Painting by Darwin Leon

HAWAII SUFFERS THE MAINLAND
By David Arthur Walters

Honolulu 1997

People on the Mainland ask me how business is in Hawaii, and I reply, Well, Hawaii suffers. Suffers from what? Hawaii suffers from the Main landing. For the titanic economic dictatorship the Main has docked in Hawaii with a motto from the Napoleonic alliance of colossal business: "Adjust or Die!"

No longer is Hawaii a sanctuary from a world weary of its vassalage to the centralizing authority of the mammoth economic doctrine of the merging vested interests. No longer is she an insular resort from the careening careers of a world crazed by love for abstract quantities with no intrinsic worth, digital monetary signs in databases signifying nothing more than the fear of life indefinitely divided.

I sadly report that Hawaii has been infected with the United State of Mind, the Monomaniacal Plague raging contagiously about the world, threatening to reduce the entire globe to a gelatinous state with its insidious, totalitarian virus.
 
And where is the Government we once cherished to protect us in our differences now that those differences are disappearing in economic correctness? The Government is almost fully merged with Business now. Business is the Government, and when we ask it for help, it says: "Let the Market decide." And this shortly after Business swears under oath that nicotine is not addictive, smoking does not cause cancer, and that its research proves that all products sold are perfectly safe.

Well, no thank you, Mr. Business. I did not vote for Chainsaw Al, Neutron Jack, or Pieface Bill, running on a platform of downsizing even one's own family, depopulating offices in the mechanical pursuit of gigantic money machines, and ganging up on the world to bring it to the nihilistic point of Global Stupidity.

When the original People of the United States, in order to form a more Perfect Union, established a Constitution, they invested their ultimate Power in Three Branches, thinking that this division of Power would make their Government safe. But the modern Trustees of those revered Offices exercise "their" monolithic "thinking" on a singular faulty Premise. Everywhere man "thinks" he is free but he is everywhere enchained by perverse economic Dogma.

Hawaii’s Constitution informs the newcomer that the lawmaking power that naturally resides in the people is vested not in some abstract branch of government but rather in the people themselves; this is a simple, easily understood tautology. Therefore, romantic hope remains that the people of Hawaii will become a Beacon unto the world, lighting the dreams and imaginations everywhere with the benevolent rays of aloha. But they suffer now, and not for the final Cause of Love, but from passive obedience feeding the mechanical jaws of an economic Godzilla that would grind them all down to an average statistical dust to be swept aside as part of the monolithic painful adjustment.

The Hawaiians, many of whom tired long ago of being happy-go-lucky stereotypes strumming ukuleles and singing English waltzes with big grins on their faces, have so learned to distrust the rest of us that some of them believe aloha is their private, spiritual property not to be shared with us; nevertheless, our economic exploitation and worship of the relativity-god has so influenced them in their own thinking that they too stand divided amongst themselves in the vicious war of all against all. "Aloha" has become a commercial motto; even so, it is increasingly rare to hear even the perfunctory, obligatory "aloha" from business, especially from those laptoppers debarking from the battleship Main: the very word is an embarrassment to them, for those emotions which are the sense of all values are not to be displayed while conducting rational business.

Yes, Hawaii suffers passively, tries to go along, goes to the Mainland for advice, to adjust, to do whatever it takes to breath clean air and feel the hot sun in the winter, to have enough creature comfort to endure the low wages and high prices and mysteriously disappearing profits; and now the buzzword buzzards with buzz saws are downsizing and privatizing all around, working little chainsaw massacres everywhere, massacres that are well-hidden by a veil of natural beauty from the visitor's casual eye, and concealed as well by the enormous wealth created by labor and placed in the hands of a few interests who, now that there is a downturn, offer a pink slip or a ten-percent reduction of a nine-dollar per hour wage. And those are, ironically, the same interests who advise everyone to invest for the long term as workers are terminated, often just for sake of the new management's short-term perpetual innovations while new management makes its underhanded efforts to pull the Government rug out from under the fired.

Think about the consequences of this immorality when the whole machine begins to grind to a halt. And it will, because the machine is manmade and man is fallible. For instance, ask the engineers why we have a Year 2000 computer programming problem coming up and you will hear: "Uh, well, you see, at the time the conditions were such that, uh...."

It is a miracle that the old-timers in Hawaii are still so nice. They have a heritage of suffering running parallel to suffering in the South. Now that the noble paternalistic duties to the needy of the wealthy plantation lords and commercial dynasties, as well as the religious duties of the missionaries, have been assumed by Government, those duties are openly despised and defamed by an invidious, covetous Business. Business would be Government by virtue of the ruthless processes it adulates. Paternalism is made a mockery by the laptoppers, and no recourse is provided under their idea of welfare except a slim chance, under the Golden Arches of Hamburger Heaven, to earn enough to go to Technology School, and, if graduated, to move to the Mainland for a real job because one must first pay homage to the economic idols of the status quo, to prove himself suitable, and hopefully save a half-million dollars for a house back home.

Maybe I have gone mad, that seeing the one glorious truth of the struggle for existence all around me, I have gone crazy and am hysterically barking at the gigantic commercial Wheel just because it spins, just because I am so paranoid as to believe that its Spokes are about to break and bring the Analog Clock crashing down on our minute pinheads. Perhaps I am really a neo-Don Quixote, and the Wheel I see is the windmill about to make a fool of me as the world keeps on turning on a real axis.

I am well aware of the foolishness of Chicken Little: the Oriental Oracle informs me of my birth defects in the Year of the Rooster. Yet, still, if I am right, I cannot help but warn of the dire consequences of that Trojan Horse being wheeled into our state of being under the guise of a gift without seeing my own eventual demise in the consequences. I will surely die eventually, but I prefer to choose my fate, my life the best I can; that is precisely my point: I prefer to be true to my own nature and to refuse to lay down and behave like a dog or a well-behaved administrator who has the firm handshake of a frozen fish, especially when every effort to participate, to contribute a unique nature, is greeted with a granite-faced, ill-informed, and impersonal public policy: it is no wonder that a head becomes sore beating against the silent monolith creeping up on Paradise. In any event one must be courageous, even on the scaffold built to relieve us of headaches.

I confess my phobia for spinning wheels. I have gone so far as to propose that all uses of wheels be prohibited except as coins of the realm. That would provide plenty of service jobs: that is, after all, one of the means to the glorious End, is it not? There we shall sit back in the comfortable stuffed seats of our Empire and live on Compound Interest while ruling the world with myriads upon myriads of phalanxes and cohorts of "free" servants empowered to execute our commands! But why not displace the servants with robots, and "thinking" with genetic heuristically algorithmic neural network software, The Adam Utility, based upon Complexity Theory, a penultimate program that will spontaneously organize the world into the best of all possible patterns populated by monarchical butterflies?

If our technology were really so useful, we would have a ten-hour average workweek and Business would pay us to be truly free the rest of the time. But freedom is not the object of economic dictatorship. A huge database of purchasing power does not satisfy the overpowering desire to see battalions of freed slaves waiting on Your Excellency hand and foot.

So if I am mad, please call me mad. But before you sit in judgment, consider these few examples from Hawaii. Let me know if you also hear the Monotone I refer to, and if you also consider it extremely perilous to that "diversity" the politically correct mouth obeisance to, and if you agree that its piercing frequency is about to shatter the fragile glass of our sustenance.

Forty-five thousand dollars have already been contributed to a team of experts who will determine the monetary value of natural resources in Hawaii, "putting a price tag on the environment in order to save it."

"Markets tend to ignore the value of natural resources, which often don't have a price tag attached to them," said Paul Brewbaker, chief economist for the Bank of Hawaii, as quoted by the Honolulu Advertiser on May 10, 1998. "This research will improve our capacity to measure the state's natural resources and how it contributes to the welfare of our citizens and the wealth of our state." Think about that for a minute....

Speaking of Natural Resources, the Hawaiian people represent Nature in the form of the Hula. They dance at the natural place first, and then bring Nature to the stage for us to appreciate. The Hula dancers are Nature, and without the flowers and leaves around their ankles and wrists and crowning their heads, there is no Nature, therefore no Hula. The Hawaiians have rights to gather the sacred plants they wear. There have been recent efforts to impinge on those rights. I suppose that each plant will have a little price tag on it! The accountants will add up the prices into a Huge Sum that the governor can use for collateral to borrow billions, and at a lower interest rate to boot since Standard & Poors will certainly raise our credit rating in the face of all that Capital.

Really! We might ask the economists: "How much is your arm worth?" Or rather, "How much is your brain worth?" However that may be, accountants are not to blame; we are at fault, so we should really ask how we have sunk so far back into Pythagorean superstition as to take Number so seriously.

Stanley Hong, president of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of Hawaii wrote a succinct summary of the predominant political-economic perspective here, which appeared under the title "The Will To Change" in the Chamber publication, Small Business On The Move '98.

I am a member of the Chamber because it happens to have an excellent salesperson on the job. I am probably the smallest business the Chamber has ever had. I met Mr. Hong briefly, and found him to be an affable, courteous gentleman with good intentions. But his article leads me to believe that he has also been hoodwinked by the economic jargon, and that he is running in the same circle with the competition; those out in front are so inured to being whipped into a frenzy that they don't feel it anymore nor, as their adrenaline gushes into the heat of the race, do they even realize they are mounted by corporate jockeys. Therefore, I believe that we should consider Mr. Hong's article as a cartel, that is, as a challenge to a duel, a challenge to wake up and live.
 
This is the proposition put forth by Mr. Hong in his cartel, to wit: downsizing both Government and Business while also decreasing the size of Government in proportion to Business and, at the same time, privatizing traditional Government functions, will have a positively salutary effect on small business and Government. Mr. Hong advises us in our willingness to change, to "adjust" to that premise. He offers as scientific evidence the advice of a Mainland Investment Bank. He mentions that Opposition does exist, but he does not state or answer its arguments, or advise where its views might be found in the glare of mega-media advertising conglomerates. He has asked for ideas. Maybe he is willing to change his opinions if he finds he has been deceived.

I do believe he has been deceived by his willingness to faithfully serve Business. For, I feel the business interests represented by Mr. Hong speak well for the consolidation of Big Business and the further concentration of wealth and other forms of power into the facilities of the major vested interests; however, they do not, in my opinion, when taken to their logical conclusions, favor either small business development or better government, nor are they conducive to social well-being.

In fact, perspicacious social workers, Sylvia Yuen, Barbara DeBaryshe, and Ivette Rodriquez Stern, at the Center for the Family at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, have pointed out, in a two-page spread in the Honolulu Advertiser, the social consequences implied by the policy professed by Mr. Hong: family violence, homicide, suicide, physical illness, depression, anxiety, and drug and alcohol abuse.

The authors presented a bulleted list of how victims should behave in order to adjust to their circumstances; the suggested behavior did not include political protest and civil disobedience. The advice given is, in many respects, entirely laudable, but I was left lamenting the day when humanism became a "science" of describing and conforming to the status quo and its prevalent ideology. Nowadays, even the numbering of How Tos has been replaced by "bullets", blank vestiges of the ability to judge and evaluate according to priorities.

Finally, I must mention here the callous treatment of the University of Hawaii, the beautiful foster mother, alma mater, of so many educated people here. She is unwittingly treated like a street-walker who should not be funded unless she provides for the vulgar interests, rather than being provided the productive, happy home that a foster mother needs to perform her work.

The university administration is very well-behaved, thank you very much for going along. However, Outsiders, a group including almost everyone who makes suggestions and efforts to help, do not even receive a Thank You or No Thank You card in response under the cold-fish impersonal policy currently in effect.

Instead of spending dollars for television advertising soliciting nickels and dimes and applause for the university administration, the caretakers should personally knock on the doors of the wealthy persons, estates and businesses that have already benefited under the university auspices everywhere, and who will make even more tremendous fortunes for everybody by investing first in universal liberal education rather than demanding that priority be given to the perpetually fluctuating particulars of fleeting desire. Understanding the huge difference between sales and marketing, between ramming products down throats instead of finding out what nourishment is wanted, the caretakers should be caretakers instead of undertakers, reduce tuition and fill the classes with enthused teachers inspiring students with the truth of a good education.

There you have it. I have been asked how business is in Hawaii and I'm still answering; I promise you: the coffee in Hawaii is very, very strong! Business is not so good. Hawaii suffers. You can see it in the grimacing face of the Governor.

I do not want you to misunderstand me about one thing: the people of Hawaii are a gentle, good-natured people who are, in my opinion, still too trusting, too easily mislead. And the islands are still kind to us, in spite of business. Most importantly, aloha is still alive.

I walked over to Magic Island the other day, to sit on the rocks and listen to the surf. This is what I heard:

"The Land is quiet, we are quiet, our voices are the gently lapping waves, our women sing the high notes of the birds, and when there is a time to roar we erupt explosively, our fire sparkles in the air as our blood runs molten into the seas and the whisper of the wind turns into a howling hurricane, in season, according to the powers that be, but not often is our peace so disturbed, yet we are mostly quiet like the mountain resting her feet in the ocean and cooling her breast in the laughing breezes, but still we are mindful of the man-troubles too as you can see in the fierce furrow of the warrior's brow made ready to battle, and that is part of us too, a quiet people who love our space encircled by stones and sand from whom we surf and fish and on whose breast we landed when our ancestor lifted up the sky for us to be."

Aloha