A Day at the Beach
How to Hide an Empire
Daniel Immerwahr has written a long-overdue book about America’s colonial empire. When we think of the American Empire, we usually think of this country’s vast financial and military dominance over the rest of the world.
In addition, there are other lands that have been taken over by the U.S., and are ruled by the U.S. Congress. Among them are Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Samoa, Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Hawaiian Islands, and many more islands, territories and bases.
Immerwahr’s list of captive colonies does not include some of the largest land grabs by the government, such as, Texas, the Missouri territory, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, and California.
Perhaps the lack of definite borders, and definitions of sovereignity explains why this country does not have a proper name, like Brazil, Italy, Germany, etc. Instead, it defines its land as a structure of states. This definition says nothing about its location, hence it can stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or across the Pacific, as needed.
At one time there were 11 more states called the United States of something, but they wisely gave up their names. Still existing is the United States of Mexico (aka the United Mexican States).
A visitor to our planet asking directions to the United States would be quite confused by the lack of geographical specificity. “What continent contains the United States?” asks the alien. “It’s the United States of America,” says an earthling. “Yes,” says the still confused visitor, “but aren’t there two continents calling themselves America? That’s a lot of ground to cover, even in a flying saucer.”
This country with the elastic name has expanded many times over the past 200 years. Among its greatest hits was gobbling up the entire Left Coast. The U.S. threatened war with Britain, if the western territories of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia, were not given to it. In 1844, warmonger James K. Polk was elected president by running on a platform of Fifty-Four 40 or Fight (the latitude of the Alaskan border) and Manifest Destiny, making the threat of war greater. But by 1846, negotiations had split the territory at its present boundary.
Also in 1846, a small group of American immigrants living in Sonoma rebelled against Mexican rule and declared California an independent republic. U.S. troops invaded and wrested the land from Mexico.
In 1893, the growing behemoth reached out to envelop the Hawaiian Islands in the mid-Pacific. These islands were not ruled by a communist, a proud boy, or a brutal dictator, but by kindly old Queen Lili'uokalani, The coup d'état was shortly followed by a military occupation, which lead to the U.S. Navy making Pearl Harbor, Hawaii its main base of operations in the Pacific. This, in turn, lead to Hawaii being drawn into a war between the United States and Japan. The war was kicked off with the bombing of poor Hawaii by Japan.
Finally, in 1993, Congress passed “The Apology Resolution,” which admitted that the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii was an illegal act. However, the Kingdom’s sovereignty was not restored.
Today, there are several groups working for some form of sovereignty for Hawaii. Whether the movement gains strength or not depends, in part, on future events on the islands, and most of all on the will of the Hawaiian people.
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The Golf Curse
by Erica Snowlake
Hawai'ian law decrees beach or shoreline access as an inviolable right to its residents, so access had to be granted by the gatekeepers of the Hokūli’a luxury development community and its uber-elite, Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course in South Kona. Dripping with condescension, the doorman informed us of the “Rules.” It felt like a disclaimer by a lawyer to street urchins being grudgingly admitted to the banquet. “Look, but don’t touch.” And, don’t look, really. “No looky-loos,” he emphasized snidely.
The name Hokūli’a is an egregious appropriation of the Hawai’ian language and travesty of its cultural values; some venture capitalist’s lame idea of a brand. It translates as “star of desire”. Yuck. Golf is played by 30 million people worldwide; most of them could never afford to play here. In general, i see golf courses as unsustainable, fresh-water guzzling, manicured conformities, laid out for neurotic control freaks and manic over-achievers with OCD. The deals sealed on golf courses by presidents and CEOs include incestuous cases of nepotism, land grabs, arms and drug deals, CIA-instigated coups, money laundering, and class warfare waged on a passive-aggressive scale, with full intent to rape the earth in polite terms. The snickering of the ruling class, with a sterile, designer dress code and spiked shoes.
We three local women in a monster truck made our way down two miles of the verdant hillside interspersed with multi-million dollar mansions to the crude parking lot set aside for our kind. A porta-potty stood in a corner. Shoreline access trails were nowhere to be seen. We had just passed a road with a No Public Access sign that one of us recognized as the road she had driven to the Kings’ Trail on a previous visit years ago. It was hard to recognize anything now, with the mounds of piled lava and flagged-off areas demarcating ancient village homesites, amid heavy machinery CAT tractors and earthmovers, left sitting tilted on the barren, stripped and desecrated land.
We double-tied the laces of our hiking shoes, adjusted our backpacks and set off. Our destination was the north side of Kealakekua Bay, along the famed Kings’ Trail, aka the Mamalahoa Trail, built between 1836 and 1855, a coast-hugging trail of immense cultural significance, connecting Hawai'ian villages, temples, and fishing areas, at one time spanning the entire island. Along this segment, it is a stunning, six-foot wide engineering feat of tightly-packed lava stones made from Huālalai’s recurring volcanic eruptions. The trail crosses a stark expanse of black, red, and brown, boulders of varying sizes, a jagged lavascape in the unforgiving Sun.
One of the ladies wanted to experience snorkeling on that side of the bay, and was loathe to take the popular, quicker, 1800-foot steep, route. After getting lost in the golf course maze of sand traps, water features, and carpet greens, we found what looked like gutted portions of the Kings’ Trail, showing no effort of being marked or enhanced, but barricaded with No Trespassing signs and knocked-down metal fences to signify the boundary of the leisure-pleasure paradise. The trail had even been concreted over at one point. We passed several golf course employees, in carts, who gave zero fucks. One was dressed in a hazmat suit wielding a spray canister of undoubtably toxic Monsanto poison, Roundup, being the weed-killer of choice among lawn care psychopaths.
It was 11am and sweltering hot. The Kings’ Trail looked (and felt!) like it went on for ten miles before it reached the bay, and not the three it actually was. The Sun plays tricks on your mind, and Death is only an empty water bottle, a twisted ankle, and two thousand centipedes away. My companions soothed my grumbling, much to their credit. When I spotted hikers on the imposing ridge of the upper trail, I knew we would arrive, alive...
...to a floor show in progress! By the water’s edge, while tourists floated in snorkel-bliss in tidal pools and eddies, their packs were the site of a ferocious land battle between competing factions of mongooses. We stood marveling, amid squeals, hisses, and hand-to-mouth combat, as snack bars, trail mix and sandwiches were tussled over and ferreted away. I loudly decried, “Whoever’s packs these are, they’re stealing your lunch,” which had the effect of rousing their owners. Dismayed, they turned to us and inquired why we hadn’t stopped the rout in progress. “There were six of them, and only three of us,” I replied, “Hang your packs in the trees!”
One of us lost no time joining the snorkel train. Two of us ambled over to the left of the brambly shore, surrounded by goats-denuding-foliage, doing-what-they-do-best. The big white phallic thing beckoning through the thickets turned out to be the Captain Cook monument, erected by the British in 1874, to commemorate Cook’s demise in 1779. I took offense at the inscription: In Memory of the Great Circumnavigator Captain James Cook who discovered these islands on the 18th of January 1778 and fell near this spot on the 14th of February 1779.
True, Cook circumnavigated like a madman, but how many times must we drum it into the minds of white-privileged historians and Manifest Destiny goons — a place can’t be “discovered” when people ALREADY LIVING THERE for generations have clearly created a thriving society and culture. Apparently, the term “discovered” conveys and asserts ownership rights to the Empire, “to ascertain the right to cause untold harm, murder, and mayhem, in the process of violently usurping said place from its rightful, native, established inhabitants, using any and every deceitful means necessary, just short of genocide, and often, not withstanding that.”
It’s a long, sad, ongoing and oppressive story of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. And like the moana (ocean), we can't turn our backs on it.
My gist concerning Cook is that Hawai'ians never confused him with their God Lono, but naturally refrained from warfare during Lono's Season of life, peace, victory, and fertility blessings for the āina (land) — Hawai'ians’ New Year celebration of the Makahiki, when the Pleiades appear overhead in the night sky.
When Cook and his ships fatefully returned after having left, to make repairs to one of the ship’s masts, the season had neared its end, and warfare had resumed.
It is theorized the British were considered persona non grata by then, and unwelcome for taking and consuming vast supplies of Hawai'ian food stores, cutting down wooden enclosures inside temples, spreading venereal disease, and demeaning Hawai’ian generosity by stingily trading cheap trinkets (beads, glass, handfuls of iron nails) as was their wont with the tribal cultures they first encountered (until later returning to arm chosen factions to “divide and conquer”, fostering a political system they could manipulate, with all the trimmings of missionary guilt, shame and pineapple economics. But I am getting ahead of the narrative.)
Cook literally "fell” — stumbling off shore, pursued by spear, rock, knife and club-wielding natives. Why he felt it necessary to abduct ali'i nui, Kalani'ōpu'u, and to kill another chief, in retribution for the theft of a longboat, I’ll never understand. He totally misread the room. Dumb move. The Monument stands as a symbol of an embittered culture clash, never resolved to this day, which has us writhing on a precipice of social injustice and planetary environmental crisis. I personally consider it an eyesore on the āina as viewed from Nāpo’opo’o, and a doomed place to visit, in my overly-superstitious mind. Well, the goats and tourists can have it.
I enjoyed our return hike, having cooled off in the enlightened presence of schools of cheery yellow tang. Traversing the King’s Trail is an epic experience, following the footsteps of the ancestors of this land. I imagined spear-carrying warriors, kapu violators seeking Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau, the Place of Refuge, priest and priestess kahunas carrying ritual offerings, women balancing baskets of ‘opihi (edible limpets) on their heads as they returned to their villages.
If stones could speak! Now, an oceanic solitude presented itself, as I faced a cliff overlooking a turquoise cove with white-foamed waves breaking below. We regrouped to later observe a flock of red and blue macaws squawking in the treetops.
And then the dreaded golf course loomed. This time we took a direct route, as it seemed devoid of its peculiar devotees. We chatted like birds, happily exhausted. At one point, we laid down on the anemic, hyper-cut grass at the edge of a green, looking up into the blue, babbling about the reality tv show, called Alone, how the winner had bagged a moose. We had all encountered moose in their element, and were sharing crazy reminiscences. As we say in Hawai’i: “Talkstorytime!”
Suddenly, a sly male voice attached to a golf cart interrupted our breaths. "What are you doing here?", it menaced. "Don’t you know you could get beaned by a golf ball, that wouldn’t be good, would it?!!! And this IS private property!”
We jumped up and ran down the hill. I saw the golf cart move nearer the hole, and a gloved hand gripping a club assume the position in preparation to putt. Its steely resolve seemed fanatically homicidal. “Let’s get outta here ladies, that sounded like a threat!”
Translation: “I’m not paying one hundred and fifty grand a year for riff-raff to stretch their legs on my teeing greens!” We laughed all the way back to the truck. There, I took a moment to acknowledge the low, rectangular-shaped, lava rock walls, a living record of the many, long-ago, homesites of the Hawai’ian people, testament to their endurance and communal harmony with the sacred āina (earth) of the islands.
The Holūli’a watchdog had warned us not to alter, move, or climb upon any of the lava rock formations we came across, while the powers-that-be seem to have no compunction disrupting 1,300 acres of what were once eleven fertile ahupua’a (traditional Hawai’ian land designations).
It will prove someday to be a vain, short-lived, hollow spoil of capitalist conquest. Those who have succumbed to its spell will be seen haunting the future as hungry ghosts seeking lost balls - the golf curse.
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Some books I’ve found interesting during the pandemic. -JS
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties - by: Tom O’Neill
Mason & Dixon - by: Thomas Pynchon
The New Jim Crow - by: Michelle Alexander - the basis on the excellent documentary, 14, on Netflix
Lifespan: Why We Age - and Why We Don't Have To - by: David A. Sinclair PhD - don’t forget to take care of yourself, fighting the Empire can be tiring
Set the Night on Fire, L.A. in the Sixties - by Mike Davis, Jon Wiener - if Mike Davis is involved, its got to be worth reading
the way she spoke - by: Isaac Gomez, audio narrated by: Kate del Castillo - about the murders of thousands of women in Juárez, Mexico
Bolivar: American Liberator - by: Marie Arana
Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome - by: Anthony Everitt - how to run an empire, should have been required reading for our presidents
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States - by: Daniel Immerwahr (see above)
A couple of “Culture” books by Iain M. Banks - a utopia of the future
Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons - by: George Pendle - makes you wonder if JPL stands for “Jack Parsons’ Lab”
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood - by: Sam Wasson - interesting book on how films used to be made
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? - by: Thomas Frank - a few years old, but more relevant than ever
Permanent Record - by: Edward Snowden - the government hates him so much it is confiscating his book earnings
L.A. Confidential - by: James Ellroy - how the LAPD got that way
Capital and Ideology - by: Thomas Piketty - his 2nd dissection of capitalism is even better than the first one
The Last Soldiers of the Cold War: The Story of the Cuban Five - by: Fernando Morais , Robert Ballantyne , Alex Olegnowicz - this is also a good film about Cuba’s heroes.
The City We Became - by: N. K. Jemisin - A great novel on the intersection of racism and gentrification. More on this later.
More books in a subsequent issue. Keep reading, the Pandemic isn’t over yet.
Meanwhile, keep those paid subscriptions coming in, and we’ll keep the true news and information flowing.