Geneva or
Gathering Place?

Those who are promoting the Asian Development Bank meeting here have taken to calling Honolulu the "Geneva of the Pacific" as a way to attract similar meetings in the future.

On reflection, that's not really the image Honolulu should project, for two reasons: One is the fawning suggestion that somehow things European are culturally superior to those of the Pacific and Asia, that copying from Europe gives a sort of a global seal of approval. That should be rejected out of hand.

Another is that, while it may be unfair to the site of a 700-year- old democracy, the image of Geneva is a cool, spotlessly clean, architecturally attractive, ruthlessly efficient -- and boring -- city where the sidewalks are rolled up precisely at eight o'clock each evening. It is seen as a sterile monument to the failed League of Nations where little of any import takes place.

Let's have something with more imagination and with a Hawaiian motif, like "The Gathering Place of the Pacific."

--Richard Halloran

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