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Honolulu Lite
I find myself in the unsettling position of agreeing with a couple of proposals by City Councilmen Steve Holmes and Andy Mirikitani. Feeling fit to be flayed
I know. It's scary. You start agreeing with Steve Holmes and Andy Mirikitani and the next thing you know you are slapping cigarettes out of the mouths of teen-age girls and marching around outside adult magazine shops waving "Selling Sex Sux!" signs.
These are not the most tolerant guys in the world. If they don't like something, they want it banned, taxed to death or criminalized. And pronto. They are the guardians of righteousness, unless questions about their own righteousness are at issue. Like, Holmes won't fully explain why the university he claims two degrees from doesn't have any records of that. He's offended when asked about it and dodges the question in grand Clintonesque fashion by saying, "It's not like I'm an intellectual fraud. I know my stuff."
Possible translation: "Even if I don't have actual degrees, my heart's in the right place on all this environmental stuff so leave me alone."
I truly hope Holmes' college degree problem is a clerical error because a cover-up is usually worse than the offense and everything he's tried to accomplish will be tarnished if he's not telling the truth.
Mirikitani faces a more serious challenge to his ethical record, namely a nasty little FBI investigation looking into charges that he forced employees to kick back part of their bonuses to him. While Holmes can be accused of merely cutting a few educational corners to pursue a laudable goal, Mirikitani may be facing a jury of his peers. (The thought of 12 Mini-Me-Mirikitanis sitting on a jury is another scary thought.)
WHICH brings us to the two things about which I agree with these gentlemen.
First, Mirikitani is proposing a bill to stop kids from buying or renting excessively violent video games. We already keep kids from buying booze, cigarettes and sexually explicit magazines. Why do we allow them to become desensitized to violence through exposure to what amounts to killing simulators?
The bill would stop kids from obtaining games that show the shooting of human characters or games that depict "decapitating, dismembering, sundering or flaying."
Sundering is a word you don't see much anymore. It means "breaking apart" as in, "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder." Flaying -- stripping of the skin -- likewise is out of favor everywhere but in violent video games and is something kids don't need to see.
While I think Holmes' desire to ban cigarette smoking in bars and clubs is dumb, I have to agree that we ought to stop the sale of those Indian cigarettes called "bidis."
Holmes wants them banned because they have flavors like chocolate and wild cherry, which could be attractive to kids. I think they should be banned because they are hand-rolled in Calcutta by children under slave-labor conditions.
Anyone who has seen news footage of these young wretches working for 15 hours a day rolling bidis would never consider subsidizing this sleazy industry. Anyone who saw the filthy conditions in which the bidis are made would think twice about putting one to his or her lips, chocolate or not.
Banning bidis is not a smoking issue, it's a human-rights issue. Anyone profiting from bidis should be flayed. Or at least put asunder.
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.
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