Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger

---

Honolulu should follow Cuba's lead

THE Frank Fasi Memorial Sewage Treatment Plant has yet to become a reality, but the effort by Mayor Mufi Hannemann and some City Council members to name some city facility after Honolulu's longest-serving mayor is still in play.

The issue isn't whether Fasi, who was first elected mayor in 1969 and controlled the city (with only a four-year break) until 1994, deserves public recognition, but whether we should smack his name upon some city facility, park or byway. It's been a standing rule that we don't name public property after living people, and it's a good one. The fact that the proposed change in that policy includes allowing city stuff to be named after living former City Council people makes it even scarier. As I pointed out last week, Honolulu has had its share of Council members who ended up "in the joint" as a result of various misdeeds.

If I were Fasi, I'd be a little leery of this whole push to name something after him while he's still alive, seeing as how when he was mayor few of his fellow government servants even liked him. One memorial to Fasi is the "resign to run" law the state Legislature passed to keep Fasi from running for governor while still serving as mayor.

I WAS joking about naming a sewage treatment plant after him, but who knows? How can Fasi be sure that if this ill-conceived policy change is passed, his name won't end up on the front door of the city morgue or the offices of the pest-control branch?

In last week's column I noted that countries that erect monuments and name things after living people are generally pretty screwed-up places, usually dictatorships. I specifically mentioned Stalin's Russia, various banana republics and Fidel Castro's Cuba.

While I still believe Cuba is pretty screwed up, a loyal reader and frequent visitor to Cuba pointed out that there are no statues, murals or currency honoring Fidel. His name isn't even on a sewage treatment plant or the Havana morgue.

"While Fidel may be a lot of things, he is not so egotistical that he has to see himself on every Havana street corner," Rod Williams wrote to me. "The visages greeting the public are Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. He is the martyr of the day and seen on every billboard and 90 percent of the T-shirts in the country."

And it is soldier-statesman Jose Marti, not Fidel, whose bust and statue can be found in every Cuban park, square and front yard, Williams says.

So I was wrong about Fidel. But it's kind of scary that the Honolulu City Council would consider doing something even Fidel Castro would find tacky.

ONE DESPOT I left out who does like to see himself on every street corner is North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. CBS's Dan Rather had a piece on the "Great Leader" on a recent "60 Minutes." The creepiest and most disheartening part of the broadcast was a huge celebration in Pyongyang's gigantic stadium. The gala, with literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers and citizens performing in robotlike precision, allegedly was in honor of the country's 60th birthday but really was a big smack on the lips for Kim Jong Il.

At one point, something that looked like an enormous computer display on one side of the stadium showed various scenes of North Korea and fireworks and such. The detail was amazing. It turned out it was not a computer program, but thousands of North Korean children holding up flashcards in the stadium stands. It is sickening to think of how much effort went into training those poor children to perfectly display those flashcards for the mere enjoyment of the pudgy dictator in the gas-station overalls on the other side of the stadium. Kim Jong Il has taken Marxism to its ultimate height, not only starving an entire country, but actually turning human beings into computer pixels.

I'm not sure what that has to do with naming a building after Frank Fasi except that the further we can keep from becoming a personality cult, the better. And that includes not naming city facilities after living beings, no matter how long they were mayor.