IN the interest of truth in advertising, perhaps the City Council should change its name to the Council of Zealots. Council zealots
should ban whineEvery time I tune in to the public access channel, I'm not sure whether I'm watching the Honolulu City Council or the Iranian Parliament.
This is not a criticism of the Iranian Parliament, even though it is not what I would call a fun group of people. But I don't live in Iran, so I'm not subject to their harsh edicts on public activity. If they want to ban alcohol consumption, hang people for pornography and make women wear veils, that's their prerogative. We're a little more enlightened about personal freedom here in the west.
Or are we?
To hear certain members of the City Council continually grouse about adult entertainment, drinking and smoking, you'd think you were listening to religious zealots bent on turning Honolulu into, well, I'm not sure what they want to turn it into, but I'm pretty sure it's a place where not many of us would want to live.
This week, Council members droned on for hours about the evils of alcohol and tobacco simply because Hawaii Theatre was silly enough to think it could get a permit to allow wine-sipping on public property adjacent to its boundaries.
Everyone knows that turkey isn't going to fly. You can't ban drinking at a baseball park in Waipahu, as the Council did, and then approve drinking on a sidewalk outside a downtown theater. It's a no-brainer. The issue should have taken up all of three and a half minutes of discussion, beginning with the phrase: "Whatareya? Crazy?"
Instead, we had to listen to various Council zealots lament about the impact of alcohol on society and how approval of such a request would favor snooty, rich theater-goers at the expense of beer-swilling, baseball-game watchers. Each mullah had to put his philosophy of abstention on the record. They couldn't just tell the Hawaii Theatre representative to "get real" and send him packing. They had to subject him to lengthy diatribes. Sure, they were couched in pseudo-polite language, but the statements dripped with disdain.
AT one point, a Council mullah (I don't want to get into personalities here) asked why the theater elite could not just sip fizzy water instead of wine because, after all, they were only there to raise money for the theater, not actually enjoy themselves by having the beverage of their choice.
Which is not the point at all. The point is that it is probably better for the city to avoid promoting drinking on public property since some drunken idiot eventually is going to do something idiotic that all of us will have to pay for. If that's the policy, then there's no discussion. If that's not the policy, then the discussion should be about what the citywide policy should be. It should not be considering the issue piecemeal with a case-by-case harangue against every citizen naive enough to enter the mullahs' den and propose anything other than eating wheat grass in a public park.
Again, don't get me wrong. I'm not against mullahs. Most mullahs wear long robes and longer beards and make their feelings about the evils of the world abundantly clear.
I'm not sure that the people who elected the Council mullahs knew exactly who they were putting into office.
Let's be honest here. The ultimate goal of certain Council members is a complete ban of smoking, alcohol and anything perceived as pornography in Honolulu. If they actually ran for election on those goals, Council meetings would be a heck of a lot shorter.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
The Honolulu Lite online archive is at:
https://archives.starbulletin.com/lite