IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE. IT'S AN EYESORE

IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE. IT'S AN EYESORE: Although it's probably been more than a decade, we remember a certain drive though San Francisco quite clearly.

Having lived there in the early 70's, we just assumed that we could find the old freeway entrance. But while cruising from "the Haight" to "downtown" we found ourselves suddenly coming around the block for the third time looking for the ramp that led to one of the elevated freeways that made much of the city center a dark, gloomy, drug and crime-filled morass.

"They did what? They tore it down? They whole thing?" "Yes," we were told, "there are no more raised thoroughfares north of Market Street."

As the years went by we noted the trend continuing across the country with cities not only refusing to build new raised monstrosities but actually tearing the old ones down.

So it was no surprise that when Honolulu's traditional lack of planning combined with its time-honored corrupt procurement process and long-standing adherence to urban design concepts 40 years out of date combined to yield yet another plan for the long-delayed, on-again-off-again mass transit project, they decided it was going to be constructed a hundred feet in the air.

Admittedly we haven't been to Honolulu in a decade or more and plan on avoiding it like the proverbial plague for the foreseeable future. Once one sets foot outside of the tourist mecca of Waikiki- and not very far- the sidewalks crack and crumble and the streets are not just filthy but filled with potholes large enough to rent for $1700 a month.

Why would we go? Just the price of a last minute plane ticket approaches that of a direct flight from Kaua`i to SF- a city of similar population where the areas known as "slums" are aesthetically more pleasing than most of "town" on O`ahu.

In their infinite wisdom, the city fathers decided on a "plan," not to spruce it up and start carefully planning- complete with pubic input (gasp!)- the city's future development but rather, to plunge most of it into darkness so no one can see how truly decrepit it actually is.

And that's just the physical limitations. The political ones are worse.

Not only was the first fully-funded, ready-to-go attempt at simply building a system to move people to and from work every day aborted a couple of decades back after a particularly entertaining dance-of-the-headless-chickens but, according to a poll reported today, support for the current similarly ready-to-commence project is dropping faster than the price of stock in the companies that lost the contract to construct it.

According to the poll in the pay-wall protected Honolulu Star Advertiser, support for the project has dropped from 49% last May to 43% now.

And as if that wasn’t enough of a sign that the denizens of Honolulu are fed up with the way the project has evolved- the way its back-room planning and pay-to-play system put into place the most expensive, ugliest system possible, not to mention one that bucks a 20 year trend in urban design- former Governor and anti-rail candidate Ben Cayetano is leading the race for mayor over the two pro-rail candidates by a wide margin.

For those that forgot or weren't around, by the time he left office, Cayetano had burned so many bridges and offended so many supporters, he's been left for politically dead ever since.

Yet current Mayor Peter Carlisle, like the rest of the tone-deaf, steel-on-steel, elevated rail supporters, still clings to the notion that the only problem is that "we haven't done as good a job as we should have in showing people exactly what all the accurate information is (on rail)."

Ah, the last refuge of a delusional pol- the notion that "if people were just 'educated' they would see it from my warped, power-hungry vantage point."

We probably have no right to even write this column today- we don't live on O`ahu and would rather be homeless on any neighbor island than live in a Waikiki luxury high rise.
Honolulu citizens seem to be saying "we want mass transit, perhaps even rail- we just don't want THIS mass transit and THIS rail." Kaua`i people have similarly spoken this way about a certain bike path, a certain electricity co-op and a dozen other projects that have been forced down our throats by smug, paternalistic officials.

The "City and County" seems to have a penchant for hiring those who graduated at the bottom of their class from the Rube Goldberg School of Urban Design. Then, when the worst of them are forced to leave in disgrace, they seem to find their way into the equally befuddled, clueless and crony-filled Kaua`i County government.

All we can say is thanks but no thanks. We've got our hands full now.

MOVE OVER ROVER:

MOVE OVER ROVER: Tomorrow will mark our 365th day doing whatever-the-heck-it-is-we-do.

Whatever you call it- reporting. political rabblerousing, activism, advocacy or just plain blithering jabber- we can’t help but see it as an outgrowth of the “new journalism” that’s now celebrating it’s 50th anniversary

“They” call it blogging now so we’ll stick with that and keep searching for an adjective to separate it from the social blather of the facebook and my space ilk..

And after this week is over we may just take a weekday off every once in a while whether it’s to do some research, attend a meeting or otherwise put a little leg work into more formal reportage or just watch some basketball on the tube.

But one thing we have done in the last year as the now-perennial low man on the Hawai`i news and political blogging totem poll, is figure out the pecking order in the world of daily on-line news, analysis and opinion.

And we mention it because there never was a better microcosmic case in point than a few posts over the past few days to provide a model of how news travels- and is impeded- in these days of battle between the emerging democratic and the dying corporate models of news delivery.

To pick it up sort of in the middle it all started over the weekend when one of the big three in Honolulu, ”I’m just a blogger” Doug White at Poinography, who works as a paper shuffling grunt at the legislature every year, discovered that new Chair of the House Judiciary Ricki Karamatsu’s usually bland politician-type blog had a post that Doug described as

A tour de force in bizarro rambling! Now, a post like that is less amusing coming from the Chair(!) of the Judiciary Committee than if it were from some random powerless “everyman,” but it still cracks me up.

Now Karamatsu has this thread of religious mumbo jumbo, very Buddhist in nature. But this post described his attempts at inner calm and “compassion” during a meeting in his office, when an elected official he called “5P8C” came in and immediately threatened him if he didn’t capitulate and pass through his committee the mystery man’s “law enforcement package” of bills.

Although as of our press time Karamatsu has put up a sort of zen notice at the permalink of his post that “the page you are looking for does not exist” it is still there on the main page at least until he discovers it.

In part it reads:

On Thursday, February 5, 2009, I had a meeting with 5P8C at my office at his request. I was ready to work with him with an open mind. However, his actions instantly changed my view. In his own words, he threatened me that he will come after me if I don’t agree with him like he did with the Judiciary chairs before me. I was shocked, considering this was my first meeting with this guy who is a couple decades older than me. Now, this is a person who fights for good against evil, yet is arrogant and mean-spirited like those he is fighting against. I just met this guy and he is already threatening me and trying to push around what power he has or thinks he has. He really tested my will.

Now it didn’t take a genius to figure out that it was Honolulu Prosecutor Peter Carlisle- especially since there’s five letters in Peter and eight in Carlisle.

But if Ricki was no Nazi Code Writer, the commenters at Doug’s post were no Navaho Code Breakers themselves with one even speculating it might have been Lt. Governor Duke Aiona despite the apt description of Carlisle as one who “fights for good against evil, yet is arrogant and mean-spirited like those he is fighting against” and especially when he added “childish” to the depiction.

Anyone who’s followed Carlisle didn’t even need the alpha-numeric clue.

Now a post by Doug or others of the three Honolulu wise men- former pro reporter Ian Lind and world-weary-traveler and discoverer Larry Geller of Disappeared News- usually gets the panties of we low-lifes and geographically-challenged neighbor-islanders in a bunch rehashing and analyzing their pearls.

But every once in a while there’s a hole in the filter and you-know-what floats to the “top”. And no time more so that when one of the mere mortal bloggers’ stories gets picked up by Honolulu Advertiser Capitol correspondent Derrick DePledge at his officially sanctioned “Notebook” blog at the Advertiser’s web site.

This time with little ado DePledge- who gets his phone calls returned and apparently lives at the legislature when it’s in session- lost little time in confirming the identity of 5P8C with Karamatsu and Carlisle himself

It seems like if the real political news- the stuff that doesn’t make us yawn- is actually reported, it’s in mainstream reporters’ blogs these days.

Notwithstanding the unequivocal comments from political reporters Richard Borreca of the Honolulu Star- Bulletin and Denby Fawcett of KITV on a KHET’s (PBS) “Island Insights” program a couple of weeks back that there is “never any news on the blogs” so they simply don’t read them and ignore anything that might have originated there, it doesn’t take a genius to see the self-fulfilling nature of those kinds of projections.

Now to be fair there are mainstream corporate press reporters like former S-B Editor Dave Shapiro- who was on the same program defending blogs- along with DePledge who can see past their cloistered employment to see the inevitability of the changes in news distribution to an electronic platform.

But for the most part it seems that until the budget cutting axe that we’ve seen at all the Honolulu newspapers and even TV news-providing station falls on them, most are content to live in their antiquated mid-to-late 20th century paradigm, seeing themselves as the gatekeepers who live by the motto “news is what we say it is”, as every first term J-School student is taught.

Only when the, to steal Larry’s term, ”Disappeared News” bubbles up so furiously that the steam fogs up their fish-eye lenses does it gets through to most of those gatekeepers and the public find out about the real news.

But then again even if the “news” is reported by DePledge in a corner of the Advertiser web site does it make a sound? Or does it serve as a dead end cul-de-sac where it reverberates in a sort of isolation booth?

You would think that a report of the Honolulu Prosecutor Carlisle intimidating and threatening the House Judiciary Committee chair Karamatsu would be, if not plastered on the front pages of a real newspaper and leading the 6 o’clock news, at least getting a little play.

But we’d bet dollars to donuts that the item will live and die it’s quasi-MSM life in DePledge’s blog albeit a slightly higher profile death than it would have died in Poinography.

How long can the corporate press editors survive by ignoring real news as “too much ‘inside baseball’”, as they are wont to tell their reporters and instead present a mélange of prepackaged competing quotes, rewritten press releases and regurgitated news from another member of their incestuous brethren.... and call it THE news?

When the last newspaper prints its last print edition some will, as they do now, bemoan the lack of the tactile pleasure of paper and ink. But few will bemoan the loss of their 21st century no-real-news “content” to a medium that has exploded in a much more democratic- if temporarily less conveniently transportable- medium.

When the actuarially inspired death of modern mainstream journalism comes, the current crop of gatekeepers will, with a few exceptions, have no one to blame but themselves for riding the corporate model dinosaur express to oblivion even as the dust from the asteroid settles in the cogs and shuts their presses down.