The Lies They Tell
Page 22
• • •
California is blue, and San Francisco is bluer than blue, but Republican presidential candidate and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson will appear tomorrow in San Francisco. I am curious to hear him.
I drive to the Commonwealth Club of California, which is “the nation’s oldest and largest public affairs forum,” according to its literature, to hear and see the man in person. What is a nice guy like you doing in a race like this? the moderator, a local journalist, asks Ben.
“Well that’s a very good question,” Ben replies. He tells us that following a certain National Prayer Breakfast, “there were so many people clamoring for me to run for president, which I thought was kind of a ridiculous idea, but I kept running into particularly elderly Americans who would tell me they had given up on America and they were just waiting to die,” and so he decided to run.
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but he talks. He tells us about his life. “My mother was trying to get me to wear something I didn’t want to wear, I picked up a hammer, went to hit her in the head with it. Fortunately, my brother caught it from behind. Other than that, I was a pretty good kid.”
I think he and Shanta would get along well, as both love hammers.
Ben has no charisma, and even when he says the most stupid line it falls flat. When this man talks, sorry to say, I find myself fighting hard not to fall asleep. If he becomes president, I’ll become a neurosurgeon.
I am ready to leave California. Where should I go next?
I pick Hawaii, a state with a unique American history: the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I drop off my Versa at the airport and take a flight to Hawaii. On the plane I read that Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who is Jewish, announced his support for the Iran deal, effectively ensuring that this deal will not be rejected by the Senate. In other words: the Iran deal is now a certainty. Do I care? No. Nobody on his way to Hawaii cares about Iranians. It’s Hawaii!
Gate Fifteen
Smoking is permitted while standing in the middle of the road in moving traffic
HAWAII, THE REMOTEST GROUP OF ISLANDS IN THE WORLD AND THE wettest dream of surfers and of honeymooners, waits for her lost son, me, to enter into her womb.
Hawaii, by the way, is the youngest American state. It became the United States’ fiftieth state only in 1959. And I can’t wait to see the young lady. I’m to land at Hawaii’s busiest and most populous island, Oahu, and my first destination is the Waikiki section of the capitol city, Honolulu. Waikiki is where most Hawaii tourists end up and where most of Oahu’s hotels and shopping centers wait to please the esteemed guests.
I follow the crowd.
My first impression as I get out of the belly of the plane and breathe the air of this tropical island is that Hawaii is not America. There’s this “aloha” all over, a word that’s not exactly English. Second impression: Hawaii is not a state but a bakery. It’s hot here, it’s humid; it’s a nuclear melting pot.
Hawaii, I hear, has the bluest of bloods and is thoroughly democratic. Its elected officials, senators and members of Congress, and its governor and lieutenant governor are all Democrats. Hey, Barack Obama was born here.
Hawaii, I’m also told by people at the airport, is about 40 percent Asian. What déjà vu! Am I in UC Berkeley land?
Whatever the case, I rent a Nissan Versa Note again. In Asia, be Asian.
I turn the AC on and cool off. So good! Maybe that’s why people come all the way to Hawaii.
I drive a bit but after a while, as happens with all good things, the ride comes to an end and when I reach the hotel I get out of Versa. I hope it’s a good hotel. Good or not, it’s very liberal. Progressive liberal. As proof of its ultra-liberal tendencies, the stern lady at the front desk forces me to sign that I’m well aware that if I smoke in my room or on the balcony I will be charged $425.
I walk out to have a cigarette on the beach, which is across the street. I forgot that I’m in an all-liberal state. There are huge No Smoking signs every few steps along the beach and the sidewalk that runs parallel to it.
I follow the signs, in hope that they end somewhere, but they don’t. I cross the street, and there are more No Smoking signs next to anything that was built by man, such as hotels and stores. I must be a safe distance from each and any of them if I want to smoke, the signs say.
Having studied mathematics, I decide to measure the exact location of legally permissible smoking areas in Waikiki. It takes a long study, and after much sweat and multiple measurements I have the answer: legally permissible smoking areas are exactly in the middle of the street, in between lanes, in moving traffic. What’s the logic in it? Hawaii wants all smokers dead before they light up.
I choose life and I light up on the sidewalk, right by a bloody red No Smoking sign. Some righteous nonsmokers tell me that I’m in a no-smoking zone and I tell them: No speak English, speak Romanian. They leave me alone. Suckers.
• • •
Pearl Harbor.
Hawaii has a unique place in the hearts of Americans. It is in this state that America was attacked by a foreign power, a rare occurrence in the country’s history. It happened on December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, a short ride from here.
I ask my Versa if she will be willing to take me there, given the conflict of interests, but the Japanese says yes.
During the attack a number of US battleships sank and their sailors died on the spot. The USS Arizona, one of those ships, was not raised from the sea and to this day it is the last resting place of over one thousand American sailors.
As might be expected, a museum has cropped up in the area. I walk in and join a group of tourists for a ride on a ferry to the monument built above these sailors’ remains. A park ranger, formerly with the navy, greets us. “Any questions?” he asks.
Yes, I say. Since when is this part of the world America?
“Hawaii became a state in 1959. Before that, at the time of the Japanese attack, it was a US Territory.”
How did it become a territory?
“This is a complicated issue.”
Give it to me simple.
“Hawaii was taken by the US illegally. There used to be a monarchy here, but America overthrew the monarchy, put the Hawaiian queen under arrest, and that was it.”
Go slow, my friend. Tell me the whole story!
“I suggest you go to the Iolani Palace to learn more.”
I do.
• • •
Iolani Palace was actually destroyed, which means that what I see here is a restored palace, a replica. Iolani Palace is a beautiful place regardless, and it tells a history.
Here’s the Cliff Notes version. Once upon a time there was a kingdom called the Kingdom of Hawaii. One day good, white Christian missionaries came by to share Jesus with the Hawaiians and, one thing leading to the other, lots of blood was spilled and the American State of Hawaii was born.
Here I also learn of the Queen’s Letter of Protest, in which the queen of Hawaii resigned under protest in order to avoid the spilling of more blood, hoping against all hope that the throne would soon be restored. But this did not happen. What was restored is this building, this museum.
Yet it is here that a sense of history overwhelms me and a picture takes shape in front of my eyes: the United States annexed this island because, as the Air Force guy in the Irish pub in New York told me, “because we can.”
Fast-forward a century plus and you are in the present. In today’s Hawaii the descendants of the butchers, those who in cold blood murdered people and obliterated their culture, proclaim utmost love for the original culture that once stood proud here. They say a thousand alohas a day in hotels and shopping malls, all for the sake of making huge profits off their ancestors’ crimes.
And they know it. In 1993 the US Congress (Public Law 103-150) apologized to the Hawaiian people for the illegal acts done by the American government in regard to Hawaii. The resolution pa
ssed both the House and the Senate and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The resolution states in part:
The Congress…apologizes to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the people of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii on January 17, 1893, with the participation of agents and citizens of the United States, and the deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination.
In other words: the United States admits that it had illegally seized this land. Is the United States planning to withdraw from Hawaii? The answer comes at the end of the resolution: “Nothing in this Joint Resolution is intended to serve as a settlement of any claims against the United States.” I love Bill! Such a fine touch!
Outside the palace I see a man named Kalani, a homeless Hawaiian, and he rages against America. Justice will come one day, he tells me, and America will repent for its crime of annexing this island.
When will this happen?
“Next year!”
Yep, of course.
• • •
The largest shopping mall in Honolulu, I’m told, is the Ala Moana Center. I drive there. On my first few steps into the mall I pass a number of kiosks, which are strategically located in the passages and corridors leading to regular stores. Quite a number of these kiosks, as in many other malls in the United States, are operated by young Israelis who will sell you everything no breathing human needs. Here in Hawaii they sell skirts that turn into shirts, underwear that turns into dresses, Dead Sea oils that will turn you into a teenager and perfumes made from diamonds.
Japanese tourists love these shmontses. I usually ignore these Israelis, but somehow now I feel like stopping for a moment. Are you getting rich here? I ask an Israeli lady who is in her seventh year in Hawaii.
“This is a very complex and complicated question,” she answers me and, sadly, she has no time to talk. She’s busy with an old Japanese lady who, I think, wants to become a young Chinese.
Most of these young Israelis are right-wingers. They believe that Israel should fight as hard as possible against the Palestinians, while they sell diamond perfumes in Hawaii. Overall, these Israelis strike me as a bunch of Ali Baba’s thieves. It is quite likely that their Dead Sea products come from Bangladesh.
• • •
Hawaii is at its most stunning outside the tourist areas. I drive for days on the island of Oahu and can’t get enough of its beauty. But it’s not until my last evening in Hawaii that I get a fuller, much more realistic picture of life in this state. A local resident, who happens to be an Orthodox Jew, asks me if I’d like to go with him on a ride, away from the Japanese buyers and far from the island’s diamond perfumes, to see the real face of Honolulu. “It’s gonna be tough,” he says.
Let’s go, I say.
Orthodox Jews, unlike most of their non-Orthodox brethren, are people who are proud of being Jewish, and they have enough room in their psyches to care about other people as well. Not that all Orthodox Jews care, just as it wouldn’t be true to say that all non-Orthodox don’t care, but those who care among the Orthodox don’t just pay lip service when they talk of those who are less fortunate than themselves. They don’t have to play this game, because they don’t care what other people think of them to start with. For them, “poor” does not mean some “Palestinian” out there on the other side of the planet, but real poor living next to them.
We drive in the direction of the non-Palestinian poor of Hawaii. It’s a ride to hell. The hellish site is a city within a city, a state within a state, a reality within a reality. It’s called an “encampment.” This encampment, my guide tells me, is just one of a number of encampments in Hawaii.
What’s an encampment? I let my eyes answer. Lines of tents, one after another, on both sides of the road, packed with people who have no home, no address, no future and hardly a life. Here are the voiceless and the forgotten: American citizens, seniors and infants, men and women, all members of the Red Zone Society of America.
I make my acquaintance with some of them, and they break my heart. Here are little kids, and here are old people. Some are less than one year of age, and some are quite old, but all are deep into homelessness and most will likely never get out of it.
The current American president, who was raised on this island and loves to vacation in it, did not come to the world the way these kids did. He went to a private school in a nice part of town, while these kids go to no school. Their school, so to speak, is a life amidst piles of garbage.
Here’s a man, born in American Samoa, who identifies himself as “Mad Dog.” I ask him to explain to me what my eyes see, but he tells me what they don’t: “No white people here.”
Whites, he tells me, don’t even pass by here. And if they happened to pass by, for whatever reason, they don’t stop to chat. Mad Dog is touched by the simple act of my standing next to him, touching him, shaking his hand and wanting to hear him out.
“I’m not a homeless,” he says, with the little pride that is still in him. “I am a houseless.”
First and foremost, he faults himself. Pointing at a bottle of beer, from which he drinks, he says: “I wouldn’t be here if not for this.”
How much do you drink?
“Two packs of eighteen.”
Thirty-six bottles a day! How do you get the money for it? And how can you drink so much?
Emotionally taken by the mere fact that I show interest in him and in his life, he tells me his story. For starters, he got out of prison just recently. In Oklahoma.
To make a long story short, the authorities in Hawaii prefer to save money on imprisoned people and they contract out-of-state private prison companies – yes, those exist in America – to “host” their prisoners.
The way this works is very interesting. When a man – or a woman – gets a prison term, the authorities dress him up nicely, put him on a commercial plane, and fly him to a prison of their choice, depending on which private prison they have a contract with, and the prisoner serves his time there. When he is released, the authorities dress him nicely once more and fly him back. The private prison business, by the way, is one of the fastest-growing businesses in the country.
What crime did you commit?
“Selling dope.”
You served your sentence and you are back in Hawaii. Are you back into selling dope?
“You drink beer with me, ah?”
I will.
He gives me a bottle.
There are between five hundred and one thousand people living in tents from Ala Moana Boulevard to the ocean and the JABSOM medical school nearby, depending on how many the authorities have been able to kick out of here in the last sweep. Yes, they do this here. From time to time the authorities, who want to make sure that no tourist encounters the poor, come and make a “sweep,” during which they push the people out and sweep their tents away.
Number of children here today: between fifty and seventy. Mad Dog spends an awful lot on beer, but he doesn’t drink by himself. He gives free bottles to others in this encampment, as he has just done with me.
Are you a proud American? I ask Mad Dog.
“I love America, but I’m not proud to be an American. In America you can be the biggest criminal, but you will be acquitted in court if you have money for a good lawyer.”
Are you happy that Barack Obama is America’s president?
“I’m happy that a brown man made it to be a president.”
Do you think he cares about you?
Somehow, I don’t know why, this question touches a chord in him. He doesn’t talk. He pauses. He looks around, up, and then at me. He is emotional now. “You honored me by being here and I won’t lie to you,” he says before answering this last question. And then he does: “That motherfucker doesn’t care a fuck about me.”
Mad Dog’s wife comes by and pats him on his shoulders. She loves him. I look at them and at the little kids strolling by. I want to cry.
I hug the man, as tight as I can – and I leave.
Some tourists celebrate their wedding anniversaries here. They would do better to celebrate the funeral of their spirit.
• • •
Before the night is over – what a strange day, today – I meet a Jewish professor, a transplant to Hawaii from California, in a local non-touristic restaurant outside of Waikiki. Smart, sharp, well-versed and knowledgeable, she speaks about her life as if she were talking about another person, not herself.
Year after year, she tells me, those in charge at her university in California tried to force her to lecture on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, and a day when most Jews take off work. So she moved to Hawaii, where she is teaching at a local university, and on Yom Kippur she’ll take off.
“Hawaii is the least anti-Semitic state in the Union,” she says. Not that they terribly love Jews here, but for Hawaiians the Jews are just another kind of “whites,” whom they collectively refer to as haole, meaning a person without soul.
What an improvement!
As the clock keeps moving and we get one fish dish after another, I ask her: Is it true that Berkeley’s professors are anti-Jewish or anti-Israel?
As far as she remembers, she tells me, there are nine professors there who have expressed anti-Jewish or anti-Israel views. Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, take notice!
Some of the intellectuals I met think that this year is the hottest on record, and they were all too happy to share this piece of information with me. This lady is an intellectual like them but she does not strike me as a progressive liberal, and so I’m interested to know what she thinks.
“The climate records that we have,” she says, “are limited, telling us a small fraction of the whole story. For example, quite a few years ago there was a spell of extremely hot weather in California, and it was followed by a very cold spell. We don’t know what caused it then and we don’t know what causes it now. We don’t have enough data. ‘Climate change’ today is a religion, and like the existence of God you cannot prove it and you cannot disprove it. It’s all a matter of faith.”