Notes To Cyberspace

THE SEARCH FOR PARADISE

2006-06-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

Recently, I saw two things on cable TV that started me thinking about the search for paradise, including my own.

One was "The Beach," a Leonardo DiCaprio film about a young American traveler who takes a French couple to a remote island in Thailand where other young people have established a secret community of paradise junkies. There's plenty of Thai dope to smoke, they grow their own vegetables and fruits, the sea is full of fish to eat and the secluded beach cove is ethereal in its beauty.

I think everyone is a paradise junkie to some degree. It's a natural desire to want to escape the insane pace of modern life, urban blight and job politics and lay under a palm tree on some sun-soaked beach and listen to your hair grow while the rest of the world goes to hell. It just depends on how you're wired as to whether you'll ever do anything about it.

In my late 20s I came to Hawaii and decided instantly that I had found my paradise. I was ready for it after several years in hectic journalism and a tour of duty in the Air Force. I "went native," the cardinal sin for white people in the tropics (according to neo-colonials who have a phony air of superiority.)
Some people find paradise in the most unlikely places. Birute Galdikas, one of anthropologist Louis Leakey's three primatology babes/researchers (along with Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey), found hers in the wilds of Borneo where she spent her early days soaked in urine from carrying around an orphan orangutan. She named her book account of the experience "Reflections of Eden" (as in garden of) and she's still in Borneo 40 years later.

The second TV program was the Indonesia episode of Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations." Tony was quite impressed by the island nation -- so much so that he began wondering if he should chuck his career as the traveling gourmet and settle down in Indonesia. He interviewed others who had "gone bamboo," another way of saying gone native.

As much as he loved the tropical scenery and laid-back lifestyle of Indonesia, Tony decided he's not ready yet to go bamboo. But judging from the gray in his hair and the creases in his face, I'd say it's too late for this famous chef. He looks around 50 and he's already making excuses about how difficult it might be for a New Yorker like him to learn the Indonesian language and adapt to the alien culture without lapsing into "apelike American behavior."

My advice to young paradise junkies is be like Generation X of 15 years ago (of which I was an honorary member.) Get a frequent flyer miles card before you get a bank book. Find your paradise while you're still young because you won't do it when you get old. Arteries harden, ways become set and dreams turn into smoke. It's the donkey carrot-on-a-stick self deception to put off living the free-spirited life you want until you retire from work. The golden years are long before you have to worry about living within a short ambulance ride of the nearest hospital emergency room in the event of a coronary thrombosis.

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

HAWAII HIGH SCHOOL DAZE

2006-06-02T21:39:00.000-07:00

Last night the local PBS television station showed a short film adaptation taken from "Wild Meat and Bully Burgers," the debut novel of well-known Hawaii author Lois Ann Yamanaka. Watching the film, I recalled how the book deals with issues of political correctness today: the clash between public education and ethnic identity and the controversy over English as the official language of the U.S.

Set in the late 1970s on the Big Island where she grew up, the highly autobiographical novel is about Ms. Yamanaka's high school days in the city of Hilo. At the time I lived 15 miles away in the Puna rainforest. I drove to Hilo several times a week to shop, eat or drink, see a movie or just hang out at the waterfront and I remember seeing high school kids on a regular basis. They looked like typical teenage students to me, but we lived in different worlds 15 miles apart -- a fact I didn't realize until I read Ms. Yamanaka's book years later.

I was shocked by her tales of heavy drug and alcohol abuse, coat-hangar abortions, suicides, rabid racism against haoles (whites) and other facets of high school life in Hilo.The novel is written in pidgin language and much of its message is devoted to the "unfairness" of teachers insisting that students learn standard English and use it in classes. Pidgin was originally invented as a common language of business in the polyglot region of the Pacific. It has a legitimate place in island life -- for example, in the humorous books "Pidgin To Da Max" -- but if pidgin is the only language you know, you'll never find a decent-paying job even in Hawaii.

Mrs. Yamanaka was ashamed of her father because he was poor and lacked a formal education. I developed a great deal of respect for him in reading the book. Although he made little money from wages, he hunted, fished and lived off of the land as much as possible. He was poor but free. This was a step up from his father, who had been a virtual slave in the sugar plantation system.

Ms. Yamanaka was a social outcast in high school because her family was poor. The haole and other kids whose families had money looked down their noses and picked on her. Welcome to American society where money means everything. I was also from a poor family, but I was a social rebel in high school. I didn't give a damn what the snobs thought of me. Ms. Yamanaka played the role of designated loser (at least in her mind) while I gave the one-finger salute to the System and found my own comfortable niche in life.

Today Ms. Yamanaka is a middle-aged writing instructor and author with several published books to her credit, but she is still bitter about her high school days. What's the point? In my opinion she should feel grateful that she was taught standard English in school because she wouldn't be a success without it.

It seems to me that ethnic identity is getting in the way of education in the U.S. And self-esteem must be earned rather than given for free by schools.

As I have mentioned before, I'm part Cherokee, but in my history classes I never heard a word about the Trail of Tears, one of the saddest tragedies of American history. Tens of thousands of Cherokees were removed from their homes in southeastern states and forced marched to Oklahoma by the U.S. Army. Thousands died along the way from starvation, disease and exhaustion. I learned about the Trail of Tears on my own. I didn't expect my teachers to instill a sense of ethnic pride in me. Why should they? It was my responsibility to learn about my native American ancestors and take whatever pride I could find in their culture.

As a fellow Hawaii author, I emailed Ms. Yamanaka a few years ago to arrange a meeting between us. I wondered if she had read any of my books and I wanted to discuss her work over a cup of coffee. She never replied to my message and I think I know why. She doesn't like haoles -- a common attitude among local people. In her case she can't forget the haole cliques that snubbed her in high school 30 years ago. Despite her success, she clings to the memory of unpleasant experiences that less fortunate people are able to put behind them.

Which reminds me of a scene from the film "On Golden Pond." Jane Fonda plays a middle-aged woman who still dislikes her father for the way he treated her when she was a girl. Her mother (played by Katherine Hepburn) says:

"Don't you ever get tired of all that? Life moves on and you better move on with it."

DR. STRANGEWRITER

2006-06-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

"The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock -- shock is a worn-out word -- but astonish." -- Terry Southern

The first time I ever heard of Southern was when I saw "Dr. Strangelove" at a drive-in theater in South Florida. I was 20 and the film Southern wrote was beyond bizarre. After the final scene, I drove out of the theater wondering what the hell I had just seen. I was truly astonished: the end of the world as a comedy!

The names of the characters were hilarious. General Jack D. Ripper, Colonel Bat Guano, General Buck Turgidson, Russian Premiere Kissov. And who could ever forget Major T. J. King Kong riding the hydrogen bomb down to its target as if he were a rodeo cowboy? What sort of twisted screenwriter was this?

Southern (1924-1995) was born and raised in Texas and served as an Army lieutenant in World War II. After the war, he got a degree in philosophy from Northwestern University and became an influential part of the Paris literary movement of the 1950s and a companion to Beatnik writers in Greenwich Village. He was also at the center of "swinging London" in the 1960s and helped to change the style and substance of Hollywood films of the 1970s. Later he taught writing at a number of universities.

Screenplays:

"Dr. Strangelove" (1964, nominated for Academy Award in screenwriting.)
"The Loved One" (1965)
"Easy Rider" (1968, nominated for Academy Award in screenwriting.)
"The Magic Christian" (1970)

Books:

"Candy" (1958)
"The Magic Christian" (1960)
"Red Dirt Marijuana" (1967)
"Blue Movie" (1970, eventually adapted to become Stanley Kubrick's 2004 film "Eyes Wide Shut."

Other writers on Southern:

"He was at once a serious, outrageously understated satirist and a quietly sophomoric Zen comedian; a patriotic anarchist, an existential Texan, a prankster tragedian, a devout non-believer and a sunny fatalist." -- Jeff MacGregor in the New York Times

"I started reading 'The Magic Christian' and I thought I was going to go insane... it was an incredible influence on me." -- Hunter S. Thompson

"Terry Southern writes a mean, coolly deliberate, and murderous prose..." -- Norman Mailer

"Terry Southern was one of the first and best of the new wave of American writers, defining the cutting edge of black comedy." -- Joseph Heller

"Terry Southern is the most profoundly witty writer of our generation ..." -- Gore Vidal

Southern is credited by Tom Wolfe as having invented New Journalism with the publication of "Twirling at Ole Miss" in Esquire Magazine in 1962.

THE ECONOMIC LESSON OF PINEAPPLE

2006-06-02T11:15:00.000-07:00

Hawaii is famous for pineapple, but the islands have never canned the best variety.It's called white pineapple and it's much sweeter and much less acidic than the common yellow variety. A small amount is grown to sell as fresh pineapple to local grocery stores, but less than 1% of the pineapples cultivated in Hawaii are the white variety.

I first tasted white pineapple from a field that had been abandoned on Maui. Since Maui Land and Pineapple Company intended to plow the crop into the soil, they allowed the public to pick some pineapples for free. By the time I heard about the freebies, they were slightly over-ripe and starting to ferment into alcohol, but I was amazed by how delicious they were. I never cared much for the yellow variety because it was so acidic the sourness often upset my stomach.

I wondered why pineapple companies had chosen to can an obviously inferior variety and I began asking questions. The answers added up to this: it was the typical American way of doing business.The white variety was developed long after yellow pineapple became the dominant type. Growers quickly discovered the white variety took longer to mature and involved more man-hours of labor to grow and harvest. To make the same profit as yellow pineapple, they would have to charge substantially more for canned white pineapple. But consumers were accustomed to relatively cheap prices for canned yellow pineapple, would balk at higher prices even for a better product and buy much less of the new pineapple. The smaller volume of sales would further raise prices to maintain a high profit level.In the end pineapple companies rejected the idea of canning white pineapple and stuck with selling an inferior-quality product. Partly because of this decision, the pineapple industry is dying in Hawaii today. Every year less acreage is grown and more workers are laid off.

American auto manufacturers have suffered a similar fate for the same type of business thinking. In the 1960s sales of Japanese and German imports began rising in the American market. The foreign cars were either cheaper to buy and operate or more reliable or both. Detroit automakers continued making gas-guzzlers with flashy designs. Why? Because they were accustomed to a high profit level and feared that switching strategies would threaten the bottom line.

By the 1980s this short-sighted approach had backfired badly. Detroit began closing U.S. plants and shipping jobs to foreign countries -- an economically devastating process that continues to this day. American steel makers failed to compete with foreign sources for the same reason, resulting in similar consequences for their industry.

Bottom-line thinking at the expense of innovation had become the American way of doing business, but it doesn't work in the new world economy. If the 20th century was the American century of unparalleled economic growth, the 21st century will belong to countries with huge labor forces like China and India. Our continuing economic decline will be caused by a failure of nerve to gamble in business matters and a myopic devotion to profits of the next quarter only.

WAR STORIES

2006-05-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

Some past experiences to ponder now that the Iraq war has entered its fourth year with U.S. casualities approaching the worst days of the Vietnam war:

"Every generation is crucified by its war." -- D. H. Lawrence

Ed Yasui was a Japanese-American boy who grew up in Hawaii, the son of Christian parents who taught him the difference between right and wrong. He learned that the sin of sins was killing another human being.

When Yasui came of age, he married Carol, a young haole woman from the Mainland. Then he was drafted during the Vietnam war.

The U.S. Army made him a LERP, a member of a long-range reconnaisance patrol in Vietnam. LERPs parachuted behind enemy lines often at night to collect intelligence on troop strength and movement. Village leaders who cooperated with the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese Army were to be "terminated with extreme prejudice." Since LERPs couldn't use firearms without revealing their presence, they killed silently with knives, garrote wires or their bare hands. Up close, face to face with the look of terror in the victim's eyes.

After some time as a LERP, Yasui suffered a psychotic breakdown and the Army sent him back home to Hawaii with a discharge for 100% medical disability. Carol barely recognized the man she had married. They lived together for awhile, but Yasui's behavior became increasingly bizarre. He was in and out of mental institutions while Carol lived alone with their young daughter, struggling to make ends meet.

A few years after they divorced, Carol swallowed a vial of sleeping pills one night at her house. A girlfriend showed up unexpectedly, called the paramedics and saved Carol's life. But Carol was not grateful. Quite the contrary, she was angry, bitter and depressed that she was not allowed to die.

**********

Saigon John lived in a shack in a remote Hawaiian rainforest. No one knew his real name, only that he had served two tours of duty in the Vietnam war. He was in good physical shape, tall and muscular, but there was something wrong with his mind.

Sometimes when he was walking, Saigon John would suddenly stop and kick the air or throw a punch as if he were practicing karate. Then, without a word, he would resume his walk.In fact, he talked very little, preferring to stare glumly at his feet when someone picked him up hitch-hiking. When he did look directly at someone, his eyes would narrow into an angry glare. There was madness in his eyes which frightened people.

In town Saigon John hung out at the public library with homeless people and alcoholic derelicts. He rarely bathed and reeked of body odor mixed with perfume.

After years in the rainforest, Saigon John disappeared one day and was never seen again. No one knew for certain what happened to him, but the consensus of opinion was that he had killed himself in some isolated spot where his body was unlikely to be found.

**********

His real name was John Salter, but he called himself Stardust. Twice in Vietnam, he was the only survivor of Army patrols that were ambushed by the Viet Cong. When he returned home to California, anti-war protestors spit on him at the airport. That's when he renamed himself Stardust and moved to Hawaii.

Stardust adopted a hippy lifestyle: let his hair grow long, wore robes and other strange clothing, and played a sort of game of Russian roulette with drugs. He would juggle his prescription medication for manic-depression with marijuana, LSD, magic mushrooms, speed, etc.When he was off his meds and on the illegal stuff, Stardust's behavior became irrational. He set fire to a church because the minister wouldn't let him pray barefoot. He set fire to a friend's apartment after they had an argument. He bought an old Camaro and drove it everywhere at twice the speed limit. He was arrested for drug possession at least a dozen times.

The police got so tired of putting Stardust in jail they chipped in and bought him a one-way ticket to California. Two detectives escorted him to the airliner and watched him board.A few weeks later Stardust was back in Hawaii. He told a friend he couldn't go home again because it wasn't there anymore.

**********

Tom Hooey had been a Marine in Vietnam. On one patrol an enemy mortar round went off nearby, killing the man in front of him and blowing off three of his fingers and part of one hand. He called what was left his "claw" and thought it made him look like a freak.

After the Marine Corps, Hooey used his life savings to build a nice house on the Big Island of Hawaii. He tried various jobs, including mail carrier, but he felt he didn't fit into any of them. Meanwhile, he was married and divorced twice.

Hooey became a party animal, drinking every day and taking speed to get through the hangovers. At the age of 41 he was mowing his lawn one day when he suffered a near-fatal heart attack. He reduced his drinking somewhat, but he refused to take most of his doctor's advice.

"Who wants to live forever?" he asked a friend rhetorically.

**********

Carl Polk served three tours in Vietnam as a lieutenant colonel in the Green Berets. Vietnam was his third war and the Army the only life he had ever known since growing up in poverty in Oklahoma.

He volunteered for Vietnam after his first wife died an agonizing death from cancer. He once admitted he went to Nam to die because he couldn't see living without his wife.

But during the war, he met Lan, a diminutive woman from an influential family in South Vietnam. They had a son out of wedlock and Carl found a new reason for living -- to kill as many Viet Cong as he could. He had a scar under his chin from a VC who tried to cut his throat in hand-to-hand combat.

After his third tour was finished, Carl smuggled Lan and their son to a new home in Hawaii. When the communists took over South Vietnam, Lan's family lost everything they owned. Both she and Carl were embittered that the U.S. had negotiated a peace treaty with North Vietnam.

Carl kept an arsenal of weapons in his Hawaii home. He was paranoid about retribution, convinced that the communist government of Vietnam would send hit men to Hawaii to kill him in revenge for what they saw as his wartime atrocities.

At his home in Hawaii Carl used a mixture of 24D and 254T to kill weeds on his property. These herbicides had been recently banned by the U.S. due to adverse health effects, including lymphatic and thyroid cancer, but Carl was sure they were safe to use. In combination they were the notorious Agent Orange used to defoliate the jungle during the Vietnam war.

Carl died of lymphatic cancer and Lan developed a goiterous tumor on her thyroid gland.

**********

Tom Gunther was a gambling addict when he was stationed as a weather observer at Travis Air Force Base, California. In the winter he would put chains on his car tires to drive through snowy mountain passes to the gambling casinos of Tahoe, Nevada.

When Gunther got orders to Vietnam, he thought he had lucked out because he was assigned to a well-guarded Air Force base where enemy attacks never occurred. His first letter from Nam contained a single word with 8-inch tall letters on the first page: FUCK!

The Air Force had "loaned" Gunther to the Army for weather reconnaisance. That meant going out into jungle combat areas and sending up weather balloons to determine wind speed for artillery assaults. Which would reveal his location to every VC within sight of the balloon.

Two months later Gunther's luck ran out. He was killed by an enemy sniper in the bush.

**********

Mike Sierra was a soft-spoken Chicano kid from Fresno, California, who joined the Air Force to escape the Army draft.

When he got orders to Vietnam, his Air Force buddies at Travis threw him a going-away party. Sierra seemed to be taking the re-assignment in stride and left the party to catch his flight at San Francisco airport.

His friends were shocked to see him back at Travis the next day. He explained he had suffered an anxiety attack when he boarded the airliner and fled in panic. This was worse than simply being AWOL. It was missing a movement, the equivalent of desertion during wartime.

To avoid decades in Leavenworth prison, Sierra checked himself into the psychiatric unit at the Travis base hospital. He was kept incommunicado for weeks before his friends were allowed to see him.Air Force psychiatrists diagnosed Sierra as having a personality disorder with passive-aggressive tendencies. A friend remarked that no one was crazy for not wanting to go to Vietnam, but Sierra insisted he was mentally ill and needed treatment.

Months later he was finally released from the hospital with a medical discharge. He told friends he intended to continue his treatment with a private psychiatrist when he returned home to Fresno.

**********

David Gliba was the funniest guy in Air Force weather technical school. If the students got out of step marching to classes, Gliba would contort his face into his best drill instructor expression and say: "All right, boys and girls, it's time to play Air Force." He also liked to stand near the runway when a plane was making a landing and shout: "Crash, you son of bitch!"

Everyone in tech school dreaded getting orders to Vietnam as their first duty assignment, which is why Gliba was so happy when he was assigned to the "storm chasers," three-man units that cruised the back roads of Tornado Alley in a van and sending up weather balloons. It was like not being in the Air Force at all. You wore civilian clothes instead of uniforms, slept in the van or motels, and only showed up at Air Force bases once in awhile to get weather supplies.

It beat the hell out of risking your life in a combat zone in Vietnam.

In the middle of nowhere one spring Gliba developed a sore throat. He tried to ignore it, since they were many hours from the nearest Air Force base hospital, but he kept getting sicker and sicker. By the time his team members got medical help for him, Gliba had a full-blown case of rheumatic fever from strep throat.

Rheumatic fever often causes permanent damage to heart valves. Gliba died at the age of 48 from heart failure.

**********

After I was assigned to Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, for the last year of my enlistment, I saw a play on the Honolulu PBS television station that I have never been able to forget.

It was titled "R & R," the military designation for rest and recuperation. Soldiers assigned to the Vietnam war were given R & R about half-way through the their tour of duty and Honolulu was one of their favorite choices. It was much closer to the Mainland than Southeast Asia and that made travel more convenient for loved ones.

The play was about a young soldier who meets his wife in Honolulu on R & R and I recall it had a haunting background song by Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane -- "I Saw You (Coming Back To Me)".

The couple check into a hotel on Waikiki Beach to begin an idyllic vacation, but the wife immediately notices there is something different about her husband. He seems nervous and agitated. She tries to persuade him to talk about his experiences in Vietnam so she can understand what he has been through, but he won't do it. They drift apart, begin to argue and the vacation becomes a mutual disappointment.

Finally, the soldier decides to return to duty in Vietnam before his R & R is finished. His wife is shocked, thinking he can't wait to get away from her. He claims he simply wants to get his tour of duty behind him, but his explanation is not very convincing. He breaks down and confesses he's not the same man she married. He has changed and he wonders if he can ever return to a normal life.

When they part at the end of the play, the audience is left with the strong impression they are saying goodbye permanently.

**********

"In war truth is the first casualty." -- Aeschylus, ancient Greek dramatist (525 BC-456 BC)

FRENCH NOVELISTS

2006-05-28T11:27:00.000-07:00

Much ado has been made about "The Elementary Particles," a novel by Michel Houellebecq that was recently nominated for France's top literary prize (the equivalent of the American Pulitzer Prize.)

Pardon moi, but I have never understood typical French novels. The stories always seem to involve long periods of glib ennui punctuated by short bursts of meaningless sex and violence. "The Elementary Particles" staggers between countless flashbacks and the present like a Parisian wino. Houellebequ raises several questions which have always intrigued me about the impact of quantum theory, then he falls flat on his face in trying to answer them plausibly. The last part of the story leaps forward into the future where struggling novelists tend to go when they don't know the right way to end a book.

In between there's an awful lot of jerking off. In fact the entire novel reminded me of mental masturbation: get all worked up about an IDEA for a book, then suffer the humiliation of premature plot ejaculation and leave the reader to clean up the sticky mess.

The earliest French fiction I ever read was Stendhal's "The Red and the Black," a sort of "Tom Jones" without the bawdy humor. Emile Zola's novels smacked of yellow journalism, socialist propaganda and the inevitable whore with a heart of gold. "Madame Bovary" was said to be the best European novel of the 19th century, but to me Gustav Flaubert's tale was nothing more than a soap opera with a main character so unlikable I thought she deserved the poison she drank to commit suicide. Marcel Proust wrote the longest novel in literature from his bed. It might have been less dull if he had gotten off his backside and gone out and about in Parisian society. Celine was an anti-semite Nazi collaborator who showed delusions of grandeur when he told his readers: "I piss on all of you from a great height." Jean Genet was a dangerous homosexual sociopath who earned the time he spent in prison.

Jean Paul Sartre wrote that hell is other people and existence causes nausea. If other people meant French authors and existence meant French novels, then I would have to agree with him.

The two exceptions of French writers I do respect are Albert Camus (who spent most of his life in Algeria, not France) and Guy de Maupassant, possibly the best short story writer in history (who died insane from brain damage caused by syphilis.)

Rather than French prose, give me a Russian novel any day, even though it's populated by village idiots, epileptics, criminals, civil servants with facial tics, anarchists, God-intoxicated madmen and other mental geeks. It's much more interesting than all that French ennui.

THE END OF RETIREMENT IN AMERICA

2006-05-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

On a TV news magazine show the other night I watched an episode about the sorry financial condition that most Americans workers find themselves in when they retire. One commentor called it "the end of retirement in America."

The typical American worker had a very rough life until the 20th century. He worked 12 hours per day 6 days a week for virtual slave wages, suffered from unsafe or inhumane working conditions, received no paid vacations or holidays. Many started their work careers as young children in lieu of getting an education. This is how great fortunes were amassed in the late 1800s by ruthless business tycoons like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller.

In the early years of the 20th century came the advent of labor unions, collective bargaining, the prohibition against child labor and laws to protect the health and welfare of workers. These gains were hard won. Thousands of people lost their lives fighting for them.

But by the 1950s, American workers had the highest standard of living of any country in the world. In addition most could look forward to a financially comfortable retirement in their golden years since large companies offered pension plans that went far beyond Social Security benefits.

All of this began to unravel in 1974, a pivotal year in the history of the American worker. It was the last year American workers gained an increase in actual buying power through their wages. Adjusted for the cost of living, wages have been slowly going downhill ever since then. The year 1974 also saw the beginning of the end of company pension plans and the first problems in keeping the Social Security system afloat.

IRAs were advocated as the solution to retirement. However, under the original company pension plans, the average company contributed 89% of the cost. With IRAs, that figure dropped to 49% with the worker contributing the extra 40% from declining wages. The end result has been a disaster for the majority of workers. Their IRA investments made LESS profit than if they had placed the money in an ordinary bank savings account. On the other hand, the IRA investments of the top 20% of wage and salary earners earned a profit 5 times as much as their lower paid co-workers.

As one commentor noted, the only way a typical worker can sustain his middle-class lifestyle is to continue working until the day he dies. Otherwise, starting at the normal retirement age of 62 to 65, he will be reduced to a life of poverty relying on inadequate IRA funds and Social Security benefits that are scheduled for radical cutbacks. If they develop disabling health problems (as often happens in elderly people), private nursing homes will be beyond the reach of their income and they will have to depend on public housing and welfare services that are also being cut by state and federal governments to deal with huge deficits.

There are no "golden years" if you have to work until you die and that is the situation faced by tens of millions of American workers. It won't be anything like the retirement of your father or grandfather, who spent their last years fishing and traveling around the country in a nice motorhome.

I want to mention one last thing about the year 1974 when the American dream began to die for most American workers. In the 32 years since then, the U.S. has had 20 years of conservative Republican presidents who all seemed hell-bent on destroying the social safety net established by Franklin D. Roosevelt to guarantee a decent life for the working man. During those 20 years, the rich got much richer through what Bill Moyers has called a class war against workers. They villified and busted labor unions to the point where only 1 of 8 American workers now belongs to a union. They shipped millions of jobs to cheap labor markets overseas and left Americans to scramble for low-paying "service" jobs at home. They "lobbied" (bribed) Congressmen to loosen workplace health and safety restrictions, to gut workman's compensation and unemployment benefits and to change bankruptcy laws so as to exclusively benefit rich debtors.

THE REVERSE OF ALOHA

2006-05-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

When I tell people I love Hawaii, I always feel like I should add a disclaimer to clarify what I mean. I love the place, not island society.

The place demonstrates how beautiful nature, God or whatever you believe in can make the earth. There are remote spots so heavenly in appearance they take your breath away. Hawaii is evidence that the Garden of Eden may not be a myth after all.

Island society is an entirely different matter. Hawaii is advertised as the land of aloha and a melting pot of the races, but nothing could be further from the truth. It's much more of a boiling pot of the races with the lid ready to blow off at any moment. And aloha is as scarce as snow.

The vast majority of local people carry a perpetual grudge against haoles or white people. By locals I don't mean only native Hawaiians. Japanese, Filipinos, Samoans, Tongans, Micronesians, Melanesians, Portuguese and Koreans who were born or raised in the islands and survived our God-awful public schools consider themselves local and they don't like haoles. It's part of the politically-correct "all white people are evil" syndrome so prevalent today.

(I omitted the Chinese on purpose since they are the most hospitable ethnic group in Hawaii, as they were in other places where I have lived. I'm proud to say I've had Chinese friends ever since I was 8 years old.)

Hawaiians are the only ehtnic group that has a legitimate gripe since the islands were a sovereign country for a thousand years before the U.S. annexed Hawaii at gunpoint. The rest of us are intruders, whether we were born and raised here or not.

But even native Hawaiians misdirect their anger. Three of them beat the hell out of an old haole man I knew because they knew they could get away with it. If they had targeted the upper-class descendents of missionary families who got rich by stealing land a century ago, they would have gone to prison.

Gary Montgomery was a haole friend of mine on the Big Island. He was married to a local woman and he worked hard for everything he had, which wasn't all that much. After single-handedly completing the hurculean task of jack-hammering a swimming pool through solid lava in his front yard, he held a party to celebrate. His in-laws brought some uninvited local trouble makers to the party and they made it very clear they resented a haole having a swimming pool.

Gary was fed up because he had run into the same attitude time and again. "Where's the goddamn aloha?" he shouted at the locals. "I haven't seen any aloha since I came to Hawaii."Paul Theroux, the most famous travel writer of the past few decades, retired in Hawaii because he loves the beauty of the place like me. In all of his travels he was treated worse by Pacific islanders than by local people anywhere else in the world.
Among local people in Hawaii, I have known a few exceptions to the "hate haoles" rule, but too few to make a real difference. And they get fewer with the passage of time.

If you visit Hawaii as a tourist, you'll be safe if you don't venture too far away from your hotel and the popular beaches. The tourist industry tries to protect Hawaii's image as a peaceful paradise because it's good for business. But if you move here expecting to find aloha, the reality will break your heart.

THE PUNISHMENT ETHIC

2006-05-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer. "The jail population is increasingly unconvicted," said Allen J.Beck of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. "Judges are more reluctant to release people pretrial."

The report by the Justice Department agency found that 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.

So much for two cornerstones of the American criminal justice system, the presumption of innocence and the right to a speedy trial. In the past few decades the U.S. has become the most punitive nation in the world (per capita), surpassing authoritarian societies like China. At the same time our streets, homes and lives are LESS safe than before, proving this approach doesn't work. Plus the cost to taxpayers is staggering.

Are Americans far more criminal than, say, Canadians or Germans who lock up a fraction of as many of their citizens per capita? Or has the American criminal justice system simply ran amok? Building new prisons and turning over public prisons to for-profit corporations is one of the biggest growth industries in the country. Is this trend about greed or something more ominous like a concerted effort to curtail civil liberties for all American citizens?

I recall this saying from 1974 when President Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment: "In a country with so many laws everyone is guilty of something, the only real crime is getting caught."