Ke 'ala ka'u i honi

Linda Dela Cruz, the stage name of Lillian Lealoha Keeawehu, was a master of singing in the ha'i style, the familiar yodel-like falsetto of traditional Hawaiian music.  Here she performs  Ke ʻala kaʻu i honi (usually translated as The Fragrance is Mine to Enjoy)  words by Keala Carter, music by Tom Carter, Jr.

The recording (whose original vintage I have been unable to unearth any information about) was compiled on a CD in 2007 by Hawaiian label HanaOla Records and was featured in a season 1 episode of The White Lotus.

The lyrics in Hawai'i:

Ke ʻala kaʻu i honi
Pōhai nā mokupuni
Hiki pū me ke aloha
I laila koʻu mahalo

Ka pua o ka mokihana
Onaona māpuna hanu
Aʻu i honi hoʻomau
Hui mai nei ke aloha

Kahi wai ʻo hoʻohila
Kēia wai kaulana
A ka manu e inu wai
Wehiwehi wale ʻia uka

Ka liko o ka palai
I wili pū ʻia me ka hala
Puana kuʻu lei i ke anu
Huli e ke ʻalo i Lanihuli

Mokihana

Extremely amateur (and possibly wrong) translation:

The fragrance 

that surrounds me 

Fills me with love

and gratitude.

The berry of the mokihana 

never ceases to

assault my senses,

telling me of love to come.

This water is modest;

That water is famous.

The bird that drinks the water

Endows the uplands with beauty.

The leaf of the fern

Woven tightly with hala

Releases a song into the coolness.

My love turns toward Lanihuli.

Hala

Hosts and Parasites

Carlson (l), Lemon (r)

Is there a shortage of celebrities?  Aside from the odd Saturday Night Live host who seems to be plucked randomly from the population at large, it seems like the same names and faces keep shuffling around from place to place causing the same boring mayhem.  Could no one else have bought Twitter?  Does Bill Maher deserve another talk show?  Joe Biden again?!  How many flavors of Oreo do we really need?  

While CNN is patently not reeling from Don Lemon's second career move at the network in less than a year (this time to the other side of the door) its remaining hosts would like us to believe that Tucker Carlson's departure from rival fake news outlet Fox on the same day has everything to do with his former producer Abby Grossberg's non-revelatory revelations about a hostile frat boy atmosphere among Carlson's production team.  It's all a bit too pat and run-of-the-mill.  How could it not be related to Fox's $787.5 million Dominion payout of the prior week and more to the point, the exposure via a trove of released emails of the hypocrisy of Fox hosts, including especially Carlson as Trump-reviling MAGA posers.

In the way they perfectly embodied their respective networks for so much of the dawning of our new, post-neoliberal era-- Lemon in his shallow calorie-poor corporate-flavored limousine-liberal Trump-obsessed identity-informed performativity; Carlson's exposed posturing a more Alpha WASP, old money, straight, white and male intersectional identity alt-right wing counterpart-- they bore a striking similarity. 

I don't grieve the career of either departed host.  I grieve that in this imagination starved culture it's inconceivable that either career is doomed.  As to who will re-emerge sooner in a stronger iteration, the smart money would be on Carlson. As of today when I google"Don Lemon fired", the dateline on most of the articles that return is the day it happened.  Meanwhile the Carlson speculation accumulates.

An elegant solution

Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2023/03/14/whole_pie_2023/

Are you concerned about crime? Have you seen the news lately?  Do you watch murder shows?  Is crime at an all time low or is it creeping back up again?  Have you noticed an uptick in police activity?  Have you observed that in spite of over $100 billion spent annually on police budgets, over $80 billion on prisons and more than $50 billion on courts-- police, courts and prisons all tell us it's not enough?  And what about the crime that does not get reported, let alone investigated, solved and punished?

When the perceived threat of crime goes up we give more money to police. When the crime rate goes down we give more money to police.  For those concerned about crime, can we agree that what we are doing-- giving more and more money to police-- is not working?   Let me propose a solution that I think you will in short order come to agree, given the proper societal commitment, is elegant in its simplicity:

Let's decriminalize everything.

That's right-- everything!  The semantic fix alone should not convince you.  True enough, if everything were decriminalized overnight, tomorrow nothing would be a crime, and therefore, crime would be semantically disappeared.  The decriminalization of victimless crimes— drug use, black markets, consensual sex— should be uncontroversial.  Theft, murder,  sexual assault, kidnapping, shoplifting, arson, public disorderliness, pollution,  embezzlement, insurance and tax fraud-- we would not expect these behaviors to magically cease.  But if everything were decriminalized, none of these would be crimes: the ledger under crime would be blank.

To go beyond the absurd elegance of the semantic trick takes some imagination and this is where the real beauty of the solution lies.  For starters, if there is no crime, there is nothing to prohibit, enforce or punish, so we do not need police, prisons or criminal courts.   This frees up over $200 billion for other priorities, the neglect of which (due to our compulsive spending on policing) we will soon see has been a contributing factor to the conditions that make what we today consider criminal behaviors flourish.  What is needed are new ways to prevent those behaviors and new ways to restore justice to those against whom those behaviors are committed. 

Money is the root of all evil, as crime shows remind us every day.  However with a commitment to  strive to meet the basic needs of everyone,  we could drastically reduce financial pressures that underpin so many criminal motivations.  As a simple example, if healthcare were universal in this country it would relieve $195 billion in medical debt in the US.*  We are eager to spend public funds to build prisons and pad the budgets of hyper-militarized police departments-- what if instead, for an additional $30 billion education dollars a year we funded universal school breakfasts and lunches for every student?  Studies show us that in communities where free meals are provided students, family grocery budgets are eased by as much as $40 on average a month which in turn has been shown to lower prices on other goods in neighborhood grocery stores.  With more investment in public transportation, housing, child care,  public secondary and vocational education, the expenses that breed inequality will less and less cause the kind of grief and want that lead to theft, fraud, drug abuse, armed robbery, violence and mayhem.

These are the easy cases.  What about the cycles of violence that beget violence-- child and spousal abuse, rape, murder?  In a world without police and punishment, what do we do about violence, both with respect to its perpetrators and to their victims?  There is no single answer.  But what we currently do-- collect every suspected perpetrator that our criminal justice system gets hold of (that it doesn't kill with its violent methods of collection†) in anti-social enclaves where they are only hardened to more violence-- is no answer. Our system of incarceration often punishes the victims as well, as families are torn apart, making life-- in more cases than our punitive state is capable of recognizing-- more difficult, not less; wounds deepen rather than heal, and cycles perpetuate.  In reality the situations in which violence arises are too complex for the one-size-fits-all (at its absolute best) non-solution of criminal justice.  Decriminalization favors different models of justice in response.  While revenge would itself not be illegal in a decriminalized world, a better model-- one that invites community involvement in maintaining and mediating the peace-- is restorative justice in which acts that cause harm are responded to with acts that bring healing.

It's true, the solution to crime -- complete decriminalization of our society -- requires a society that is quite different from the one we live in and getting there will take some steps that we have been conditioned to think are impossible.  But before you abandon the idea as hopeless, consider for a moment the forces in society that do not want crime to disappear anytime soon.  Other than employees, stockholders and other direct beneficiaries of the Prison Industrial Complex, those who least want you to consider alternatives to policing, punishment and imprisonment are those who benefit the most from the inequalities of the capitalist system.  They who control the messages about what's possible and what is not are happy within their citadels with their armed security details to let crime run rampant among us, because it keeps us trapped trying to scrounge for safety and security outside the gates of their communities while they rest fat and happy within.  

We need the peace and safety that every human deserves, the deprivation of which is behind so much of the crime that fills our prisons and breaks the stillness of our nights with the wails of sirens.  We need the peace that they purposely withhold from us.  They need to twitch in their sleep.

 * * *

The spin on the argument is my own, but for further reading and a strong and solid case for police abolition, I highly recommend Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie's excellent, mind and life changing book on the subject, No More Police.

~~~~

* It would also simplify the exit from abusive relationships of those who under our current system remain partly to keep the health insurance provided by a violent spouse's employment.

† Five percent of homicides per year are committed by police.

Ectopistes migratorius

Artifact of nostalgia: Lewis Lumen Cross's Bird's Eye View of Passenger Pigeons Nesting (1937)

In 1600, billions of passenger pigeons populated the forests of North America east of the Rockies to the Atlantic Coast, from southern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico as they had for 100,000 years.  Today, there are none. What happened to them?

Until the mid 1800's at certain times of the year depending on where you lived, the sky would be black with them for hours as they followed the growing cycle in search of food, traveling in bands a mile wide and mile after mile after mile in length. But by 1857, the dwindling number was apparent enough that the Ohio legislature considered enacting a law to protect them.  That recognition notwithstanding, on September 1, 1914 the last known passenger pigeon, a female named Martha -- the sole survivor of a last ditch breeding effort-- died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Her preserved body is in the Smithsonian archives.

Without the pressure of habitat-consuming humans, passenger pigeons had evolved a survival advantage over predators in their sheer number.  Living in vast swarms was not merely a convenience but a necessity, and as such, one that worked against any prospects of domestication.  But from a food perspective, domestication of passenger pigeons was not a priority for humans since for millennia, the sheer number of pigeons in the wild provided a plentiful seasonal food source even before the arrival of Europeans.  The first Europeans discovered the trade-off of a noisy flock of pests who without mitigation ravaged crops yet provided protein in abundance.  But the pestilence worked in reverse as well. As Europeans replaced First Nation peoples in their expansion west, they replaced the woodland habitat of the passenger pigeon with farms, towns, cities, roads and railroads, posing one of the first major threats to passenger pigeon survival.  As they were already a staple of the early American diet, fewer passenger pigeons in the settled East contributed to the success of a market for squab, the preferred meat of birds too young to have reproduced.  To keep the East well stocked with squab, hunters employed tricks established in Europe which worked devastatingly on passenger pigeon populations.  

Shoshana Zuboff* describes it:

... Bernd Heinrich describes the fate of the passenger pigeons, whose “social sense was so strong that it drew the new predator, technologically equipped humans, from afar. It made them not only easy targets, but easily duped.” Commercial harvesters followed the pigeons’ flight and nesting patterns, and then used huge nets to catch thousands of pigeons at a time, shipping millions by rail each year to the markets from St. Louis to Boston. The harvesters used a specific technique, designed to exploit the extraordinary bonds of empathy among the birds and immortalized in the term “stool pigeon.” A few birds would be captured first and attached to a perch with their eyes sewn shut. As these birds fluttered in panic, the flock would descend to “attend to them.” This made it easy for the harvesters to “catch and slaughter” thousands at once. 

The effect of habitat destruction and mass slaughter of birds for food and for sport had an observable effect on the population to such a degree that in 1857

a bill was brought forth to the Ohio State Legislature seeking protection for the Passenger Pigeon. A Select Committee of the Senate filed a report stating, "The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced." 

As is often the case where politics substitutes for science, the conclusion of the committee was soon to be proven wrong.  In 1897, with the population almost depleted, Michigan, at the heart of the passenger pigeon's territory, enacted a poorly enforced 10-year moratorium on hunting within 2 miles of the species' nesting areas.  But it was too little too late.  A University of Chicago ornithologist Charles Otis working in conjunction with the Cincinnati Zoo in the early 1900s was the last to attempt reviving the species with the offspring from only 2 birds, but with the population down to 12, they stopped breeding altogether, and just aged and died one by one until only Martha was left.  

According to a 2017 study published in Science, the depletion of the passenger pigeon population  was so rapid that that there was no time for the species to adapt to the dramatic shift in population density.  In effect, so engrained in passenger pigeon DNA was the certainty of numerousness that the human destruction of that essential of passenger pigeon survival began a negative feedback loop resulting in a downward spiral of the species' population that, barring a miraculous adaptation, could only result in extinction.

As Bernd Heinrich (quoted in Zuboff) writes:

The pigeon had no home boundaries over which to spread itself and continued to orient only to itself, so it could be everywhere, even to the end.… To the pigeons, the only ‘home’ they knew was in the crowd, and now they had become victims of it… the lack of territorial boundaries of human predators had tipped the scales to make their adaptation their doom.

~~~~~

* The quote is from Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.  Zuboff is making an analogy between the hunting strategy and the way in which likes on social media tend to beget likes, creating an atmosphere in which particularly young users seek and are granted or denied valorization via the extent of their popularity on social platforms so that their data and habits can be monetized by those very platforms.