system already had a warrant for him on another matter entirely. One woman, her shoulder-length hair now mostly gray, sat there silently with her eyes closed as Judge Couzens repeatedly asked her questions. Eventually he put her down as "non responsive" and postponed her arraignment.

It was while watching all this that a wave of depression washed over me. The few days beard growth, unkempt hair, fatigued faces and orange jumpsuits were all powerful images. Every last person getting arraigned looked guilty--guilty as all hell, even though I knew and respected the fact that they were all presumed innocent. Then I found myself imagining what it would be like to sit there with them, royally fucked, adding their names to a long list of clients already represented by the desperately overworked Public Defender's office.

Once I was done, I hurried outside into the bright afternoon sunshine. For a moment I had the urge to run around and call every friend I had, just because I could. But then I remembered that I had no story update, so I'd now have to find something else to write about, and that feeling of giddy freedom evaporated again.

My dilemma

2009-07-15T06:06:00.007-10:00

Blogging when you're a journalist can really mess with your mind. Case in point is what I should or should not do with this Sacramento Bee article, covering events at yesterday's Sacramento County Board of Supervisors hearing, which I watched online from the comforts of my home.

As the story notes, a great many residents packed the Board chambers, watching how the supes would react to Sacramento Sheriff John McGinness' draconian proposal to balance his budget by sacking 200 deputies. Many of those who spoke out against the cuts were current or former Sheriff's deputies. What's more, a lot of the testimony (including that of McGinness himself) was vivid and colorful and, at times, emotionally charged to the point of hysteria.

In other words, I got some great quotes--the vast majority of which, for whatever reason, did not appear in the Bee's story.

So what do I do with them? Give them up for free here, to my tiny but loyal blogging audience, or horde them like little nuggets of gold I found in a stream, waiting for a much larger story to come around that I can sell to a paper for actual money?

If I had a gigantic blogging audience, I don't suppose this would be much of a dilemma, but I don't. Then again, how do I build up such an audience unless I put real meat on my blog?

Apologies for such a long absence...

2009-06-18T04:20:00.005-10:00

... But blogging is an altogether different thing entirely when you get back into being a working journalist. Or semi-working. Whatever, the point is I'm on assignment again for a newspaper, and it feels really good–like having a cast cut off from your arm, freeing it for the first time in months.

It's funny how writing and reporting for money really saps the desire to blog, which, at least as far as I interpret it, is doing journalism without pay. What was it the Joker said in The Dark Knight? Something like, "If you're good at something, never do it for free."

Anyway, I'm headed off to court right now to cover a case I'm working into a story for Sacramento News & Review. That story should be done next week and, if all goes well, published the following week. I will, of course, provide the appropriate links when completed...

An American documentary

2009-05-29T03:36:00.005-10:00

Had a curious experience watching television the other day. I was sitting there on the couch with a friend, switching through the channels without any real interest when we stopped on an HBO documentary called Hard Times for an American Girl: The Great Depression, though we didn't know that was the title at the time.

The program was a thoughtful and quirky look at how the harsh economic conditions of the 1930s and 1940s affected people's lives. Basically, the program followed children around as they interviewed (sometimes in endearingly scripted ways) senior citizens (at least one was more than 100 years old) about their experiences as children during the Depression. The program was alternately funny and heart-breaking, and we were riveted.

But then we started noticing the dolls. Some of the girls doing the interviews or talking later about what they heard were holding dolls. One girl held a doll wearing exactly the same dress she had on.

"That's an American Girl doll," my friend said. "Each doll is tailored exactly to the girl. They're quite pricey."

It was only at the end of the program, when we finally saw the complete name of the documentary, that the whole thing made sense. Turns out the whole thing was just an advertisement for the American Doll company. In fact, according to this February 21, 2007 Time Warner press release, American Girl and HBO are making all sorts of stuff together.

"HBO and American Girl, one of the nation's top direct marketers, children's publishers and experiential retailers, have entered into an overall relationship to develop a variety of multi-platform ventures including theatrical films, series, specials, and documentaries," the release stated. Further on in the release, HBO Films President Colin Callender offers this gem of corporate stooge-speak: "This is an unprecedented opportunity to align the forces of both the HBO and the American Girl brands in a groundbreaking collaboration that will enable us to take advantage of the rapidly expanding, multi-platform, multi-faceted promotional opportunities spanning all areas of distribution."

Experiential retailer? Overall relationship? Multi-platform ventures? Multi-faceted promotional opportunities?

Yeah, I'd guess I'd spout euphemistic nonsense like that if I was turning 16 years of unimaginable hardship and misery into advertisements for expensive dolls.

More thoughts on Roseville

2009-05-28T04:09:00.011-10:00

Having lived here now two weeks, and having seen a lot more of the burb since this recent blog post (which was constructively criticized by a longtime resident), I can definitely say my thoughts on Roseville, California have moderated. I still think the whole place is a model of the auto-centric, gasoline-addicted urban sprawl that's plastering over so much of American territory and is going to be absolutely unsustainable once the era of cheap oil ends, but it definitely offers more public space than I first noticed.

The Roseville Library is a large, roundish building swathed in recycled railroad ties. It's located downtown and it's quiet, comfortable and packed with books. Trains are a recurrent theme in Roseville, (the train station in Old Town is, though relatively new, a clear and welcome throwback to the 19th century) and the town sports one of the largest rail switch yards in the entire state. Anyway, next door to the library is Royer Park, a wonderful mix of meadows and woods that borders a beautiful stream (though you'd never guess that by looking at this, the city's official webpage for the park).

But that's all downtown. Closer to home, in the maze of cookie-cutter four- and five-bedroom houses that all seem to include three-car garages, there are public options far in excess of the tiny parks I alluded to in my last post. While out walking the other night, I discovered a clean and well-maintained bike trail I had never even noticed from my car that, once again, follows a wooded stream (I also saw two horses and one garter snake, which tells me the place isn't as completely developed as I originally thought).

There are ecologically sound reasons for living in an urban area these days, but Roseville does offer a few environmental advantages that city living lacks. I just had to look harder for them.

Awesome!

2009-05-19T11:47:00.003-10:00

Congress is trying to make it legal once again to carry a loaded gun into national parks! Isn't that fantastic? And by gun, I of course mean pistol, revolver, automatic, hunting rifle, shotgun, whatever. You know, there just aren't enough places in this great nation of ours that allow a person to carry a loaded weapon.

And yes, as this Sacramento Bee article on the move points out, the Democrats are still in charge of Congress.

USA! USA!

The "public" side of Roseville

2009-05-18T11:41:00.010-10:00

So I've spent the last few days adjusting to life in the greater Sacramento area. Sacramento is a fine city, with a great urban core full of life and public spaces, all serviced by public transit, which includes light rail. Virtually everything in the city center is within walking distance. But for a variety of reasons, I live about 15 miles east in Roseville, which reminds me a lot of Irvine in Southern California.

Roseville is, as suburbs go, a pretty nice place to live. It's also a glaring example of the urban sprawl and automobile dominance that plagues modern American life. My particular neighborhood is full of houses that, except for the variations of beige paint used on the exterior surfaces, pretty much all look alike. They lack porches (the front part of the house has long ceased to be a place where neighbors gathered to talk and get to know each other) but offer two- or in some cases three-car garages that provide most of the house's actual street frontage.

Streets lined with these dwellings twist and turn for miles, snaking themselves into mazes that will confuse even long-time residents. But once you escape, you quickly find yourself on a boulevard as wide as a freeway that sends cars hurling past gigantic "big box" retail outlets (literally gigantic masonry boxes), light industrial centers and, eventually, a full-blown air-conditioned shopping mall (again, all painted either white or some tone of beige). The other day I drove through at least four strip malls while trying to find a Barnes & Noble.

Except for very modest parks here and there (usually just squares of grass holding playground equipment in one corner) and the very quaint "Old Town" on the other side of Interstate 80, there is no real public space in Roseville. In a disconcerting twist, "The Fountains at Roseville," one of those strip malls I wandered through earlier, is trying to set itself up as public space. The mall itself is an attempt at an old downtown, laid out in a plus sign with shops and restaurants lining each block. This would work, except the roads are completely open to auto traffic, meaning pedestrians and cars inside still have to dodge each other. That little design quirk is left out of promotional blurb for the center in a special advertising section of the May 2009 issue of Sacramento Magazine:

"Fountains brands itself as a lifestyle center–a place where the community comes together. That notion is catching on quick."

Never mind that old "lifestyle centers" (towns) were places where people lived and worked. Fountains is a place to shop and eat–nothing more and nothing less. That a place like Fountains might actually become synonymous with "community" is just one more depressing piece of evidence that "citizen" is nowadays just another word for "consumer."

The future of Maui

2009-05-12T12:58:00.010-10:00

That sufficiently dramatic for you? Good reporters stick to reporting, but I'm going to draw from my nearly six years of living on Maui and make some pretty big conclusions about the future of this island. I'd like to say this place has changed dramatically since I arrived, but it really hasn't. And that's a big problem.

The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks hit tourism–and by extension, Hawaii–pretty good. Then the tourists began returning, but of course, the state did nothing to move the Hawaiian economy away from being so dependent on airline flights. That the state seems to be in much the same immediate post-Sept. 11 woes today would seem to indicate that, despite Governor Linda Lingle's focus on growing high-tech industries here, most residents still make their living selling goods and services to visitors.

And yeah, Maui is still paradise and all, but how much longer is it going to stay that way? Land developers keep building giant, ugly condos, timeshares and "neighborhoods" jam-packed with dull, cookie-cutter houses–all linked by shoddy roads choked with cars and, here and there, still-weak public transportation. And if people like James Howard Kuntsler are correct in their predictions of the impending end of relatively cheap oil, it's all doomed.

The big gamble seems to be what's coming first: death by energy strangulation or by climate change. Global warming is happening, and it's going to raise ocean levels. That will swamp virtually all of Maui's priciest private property and will consign the word "beach" to the history books (check out this webpage to see what's going to happen to Waikiki). And God help the islands if the Trade Winds get disrupted...

So I guess the status quo lovers are right: bring in the tourists now, while we still can. And while we're at it, let's still grow (federally subsidized) sugar on a few thousand acres. I mean, we can always rip it all out and plant fruits and vegetables to feed us later, right? And the voters should by all means keep electing their pro-development, pro-tourist industry buddies to the the Maui County Council. And the Department of Liquor Control–you go right ahead bringing the hammer down on locally owned bars and restaurants, while largely steering clear of the big Wailea and Kaanapali resorts.

But I digress. I'm headed to a land where an ex-Phoenix Sun is Mayor and the Terminator is Governor. Oh yeah, this is going to be fun...

Leaving Maui, Part III: Things I didn't do

2009-05-10T15:54:00.020-10:00

Editing Maui Time Weekly was the best job I ever had. It was tough (I usually put in around six days a week getting the paper out the door) but it was also fun. I got to be snide, I got to play pundit and I got make the rich and powerful (or, at least some of them) angry. The paper was small, with a tiny staff and a tinier budget, but there was also an undeniable power trip to the job: each week, I got to decide how stories were told, what piece received cover promotion and, ultimately, what went into the paper each week.

Yesterday I blogged about some of the things I did in my five years as editor. Today I'll write about a dozen things I didn't do during that time. For anyone even remotely familiar with the paper, I'm going to warn you now that this post will be pretty rough...

1. Increase the amount of money budgeted each week to pay freelance writers. When I began the job, pay was listed as $45 for what we called an "up front" story–news, arts, music, food, all between 500-800 words–and $100 for a cover story, which required more reporting and research and typically ran 2,000 words. I succeeded in getting the cover story payment raised to $150, but I was also limited to running just one freelance cover a month. Those pay rates didn't change again.

2. Do much of anything when, during my last week as editor and after nearly four years of me journalistically pounding on the Maui County Department of Liquor Control, a certain investigator in the office contacted me, saying he wanted to spill the beans on corruption in the department. Though he refused to allow me identify him in print or even use any of what he told me in a story, his call genuinely surprised me and should have spurred me to interview him at length. But by that point I was exhausted, and passed the tip off to a freelance writer who did contact him. Though the LC investigator never really provided much in follow-up and continued to insist on anonymity with the freelance writer, basically ending any story possibility, it does not excuse my failure to pursue him earlier.

3. Properly handle the transition from the column "Holoholo Girl," which began the first week of my editorship and lasted until August 2007, when Associate Editor Samantha Campos moved to California, to "Restless Native," written by Starr Begley (now of The Maui News). Holoholo, which after stirring up considerable initial resistance (more than a few readers were pissed that I dumped Amy Alkon's syndicated "Advice Goddess" column), eventually built a strong readership for itself. And while Restless Native was also an excellent column with a solid readership of its own, it was very different. Whereas Holoholo was about the troubles of being single and cultured on Maui, Restless Native concerned the life of a young mother. Restless should have run in the front of the paper, where readers would be more apt to give it a chance on its own rather than see it as a straight replacement for Holoholo.

4. Lose my cool when then Haleakala Times editor Rob Lafferty (a usually intelligent and progressive person) called me and cursed me for 20 minutes after I told reporter Joan Conrow that papers like the Times were mostly dull and milquetoast. As Lafferty yelled at me, I sat there calmly, patiently repeating my arguments in simple, rational terms, just as I'd earlier practiced with my publisher, Tommy Russo, who happened to be sitting in my office, listening. The high point of the conversation was when I gleefully told Lafferty, "For a guy who doesn't like it when I print curse words in the paper, you certainly use the word 'fuck' a lot."

5. Get into very many arguments with Russo over Maui Time's stories. There were one or two dust-ups over stories (usually food-related) but on the whole, he granted me considerable, even lavish, freedom of action. For that, I will be eternally grateful.

6. Surf. Imagine this for a moment: guy moves to Maui, lives within sight of the ocean for virtually the entire six years he's on island, hangs out with a half-dozen surfers and never once paddles a board into the waves. Yes, it's tragic.

7. Show sufficiently good judgment concerning nasty letters addressed to Campos and Begley. Put simply, I let both writers see too many nasty, personal attacks that offered no actual story critique. In addition, I let too many letters that were at least somewhat professionally critical of both writers appear in publication.

8. Lose heart over the immense, astonishing turn-over in writers I had to deal with as editor. While I have no doubt Maui Time's terrible pay rates were at least partially responsible, the island's ambient transient nature played a big role.

9. Discern who exactly was reading the paper. Young people? Retired liberals? Bar owners? Angry locals? Who knows: through anecdotal evidence culled mostly from letters to the editor, the most popular features were Eh Brah!, Holoholo Girl and LC Watch, in that order. Since we could never afford to carry out proper, scientific market research, we could only guess at who was picking us up each week.

10. Let freelance writers whither on the vine. When I received pitches for local stories (the only stories we published) from writers, I responded as often as possible. This, I've sadly found from my failed attempt to build a post-Maui Time freelancing career in Hawaii, is not the case with most local publications, which will simply just ignore any pitches (and phone calls and e-mails) they're not interested in. That is a horrible, ridiculously unprofessional way to do journalism. I know editors are busy–I was rarely not busy–but it takes 20 seconds for an editor to e-mail a writer saying he or she is not interested.

11. Put a story about cock-fighting (including a blood & guts description of an actual bout written by a reporter who infiltrated a cock-fighting ring) on the cover. From Day One I wanted a snarling, squawking expose of cock-fighting and all its horrors in the paper, and I could never get it. This still pains me.

12. Get any kind of payment at all for Ron Pitts, who each weeks draws a bang-up illustration for Eh Brah! He puts hours and hours each week into those illustrations, for which he receives no actual monetary compensation. That's real love and dedication, people–the kind papers like Maui Time need to survive.

Leaving Maui, Part II: Things I did

2009-05-09T08:28:00.027-10:00

I arrived on Maui on Aug. 28, 2003 as something of a misfit. Rather than spend my life working so that I could move to a tropical paradise, I had actually rarely given living in Hawaii any thought. Instead, moving to Maui meant a promotion–in this case, from a general assignment, sometime investigative reporter at a paper in Orange County, California packed with talent to editor in chief of a tiny, shoestring paper in Lahaina. Basically, I jumped at the chance.

Looking back, I guess I did a good job, though it's hard for me to tell. I mean, I got just as many compliments as criticisms–and too damn many of the latte being just personal attacks, in my opinion. My philosophy was always to put as many well-written, good stories (informative as well as entertaining) in the paper as possible, covering a wide variety of subjects that weren't already receiving coverage. Of course I made plenty of mistakes. Whether I ultimately succeeded depends on what a given reader wants from a newspaper, I suppose.

Anyway, here's a dozen things I did while editor of Maui Time Weekly, in no particular order:

1. Allowed an issue to go to press with a year-old calender section. This was about the worst thing I ever did as editor, and not simply because it was so stupid (virtually the whole editorial staff played some sort of role in the screw-up, but as editor, I checked over the entire paper before publication and should have spotted the trouble. In any case, I was ultimately responsible for the paper each week). Anyway, we conservatively estimated that 70 percent of all readers picked up the paper solely to find out what was happening that week, which means my mistake hurt the vast majority of our readers.

2. Assigned and edited a piece by freelance reporter Greg Mebel on a scandal that brewed around Bob Awana, then-chief of staff to Governor Linda Lingle (you can read the story here). The story helped spark a chain of events that led to Awana's resignation, which the Honolulu Star-Bulletin very nicely acknowledged (you can read the Star-Bulletin editorial here).

3. Drank a shot of whiskey with musician Howard Ahia and then-Kahului Ale House owner Chad Metcalfe at the Hard Rock Cafe in Lahiana.

4. Infiltrated a gathering of homeowners at the Olowalu plantation house brought together by developer Kent Smith to boost his troubled Puunoa housing project at the south end of Lahaina Town.

5. "Fired" a very good freelance writer after hearing that this person used Maui Time's name to get backstage at a concert, even though this person was not actually on assignment for us.

6. Sat nervously in my office while an obviously disturbed man paced up and down Market Street, trying to call me after appearing at the paper's front desk and asked for me, saying that he wanted to tell me how he had overheard (through the use of a chip implanted in the back of his brain) the police conspiring to murder him.

7. Followed model (and eventual Penthouse Pet) Crystal Klein through a Saturday morning photo shoot that involved her being nude on some cliffs in Haiku that overlooked the ocean.

8. Dealt with a very eclectic group of freelance writers, including one very beautiful, very intelligent young woman who, after telling me that aliens had stolen part of her soul and used it to power their spacecraft, anonymously wrote a very good cover story for us on what it was like to work in erotic massage.

9. Kept an actual bottle of Jack Daniels in my desk (it was a gift from Holoholo Girl, who believed all editors had to keep a bottle of whiskey in his or her desk). I believe we finally finished it off the night George W. Bush won reelection.

10. Flirted with a topless French chick on the beach in front of our old Maui Time headquarters at 505 Front Street in Lahaina while then-art director Rudi King snapped photographs of me from his office (and sorry, I long ago lost my copies of the photos).

11. Pissed off Maui County lifeguard/big wave surfer/all-around good guy Archie Kalepa by quoting him (after identifying myself as a reporter) when he started talking about a dead body that had been pulled from the water at Honolua Bay a day or two before–a subject that he later admitted over the phone should not have been mentioned in public.

12. Helped turn Maui Time from a 32-page, 11,000-circ paper into one that averaged 40 pages and printed 18,000 copies.

Leaving Maui, Part I: Things I've seen

2009-05-08T08:14:00.012-10:00

Since I'm moving to Sacramento May 13 (booked my flight and everything) I've decided to write a give a kind of retrospective look at my nearly six years on Maui, before this blog starts commenting on more California-centric topics. Today I'll write about how much Maui has changed since I moved here Aug. 28, 2003. Tomorrow (or the next day, who can say...) I'll write about things I did while on Maui. The next blog post will be about things I didn't do, but maybe should have. And the last will be a rundown of my thoughts on the future of Maui.

So, in no particular, here are some of the choicest things I've seen while living on Maui...

1. State officials open a road (the realigned South Kihei Road/Piilani Highway intersection) even though two telephone poles were standing in the middle of lanes of traffic.

2. Erin Smith sing (Seriously folks, she's the real deal. See her while you can, because five years from now we're going to be wondering how lucky we were to see the Famous Erin Smith when she played for tourists...).

3. The sun rise over the ocean at Haiku.

4. A man cutting his hair with clippers in the Kihei Kalama Village men's room.

5. Humpback whales swim just a few dozen yards from my kayak while I floated in a world completely silent save for the sound of them breathing through their blowholes.

6. A completed, ready-to-use boardwalk at the Kealia wetlands just sit, unused and unopen for years (it remains so) while state officials endlessly delayed the construction of a tiny parking lot.

7. An effective, technocratic mayor lose his reelection bid to a councilmember who never really articulated why she wanted to be mayor, then promptly declared war on unpermitted but locally owned vacation rentals shortly after taking office.

8. The governor and a majority of state legislators approve the writing of a law that would allow a single company (Hawaii Superferry, Inc.) to bypass state environmental regulations, then bitch and moan when the state Supreme Court struck it down.

9. Massive, ugly timeshares completely cover the beautiful grasslands that sat between North Beach near Kaanapali and the West Maui sewage plant (I also smelled this item, too, on a regular basis during the years I lived in Honokowai).

10. Abandoned cars left on the sides of various highways slowly stripped away by scavengers, like some time-lapse video of the jungle consuming a dead animal on the Discovery Channel.

11. Kahului Ale House owner Scott "Scooter" Metcalfe denounce me before the Maui County Liquor Control Adjudication Board as a "bad writer."

12. Alicia Silverstone accidentally suggest to a packed house at the Paia Community Center that no one would want to drink a cup of her breast milk.

Reason #138 why journalism is dying

2009-05-04T16:29:00.006-10:00

Euphemisms and cliches. They're strangling journalism, you know. Clogging up the sink like tea leaves is how I believe George Orwell put it in his essay "Politics and the English Language." I choked on more than a few this morning while listening to this Associated Press story about U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on NPR.

Go ahead and read the AP story. It's not long, but when I went through it I found 38 instances where Gates or the reporter was dangerously ambiguous. Words like "relations", "concerns" and "reassure" kept popping up–words that are deliberately unspecific and open to interpretation. It wasn't until I was 12 paragraphs in that I found actual specific actions that might occur.

This isn't journalism: it's just repeating the gibberish of a public official desperately worried that people might accidentally understand his actions and motives. As a result, even after reading the story I really have no idea what Gates is actually doing (or planning to do) and I'm pretty sure the reporter doesn't know either. I can guess what Gates means by his oblique references to "closed fists" and such, but journalism should shoot a bit higher than giving a wink and nod and letting the reader try to find her way on her own.

Happiness at the DMV

2009-05-04T13:39:00.008-10:00

And no, I'm not being either ironic or sarcastic. This morning, I had a great experience at the Kihei office of the County of Maui Department of Motor Vehicles. I was there to get a copy of my truck's Certificate of Title (I accidentally shipped off the original with a bunch of books last week) so that I can put my vehicle on a Matson freighter this Friday. Not sure if you've heard, but I'm moving to Sacramento, California May 13. There are a variety of reasons for this, but mostly it comes down to the fact that there are more news writing opportunities for me in California than here. There's a beautiful woman and the phrase "hopelessly in love with" (as in, "I'm hopelessly in love with this beautiful woman") involved, but no one really wants to hear anything about that...

Anyway, I'm at the DMV, and the nice woman named Ann calls my number and I go sit at her counter. I tell her I'm there to get a duplicate title for my truck, and she asks for my truck's license plate number and my name, which I give her.

"Are you the writer?" she asks after hearing my name.

I'm flabbergasted. I haven't had anything published on Maui in a year, and yet she clearly, unmistakably recognized me from my time as editor of Maui Time Weekly. She was sad to hear that I'm leaving, but happy for me, if that makes any sense.

Walking out, I was struck by how that's exactly the kind of thing I'll miss when I'm gone. Yes, Maui can be exasperating (spending years watching the Kealia Boardwalk finished but not open to the public because a stupid, tiny parking lot hasn't been built yet is one example; seeing local and state officials congratulate themselves over finishing the expansion of seven-mile-long Mokulele Highway from two lanes to four, despite the fact that it took $87 million and six years to do the work, is another) but the island remains small and quaint enough that a person can still have a pleasant encounter in, of all places, the DMV.

I told Ann that she made my day. It's absolutely true.

Okay, don't Run and Hide!

2009-05-02T07:40:00.009-10:00

With no sense of irony or responsibility, CNN.com is reporting that swine flu "hysteria" is sweeping the nation, and that this is not really a good thing.

"After a week of headlines about the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, many emergency rooms and hospitals are crammed with people, many of whom don't need to be there. The visits by the 'worried well' have triggered concerns of overburdening the nation's hospitals and emergency departments, several health care professionals told CNN."

Are you kidding me? This is all a big joke, right? Our nation's mainstream media–including CNN–hypes swine flu like it's an asteroid speeding directly towards Manhattan and then, when people freak out and swamp our hospitals, they stand back all cool and rational and report on that like they had no idea it would happen.

Look, I still consider myself a member of the media, and am generally concerned about the survival of journalism, but is it even remotely possible that my profession has simply become too stupid to live?

Run and Hide! Run and Hide!

2009-05-01T09:18:00.008-10:00

So this year's big doomsday threat to humanity is swine flu (H1N1 to you scientific types out there). Can't turn on the radio, television or log on to the Internet without seeing some story like this one from CNN filled with terrifying phrases like "worldwide outbreak," "potentially pandemic virus" and "the number of confirmed cases stood at 331."

Wait a sec... 331? For the whole country? Oh, I'm sorry–that's for the entire world. There's just 141 confirmed cases in the U.S. As far as fatalities go, the number of people killed in the U.S. by swine flu currently stands at, let's see, um, just one.

Look, I don't want to say that swine flu (or any communicable disease) is no big deal, but are we maybe just a little blowing this whole thing out of proportion? Is it really necessary for Fox News to run headlines like "Swine Flu Enters Dangerous Phase"? School Districts are starting to close when a child develops "flu-like symptons"; at least one plane headed to the U.S was diverted because of the same thing. Is all this absolutely necessary?

By contrast, check out this press release sent out earlier this month from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "The number of traffic deaths on U.S. roads last year reached a record low," the release tells us. That's right, a record low: 37,313 people killed on American roads last year. The lowest previous tally was 36,285, recorded way back in 1961.

I feel safer already.

Military-Speak gone mad

2009-04-20T13:08:00.004-10:00

I was watching this History Channel program a while ago and realized that, at least publicly, military officers speak a language that's exactly half technical jargon and half stale cliche. The reason for this, I believe, is that it thoroughly eliminates the possibility of any original thought falling into civilian ears. Everything that comes out of the officer's mouth is pre-packaged and safe–either too arcane for the foolish civilian to understand, or too well-worn and ambiguous to be dangerous. The scariest thing about this kind of language is that it's too safe.

Then, every once in a while, some officer somewhere will say something completely and utterly stupid, and then that saying will get into print with no accompanying context or air of irony. This happened in today's Honolulu Advertiser, in this story about the U.S. Navy's newest attack submarine, the USS Missouri. Here's the quote, from one Rear Admiral J. Stanton Thompson:

"She could be in the Gulf of Mexico and put a cruise missile into a window in Kansas City."

We can surmise what the good admiral was trying to say (namely, that the submarine is a very sophisticated weapon) but when we actually think about his location choices, and why he happened to decide that mentally incinerating an American city was a good way to introduce American taxpayers to a new weapon that they are paying for, and that for most Americans, this kind of saying is actually easily understandable and, indeed, kind of awesome, then we begin to realize that for most Americans, this country's mighty imperial power is a great thing, regardless of who it happens to be pointed at.

How come Republicans like teabagging so much?

2009-04-16T21:47:00.003-10:00

So let me get this straight: Yesterday "tens of thousands" of people (Republicans) across the country (estimated population 307 million) rallied and protested the Obama Administration's "government spending and taxation" by chanting slogans like "no more spending" and waved signs saying "Over Taxation is Tyranny" and, in at least one case, threw a box of teabags at the White House. Oh, and the governor of Texas has repeatedly made very thin references to his state seceding from the union "if Washington continues to thumb their nose [sic] at the American people."

This is all a late April Fools Day prank, right? (I would LOVE to see national poll results on the question of Texas withdrawing from the Union.) I mean, they know this is utter, ridiculous nonsense, right? The American people can't be this flat-out dumb, right?

I mean, they must understand that every Administration in living memory has taxed income so that it can pay for things like our globe-trotting navy and planet-killing nuclear missile stockpile? Do they want us to go back to the old days of balancing the federal budget on the back of a tariff? Do they want to end world trade as we know it? Would they prefer 25 percent unemployment sweeping the nation to the eight percent or so we have now?

This is what's become of the terrifying, all-powerful Republican Party? Throwing teabags at the White House while spouting gibberish and threatening secession? I mean, the Democrats don't even have to try anymore to come up ideas: all they have to do is make sure the press covers GOP events, and their work is done.

'Superpower'

2009-04-11T21:37:00.004-10:00

I don't ever want to hear or read again that the United States is a "Superpower." "Superpowers" do not do this.

What a difference a year makes

2009-04-09T11:53:00.010-10:00

A tip from a friend today led me to reread Governor Linda Lingle's April 25, 2008 speech before the Hawaii Economic Association's Annual Conference. This speech exemplifies everything that's wrong with the Lingle Administration. When it first came out, I briefly commented on the speech here (third item), but looking back now, it's clear I didn't even scratch the surface.

The speech begins well enough, with a brief outline of the economic disaster unfolding on the mainland:

"The condition of the U.S. economy is under intense scrutiny. We hear every day of volatile stocks, rising oil prices, increased foreclosures, and continued inflation despite decreased consumer spending."

But then Lingle begins to veer into very risky territory:

"National and international events obviously have an impact on Hawaii's economy. The price of gasoline, electricity, and food is heavily affected by events outside our borders. But in many ways economic and fiscal factors here at home are different from what is occurring in mainland states and foreign countries."

In no time at all, Lingle tells the assembled business-people pretty much exactly what they wanted to hear at that time: Hawaii's economy is fine despite the firestorm blowing everywhere else, and everyone should just stop listening to the always-negative media because it's all their fault:

"The differences are often blurred because of the media's tendency to highlight negative stories, and then to repeat them like a drum-beat throughout the 24-hour news cycle via a wide variety of information sources, including the Internet. People locally continue to hear these reports and commentaries about how bad the economy is and how it keeps getting worse... but the fact is that many of these stories simply don't apply to Hawaii."

Just in case anyone hadn't caught the subtlety of her position, Lingle (whose own degree in journalism apparently gives her special credibility here) went on to make the point explicity:

"This abundance of negative stories about the mainland and world economies is precisely why I believe an objective perspective on our specific situation is so important - we must ensure that our residents' attitudes are based on a complete and accurate picture of our state's economy."

Lingle went on to paint that "objective" picture in stark terms:

• The recent shutdowns of Molokai Ranch, ATA and Aloha Airlines (all in a single 10-day period) "were not connected to the status of Hawaii's overall economy or based on weak fundamentals."

• "Our state's economic growth has slowed, but it has not stopped."

• and finally, "our state will not slip into a recession."

That was a year ago. Subsequent events have shown that Lingle either had no idea what she was talking about or just plain mislead us for whatever reason. For proof of the utter bankruptcy of her April 25, 2008 speech (and quite possibly her entire approach to governing), we need look no further than Governor Linda Lingle's official webpage:

"Hawai`i is facing a challenging period, with many unprecedented events converging to create an economic, financial, and fiscal environment that threatens the very foundation of our national economy... The adverse impact of these external events on Hawai`i has been felt in many sectors."

And so on, and so on... I can hardly wait until Lingle runs for U.S. Senator.

Maui 'Humane' Society

2009-04-06T13:23:00.006-10:00

There are many good and decent people who work at the Maui Humane Society, but I've got to say I'm not surprised at all at the really awful, heart-breaking stories appearing in The Maui News and Honolulu Advertiser these days about mistaken euthanizations and internal staff quarrels. Five years ago, I wrote about exactly these issues for Maui Time Weekly. The story is no longer in the paper's online archives, so I'll just reprint it here. See for yourself if any of this sounds familiar:

Mourning Coco

Why the Maui Humane Society killed a puppy after just 48 hours

By Anthony Pignataro

This is a story about a very cute little puppy named Coco who loved people but ran away from home and then would up at the Maui Humane Society, where, after staying there just 48 hours, was deemed "unadoptable" and euthanized.

Coco was about six weeks old when Kula resident and Paradise Spice owner Charles Bunch adopted her. A friend's dog had just given birth to a large litter, and Bunch's family decided to take one of the puppies. A bulldog-terrier mix, Coco was very friendly and, like most puppies, had a tendency to cry when left alone.

On July 20, Coco dug underneath the chain-link fence that surrounds two sides of Bunch's quarter-acre home and escaped. But that day, another Kula resident found Coco. Not knowing whom she belonged to–she wore no collar or tags–the neighbor took her to the Maui Humane Society. Three days of fruitless searching later, Bunch finally contacted the shelter. Humane Society Director of Animal Control Aimee Anderson took the call. At first, Anderson seemed hopeful. She asked Bunch to describe the puppy. But then she got quiet. She asked Bunch if Coco cried when separated from people. Bunch said she did.

"I'm afraid I have some terrible news," Bunch remembers Anderson saying. Anderson began to cry as she told him Coco had been killed just 24 hours earlier.

Bunch said the realization that his puppy was dead devastated him. He set up a website showing pictures of Coco and announcing that the shelter "failed" its stated mission of trying to find a home for "every orphaned animal." And he wrote letters to local newspapers excoriating the shelter. An edited version ran in The Maui News on July 30.

"An ounce of common sense could have prevented this death," Bunch's original letter said. "[Coco] cried because she was lonely for her owner, or even simple human contact. Are these signs of an unwanted, stray animal? She was used to being loved... Who now wishes to take a lost animal to the Maui Humane Society?"

Anderson said Bunch's criticism stung the shelter, but refused to blame him. "Management made the decision to euthanize," said Anderson, who's worked at the Maui Humane Society for 16 years. "I didn't make the decision and I'm not going to question the decision because it's not an easy decision to make. [But it's] something we need to actually look at. When you're running at full capacity, have nowhere to put dogs, that's when decisions have to be made."

Despite her wish not to question the decision to euthanize, Anderson kept returning to the issue. "How do you make that decision?" she asked. "I don't think two days is long enough, personally."

Anderson said state law is very clear on the issue of killing dogs left at the shelter. The Humane Society must hold licensed dogs for at least nine days, but need only hold unlicensed dogs for two. Because Coco wasn't wearing a collar, she fell in the latter category. According to Bunch, Coco suffered from a skin disease that made it impossible to attach a collar to her neck. Ironically, the disease–which Bunch said a month of antibiotics had nearly cured–contributed to shelter management's belief that no one would want the dog.

"We have 24 kennels and they're always full," Anderson said. "In the isolation area in the back are seven kennels and those are all full. Every day we get dogs. We can have three, four days when we don't have to put down any dogs. That's joyous. Then there are weeks when we put down dogs every day. The other day we got 28 puppies in one hour. That's tough. One of the litters has ringworm, and that's not helpful. Our goal is to become a no-kill shelter. But the only way to do that is to get adoptions up."

Bunch said he understands the shelter is crowded. But he insists that "better judgment" would have saved his dog. "The main thing I would hope happens is they at least give owners a week," he said. "Animals are supposed to be saved, not destroyed."

[August 5, 2004]

War! Or something like that...

2009-04-04T08:54:00.016-10:00

So I woke up this morning to the news that we were at war with North Korea.

Okay, I'm being hyperbolic, but not as much as you might think. It started with a Twitter message I received from Maui News reporter Ilima Loomis: "Oops! Lanai beach mistakenly evacuated over N. Korean missile threat!" The message then linked to this unbylined News article reporting how Four Seasons Resort officials on the island of Lanai got confused yesterday and actually told tourists to move inland because they thought a North Korean missile was going to hit the beach.

How the hell did this happen? How is this even believable?

Let me take a stab at it: we the people of the United States of America–the most powerful nation in the history of the world–are scared shitless. That's not at all surprising, considering how much hear the word "threat" these days. It's a constant refrain, starting with TV news anchors and working all the way down to our elected leaders.

North Korean missiles are a threat. Al Qaeda is a threat. A resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan is a threat. The Chinese navy is a threat. Legalized marijuana is a threat. Gay marriage is a threat. And on, and on, and on.

This nation currently possesses, according to this report from Nuclearweaponarchive.org, 5,736 active nuclear weapons of all types. That's a lot of weapons–enough to destroy the entire world and every living thing on it, oh, at least once, which is all that really matters. We keep them, as the old theory goes, to "protect" ourselves from all the various threats we keep hearing about every damn day.

This theory, as the people on Lanai know only too well, looks really good on paper but performs pretty lousy in day-to-day living. But it doesn't work, and people are scared all over, because (in my opinion) they're constantly told to be scared. This is what government does best: Republican or Democrat, it governs by fear. A frightened people are a docile people, less apt to question what government is doing with their tax money and their children who don uniforms.

UPDATE: According to this Los Angeles Times story, even though the North Korean missile launched on April 5 apparently failed to put a satellite (much less anything else) into orbit, U.S. officials still say it shows "disturbing progress" and, thus, we civilians should probably still live in fear of it and continue to support American military and intelligence efforts to counteract the "threat" it poses. Seriously: was there any outcome to this missile test that wouldn't have resulted in our top brass getting "clearly more worried" about North Korea, which, the last time I checked, was one of the poorest nations on Earth?

Action in Kaanapali

2009-03-30T11:02:00.004-10:00

So yesterday afternoon I decided to drive all the way over to West Maui and visit Kaanapali. I parked my truck at Canoe Beach and headed north, along the beach walk, to Whaler's Village to get some lunch. It was a typical day, sunny and warm and gorgeous. About halfway there I ran into my friend George, sitting at a timeshare kiosk in front of one of the resorts. We chatted a bit about my book and his family, and then I walked off to lunch. When I was done I walked back the same way and saw him, still sitting at the kiosk exactly where I'd left him.

"So was there any action while I was gone?" I asked him.

"Yeah, there was," he said. Maybe 10 minutes earlier, a kid in dreadlocks wearing jeans and tribal bands of some sort ("he clearly wasn't from around here," George said) was just sauntering down the path, handing people $100 bills. George said he was busy and didn't get one, but his buddy at a nearby kiosk did, and after carefully checking the bill to see that it wasn't some kind of funny money, had ran after the guy to thank him profusely. Apparently the guy just smiled and walked off, saying nothing but still tossing wadded-up bills to the tourists along the walk.

"Why was he doing that here, of all places?" George asked me, referring to the fact that the people getting the free bills were already paying around $500 a night to stay in Kaanapali in the first place. "Why not go to Paia and do that, where the people could really use the money?"

Guess that's just Maui for you.

Remember the Superferry!

2009-03-24T11:27:00.008-10:00

With the future of Hawaii Superferry increasingly in doubt, I've begun to notice more a few blog posts and Facebook petitions calling upon us to "Save the Superferry." While well-intentioned, I fear these efforts are pretty much doomed to failure for a host of reasons.

First, some background: from about 2005 to 2008, I wrote (and edited) some pretty nasty stories about Hawaii Superferry, Inc. for Maui Time Weekly. These stories were all premised on the view (which I still hold) that Hawaii Superferry was probably a good idea and could be made to operate in an environmentally friendly manner, but the state and company officials pushing the boat were going about in an arrogant manner contemptuous of both public opinion and the state constitution. Recent court decisions would seem to have born out the later of those views.

But as this blog post from Hawaii Superferry Unofficial Blog shows in crisp detail, Hawaii Superferry was not really popular with the general public. What's more, these numbers show Hawaii Superferry was never even close to breaking even financially, must less making a profit. I have no doubt that the Hawaii Superferry was a convenience for many people, but it just doesn't seem to have been convenient for nearly enough people.

The story of the Hawaii Superferry is a tragedy–not because "it is the last in a list of businesses pecked to death by Hawaii's anti-business ducks" (as this recent and absurd Richard Borreca column opines)–but because a few hundred people have lost their jobs because state officials weren't doing theirs in the first place. Hawaii Superferry should never have been as controversial as it was. Had state officials pushed the company to do environmental studies early on, instead of seeking ways to end-run state environmental laws, I'm confident none of this would have happened and the Superferry would be running today.

Superferry Sunk!

2009-03-18T10:24:00.011-10:00

Yeah, I know this is old news now.

Forgive me for waiting so long to blog on the sudden and possibly permanent demise of Hawaii Superferry, Inc. I mean, it's not like no one else was writing about it–blogger Ian Lind took a whack at it, as did Doug White at Poinography. Ditto Larry Geller at Disappeared News and, of course, Brad Parsons at Hawaii Superferry unofficial blog. Then there were numerous stories in the Honolulu Advertiser, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Maui News, Pacific Business News as well as my old Maui Time Weekly.

To be honest, I had no idea what to add to the news that Hawaii Supreme Court had ruled that hated Act 2 was, in fact, unconstitutional, rendering Hawaii Superferry's operation before the completion of an Environmental Impact Statement illegal and spurring the company to halt all sailings and start laying off workers. Then I started digging through some of my old writings on the ferry and found this Maui Time story I wrote last year. In it I reference a December 29, 2004 report titled "RECOMMENDATIONS," written by some employee at the state Department of Transportation and obtained by the Honolulu Advertiser in early 2008 (click here to read the report–you'll have to scroll down to nearly the end of the document–and here to read the accompanying Advertiser story).

Now lately it's become fashionable to say that the people run our state government are either in the hip pocket of Hawaii Superferry, Inc. (which has very deep pockets, as you can read here) or are just stupid and no one will notice or care when they pass a bill that provides a legal exemption to a single company. But rereading that old 2004 DOT memo, I realized that that view is unfair and incomplete.

Some analyst (the memo lists no author) at our state Transportation Department knew five years ago that his or her bosses were taking our entire state down a perilously slippery slope by agreeing with Hawaii Superferry that they wouldn't have to conduct any environmental review before starting service. The language in the 2004 report is unmistakable:

• Not doing an EIS "may trigger a challenge where we may be subject to the courts' schedule and processes"

• Requiring a statewide environmental review is the "Right thing to do"; offers "less risk in that we avoid probable challenges"; "would address public concerns--minimize opposition and gain support"; "expedite processing of other permits"...

What's more, the report's author was openly skeptical of Hawaii Superferry's reason for not wanting to do an environmental review (namely, that it would take too long, drying up investor support that had to be in place by June 30, 2005) writing (in italics!) that "The criticalness of this deadline has never been verified."

The author of this report–an employee of the state Department of Transportation–absolutely nailed the whole Superferry situation FIVE YEARS AGO. Our elected officials and department heads may made a mockery of our state laws, but they can never say they weren't warned. If DOT has any sense of responsibility and integrity, they will immediately find this person and promote him or her all the way to the top.

Outraged!

2009-03-16T09:47:00.004-10:00

So I get that President Barack Obama is all outraged at A.I.G. paying out many millions in bonuses to a bunch of its execs. "This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed," Obama said, according to this Pacific Business News story. "Under these circumstances, it's hard to understand how derivative traders at A.I.G. warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay. How to they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping this company afloat?"

But using that same line of thinking, how does Obama justify making a man like Lawrence Summers his chief economic adviser? In the late 1990s, Summers (as I previously blogged here) played a key role in making sure the government didn't regulate derivatives in the first place. How does Obama justify that outrage to the voters who elected him to clean up the mess in Washington that led to the current economic crisis?

Justice? What's that?

2009-03-14T15:10:00.006-10:00

A few hours ago The New York Times breathlessly reported that insurance giant A.I.G.–recipient of $170 billion in bailout funds (so much money that taxpayers actually own about 80 percent of the firm)–will soon pay out $100 million in bonuses to the very executives who bungled the company's finances to the point that it needed rescue.

I'm sorry, but did any of us expect A.I.G. corporate officials to behave with anything other than arrogant contempt towards the very taxpayers who saved their very sorry asses? I mean, look at the government that bailed out them out. Specifically, look at Larry Summers, President Obama's director of the National Economic Council.

He's one of the principle government officials who got us all into this financial mess in the first place. Back in 1998, when Summers was President Clinton's Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, he backed repealing the Glass-Steagall Act (one of the strongest bank reform laws that came out of the Great Depression) and he helped sack Brooksley Born, the chair of the Commodities Future Trading Commission, whose only crime seems to have been vocalizing her desire that the government regulate derivatives.

If Summers' punishment for helping engineer the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression is a critical post in the Obama Administration, then why shouldn't expect the same kind of behavior from the fools who run A.I.G.?

"Cheap" gas prices

2009-03-13T13:22:00.008-10:00

This Pacific Business News story from a few hours ago is very easy to understand: the average price of gasoline in the state of Hawaii hasn't changed in the last two weeks, and remains at $2.45/gallon. This compares favorably to Alaska, where the average price is $2.51/gallon, and unfavorably to Wyoming, where it's a mere $1.73/gallon.

All of these prices are, compared to the rest of the world, quite low. As this CNNMoney.com chart makes terribly clear, pretty much the rest of the developed world gets boned at the gas pump. A big part of the reason for such price disparities lies in the simple act of bribing dictators, as Ken Silverstein wrote in sickening detail in this recent Harper's article profiling an "oil fixer" (sub. required).

"Americans want their gasoline cheap," Ely Calil, who makes his living facilitating deals between oil companies and oil-rich governments, tells Silverstein with characteristic flair. "But it's not possible without cutting a few corners."

Put simply, Calil and other fixers bribe government officials like those who rule Nigeria (a notorious human rights violator) to get firms access to oil. Much later in the story, Calil elaborates on the overall nastiness of the whole situation:

If you want to end corruption, you have to become the policeman of the world, and put in prison–in America–the Obiangs and Dos Santoses and the Qaddafis. But the businessman has no choice but to do what these guys want. He's between the devil and the deep blue sea. The Chinese are coming to Africa and promising 25 percent for concessions. So what do you do: say the U.S. government doesn't approve? The Chinese will give you the finger.... No one looks forward to paying bribes. It's no joke, and it's coming out of [the fixer's] pocket, not yours or Uncle Sam's. But if you have to do it, you have to do it.

The moral compromise here is staggering–poor people suffer in Africa under the fists of brutal despots so Americans don't have to pay more than a couple bucks for a gallon of gasoline. And the fact that Calil is so open with Silverstein means that this just isn't controversial. Hell, I own a gasoline-powered vehicle. It's nothing more than the cost of doing business, or at least, that's how we're all encouraged to think about it.

Twits and Twitter

2009-03-11T10:25:00.007-10:00

Ever since a bunch of U.S. Congressional Representatives got press for sending out Twitter messages during President Barack Obama's big address before a joint session of Congress a few weeks ago, I've contemplated giving up my Twitter account. I mean, how edgy and provocative and cutting edge can the thing be if MEMBERS OF CONGRESS are using it? But then I read this lame, woefully incomplete Honolulu Star-Bulletin story on Hawaii state politicians who use Twitter, and I decided against dumping Twitter.

See, Twitter–a social networking service in which people send 140-character messages (tweets) directly to their "followers" and their cell-phones–works best when utilized by someone who does something interesting for a living. I use it more to receive than send because I'm a writer, and writers don't live the most interesting lives. But someone who does something interesting–like an actor, SWAT team sniper or suicide prevention counselor–is the perfect candidate for Twitter. The problem, of course, is that these people are usually too busy doing their jobs to step aside and send out text messages.

Members of Congress–all politicians, really–should be on Twitter. I can think of no better way right now to keep in touch with constituents. But they should use it before or after they do something big: "About to chair hearing on sugar subsidies" or "Just got out of boring meeting with telecom lobby" are great; "I did big wooohoo for Justice Ginsberg," which was an actual Tweet sent out during Obama's speech–not so much.

Which brings me back to the disappointing Star-Bulletin piece in today's paper. Reporter Richard Borreca has the right idea, but he limits his study of local officials and their online social networking to Lieutenant Governor James "Duke" Aiona and Democratic U.S. Representative Neil Abercrombie (both of whom are running for governor in 2010). There's no mention at all of state officials like Democratic Senator J. Kalani English and Democratic Representative Gil Keith-Agaran, both of whom use Twitter fairly frequently.

Yes, it's good that Borreca mentioned that Abercrombie uses Twitter, but he left out any analysis of how he uses it. Usually Abercrombie sends out Twitter messages linking to voice messages to his constituents, which is pretty cool. In contrast, English sends out much simpler messages like "is FINALLY leaving Hana to catch a flight to Honolulu" and "is in session for 3rd and final reading of Senate bills today in Honolulu"–straightforward, but not that intriguing.

Keith-Agaran is about the best local official I've found on Twitter, though his messages are locked (meaning people can't just subscribe but must make a request to receive them). "State & County workers remain hurt/tickedoff by HBs changing health & retirement benefits. Kyle Roz & I met w/HGEA PAC members" was one typical tweet. Now that's inside politics (I'm guessing "Kyle" is Democratic Representative Kyle Yamashita and "Roz" is Democratic Senator Roz Baker), but it's also a real snapshot of what a congressional representative actually does.

With few exceptions, congressmen and women still don't know what they're doing with Twitter. And that means, yeah, I'm still slightly cool, so I'm staying.

My new book

2009-03-10T12:05:00.009-10:00

I've done it. As more of an experiment than anything else, I've gone and self-published a book of a few dozen of my old Maui Time Weekly feature stories. The book, printed on demand by Cafe Press and retails for $14.95, is about 180 pages long, contains 33 stories and an original cover illustration by my friend and current Maui Time cartoonist Ron Pitts. Each story is prefaced by a brief note adding context and updates, and the book has an introduction I wrote where I satirically compare the book to that of other, far more famous writers like Mark Twain and Hunter S. Thompson.

You can find the book here.

Strangely enough, though I'm exhausted, doing the book wasn't as difficult as I imagined. I received full cooperation from Maui Time to rummage through their photo files. I set up the whole thing on Word, which though crude, was effective (book pages aren't very sophisticated, after all). I even managed to get a couple great back-of-the-book review quotes from Ellen Peterson, the acting head of the Maui Community College Library, and Erin Smith, the lead singer of the popular local rock band The Throwdowns.

So that's that. It should be all the way I want. If not, because it's print on demand, I can make changes relatively simply. As of now, it's only available at Cafe Press, though I'm exploring other options.

If you're a fan of this blog and my writing, please consider purchasing a copy. And thanks for reading.

This week in deranged penguins

2009-03-05T10:53:00.006-10:00

So the other day I'm watching Werner Herzog's 2008 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, which is quite good and quirky like most of Herzog's best stuff but then I get to this one part where he "interviews" (I'm using quotes here because it's painfully clear watching this–and Herzog even comes right and says it at one point–that Herzog's subject is not too fond of talking with human beings, especially ones who are celebrated filmmakers) this penguin scientist and Herzog (who is doing maybe 80 percent of the talking) just out of the blue asks the guy if penguins can go insane. The scientist pauses thoughtfully (which probably doesn't mean much because he pauses thoughtfully after every question Herzog asks) and then says something to effect of Yeah, I've seen one or two bash their heads against rocks for no apparent reason. Then Herzog segues to this chilling footage of a bunch of penguins happily (I'm guessing) waddling off towards stage right, which Herzog tells us (well, me) that this is the way to the ocean and plenty of life-sustaining fish (penguin food) when suddenly this one penguin (which Herzog insists on calling "deranged") stops dead in his little penguin tracks, stares at these forbidding ice mountains that look to be miles away in a completely different direction, waits for all the other penguins to pass him by (not one of which stops to ask if everything's cool), and then just waddles off towards said mountains, the harsh Antarctic interior and Herzog says rather melodramatically is "certain death."

This fascinates me to no end. Also the fact that when I Googled the term "deranged penguins," I got 1,700 results.

I've been waiting for this

2009-03-01T14:39:00.005-10:00

It's been a morbid thing for me to ponder, but ever since David Foster Wallace–author of Infinite Jest, most famously, and a host of short stories and journalism that use humor and language in ways that continually surprise me–killed himself last September, I've been wondering what writing was still on his desk, unfinished and unpolished. He was a writer of astonishing output–it wasn't a question of whether he he'd been working on stories and/or another novel he died, but how much he had done.

This Washington Post story confirms this, saying Wallace had written about 200 pages of a new novel called The Pale King when he died. An excerpt of this novel will appear in this week's New Yorker (you can read the excerpt here, as well as a giant story by D. T. Max about Wallace and the unfinished novel.

I haven't yet read either the New Yorker story or the Wallace excerpt, but I intend to very soon.

Same Story, Different Headlines

2009-02-24T10:14:00.003-10:00

I'm always fascinated at how different newspapers and editorial staffs interpret the same news event–sometimes so much so that it's hard to imagine they're writing about the same thing. Check out these headlines on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's talk today on the state of the U.S. economy:

USA TODAY: Bernanke: Economy could climb out of recession this year

CNN: Bernanke: Recovery will take years

NEW YORK TIMES: Fed Chief Says Recovery May Wait Until 2010 or Later

LOS ANGELES TIMES: Bernanke vows Fed will use all available tools

WASHINGTON POST: Bernanke hopes 2010 'Year of Recovery' for US

As to what Bernanke actually meant, that's another story entirely.

'What Matters' - Part Deux

2009-02-24T09:48:00.005-10:00

Returning to the issue of our mighty American bombers dropping explosives on men, women and children unconnected to the warlords and insurgents of Afghanistan (which I most recently blogged about here), it has been hard to miss that, despite repeated hand-wringing and stirring, promising words from U.S. defense officials, we're still doing it.

This essay by writer William Lind puts in very clear terms why this is still happening (spoiler alert: the men who actually run the U.S. military don't come off well). Oh, and for those growing kind of hazy as to why our military–after more than seven years–is still fighting in Afghanistan, join the club and read this essay by retired U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings, which Ian Lind (no relation to William, as far as I know) blogged about last week.

I'm shocked!

2009-02-18T07:41:00.004-10:00

I'm shocked that the giant social networking site Facebook (of which I am a member)–which is, in fact, a private corporation based in Palo Alto, California–changed its terms of use to say that it could do whatever it wanted to member photos, messages, notes, etc. (ie, "content") in perpetuity, even after a member ceased to be a member and deleted his or her page. And I'm equally shocked that Facebook–a private corporation–backed down and returned to its original terms of use (which still, in fact, say that Facebook, a private corporation, pretty much owns everything you post on "your" page) in the face of media interest and public pressure.

I'm shocked that U.S. Senator Roland Burris (D, Illinois)–appointed to the U.S. Senate last year by now-impeached Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich–is now admitting that, yes, he was asked to raise campaign funds by the then-governor's brother Rob, despite the fact that Burris said (under oath) at the Illinois impeachment hearing that he (Burris) had "no" conversations with any Blagojevich about anything money-related before getting appointed.

I'm shocked that New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez (who, though a member of the University of Miami Board of Trustees, never actually went to college) is now admitting that, yes, he used steroids during three seasons he played for the Texas Rangers from 2001 to 2003, and that his "cousin" obtained said steroids and injected them into him (Rodriguez), even though in December 2007 A-Rod went on national television and told Katie Couric that he "never" used steroids.

I'm shocked, I tell you! Shocked!

'What matters'

2009-02-17T11:32:00.004-10:00

An astonishing 2,118 civilians died in Afghanistan last year as a result of the war, according to this AP story on a new United Nations report. Thirty-nine percent of those deaths–828 men, women and children–died because of direct American actions. Of those 828 people, 552 were killed by missile and bomb attacks.

It's a cliche to say that one civilian death (so-called "collateral damage") is too many in war, but in Afghanistan–where the spoils of war are actually the civilians themselves–the killing of a civilian is actually counter-productive. The Taliban, Al Qaeda and the myriad warlords who actually control the Afghan countryside understand this. So they position themselves in such a way that when we fire a "high-tech" missile that costs millions of dollars and has a wonderful guidance system that allows for "pin-point accuracy" from thousands of feet up, we still end up killing the people we're ostensibly there to protect. This goes on and on, mission after mission, year after year, until the people we want to protect only want us to leave, and then we leave. We pretend it's a victory, but the survivors know better.

When a rich and powerful nation fights a poor, rag-tag band of guerrillas, the guerrillas almost always have the sympathy of the people. I'd always thought this concept was completely lost on the Pentagon officials who command our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and all the other places in the world where, over the last few generations, we let our magnificent hubris guide us into all sorts of bloody fiascos. Then I read this op-ed piece by Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen that ran in the Feb. 15 Washington Post:

"It doesn't matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard. It doesn't matter how proportional the force we deploy, how precisely we strike. It doesn't even matter if the enemy hides behind civilians. What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it. In the end, all that matters is that, sometimes we take the very lives we are trying to protect.

"You cannot defeat an insurgency this way."

Those are among the best words from an American military commander I've ever read. It will be very interesting to see how our actions in the coming years match up to them.

What exactly does DLNR mean by 'Renaissance'?

2009-02-11T11:30:00.008-10:00

This morning I read with great interest the Honolulu Advertiser's big story "'Renaissance' proposed for parks," concerning the state Department of Land and Natural Resources' proposed $240 million renovation plan for parks all over the state (the Honolulu Star-Bulletin ran a shorter story on the same subject back on Jan. 30).

Both stories do a great job of detailing DLNR Chairperson Laura Thielen's plan to charge user fees to locals and tourists alike to help pay for the massive but badly needed park improvements. But both stories also give maddeningly brief play to another, potentially far more destructive and controversial part of the plan:

"But so-called user fees won't be nearly enough to cover the cost of overhauling the state's sprawling inventory of 54 parks, 20 small boat harbors, 25 boat ramps or landings, 275 miles of hiking trails, 19 natural area reserves, 55 forest reserves and hundreds of miles of state beaches," wrote Advertiser reporter Dan Nakaso in today's story.

So far, so good. But then there's this paragraph:

So Thielen wants to generate the bulk of the money by leasing some of the 1 million acres of land under DLNR's control for commercial and industrial use. The revenue would then be used to pay the debt service on an estimated $200 million in general obligation, reimbursable bonds over the five years of the plan.

That's all–no further explanation. How many acres would DLNR lease? And what exactly does "commercial and industrial use" mean? The questions boggle the mind.

The Jan. 30 Star-Bulletin story was even more vague, mentioning only that "Thielen said the debt service will be paid by revenue from commercial and industrial land leases..."

The Advertiser story links to the DLNR's webpage on the "Recreational Renaissance" plan, so I clicked over to see if I could get more details. The webpage is a lot bigger on flashy public relations images and phrases than details, but in Appendix B–Financial Plan, I did find these points:

• $3,000,000 in annual lease rents from those 124,000 acres of public lands currently managed by the DLNR

• Within six years generating $6,000,000 in new revenues from currently vacant lands with high development potential, to be developed through public-private partnerships.

Now your guess is as good as mine as to what 124,000 acres we're talking about, or what exactly DLNR means by "high development potential" and "public-private partnerships," but I'd sure like to find out.

Today has not been a good day

2009-02-06T21:47:00.008-10:00

First I inexplicably woke up at 3:51 a.m., Hawaii Standard Time. Then the Honolulu Star-Bulletin announced that it's sacking 17 people, closing its neighbor island bureaus, ditching its broadsheet in favor of tabloid size and, in general, just disappearing from the state's media world.

That led to increased fears that I'll probably never work for a newspaper again because the whole industry is doing everything it can to slash its own wrists and, even if I could find a paper I wanted to work for, the dedicated, sprawling investigative news projects I'd want to work on probably wouldn't be their top priority.

Then I found this story in, of all places, Straits Times, which publishes out of Singapore. It is probably the strangest–and most fascinating–story I've read in the last year. Like all great and dramatic stories, it contains intrigue, a powerful Russian leader and a secret concert held by the ABBA cover band Bjorn Again.

Guess there's hope for journalism after all.

And now for something completely stunning...

2009-02-05T11:03:00.005-10:00

And I'm back. Sorry for the absence–friend visiting from out of town, then I caught a cold. Anyway, today's the first day I'm pretty much back to normal (or, at least, back to being healthy). And so this morning, while perusing the day's online papers to find out what I'd missed over the last week, I found this Associated Press story at the Honolulu Advertiser.

Yes, you read that right: last month, the United States Army lost more soldiers to suicide than to combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Keep in mind these are "suspected" suicides (investigations are pending), but given the fact that January 2009 saw 24 suspected suicides while January 2008 saw just four, it would seem that something is seriously, tragically, horribly messed up. And army officials are baffled at why this is occurring.

"Why do the numbers keep going up? We cannot tell you," Secretary of the Army Pete Geren said in the AP story.

And why should he know? A soldier who kills him or herself is a human problem, not a weapons problem. For the Pentagon, human problems may as well deal with aliens from Mars.

"Civilians unacquainted with the ways of the Building have only vague ideas about what it is the Pentagon does," Robert Coram wrote in his superb 2002 biography Boyd, about fighter pilot/military philosopher/Pentagon critic John Boyd. "They think the real business of the Pentagon has something to do with defending America. But it does not. The real business of the Pentagon is buying weapons."

Don't believe me? Take a look at this "information paper" on the Army's suicide prevention program. It was clearly not written with the view that soldiers are human beings with feelings and emotions. If you can get halfway through it, you're sharper than I am.

Euphemism Exercise

2009-01-28T14:10:00.005-10:00

As a writer and editor, I'm probably more sensitive than most people to corporate euphemisms, which serve no other purpose than to put a pretty spin on an ugly action. They dilute meaning and whitewash color. It's no secret that I don't like them. And by "don't like them," I mean "feel like a cheese grater is slicing my skin whenever I hear them."

Journalists, and their corporate owners, are not immune to these words. In fact, I found eight of them in this memo, which attempts to justify the Washington Post's recent decision to cut back its Book World. See how many you can find.

John Updike is dead, Part 2

2009-01-28T08:38:00.013-10:00

Okay, so I was in error when I wrote this post, concerning the death of celebrated writer John Updike. In the post I wrote that I had never read any of Updike's work. This, I now realize, was an error.

See, I'd forgotten that Updike used to write for The New Yorker–especially the Talk of the Town section. Troy Patterson of Slate reminded me of this fact when he wrote in his take on Updike's death that "It is possibly true that he was the best Talk of the Town writer The New Yorker will ever have, though saying so feels like a heresy against James Thurber."

Reading that sent me scrambling for my copy of The Fun of It, a wonderful collection of the very best Talk of the Town pieces ranging from the late 1920s to the 1990s, edited by veteran New Yorker writer Lillian Ross. It's hard to explain the importance of this book to me–I used to loan it to or just buy it outright for my writers. The Talk of the Town, the always whimsical, usually somewhat skeptical short pieces that run in the front other The New Yorker each week, provided a kind of model for the kind of journalism I wanted when I edited Maui Time Weekly.

Anyway, I thumbed through The Fun of It, and discovered that I had indeed read Updike–three of this pieces are in the book: two from 1956 and one from 1961. And I also realized why I'd forgotten that I'd read him: his Talk pieces, though intelligent and well-written, are also entirely forgettable. I mean, his "Rockefeller Center Ho!", about his attempt to "plot a course from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center that would involve no contact with either Fifth or Sixth Avenue" is amusing, but his other pieces (most notably "Loverlee, Loverlee", about the 1956 New York High Fidelity Show) are derivative of stuff Thurber was putting in the magazine back in the 1930s.

Stuff like his outstanding tour of the still-uncompleted Empire State Building ("The High Place") and his–with Harold Ross–interview with boxer Jack Johnson ("Big Boy"). Thurber's 1930 story on aviator/filmmaker/nut Howard Hughes ("Angel") and his 1931 piece on painter Diego Rivera ("The Frescoer") are similarly excellent and unforgettable. Here is Thurber on Rivera, so you can see for yourself:

We met a lady who, a year or so ago, sat with Rivera on a scaffold in Mexico City for nineteen hours. At the end of that time, night having given way to morning and morning to afternoon, she got up and started down the ladder. Rivera looked surprised and injured, and remarked sadly, "I have begun to bore you."

Put another way, Thurber–by himself or with shared bylines–has 20 stories in The Fun of It. Updike has three. Clearly, Patterson was right: slighting Thurber in favor of Updike is heresy.

60 percent?!

2009-01-27T09:18:00.011-10:00

Heard something stunning on the radio yesterday (which, in itself, is very unusual indeed). It was one of those mid-day news briefs read by Wendy Osher (click here for my completely unrelated take on what I perceive to be Osher's slippery ethics). And Osher was reading off headlines and news blurbs and then she came to one, which apparently came right off a press release, saying the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) had just donated $24,000 to Friends of Maui Drug Court (click here to read the Drug Court press release announcing the gift).

This is, of course, very good news. Maui Drug Court is a valuable organization that helps many drug addicts who would otherwise waste away in prison. But then, I presume to explain why OHA would give so much dough to the Drug Court, Osher said that (and this is also in the press release) that "approximately 60 percent of Drug Court clients are native Hawaiian."

Wow. That is, given the fact that 2006 U.S. Census Bureau figures show native Hawaiians make up a mere 9.1 percent of those who live in the state of Hawaii, a shocking figure. And that was it–no follow-up or further elaboration from either Osher or the Drug Court press release on WHY native Hawaiians make up such a disproportionate percentage of Drug Court's client base.

Two years ago, while I was still editor of Maui Time Weekly, I had Greg Mebel look at the issue as to why there were so many native Hawaiians in prison (you can read his story here). His story was good, but also–given the tiny budgets and severe time constraints we operated under–just scratched the surface (other stories, like this Honolulu Star-Bulletin piece from 2002, were far thinner).

Why there is such massive over-representation of native Hawaiians in our criminal justice system always struck me as the biggest under-reported story in the state. Now last year, there was state Senate bill SCR 156, which called for a study as to why there were so many native Hawaiians in prison. But according to the state Senate Majority Communications Office, the bill–while referred to the Judicial and Ways and Means committees–"wasn't scheduled for a hearing."

Might be a good time to revive the measure.

John Updike is dead

2009-01-27T09:01:00.004-10:00

Just read that John Updike, one of the giants among American novelists in the last few decades, has died at the age of 76. This is probably going to surprise some of those who read this blog, but I've never read any of Updike's work.

What's more, it was a conscious decision on my part, fed entirely by this New York Observer essay by David Foster Wallace, who I've recently concluded was, before his suicide last year, the best living American writer and, had he lived, undoubtedly would have become the greatest American writer of the last century.

Something stinks at North Beach

2009-01-26T07:23:00.008-10:00

And it isn't the big Lahaina Wastewater Treatment Plant. Oh, wait–yes it is. You know, I used to live in Honokowai, which is just north of both the sewage plant and North Beach (all of which are located on Maui's Westside) and watched (again, over the period of years) the construction of the thousands of Honua Kai timeshares, which are only now nearing completion, all the time wondering to myself, "Why the hell would people buy a timeshare right next to a sewage plant that smells, well, exactly like a sewage plant?" I mean, everyone I knew in the area was very much aware of the plant–and its smell–and couldn't stand even driving by the place during warm, not particularly windy days. "If we're disgusted just driving by at 50 miles per hour," we'd say (or something to that effect), "why on Earth would people decide to spend their hard-earned, expensive vacation just sitting out there?"

Well, this Maui News story offers up one potential answer: Honua Kai owner Intrawest allegedly just never told prospective buyers that the plant was there. Well, so says a dozen buyers who are suing the timeshare giant for allegedly not telling them that there was a giant sewage treatment plant literally across the street from their new luxury North Beach digs. The article says the company did disclose the plant in 2007, but apparently not in 2005 or 2006, when many of the buyers first signed their contracts, which called for down payments in the $130,000-$320,000 range.

Intrawest didn't respond to The Maui News questions by press time. But I did note that Wailuku attorney Richard Rost is representing all 12 plaintiffs. I happen to know firsthand that Rost is very, very good. I know this because for two days in late 2006 he argued before the Maui County Liquor Control Adjudication Board–the board of political appointees who sanction liquor licensees found to have violated liquor laws (you can read about the trial here). This board, which rarely hands down anything other than "Guilty" verdicts and heavy fines (I can and sometimes do count the Not Guilty verdicts they handed down in four years on one hand), gave Rost's client a full and complete exoneration.

Now Intrawest is a giant company with timeshares all over North America, but if I were them, I'd be a little bit scared.

One more thing about Obama's speech

2009-01-20T17:20:00.005-10:00

Inaugural Addresses–and all political speeches in general–are masterpieces of ambiguity. Low on specifics and high on lofty euphemisms and well-worn cliches, they seek to both reassure voters and provide sufficient cover for later, quite possibly nefarious actions. President Barack Obama's address today (click here to watch it, here to read it) was no different. One paragraph in particular stood out to me:

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends–hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism–these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility–a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

Obama is talking to us here, but there is no reason why we can't turn this around and say the same thing to him. Over the last eight years, high officials in his predecessor's administration committed what can only be described as "war crimes" in the name of prosecuting our vaunted "war on terror." This nation, with its commitment to justice and human rights, and the rest of world, which has long looked to this nation for guidance and leadership in such matters, cannot allow these crimes–and the officials responsible–to go unpunished or even uninvestigated.

President Obama has a responsibility–his word–not merely to stop such crimes, but to seek out those guilty and punish them, regardless of their stature and years of "public service." This is what we did to the Nazis at Nuremberg, to the Japanese in Tokyo, and to the Serbs at the Hague. War crimes investigators, if they are to do more than simply impose "victor's justice," must be allowed freedom of action.

Lingle apparently wants it both ways

2009-01-20T07:54:00.004-10:00

Skeptic though I am of all things political, I must admit–in this first hour of Barack Obama's presidency–to feeling a bit contented at the state of our nation and its government. I'm sure it will pass in due time.

In other news, I just noticed some strangeness surrounding our own Governor Linda Lingle's official statement regarding Obama's inauguration. Let's start with Lingle's official statement as it appears on her homepage: as you can see, it's short–just four paragraphs, containing all the warmth and humanity you'd expect from someone who traveled the nation stumping for Senator John McCain by publicly denigrating Obama's Hawaii roots.

But now check out the statement as reported by the Honolulu Advertiser: It's actually two paragraphs longer than the other statement. And among other things, it includes this sentence not in the "official" version posted on Lingle's homepage:

"For the people of Hawai`i, this presidential inauguration holds special significance because of the local roots of President Barack Obama."

Considering all she's said, that's pretty generous. But which is her "official" statement? I've heard of wanting it both ways, but come on!

Save the Paper Airplane Museum!

2009-01-15T15:01:00.005-10:00

One of my first stories for Maui Time Weekly was on the old Paper Airplane Museum in Kahului's Maui Mall and its earnest curator Ray Roberts (you can see some of the amazing aluminum can models he built for the museum here). It was a quiet, quaint place run by Roberts, a soft-spoken retired shop teacher, and full of both aircraft history and good cheer. Writing that story was a very gentle, entirely satisfying way for me to start my life on Maui.

But the museum–which he boasted was the "largest paper airplane museum in the world"–closed a few years ago. I never found the time or proper hook to track down Roberts and find out what happened until now. Recently I began a project that requires me to update some of my old Maui Time stories, so I called Roberts to find out what had happened to him. While he gave me far more information than I actually needed, he also told me a fascinating story I'd never heard before.

Roberts started off by saying that explaining what happened to the museum first required knowledge of how it began, back when Hannibal Tavares was still Maui County Mayor. Roberts, who had been collecting paper airplanes for many years, decided that he needed to store it somewhere. So he and his wife Edy went looking for a place near Kahului Airport. Eventually, they found a more or less permanent site at the Maui Mall. I say "more or less" because each location he'd move into carried the stipulation that if landowner Alexander & Baldwin found an actual tenant, then Roberts would have to pack up and move out.

"We still had to pay our fair share of rent, insurance, etc.," Roberts said. "And if we opened late or closed early, we were fined $75. It was serious stuff."

It wasn't long before people started donating photos of airplanes–all sorts of airplanes, many of them historic. So Roberts began putting them up on the walls. Then one day Mayor Hannibal Tavares walked in.

"Hey Buster, where's your 50(c)3?" Roberts said Tavares asked him in his usual no-nonsense fashion, referring to his operation's non-profit status.

Roberts said he didn't have any such status.

"Listen Buster," Tavares then told him, "this is a museum. It's involved so many people, it must be preserved. So go to the state building and get your papers."

Roberts did exactly that, though he says it took him two years and cost him $300 (money he paid a guy to do the paperwork who ended up skipping out without filing a page).

For about a decade, things were stable for Roberts and his Paper Airplane Museum, with reporters popping in now and then to do stories on him (mine from 2003 doesn't seem to be online, but you can read Hana Hou's take here). But in 2005, A&B told Roberts they'd found a more suitable tenant for his spot, and said he had to leave. But the company then offered him a slot at their Kahului Shopping Center.

"Something told us, 'Don't do it," Roberts said. "So many people entrusted us with their historical materials. So we thanked A&B–we had no animosity towards them–and put everything in storage."

A week later, the venerable old Kahului Shopping Center burned to the ground.

To this day, the Paper Airplane Museum remains in storage, though Roberts seems optimistic about finding a new location and reopening. His preference is for a spot near Kahului Airport, and he says discussions with airport managers are ongoing.

Those wishing to help Roberts and his museum can email him at RayTCM@webtv.net.

7 days to go

2009-01-13T10:24:00.006-10:00

Like many of my friends and neighbors, and much of the rest of the world (we're talking just about every conscious person out there), I'm looking forward to a time now slightly less than a week away when George W. Bush will no longer be President of the United States.

That this will be a good is unquestionable–Bush's contempt for those who did vote him, those who do not share his wealth, skin color or religious certainty, those who would restrain corporate criminals and polluters, those who do not live in this country and/or those who actually speak properly has done considerable damage to our nation and world. But as Democrat Barack Obama gets closer to taking the Oath of Office, I find myself getting increasingly concerned:

• Obama is preparing to spend the so-far unspent $350 billion in financial sector bailout money with little trepidation;

• Obama is hedging on whether he will restrict "special interrogation" interrogations as he promised during the campaign;

• Obama has said he's "unlikely" to investigate past Bush Administration interrogation or domestic wiretapping practices that might have been illegal;

• Obama is perfectly willing to continue the practice of militarizing our nation's intelligence and foreign policy by naming former generals as his Director of National Intelligence and National Security Adviser.

Is it possible we're merely trading an arrogant, contemptible, anti-intellectual imperialist for a shrewd, articulate one? And given America's military and economic power (steadily eroding though it may be), is it even possible to get anything other than these two choices?

Newspapers according to Thoreau

2009-01-10T15:43:00.007-10:00

Been relaxing with a copy of Henry David Thoreau's Walden for much of this afternoon, and I came across the following passage on newspapers. I tend to think about journalism a lot–given that until recently it's how I made my living and will probably be my profession again–and have often thought that the practice has changed much (and for the better) since the middle of the 19th century, but after reading this, I'm not so sure:

"And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,–we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea."

THIS JUST IN: Irony Lives!

2009-01-09T07:49:00.006-10:00

Seriously, I was beginning to worry. But good ol' embattled Maui County Councilman Wayne Nishiki has ridden to irony's rescue. Check out this Maui News story, posted this morning, about how Nishiki now says County Board of Ethics Chairman Alan Kaufman is actually too biased towards super-developer Everett Dowling to be fair about Nishiki's failure to disclosure a $100,000 loan from Dowling in a timely fashion during the recent election (click here to read my previous blog post on this matter, which in the world of Maui politics is about as juicy as it gets).

Anyway, here's what Nishiki thinks, according to the Maui News:

"Nishiki also argued that Kaufman had a conflict of interest because he had accepted a plane ride from Dowling and had a 'close personal or business relationship' with the developer. 'Kaufman's suggestion that I renounce my County Council seat to permit a special election would potentially benefit his friend Everett Dowling,' he wrote."

You read that right: Nishiki is blasting Kaufman for being friends with Dowling. Not that Nishiki and Dowling are bestest buddies or anything... I mean, just because back in 2005 Nishiki asked Dowling for a personal loan for $100,000 doesn't mean–oh, wait, yes it does: remember this Maui News op-ed Nishiki wrote a few months ago? The sixth paragraph mentions that Nishiki's anti-development stances during his previous council terms never "prevented me from being friends with Mr. Dowling and he certainly came to my help as a private citizen when I needed it."

Of course, all of this raises a key question: is there anyone in county government who isn't friends with Everett Dowling?

8.5 trillion reasons why we're screwed

2009-01-07T15:07:00.011-10:00

I know I've written about this before, but today's Pacific Business News report saying that the current $8.5 trillion in taxpayer-supported bailouts is more money than that spent on all U.S. wars since the Civil War demands some kind of comment.

It seems like only yesterday (it was nearly 20 years ago actually) that the Berlin Wall came crumbling down and pundits across the land were hailing the triumph of mighty God-Fearing Capitalism over cursed, atheistic Communism. Flushed with confidence over their perceived success, Wall Street's biggest financial institutions began bankrolling a sweeping move to open markets across the globe.

How far we've come in such a short time. Today non-governmental organizations (some of them deemed "terrorist groups") are shattering nation-states all over the world. In response, developed nations like the U.S. and Israel increasingly lash out, blowing apart already depressed cities with million-dollar missiles.

As for the Great Captains of Industry who helped spread our uniquely American hubris around the world and got very, very rich doing it, they're now largely bankrupt–busted by crooked practices and raw greed–and now beg for money at the door to the U.S. Treasury.

Now before we taxpayers write yet another check for a few billion dollars, backed by the full faith and credit of generations not yet born, let's look for a moment at the society and way of life we're rushing to save:

• Hospitals, doctors and drug companies that treat health care as a commodity, with the best care doled out to those with the most money.

• Millions around the world going hungry while we debate with crops make the best automobile fuel.

• Anti-crime legislation that includes vast sums of money for prisons and uniformed police and precious little for even cursory examinations of root causes.

• A cabal of corporations that control virtually all media across the globe, limiting coverage and viewpoints in the name of "access" and "freedom."

• Manufacturers and energy-producers dumping frightful quantities of harmful toxins and pollutants into the air, soil and water.

• Automakers who promise "freedom" while our roads get even more congested and, except for a few cities, clean, reliable mass transit remains non-existent.

Forgive me for all this, but earlier this afternoon I was gardening. For some reason, doing something resembling manual labor tends to make me even more critical of the wealthy and powerful.

BREAKING NEWS: Irony is dead

2009-01-05T11:11:00.008-10:00

Seriously, it's hard to draw any other conclusion after reading this story in today's Honolulu Star-Bulletin about the growing national gaze being thrust upon some baby President-elect Barack Obama held during his recent Oahu vacation (click here for Oahu blogger Ian Lind's back story on the baby in question).

Umm, politicians posing with babies was old a CENTURY ago (I believe Andrew Jackson originated the practice). In fact, in 1903 Theodore Roosevelt angrily denied the "outrageous lie that I had been kissing babies" [and thus overtly campaigning]. Candidates criss-crossing the nation in search of babies to kiss has been a joke for many, Many, MANY decades (Even Bugs Bunny made fun of the practice in this cartoon in which Yosemite Sam campaigns for some office by yelling "I love babies! Show me babies!").

But apparently, that history has largely been forgotten by both the press and general public. Instead, time has bent back on itself, plunging us all into a world in which a politician holding a baby is no longer ironic or even cliched but once again novel and newsworthy. Acts once deemed pedestrian, even shameless, are now provocative.

We truly live in special times. And if we're really lucky, we'll make it out alive.

Just reading DFW

2009-01-03T14:35:00.007-10:00

Been reading the late David Foster Wallace's 1997 A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (a collection of thought-provoking and hilarious essays and journalism from the first half of the 1990s). I had forgotten the extent to which reading Wallace requires the reader to sit within relatively close proximity to a dictionary, and as I made my way through stories of Wallace talking about playing tennis in a tornado, visiting the Illinois State Fair and taking a Caribbean cruise, I found myself referring to said dictionary more and more (I'd like to think it's because Wallace possessed an Olympian vocabulary rather than simply that my vocabulary is under-nourished, but no matter...).

Anyway, I found a few words popping up more often than random chance should dictate. When strung out in a list, as I'm about to do, they provide a hairline crack of a glimpse into Wallace's troubled genius:

• picayune

• banal

• peripatetic

• creepy

• poststructuralist

• bovine

• otiose

• irony

• Heidegger

• plangent

• vomity

That's all.

Why I feel icky

2008-12-30T11:39:00.006-10:00

I can't believe I just read this story. Nobody made me–I just up and read the whole thing, completely of my own free will. And yes, I did indeed read the entire story.

Every single thing in it, from the headline to the very last word, is appalling. Appalling! So much so that I now feel icky. And not in that good way, either.

Novels are for fools

2008-12-29T11:10:00.018-10:00

Seriously, I think I'm wasting my time writing a novel. The fame and fortune these days is in fake memoirs.

Case in point: today's New York Times story on Herman Rosenblat, an actual Holocaust survivor who's not-so-forthcoming memoir Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived isn't so true at all. In fact, it's apparently just a sappy, completely false account of how Rosenblat met his wife (Click here, here and here for The New Republic's investigative reports that led Rosenblat to admit his fraud).

For at least the last decade, Rosenblat and his wife have been peddling this tale of how he was a boy in a German concentration camp (true) and she was a girl who tossed apples to him over the fence (false). Then years later they met on a blind date (apparently true) and discovered they already knew each other from the camps (apparently completely bogus).

"[Rosenblat's tale is] the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air," said Oprah Winfrey, who has had Rosenblat on twice and already has some experience with bogus memoirs.

Cynical lying and fraud aside, guys like Herman Rosenblat and James Frey really seem to understand that in today's cultural landscape, cynical lying and fraud can, if properly managed, turn into fame and fortune that far outstrip schmucks like me who still believe that memoirs are the realm of checkable facts and novels are for made up stuff like self-dentistry and girls who toss apples over death camp fences.

I mean, Frey's A Million Little Pieces is still in print and for sale! And while Rosenblat's actual memoir may be toast, he's still got a movie deal in the works. Clearly, people who sell lies as facts know how to get things the done. The rest of us are mere pretenders.

'Fretful little bureaucratic douche bags'

2008-12-26T11:42:00.008-10:00

Freelance writing is all hell. When I left Maui Time Weekly in early June after five years as editor, I figured my days of chasing and kicking people were long gone. "I'm just a writer now," I told more than one friend. "It's going to be easy now because I just get to deal with professional editors."

Um, no. In many ways, I'm dealing with more unprofessional people now than in my days when perpetually cash-strapped Maui Time gave me an editorial budget that pretty much limited me to working with just rookie and student reporters. In fact, to list all the instances in the last six months of my having to deal with unreturned phone calls and e-mails, to say nothing of accepted-then-suddenly-rejected stories, would require more space than even this blog affords.

Originally I thought my problems were specific to Hawaii. They are most certainly not. Take this quote from genius author James Howard Kunstler, interviewed in Curtis White's 2007 book The Spirit of Disobedience:

"I had been writing some stories for the New York Times Magazine about land development in American and the problems it entailed. After three or four of them, I pitched a story with the working title "Why Is America So Fucking Ugly?" and they gave me the green light to write it up. Once I did, they rejected it. The Times Magazine always rejected anything with either wit or an interesting point of view–and if you happened to slip one in on them, the editorial board always found a way to extract every single joke from the piece. I hated those cocksuckers. They were like a literary politburo. Smug, supercilious, fretful little bureaucratic douche bags. They didn't have enough soul to be actuaries. And even if you made it through the grueling editorial wringer and got your story–with all the heart and soul wrung out of it–into print, then they'd jerk you off for months about cutting a paycheck. I wanted to go down to 43rd Street with a fungo bat and beat their fucking heads in. But instead I took that rejected manuscript about "Why Is America So Fucking Ugly?" and turned it into a book proposal, which my agent wound up selling to one of the more high-toned imprints of Simon & Schuster. That was published as The Geography of Nowhere."

To any of my former writers who chafed under my editing and are reading this now: you have no idea how good you had it.

Time for a little Bible-thumping

2008-12-24T09:47:00.004-10:00

In honor of Christmas, I'm going to do something truly radical and quote from the New Testament–that holiest of holy books for the ostensibly Christian capitalists who run our great nation:

"The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.... There was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale, and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need" (Acts 4:32-35).

Now if all that sounds, oh, a tiny bit Marxist, it's only because it is. Merry Christmas!

Death of a strategist

2008-12-22T16:20:00.011-10:00

William Kaufmann died a couple weeks ago, at the age of 90. Unless you're a military history and strategy nerd like myself, the name means nothing to you (click here to read his obituary, published in yesterday's New York Times). Kaufmann advised five presidents on how to fight (and presumably, win) a nuclear war. He was, to put it simply, one of those geniuses without whom a global empire such as the United States simply cannot function.

Kaufmann was probably a very nice and reasonable man. But he played a key role in building the most dangerous and threatening war machine in human history, which has since the end of the war against the Japanese in 1945 gripped the world in a state of "pure war." As the Times obit (based largely on quotes and information from Slate's Fred Kaplan, one of the best military journalists working today) sums up nicely, Kaufmann's biggest contribution to nuclear war theory was in convincing successive American administrations that threatening to bomb every city in Russia with nuclear weapons should the Red Army attack Western Europe was not the way to go (such a strategy would kill something like 285 million civilians).

Instead, Kaufmann argued, the U.S. should adopt a "counterforce" strategy, whereby we would only bomb Russian and Warsaw Pact "military targets." This would, in the Times' words, "be a way of perhaps controlling nuclear war..."

Of course, counterforce is a fraud. Nuclear weapons, regardless of where dropped, would kill hundreds of millions of civilians. Think of the island of Oahu–there are, by my count, four major military targets there: Pearl Harbor Naval Station, Marine Corps Base Kaneohe, Hickham Air Force Base and Schofield Barracks. One nuclear bomb dropped on any one of those bases would slaughter at least half the island's civilian population.

Kaufmann never sought publicity, so we have no idea if he ever seriously considered the ramifications of his ideas, which caught on with President Kennedy and never really stopped being U.S. policy (to this day the U.S. fields approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads to this day, though it is scheduled to decline to 2,200 by 2012). We still very much live inside that gigantic nuclear machine reasonable men like Kaufmann constructed for us; we orient our lives to it without thinking that we still live in the shadow of a global "war" that would erase half or more of the planet's inhabitants in just a few minutes.

This is how we define "national security"–building enough bombs that war and genocide become indistinguishable. And we pay for it every year with our income taxes. But most of all, we say we feel secure because to say otherwise is to open a door to a monstrous terrors that would simply make society impossible to maintain. We don't stop to think that harmless terms like "economic sanctions" actually mask depriving starving children of food or medicine, so why should this bother us?

After all, aren't we the world's only superpower? Who's going to stop us?

Stalker nonsense

2008-12-21T12:56:00.008-10:00

I know I'm probably in the minority here, but I really don't care that President-elect Barack Obama left his Kailua vacation rental at 7:15 this morning for a workout at Kaneohe or that "his shirt was soaked when sweat" when he reappeared at 8:10. I don't care that his neighbors are sitting on "lawn chairs" waiting for a glimpse of him. And I certainly don't care that he was wearing a "black Chicago White Sox baseball cap" when he stepped off the plane yesterday.

How is this news and not just creepy stalker nonsense? And more importantly, is the Honolulu Advertiser going to continue peg us all as rubes and "report" every single mediocre thing the President-elect does on his vacation? His first plate lunch selection? What kind of slippers he puts on? Because, damn it, we must know these things!

Thank God this state is doing fine right, with no unemployment, health care, education or environmental problems to worry our pretty little heads over.

Obama's nutty OC antagonist

2008-12-19T12:36:00.015-10:00

And now to plug yet another of my former OC Weekly colleagues. On Monday, according to this Associated Press story, the Supreme Court trash-canned some New Jersey wad's attempt to overturn Barack Obama's presidential election, saying Obama is not a U.S. citizen because his dad was a British national. This is well known. But did you also know that there's a right-wing nut job preacher in Orange County, California who hopes to get the election results nullified because he claims Obama was not born in Hawaii, but actually in some mysterious other country?

Check out my friend Matt Coker's exhaustive, humorous and definitely odd interview with the good Pastor Wiley Drake (who both helps the homeless and spews homophobic bile) here, then for fun look here at the even crazier comments the story's getting. And people say politics are boring.

Return of the Superferry...

2008-12-18T07:56:00.009-10:00

... To court, that is. Today the Hawaii Supreme Court takes up the matter of whether Act 2, the state Legislature's special law passed in 2007 that grants a special exemption from state environmental laws to Hawaii Superferry Inc., is constitutional. The matter begins at 8:45 this morning–click here for live blogging of the proceedings.

While you're waiting for court to begin, you might want to read the slightly scathing state Auditor's Phase 2 report on "the State Administration's Actions Exempting Certain Harbor Improvements to Facilitate Large Capacity Ferry Vessels from the Requirements of the Hawai'i Environmental Impact Statements Law," which came out yesterday. The whole report is fascinating (you can read it here), but those not wanting to wade through its 50 or so pages can check out Hawaii Superferry Unofficial Blog's take, Disappeared News' take, The Maui News' take (it's by Harry Eagar, so take it for what it's worth) or just read the following paragraph from the introduction, which I think sums up it all up very nicely:

"In their haste to support Hawai'i Superferry, Inc., state officials ignored the recommendations of their technical staff, setting off a chain of events that culminated in the implementation of a $38.5 million interim harbor improvement system that is costing the State millions in repairs, and may, in the end, sit idle. In addition, subsequent legislative action on behalf of Hawai'i Superferry, Inc. compromised the islands' environmental laws and set a precedent for future government intervention that puts the interests of a single business before the State's environmental, fiduciary, and public safety responsibilities."

Cox sucks (as well as blows)

2008-12-17T09:32:00.005-10:00

You have no idea how much I enjoyed writing that title, which refers to current Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. See, back when I was a reporter in Orange County, California, Cox served as a U.S. Congressman representing the extremely affluent and conservative people of Newport Beach, so I learned first-hand just what the bubble-headed Republican pretty boy was capable of. And believe me, no one laughed harder (except maybe my former colleague R. Scott Moxley) when, in June 2005, President Bush nominated Cox to be head of the SEC, which–at least on paper–is responsible for protecting our nation's investors from fraud and abuse.

Seriously, take a moment to read this, Cox's official SEC biography. You don't have to get very far before you come across this sentence, clearly written by someone who could not care less about facts or reality: "During his tenure at the SEC, Chairman Cox has made vigorous enforcement of the securities laws the agency's top priority, bringing ground breaking cases against a variety of market abuses including hedge fund insider trading, stock options backdating, fraud aimed at senior citizens, municipal securities fraud, and securities scams on the Internet."

Now do your best to reconcile that stunning bravado with this New York Times story in which Cox himself admits that his agency brazenly ignored a decades' worth of warnings that Bernard Madoff's ostensibly successful and charitable hedge fund was, in fact, nothing more than a massive, obscenely illegal Ponzi scheme. "I am gravely concerned by the apparent multiple failures over at least a decade to thoroughly investigate these allegations or at any point to seek formal authority to pursue them," Cox says in the story.

A few months ago, when the big Wall Street firms were going bust and begging for taxpayer bailouts, even John McCain wanted Cox fired, and that was before most people had ever heard about Madoff. Of course, Bush would no more bring the hammer down on Cox than he would chop off his own, well, you get the idea.

Bush and Cox just go together perfectly (and I mean that in every sense of the words). In Bush's screw-the-people world view, who else but pro-business Cox, who took much of his campaign contributions when in Congress from corporate lawyers and securities and investment firms, could handle the office designed to regulate those very same lawyers and firms? When you hold as much contempt for public institutions as George W. Bush, there is no better Wall Street "regulator" than Christopher Cox.

Toy Story

2008-12-15T11:40:00.011-10:00

And now, with the Christmas holidays nearly upon us, here's a heart-warming tale of corporate negligence and stinginess. According to this Pacific Business News report, the State of Hawaii will get a whopping $200,000 from the mighty Mattel Corporation. The money is our cut of a $12 million settlement package between Mattel and 39 states over last year's debacle in which millions of Chinese-made toys bearing the toy giant's logo were found to contain excessive and toxic amounts of lead paint.

Now $200,000 for an entire state (the PBN story says officials will use the dough to "find [I think they mean 'fund'] consumer education and enforcement of consumer protections laws") is pretty miserly, but the whole $12 million is pathetic, too. According to this Reuters story from October, Mattel made a net Third Quarter profit of $238.1 million. That means the settlement represents a mere five percent of what Mattel pulled in during just three months of this year.

Oh, did I mention that back in August Mattel Corp. won a far more substantial $100 million settlement from fellow toy-maker MGA Entertainment over "copyright infringement"? In this country, that's apparently more important than attempting to sell millions of toys containing toxic quantities of lead. Though somehow I don't think MGA's CEO will follow the example of the co-owner of the Chinese factory that made many of the tainted toys.

But don't get the idea that Mattel doesn't take the toy recall scandal seriously. This cool chart from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that while Mattel used to spend just $120,000 a year on lobbyists, after the toy recalls began the company suddenly upped the figure to more than half a million a year.

Shoes you can trust

2008-12-15T09:56:00.008-10:00

Rather than try to improve on what's turning out to be the shoe-related story of the decade, I'm just going to refer everyone to this take on the matter by my old friend and OC Weekly colleague Jim Washburn. It's far superior to anything I could have written on this momentous occasion, and captures what I believe is its singular importance. Also, he's funny. So there.

Iraq can be fun!

2008-12-13T15:31:00.009-10:00

Here's a fun little exercise you can do if you get bored this weekend:

1. Read this, a transcript of President George W. Bush's December 6, 2008 Weekly Radio Address in which he discusses why our occupation of Iraq has lately been so successful that we will soon be able to begin withdrawing some of our troops.

2. Read this, a December 13, 2008 New York Times story on a new "unpublished" government report that describes the American-led Reconstruction of Iraq as a "$100 billion failure" blamed on "bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure."

3. Rub your eyes/ shake your head/ start running around the room like Daffy Duck does in this cartoon.

Enjoy!

'Outsourcing Intelligence'

2008-12-12T09:46:00.018-10:00

Now there is a truly glorious contradiction in terms. In this era when the Bush Administration sees privatization possibilities in every corner of government, and government effectiveness and accountability is at its lowest point since the Hoover Administration, I suppose it makes perfect sense that it would hire L-3 Communications, a New York-based publicly traded corporation, and its San Diego-based subsidiary Titan Corporation, to gather intelligence and conduct prisoner interrogations in Iraq.

You read that right: a civilian company is gathering a lot of our battlefield intelligence in the Iraq war. (Click here to see a complete breakdown of L-3's Washington lobbying efforts, courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics.)

Despite its low profile and virtual absence from most Iraq war news, "L3/Titan is now probably the second-largest employer in Iraq (after Kellogg, Brown & Root, a former Halliburton subsidiary) with almost 7,000 translators and more than 300 intelligence specialists," Pratap Chattergee, author of the superb 2004 book Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation, writes in this CorpWatch.org report posted a few days ago. Chattergee goes on to detail how L-3's employees "have been barely competent," "indicted for criminal acts" and have "the highest rate of casualties for any civilian contractor in the country."

Of course, the situation involving private military contractors in Iraq is exceedingly complex. Corporations KBR are raking in the dough, while apparently making life difficult, if not outright unbearable, for their actual employees. In fact, KBR has allegedly been exploiting so many migrant workers in Iraq–holding many in nearly prison-like conditions–that 1,000 of them reportedly began staging protests earlier this month. The United Nations has even gotten into the act, and is now calling for better working conditions.

Seriously, is there anything in Iraq that Bush hasn't screwed up? Anything at all?

Bush's Legacy, Part 2 (or 1, I can't keep track anymore of what I've written)

2008-12-11T11:17:00.008-10:00

Wow, George W. Bush is really taking this whole "legacy" thing seriously. This kind of amazes me, since he's never really taken anything in his whole life seriously (well, maybe executing people when he was Texas governor).

Anyway, this article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times says Bush Administration officials are distributing a two-page "talking points" memo on all the good things Bush has done for us while he was president. "The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success," wrote Peter Nicholas. The memo, which the Times says it obtained but did not post online, says Bush's good things include cutting taxes, keeping America "safe," curbing AIDS in Africa and upholding "the honor and dignity of his office," whatever the hell that means. Other matters like Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the global credit crunch and torture at Abu Ghraib are apparently not in the memo for some reason.

Have no fear! The good people at the Center for Public Integrity have been busy compiling their own run-down on Bush's legacy. You can read it here, in all its glory. (You can also still check out ProPublica's look at Bush's record here.)

The invisible atrocity

2008-12-10T10:05:00.013-10:00

As if we don't already have enough to worry about (global financial collapse, endless wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, the future of network programming), here's an AP story that's gotten very little play but I found on the Honolulu Advertiser website. It says that stupid accidents around the world kill nearly a million children every year.

According to the AP story, "More than 800,000 children die each year from burns, car accidents, falls, poisoning and other accidents, with the vast majority of those deaths occurring in developing countries, according to experts and a report released Wednesday by the World Health Organization and UNICEF." (You can read the original WHO/UNICEF report here.)

Eight hundred thousand children killed every year in preventable accidents. That's something like 2,000 deaths every day. The number is so high as to be nearly impossible to imagine.

So we simply don't imagine it. I was being sarcastic in my lead sentence: we will worry about wars and financial disasters, but children around the world dying in accidents–that we won't worry about. That's just a statistic, and statistics aren't tragic. They're just background noise.

Look at how we're able to live with highway deaths in this country. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 340,000 people died on the highways between 2000 and 2007 (with another 16.5 million injured in the same period). Every year, an average of about 41,000 people die on American highways.

This is neither a new figure nor one that seems to trouble many people. In fact, we as a society have done a remarkable job of living with the dead, even when they literally lie all around us. We live with them by saying and doing nothing. Forty-one thousand (or 800,000) dead every year is an atrocity, and we deal with that atrocity by making it invisible.

"Where is the memorial to those deaths and wounds?" Curtis White asks in his remarkable 2003 book The Middle Mind: Why Americans don't think for themselves. "These numbers dwarf the losses in wars like Vietnam and Korea, and yet they are the result of a 'rationalizing' of our communities and our lives."

UPDATE: A few minutes after I posted this entry I came across this story about a horrific car accident early this morning in West Maui that killed a man. My first thought was, "Aha! Here we have a tragedy, and it is being portrayed as such." But then I realized that the 41,000 people who died in traffic accidents last year probably had similar stories marking their deaths, too.

Surveying the 'television landscape'

2008-12-09T14:53:00.022-10:00

In 1961, 34-year-old Newton Minow gave his very first speech as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. In it he called network television a "vast wasteland." Minow's candor earned him national scorn, ridicule and everlasting infamy when Gilligan's Island producer Sherwood Schwartz named the castaway's wrecked boat the Minnow in his honor.

I was reminded of Minow's words today while listening to NPR. On All Things Considered, I heard that Jay Leno, who is leaving his job hosting The Tonight Show, which airs in most markets at 11:30 p.m. on NBC, will in fact stay at NBC and host a new, as yet undefined show at 10 p.m.

Ahh, the machinations, madness and mayhem of network television–where the drama behind the scenes is far superior to that which appears on screen. Apparently, NBC's move is considering almost revolutionary–another Leno talk show reportedly costs just a third that of a dramatic program. Even NPR reporter Kim Masters got a bit misty-eyed over the news, going so far as to quote long-time network producer Fred Silverman on how this could spark the beginning of the end of the network television we've grown to love.

"Fred Silverman finds it a bit sad that a major broadcaster like NBC isn't even going to try to come up with dramas for a big chunk of prime-time," she said in today's report. For him, this is part of a decline that will transform the television landscape." Masters added that Silverman predicts that moves like this means we'll go from three to just two major TV networks in five years.

Decline? Sad? Television has a "landscape"? Silverman said all that? Wow. This, from the guy who brought us such cultural splendor as Charlie's Angels and Starsky and Hutch.

We are talking about NETWORK television, right? Are we as a society (and I use that term rather loosely here) to believe that it would be a bad thing if a "major TV network" went out of business? Oh my God, what would happen if all three networks were to go under? Can you imagine what a nightmare that would be?

We should all be so unfortunate...

The numbers are in

2008-12-08T11:30:00.004-10:00

I love ProPublica, a website entirely devoted to investigative news. Today they posted a fantastic new rundown of statistics on what exactly the Bush Administration has accomplished. Some stats show real progress over the last eight years (AIDS funding is up!) while others show some real decline in society (deportations are way up, too!).

With George W. Bush using these weeks before Barack Obama takes over to promote his "legacy"–complete with a little polishing, where needed–these stats will be both a fun way to reminisce about all that Bush has done for the nation and the world in the last eight years as well as a bench-mark for us to see exactly how much we need to do to clean up the damage.

Correction!

2008-12-08T07:20:00.006-10:00

How quaint and immodest that title looks to me, considering I have, what, three actual readers? I'm kidding, of course. I have four. Anyway, it's come to my attention (thanks Ellen!) that Cornel Bonca's outstanding piece on David Foster Wallace that's running in this week's LA City Beat and that I wrote about here actually originally ran in the Nov. 19 edition of The District Weekly in Long Beach, California. My apologies.

Speaking of apologies, CNN's Political Ticker blog says Karl Rove will apparently be offering tons of them (and by "tons of them," I mean "absolutely none") in his new tell-all book about the legions the mean, mean people who, in CNN's words, "never accepted the president as a legitimate commander-in-chief."

"I'm going to name names and show examples," Rove said, according to CNN. So this is going to be a Roll of Honor, then?

RIP DFW

2008-12-07T12:26:00.011-10:00

David Foster Wallace has long been one of my inspirations. A master of the English language, DFW could string together impossibly long sentences, replete with colorful descriptions, conservational prose and, every now and then, completely made up mathematical formulae. It made no difference what he was writing; Infinite Jest is a delightful monster of a novel; Consider the Lobster gathers some of the best journalism I've ever read. Even now, I find myself attempting–and miserably failing–to mimic his style.

His Sept. 12 suicide hit me, like many of his fans, like a baseball bat to the gut.

Anyone even a bit saddened by his death should read this week's LA City Beat cover story. I'm a bit biased as to its charm and intellect (both the writer, Cornel Bonca, and the editor, Will Swaim, were colleagues of mine during my days at OC Weekly) and other stories are far more detailed and biographical, but this piece nicely captures that feelings of emptiness that gripped fans after they heard DFW had, like so many other creative, brilliant writers, ended his own life.

How to sell a dead actor

2008-12-06T10:26:00.014-10:00

Going to run with the idea of commodifying human beings (especially dead ones) a bit more. Today's Los Angeles Times has a fascinating article on the "tough balancing act" Warner Brothers is trying to maintain as it markets the movie The Dark Knight to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Reporter Rachel Abramowitz puts it quite succinctly in the lead:

"How do you run an Oscar campaign for Heath Ledger, the widely admired young actor who died last January of an overdose of prescription drugs? Very carefully, it seems, as Warner Bros., the studio behind 'The Dark Knight,' tries to tread the line between tribute and exploitation in rallying academy support for Ledger's performance as the maniacal, nihilistic Joker."

Here we have one of those morality tales that Hollywood loves to death–literally–and it's being handled with all the subtlety of a Ron Howard picture. Warner Bros., a massive multimedia subsidiary of Time Warner, desperately wants an Oscar statue inscribed with Ledger's name. The company wants this because the phrase "Academy Award-winning" translates into actual, real money when printed on a movie poster or DVD box.

But the trick (and I use this word deliberately as well) here is that the Academy Warner Bros. is trying to woo is actually Warner Bros. itself. See, the Academy is made up of "motion picture professionals"–in other words, people who work at Warner Bros., among other studios.

Put another way, the "balancing act" that's going on here isn't really between Warner Bros. and the Academy, but between Warner Bros. and the Academy on one side and the movie-going public on the other. And this is a very delicate operation indeed, because it's the public that ultimately pays for both movies and the Academy Awards program itself. This, Abramowitz writes, is something the Academy understands very well:

"Already, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members say that if Ledger is nominated, his spectral presence could help reverse the ratings slide for the Academy Awards show as fans tune in to see if his riveting turn as the demonic Joker is honored."

What, too crass? Remember, the LA Times story began with the word "How," not "Why." Some questions are apparently so obvious that it's ridiculous to ask them.

Ask for Obama by name

2008-12-05T08:32:00.015-10:00

Nice to read today that Barack Obama has officially reached that uniquely American achievement of becoming a brand. "While many local tour companies now are offering visits to the old stomping grounds of President-elect Barack Obama, at least a dozen companies are using the Oahu-born politician's name in their trademark or trade name," reports today's Pacific Business News.

Of course, we reduced Obama to a mere commodity long before his election as president. And the popularity of that commodity apparently hasn't abated. Cafe Press, that great indicator of online consumer preference, currently offers 97,600 Obama-related designs on 3,050,000 products. (Those wanting to see more unusual Obama merchandise can click here.)

In fact, Obama-as-a-brand is probably a far greater achievement than even his historic winning of the White House. Our Constitution limits Obama to eight years in office, but the Obama brand is potentially eternal. It (branding unfortunately means that "he" is now an "it") could generate revenue for decades, even generations. Look at Elvis, or The Beatles. They're both long dead (sorry Paul and Ringo, but John and George are actually more alive than you two these days) but both are still raking in cash with no end in sight.

And they're just musicians! Think of what President Obama, who seems to transcend race while offering hope to billions around the world, could bring in! And in a society built on markets and marketability, where every person is a consumer first and a citizen second, isn't that the ultimate goal?

Watching The Great American Giveaway

2008-12-04T08:37:00.013-10:00

Anyone not getting enough misery and disgust in their lives really ought to turn on C-SPAN right now and watch the Senate Banking Committee hearings on whether to bail-out the Big Three automakers. A month ago Ford CEO Alan Mulally, GM CEO Rick Wagoner and Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli flew to Washington in private jets and warned lawmakers that unless they immediately got $25 billion they'd go out of business and make our unhappy economy a whole lot worse. Shut down completely by the skeptical senators, they slipped away (still apparently on their corporate jets) but then experienced an epiphany: they'd return in hybrid cars (which they are loathe to build unless the Fed subsidizes them), beg forgiveness and, while they're at it, up their request to $34 billion.

"If the federal government can provide a blank check to Wall Street, it should be able to provide a temporary bridge loan to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler," United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger told senators today. And, with all the "free market" logic I learned in high school and college turned on its head these days, Gettelfinger is right. Other countries give money to their domestic auto-makers, we're told, which is also right. Of course, "other countries" also pay for their citizens' health care, but I doubt we'll hear that argument in the Dirksen Office Building anytime soon.

Wait–did I just write "argument"? What possibly constitutes an argument here? Three publicly traded firms–represented by three executives beholden to boards of directors, which are themselves beholden to something called "shareholder interest"–that have consistently failed to compete in an ostensibly free market are now calling themselves victims of our recent global credit collapse and begging for taxpayer dollars when they should have long been paying more attention to consumers (who, for some strange reason, really would like to buy cars that use little or no petroleum-based fuel). In fact, the Bush Administration, which could easily instruct the Fed or the U.S. Treasury to give the auto-makers money, instead wants Congress (beneficiary of $1.5 million in auto-maker campaign contributions in 2008 alone) to allow the Big Three use a $25 billion alt-energy subsidy for the bailout.

But I digress... The Great American Giveaway is still underway! And we get to watch it live! On TV! Is this a great country or what?

Lies, news and Afghanistan

2008-12-03T10:41:00.011-10:00

Thanks to the always-uplifting Center for Media and Democracy, I just learned that at a time when President-elect Barack Obama is apparently planning all sorts of new and wild things for our relatively small but intensifying war in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, the commander of NATO forces there, is merging the military office in charge of sending out news releases with his psychological warfare unit–an apparent violation of NATO policy, to say nothing of common sense.

That's right, folks: we've got rising NATO casualties, pro-Taliban and anti-government warlords creeping ever closer to Kabul (the only real domain of Afghan President Hamid Karzai) and a "commander in the field" who decided that there's no real difference between news reports designed to inform the taxpayers who fund his army and outright lies and propaganda crafted to fool our enemies.

Of course, U.S. military officials have long said all sorts of stuff about Afghanistan that turned out to be not anything close to true. Check out this five-year-old Time Magazine article questioning whether then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's May 2003 declaration that the war in Afghanistan was over was, in fact, a bit premature.

So in a way, what McKiernan is proposing isn't all that radical: rather than tell a lie and call it the truth, our generals and statesmen will simply speak lies and then call them lies. In a way, that might actually make this war more honest. I'm kidding, of course, and it would be very funny, too, had 1,017 soldiers and untold thousands of civilians not died in our little war that Obama wants to fix...

UPDATE: Just moments before I was to post this entry, I stumbled across this Reuters story reporting that McKiernan has just today changed his mind and "scrapped" plans to merge the news and psy-war offices. His reason? "[T]he commander wanted to make sure he had something completely compliant with NATO policy," a spokesman told Reuters.

Feel better now?

Linda Lingle's the one!

2008-12-02T10:11:00.007-10:00

Somehow, 49 governors and governors-elect managed to attend President-elect Barack Obama's big meeting in Philadelphia today. Guess who didn't show? That's right, our own lovely and talented Linda Lingle, governor of the Great State of Hawaii. During the election, Lingle repeatedly made herself look a lot dumber than she is by publicly denigrating Obama's Hawaii roots. Now she's topped even herself by showing the rest of the nation's governors (including Alaska's Sarah Palin!) that she possesses all the political instincts of a lava rock wall.

Think about this: 49 governors found time in their schedules to attend Obama's big meeting. But not our own Linda Lingle–she just can't spare a moment from focusing on our state's economy to fly to Philly. Hey, Linda–you think Obama and the rest of our nation's governors, many of which also supported Senator John McCain for president, headed there on very little notice during a very cold autumn just for their health?

Just about every reporter who's ever covered Lingle has heard of her reputation for having a long memory where slights are concerned. Maybe she doesn't care if Obama remembers this little insult, but I'm pretty sure the rest of the state–which overwhelmingly voted Obama for president–just might.

Bankruptcy: It's Fantastic!

2008-12-02T07:38:00.011-10:00

Seems that a lot of us, at least in Hawaii, are following old Hawaiian Telcom into Chapter 7, 11 and 13 lands. "A review of U.S. Bankruptcy Court filings shows there were 215 filings in November, the most in any month this year," says this Honolulu Advertiser story. "That was a 72 percent increase from a year earlier."

Indeed, this Honolulu Star-Bulletin story says the number of bankruptcies–virtually all Chapters 7 and 13–are at their highest level since 2005, and that was apparently a banner year because people wanted "to beat a new law... that made it more costly and difficult to file for bankruptcy."

And we're talking the entire state here, not just Honolulu: "Maui bankruptcy attorney David Cain reported he's seen a big rise in business," says the Advertiser, "and that some of his new clients include former real estate and mortgage brokers who overextended themselves during better economic times."

Former real estate and mortgage brokers who overextended themselves? That could be half the island...

HT still not OK

2008-12-01T14:59:00.011-10:00

Apparently, Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle–fresh off the John McCain campaign trail, where she made a name for herself ridiculing Barack Obama's Hawaii roots–is also taking an interest in Hawaiian Telcom's troubles: "Our Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, the Consumer Advocate and the Public Utilities Commission has been closely monitoring the company's financial circumstances and correspondingly has been informed of the company's hopes to restructure in an effort to make Hawaiian Telcom financially stronger," Lingle said today in an official statement, according to this Honolulu Advertiser story.

So now Lingle is interested in HT's troubles? How about two years ago, when rotten customer service were infuriating customers that the state Public Utilities Commission felt compelled to start an investigation?

HT not OK

2008-12-01T11:30:00.011-10:00

Been reading about Hawaiian Telcom's filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy this morning. Not that it really affects me–I haven't had a land-line in years, which is probably part of HT's problem. Certainly, the trend towards cell-phones, Skype and cable phone service is certainly causing problems for Hawaiian Telcom (to the tune of $425 million in losses since mega-private equity fund Carlyle Group bought the phone company from Verizon Hawaii back in 2005) and every other land-line provider out there.

But what I find most surprising about the HT bankruptcy news is how HT can fail so utterly (it has nearly $1 billion in debt?!) when it's owned by huge, massive, ridiculously wealthy and well-connected Carlyle Group. I mean, when Carlyle bought the company it was practically choking on its own hubris about how great this would be for local phone customers.

"We're a company that has come full circle, back to being locally managed again," Michael Ruley, then HT's CEO, said in this May 3, 2005 press release. "The company was founded more than 120 years ago to serve Hawaii's people, and today we're returning to that original mission."

Did I mention that HT sacked Ruley in February of this year, in favor of a "restructuring guru"? Or that a former Hawaiian Electric Co. exec replaced that guy in May? Coming full circle seems to be something HT does on a regular basis.

Dissing the 'commanders in the field'

2008-11-30T08:51:00.010-10:00

Today the Honolulu Advertiser editorial page heartily approves of President-elect Barack Obama's "apparent" choice to keep Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. "That's a smart move," the unsigned editorial puffs. "With the nation's economic turmoil rightly Obama's top priority, Gates' understanding and proven leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan will help us continue to chart the right course regarding war policy."

Huh? Since when has American "war policy" been on the "the right course"? How is fighting two wars simultaneously in Asia, neither of which will end anytime soon, the right course? And since when has the U.S. had a "war policy," other than a vaguely identified doctrine of "preemption" that may in fact violate international law?

Even more disturbing is the Advertiser's willingness to rely on meaningless cliches to describe Gate's skills and effectiveness: "Gates wisely listened to commanders on the ground, namely Gen. David Petraeus, and revised the timetable for withdrawal [of U.S. troops from Iraq] to accommodate the 'surge,' which military leaders say has resulted in a reduction of casualties." Leaving aside the contention that the well-promoted "surge" in U.S. forces has dampened the violence in Iraq (other analysts point to the U.S. paying Sunni insurgents to stop fighting may have also helped), let's focus on that favorite military cliche, the inherent wisdom of the "commanders on the ground."

President George W. Bush often mentions in war speeches how he only makes military policy after listening to his vaunted, infallible commanders on the ground. After all, he may be our commander-in-chief, but he's not there in the shit, actually fighting the war. Our commanders are there, and if they want something like more troops or permission to chase suspected terrorists into Syria, who is Bush to say no?

The obvious problem with this view is that the commanders on the ground aren't always right. Remember General of the Army Douglas MacArthur? His amphibious landing at Inchon in the early months of the Korean War has been called "brilliant" more times than I can count, but then not long after all of his military genius abruptly drained away, with horrifying results. In November 1950, the Chinese sent 300,000 soldiers into the North Korean mountains and slaughtered thousands of American soldiers, despite "brilliant" MacArthur's repeated assurances to President Harry Truman (who also wasn't shy about telling critics that he was acting on recommendations from the commanders on the ground) that China would never, ever enter Korea.

Lousy generals are nothing new. They plagued both sides in the American Civil War. In Vietnam, Generals Paul Harkins and William Westmoreland were particularly clueless about how to deal with Viet Cong insurgents. And in Iraq, as this Armed Forces Journal article by the very brave U.S. Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling makes abundantly clear, bad generals are the reason we're still hunkered down in the desert doing little good.

WaMu BS

2008-11-29T19:42:00.007-10:00

Just saw a commercial for Washington Mutual bank advertising how it's great that they're now "part of [JP Morgan] Chase" because customers have just gained access to "14,000 ATMs." For some reason, WaMu failed to mention in its ad that getting bought by Chase (a recipient of $25 billion in federal bailout money, which the company plans to use not to approve more loans but to buy up more weak banks) was also great for customers because it negated WaMu's recent triumph as the "biggest bank failure in U.S. history."

"JP Morgan Chase is known for strength and stability," trumpets the WaMu website. "We know–it's a big, exciting change."

Seriously, where would I be without corporate advertising bullshit?

Top 10 words and phrases I don't want to hear anymore

2008-11-29T11:54:00.003-10:00

10. Skillset

9. Empower

8. Gated community

7. Cut and run

6. Evil-doer

5. Touch base

4. Privatize

3. Drinkability

2. Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

1. Keanu Reeves

Parsing Wayne Nishiki

2008-11-28T17:36:00.014-10:00

I just read with great interest Wayne Nishiki's Viewpoint article on his election disclosure troubles in Thursday's Maui News. As is now well-known on Maui, ex-Maui County Council member Wayne Nishiki barely defeated former County Planning Department Deputy Director Don Couch in the race for the South Maui seat on the County Council–a race that seemed to hinge on Couch's taking campaign contributions from land developers and Nishiki's repeated pledges not to take any such money.

But now Nishiki is in danger of losing a seat he hasn't even officially taken yet because of the sudden, post-election revelation (broken by my old Maui Time Weekly on Nov. 18) that in 2005, Nishiki received a $100,000 personal loan from mega-developer Everett Dowling (one of my favorite targets back when I edited Maui Time). Had news of this loan–which remains outstanding and involves a man pushing the development of Makena, one of the biggest land issues facing the County Council–it's likely the election would have turned out very differently. While candidates had to disclose their finances to both the County Clerk's Office and the County Board of Ethics in early August–so that voters would have enough time to take in the information–Nishiki waited until Oct. 16, not quite three weeks before the election. And even then, he filed it with Ethics Board only.

With calls for both impeachment and recall floating around, Nishiki's Nov. 27 Maui News Viewpoint is thus a very important look at his strategy. But it's not encouraging. In the immediate hours after news of the loan broke, Nishiki seemed apologetic and humble for not filing his financial disclosure form outlining the loan in August, when it was due. In fact, in the Nov. 20 Maui News he admitted that, "I did file it late... There's really no excuse."

But now, Nishiki says he filed the form on time. "The disclosure form was on file with the county almost three weeks before the election on Nov. 4," Nishiki wrote in his Nov. 27 Maui News Viewpoint. "Anyone wishing to know the information contained on the form had this nearly three-week period to review the information. This information was not hidden from anyone."

Nishiki's explanation ignores two key points. First, as this Nov. 21 Maui News article makes clear, any filing with the County Ethics Board doesn't become public until reviewed at their next monthly hearing, which in this case, didn't occur until Nov. 12–more than a week after the election. And secondly, Nishiki also failed to file a copy of his disclosure form with the County Clerk's Office–had he done that, the form would have become publicly available immediately.

While there is an argument that Couch and his people didn't fight hard enough in the closing weeks of the election to force Nishiki's disclosure form, the ultimate responsibility for disclosure fell on Nishiki's–not his opponent's–shoulders.

"Despite my shortcomings," Nishiki writes near the end of his Nov. 27 Viewpoint, "I have never betrayed the public trust as a council member." These words may be the closest thing to an official apology we get from Nishiki, since both his accepting of Dowling's loan and his ultimate failure to disclose the loan in a timely manner that would have benefitted the voters took place when he was not a council member.

Sometimes I hate it when I'm right

2008-11-28T09:21:00.014-10:00

I usually feel good when I find that a certified smart person thinks the same way I do about politics. But in the case of Noam Chomsky's recent 7,700-word take on the election of Barack Obama in Znet, not so much.

I've been watching a lot of my left-leaning friends take serious satisfaction in Obama's victory over Senator John McCain–taking Obama's frequent calls for "change" to mean that he'll enact much-needed liberal policies and legislation. And I've been feeling more than a little satisfaction when I read right-wing blow-hards like Sean Hannity of Fox News say that he thinks Obama's election means we'll finally "see the person that I think Barack Obama is. I think he is hard, hard left." But through it all, a quiet but steady voice in the back of my mind has repeatedly questioned whether Obama is as leftist as I want him to be: will he slap real, progressive regulations on Wall Street? And will he actually liquidate loathsome, illegal, immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq?

Now, thanks to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's website, which first alerted me to Chomsky's essay, I see that I'm not alone. Chomsky points out that both Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel were early and among the "strongest supporters" of the 2003 Iraq invasion. He notes that key Obama economics adviser Robert Rubin "worked hard to abolish the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial banks from financial institutions that incur high risks." And he mentions that key Obama financial adviser Lawrence Summers "presided over legislation barring federal regulation of derivatives"–ultra-risky investments that played a substantial role in the recent global financial meltdown.

As far as Iraq goes, "Obama has frequently been praised for this 'principled opposition' to the war," Chomsky wrote. "In reality, as he has made clear, his opposition has been entirely unprincipled throughout. The war, he said, is a 'strategic blunder.' When Kremlin critics of the invasion of Afghanistan called it a strategic blunder, we did not say that they were taking a principled stand."

To be sure, a President Obama is infinitely preferable to a President McCain or President Bush (either one). But it's naive, even laughable, to think that he represents a turn away from the long-held imperial view that, in the U.S., it's perfectly acceptable for bankers to make domestic policy and generals govern foreign affairs and if a few ordinary people around the world get trampled here and there, then that's just too bad.

Is it Thanksgiving already?

2008-11-27T08:49:00.013-10:00

Laughing over the latest e-mail newsletter from Hawaii Lt. Governor James "Duke" Aiona. He's a busy man, you know, traveling to Asia, opposing teen smoking in all its forms and doing photo-ops with Disney officials building a big resort in West Oahu. Scanning the newsletter, it's painfully obvious that Duke–one of the few elected Republicans in the state–is running for governor, but of course that's been well known since June 2007 when, with no sense of irony, Aiona told a Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter that he was too busy being Lt. Governor to talk about the 2010 Governor's race, even though he had just filed his campaign's organizational report with the state Campaign Spending Commission.

Anyway, enough of that. I'll just close early by wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving–especially my friend Chris, who will be eating his turkey and trimmings (if he's lucky to get them) in Iraq this year.

'People' vs. 'Bad Guys'

2008-11-26T20:29:00.009-10:00

Watching a rerun of the HBO miniseries Generation Kill right now. Though vivid and compelling in its portrayal of an elite U.S. Marine Corps unit that fought in the 2003 invasion of Iraq as well as surprisingly loyal to its source material–in this case, an outstanding 2004 book of the same name by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright–the series does contain some striking differences. One of them, though tiny at first glance, is gnawing at me.

The scene takes place a little more than halfway through the series, when Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick is briefing some of his men on an upcoming mission. "The bad news is, we won't get much sleep tonight," Fick says in the HBO series. "The good news is, we get to kill bad guys." Since I had just turned on the TV when that scene aired, I pulled my copy of Wright's book off the shelf to find the scene and figure out where they were. I found the dialogue right away, but was surprised to see that Fick actually told his men that the good news was that his men would get to kill "people," not "bad guys."

This is not a small distinction (though given the number of civilians killed by U.S. personnel during the war, Fick's actual words were morbidly prescient), but I know exactly why HBO made the change. In 2005, Fick–a thoughtful and intelligent Dartmouth grad then studying at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government–wrote his own outstanding memoir. In that book, Fick says Wright's "kill people" quotation caused considerable consternation on the part of grad school admissions people.

When asked to explain why he pumped up his Marines by saying they were about to "kill people," Fick said he could not, but refused to back down from the quote. That he ultimately made it into grad school would seem to say fears of Fick turning into some clock tower sniper ultimately didn't amount to much, but the HBO rewrite actually reinforces the admissions officer's squeamishness and does everyone a disservice. Fick, an honest and thoughtful man ultimately wracked by guilt over the number of civilians his troops were accidentally killing, is also a Marine thoroughly steeped in the Marine Corps "kill" mentality.

Maybe it's just the journalist in me, but I don't see how we can learn about war by simplifying a complex man and changing words he refuses to deny.

$8 Trillion!

2008-11-26T08:33:00.030-10:00

U.S. taxpayers are now officially on the hook for an astonishing, mind-numbing, ludicrously intolerable $8 trillion in financial sector bailouts. Woohoo! Eight trillion bucks! That's gotta be some kind of record! USA! USA! USA!

And now on a more serious note, we're screwed. It's all but impossible to describe that number in a way that's easy to visualize, except to say that U.S. National Debt currently stands at $10.6 trillion and the U.S. Gross Domestic Product–basically the sum total of the nation's entire economy–is $13.8 trillion. Check out CNBC for a good breakdown of where the money is actually going and the immensely readable Propublica investigative journalism website for solid context and commentary.

"We privatize profits; we socialize losses," former U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission Director Michael Greenberger told NPR's Terry Gross back in September when projected bailout figures hovered nowhere near $8 trillion. And what's more, no one really knows how long this can continue. While it's easy to say that the election of Barack Obama represents a complete rejection of the Bush Administration's policies (or lack of policies) that led to the housing collapse and credit crunch in the first place, those who look carefully at this chart listing Obama's top contributors and then at this one identifying banks getting taxpayer bailouts may find it hard to be optimistic.

Gates Stays Open

2008-11-25T14:45:00.019-10:00

Just read a shocking story broken by the Associated Press. Seems that President-elect Barack Obama has asked current Defense Secretary (and former Central Intelligence Agency Director) Dr. Robert M. Gates to stay on at least another year. And like you, my first thought was simple and obvious: Why not me? I mean, it's like I haven't asked for a big cabinet job, and running the Pentagon would be sweet. Given Gates' predecessor, the job can't be that hard...

Anyway, my second thought was that this was merely another example of Obama acknowledging that he believes the U.S. is an empire that requires a militarized foreign policy, further demolishing Senator John McCain's campaign rhetoric that Obama will push a socialist agenda once in office. But then I remembered that Secretary Gates is not so easily explained.

Thumbing through New York Times reporter Tim Weiner's superb 2007 Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, I came across this passage on a key CIA shortcoming that contributed to the failure to identify the 9/11 terror plots and has never really been properly addressed:

"Over the years, the CIA had become less and less willing to hire 'people that are a little different, people who are eccentric, people who don't look good in a suit and tie, people who don't play well in the sandbox with others,' Bob Gates said. 'The kinds of tests that we make people pass, psychological, and everything else, make it very hard for somebody who may be brilliant or have extraordinary talents and unique capabilities to get into the agency.'"

For an agency that thrives on secrecy and paranoia, that's an unusually harsh and thoughtful critique, especially for a former director. Of course, we must also remember that Gates has always tended to tell Congress and the press what they wanted to hear, which probably at least partially explains why there's never been much call to examine his role in the 1987 Iran-Contra Scandal.

Is it possible Gates might actually be an honest broker in the Obama Administration? Or is he simply a master spymaster, able to read anyone, regardless of ideology and position, and adapt accordingly to keep himself in power?

Then again, the AP story cited above is based on a single unnamed source, which means I may be theorizing for nothing. I don't know about you, but that somehow reassures me.

Let's start with some good news...

2008-11-25T10:48:00.011-10:00

And by "good," I unfortunately mean "lousy." CNN Money is reporting that housing prices are still plummeting at a record rate. "The S&P Case-Shiller Home Price national index recorded a 16.6% decline in the third quarter compared with the same period a year ago," CNN Money reported today. "That eclipsed the previous record of 15.1% set during the second quarter." This means even more bad, bad times for the Mainland real estate and construction market, though it's not clear that Hawaii will suffer too–at least, not yet. Though local housing prices have fallen–some Honolulu sellers are actually dropping $100,000 off their asking prices–median prices in Hawaii's capitol city are apparently still the third highest in the nation.

Of course, the really scary thing about the collapse of the domestic housing market is the way it exemplifies the Bush Administration's utterly misanthropic approach to domestic policy (hell, all government policy). In fact, it was just four years ago that President George W. Bush told us the centerpiece of his second term of office was a plan to make it easier for people to buy their own homes. "We will... build an ownership society," Bush said in his 2005 Inaugural Address. "By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our society more prosperous and just and equal."

Is it really a surprise that consumer confidence seemed to rise following the November elections?