Aug
28
Fresher via the ferry
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Your greens could taste better as a result of a new offer from Hawaii Superferry that spotlights the role the ferry can play in interisland commerce.
In a move that reminds one of the literal meaning of kama’aina — “man of the land” — Superferry is making the ultimate kama’aina offer to local farmers: 30% of when they transport their produce between islands.
Refrigerated trucks can drive onto the ferry and plug into power to keep the produce cold. Dean Okimoto of Nalo Greens in Waimanalo says this means greens that would otherwise be good for only perhaps four days can be tasty for a couple weeks.
Oahu farmers who sell salad greens to Waikiki hotels can sell to Maui resorts. Maui farmers who used to sell three times as much to NCL and now sell to Honolulu hotels and supermarkets.
In highly competitive situations, where one hotel is making a big deal of using one brand of local produce, this would allow a rival resort to buy from another local farmer with equal fanfare.
I can see how this could help a lot of farmers grow their premium produce business without hurting the ones that are already well-established.
Aug
28
When cynicism is naive
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In Hawaii, though not uniquely here, we learn to be cynics instead of learning civics, leave the tough problems to others, then criticize how they did it.
Always in this criticism there is the confident belief that if things didn’t work out just ducky, it was not because the problems were intractible, not because of lack of money or time or resources, not because legal considerations prevented the solution, but always, always, always, because those in charge were stupid or venal and the fix was in.
When cynicism passes for knowledge, people confidently spot eight out of every two instances of corrupt behavior, tarring well-meaning officials, business executives and union leaders with brushes better saved for the much smaller group of people who actually deserve it.
Governor Lingle, who arguably has herself engaged in this practice (exculpating herself in the Aloha Airlines collapse by pretending she was insufficiently informed, as if her newspaper subscription had been canceled) is the victim of it in the case of her proposal for the state to acquire Turtle Bay Resort, place some lands off-limits to development, then flip the rest.
Lingle has repeatedly said the proposal would not use taxpayer dollars, and the deal can be done in any number of ways that would leave the state coffers in the same health as before, yet cynics continue to make remarks bemoaning the fact that the state can afford to buy Turtle Bay but it can’t afford to do some other thing they’re more interested in.
Flipping Turtle Bay (once credit markets loosen up enough for such deals to be done again) is a good idea. It uses the rules of the marketplace to finance doing the right thing without tapping tax dollars. It will leave the current owner with a profit for having invested in the property. It neatly circumvents the fuzzy issue of the owner trying to develop land with permits and approvals so old that all the S’s look like F’s. It gives a future owner some room to develop some of the land further and guarantees that owner some exclusivity by showing how firmly the state believes in limiting future growth in that area. It builds in some public approval by putting residents, and employee unions, into the process. It limits the risk that project will be screwed up because officials are running it by tapping private sector expertise.
This is really very well-conceived, and deserves more serious consideration than cynical dismissal by people who haven’t even read the proposal and betray through their criticisms that they don’t understand what the proposal really is.
All of this comes up because residents of Molokai, who in other circumstances are as good as the rest of us at naive cynicism, are starting to pull together behind the idea of having Maui County (or someone) acquire Molokai Ranch.
The proposal is too new, with details not yet worked out, to say it’s a good idea or a bad one. But it’s worth a serious, calm look, in case it can work.
Aug
27
Richard Dreyfuss, speaking to Keahi Tucker on “Sunrise” Wednesday morning from the Democratic National Convention in Denver, said it’s time to bring in Hollywood directors to manage such events.
Dreyfuss said presidential nominating conventions have gradually become celebrations of decisions that have already been made, so organizers might as well abandon the pretense, admit that the purpose is spectacle, and hire professionals to put the spectacle together.
Dreyfuss, who is a Democrat, specified that he is referring to both parties.
To some extent, of course, this has happened already. Who speaks at which hour on which night is determined in part by a narrative thread. But it’s also determined by political considerations.
I notice, for example, that at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., next week, a number of governors including Linda Lingle have been lined up to speak on the same night as Mike Huckabee, the closest thing to a challenger in the later months of the campaign, and it occurred to me when I saw this that someone might have been playing down Huckabee’s appearance by putting him in a crowd.
The people who do manage these events, if not yet willing to hand the reins to Steven Spielberg or whomever, are not unwilling to take leaves from their books. Hillary speaks, then the director cuts to a camera focusing on Bill, and Bill leaps to his feet — he’s a FAN of his wife! — even if half the stuff the comics say about their marriage is true.
Unplanned touches can stick in the memory. The morning after Sen. Ted Kennedy gave his rousing speech to the convention, a senior writer for the Associated Press wrote a nice summary of Kennedy’s career from the perspective of his convention appearances and absences — which reminded me of the night Jimmy Carter was nominated, when Kennedy, having given him an endorsement that sounded ambiguous to me, shook Carter’s hand but then moved to the opposite side of the stage and avoided Carter’s attempts at a further physical display of unity. (The article, and so many others, referred to this as Kennedy’s “last hurrah,” and I wonder how many who used the phrase knew it came from a novel about a Boston politician.)
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, made a point of being unequivocal about endorsing Barack Obama. She had not fought all these years, she said, to have a Republican in the White House again. It was an ingenious way of putting the point. In just a handful of words, she told her diehard supporters why they shouldn’t make trouble, and she made it about her, so that anything they did would be to her, not to that other guy.
I have never been a big Hillary fan, and at several points in the campaign I felt like she was trying to arrogate to herself the credit for feminist advances really made by others. Stuff that Geraldine Ferraro had the right to say (the cracks in the glass ceiling, etc.) seemed less persuasive from a woman who rode her husband’s coattails to the national political scene. But in her endorsement speech there was nothing of the borderline petulance of Kennedy’s endorsement of Carter in the 1970s; rather than undermine her own endorsement by looking forward to her own future, she concentrated on persuading her faithful to do as she was doing.
The speech was the more interesting for the suspense that led up to it, and I wonder if a Hollywood director could manufacture that. But there is also the matter of news coverage. News operations don’t like to cover foregone conclusions, and if the last vestiges of unpredictability were to be squeezed out of these events, it wouldn’t be long before political nominating conventions were relegated to one cable channel, probably the same one that does the dog shows.
Dreyfuss doubtless has seen the movie “Wag the Dog,” which Dustin Hoffman plays a Hollywood producer who is hired by the White House to orchestrate a war. I was still living in Washington, D.C., when that movie came out, but was returning from several weeks in Hawaii and spent a couple days in Los Angeles on the way back, and saw the film in Santa Barbara, Calif., where a lot of movie industry people live. The house was packed and everybody thought the film was hilarious, as did I. When I got back to D.C. I was surprised to find that the prevailing view was that the movie was NOT funny because it “got so many things wrong.”
Hollywood and Washington have always had an incomplete understanding of each other, but they are drawn to each other, and they influence each other, and Dreyfuss probably isn’t the only one thinking that what these political conventions need is less Hollywood and more Washington.
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