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Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
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Renaissance can be costly
IT IS IRONIC that the renaissance of Honolulu is sitting in a dusty box on a shelf at City Hall. A lot of people's hopes and dreams end up on shelves in boxes, but taxpayers usually don't have to pick up the tab.
The "Renaissance of Honolulu" was former Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris' dream -- a glossy, ill-conceived exercise in propaganda, manipulating history and pushing vanity publishing to the extreme.
It apparently was intended to show what a grand place Honolulu had become under his stewardship, and the pictures certainly were pretty. The ones that were there. Someone gave me a copy of the book (someone gave a lot of the books away since no one will 'fess up to actually paying for one) and I thought the little gray squares on some pages were an attempt at art that I just wasn't smart enough to understand.
It turns out that those squares were where other pretty photographs of Honolulu were supposed to go, but the photos apparently never made it to the printer. If Harris had handed out crayons with the book, the little gray boxes could have been passed off as an interactive element where you could draw your own favorite views of Honolulu.
I'VE GOT nothing against Mayor Harris other than that every time I wanted to publish a book, I had to convince some publisher that he could make money if he published my tome. It can be a rather humiliating enterprise, selling yourself to publishers. From your point of view, you have a great idea. From their point of view, you are the only thing standing between them and their afternoon gin and tonic. (I'm talking about "other" publishers, not the folks who published my latest book, "Hey, Waiter, There's an Umbrella in My Drink!")
Mayor Harris didn't have to shop his book around because, well, because he was mayor. And because it was to be a promotional product allegedly to benefit the city, the taxpayers would become unwitting co-publishers. It was a brilliant stroke and I confess that I'm extremely jealous.
Some writers do pay to have their own books published. It's called "vanity publishing" because you gotta have vanity by the vat-load to sink your own bucks into such a project. You also gotta have a large garage since that's where you'll be storing the 10,000 books that don't sell. Mayor Harris had the vanity, the money (other people's) and something better than a garage: He had some big empty room at Honolulu Hale, where more than 1,000 unsold and returned "Renaissance of Honolulu" books are residing in air-conditioned comfort. As a commercial enterprise, it was more or less typical of how government works.
According to writer P.J. O'Rourke, money is spent four ways: 1) Your money on yourself; 2) Your money on somebody else; 3) Someone else's money on yourself; and 4) Someone else's money on someone else. No. 4 is how government spends money. No. 3 is how embezzlers and politicians running for office spend money. No. 2 is why you give your dad a funny-looking tie for Christmas. And No. 1 is why you get the curry mixed plate for lunch instead of lobster.
BECAUSE Mayor Harris' book was paid for by someone else, it didn't matter whether it made money. Using an economic model that would make Mao Zedong proud, if all 5,000 copies of Harris's book sold for the retail price of $20, he would have raised $100,000. But it cost $108,763 to publish, leaving a potential profit of negative $8,763. Since no one actually has bought a copy of the book, the retail cost should have been $1,000 per copy, so at least the potential profit ($5 million!) would look good on paper. (When I say "nobody" has bought a copy of the book, I mean "nobody I've heard of" or "nobody you've heard of" or "nobody who will admit it.")
It would be unfair to single Mayor Harris out as the only elected official who sees sunshine and rainbows in various expensive enterprises financed by other people's money. Whether it's a propaganda book, a public after-school program, a freeway onramp or, hmmmmm, let's see, even a light rail mass-transit system, politicians have been known to look on the happy side of the cost of things instead of the cold, brutal, wallet-wrenching truth of the matter. As far as wasted public money goes, Mayor Harris' little book was quite a bargain, gray boxes and all. When it comes to tossing our tax dollars in the Dumpster, $76,000 is chump change.
As far as a renaissance, if Honolulu truly is on the road to a glorious resurrection, we can only hope it doesn't lead us all to the poor house.
Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail
cmemminger@starbulletin.com