Americans crave the stupid; they yearn for it with all their hearts. Why else would Americans be moving to places where the stupid is thickest like Texas and the South in general, especially Florida?
In Hawaii, this translates to moving to the legendarily lawless and crime-infested Puna district of the Big Island, where at least until recently you could buy land for a few thousand an acre, the catch being that then you have to live in Puna.
I just got an email today from my friend Pat who does indeed live in Puna and cannot comprehend why I'd not want to move there myself. This is someone who had a couple million around 1990 when that was real money, pissed it away in record time, managed somehow to buy one of those "unpermitted structures" in Puna, and has been living there in misery, with a mystery illness, a freeloading girlfriend, neighbors he's enemies with, and the poverty that comes with living off of Disability with absolutely no desire to work in any way, not even under the table, since.
He's also a vegetarian who can't stand for me to mention fishing, who keeps 3 cats (which amounts to the meat consumption of 1 human) and feeds those cats on food shipped in from Australia, since apparently buying fish off of the locals isn't something he's going to do.
So we're discussion the failing colonial project of "Israel" and he just came back with all those Fox News bullshit, how "they" are going to institute sharia law, yadda yadda.
Being out in the sticks, he can only get AM radio, no FM and no TV, and who knows how rudimentary his internet is, if mine is slow as shit here in Silicon Valley, he's probably down to text and the occasional .gif. Right-wing web sites tend to cater to people with old computers and outdated skills so he's probably on those, like Breitbart etc. All day every day because ... work is a dirty word!
The thing is, like myself, he grew up on the island of Oahu. Unlike myself, he didn't go through the kind of poverty I did. Maybe that's why he never became as "local" as I did. I'm going to assert that if you're fishing on the reef for dinner, doing odd jobs to buy S&S saimin with spam and green onions for dinner for yourself and your siblings, if your idea of a good time is beach combing especially at 4AM to find Japanese glass floats, etc., you're local.
Pat never had to do these things or would be inclined to. He may not have even gone to public school, and I know he went to the Catholic summer camp. He always had enough to eat. He graduated high school and I'm sure he has a college degree.
He's also so "fair" he practically glows. He has no "local" accent, so for the longest time I assumed he was pretty fresh off the boat from the mainland.
The thing is, though, he knew a ton of people, had a ton of connections, could have found a cheap way to stay around the Honolulu area which is a pretty intellectual place, and he intentionally moved to Hawaii's answer to Bumfuct East Texas.
He's basically replicated the lifestyle of those leeches, the 1970s hippies who moved to Hawaii to leech off of welfare and food stamps. And he didn't have to end up this way.
Of course Dave T. in Honolulu is if anything even worse, he's lost his houses, tons of electronics equipment and collectible records, valuable coins, etc., because he wouldn't let Pat and with Pat's arrangement, myself, help him. I was ready to jet over there to Hawaii a few years ago because Pat tried to arrange to have Dave let me clear out a room in one of his houses to live in, and help him sell his stuff and prepare one or more houses to sell. I thought this was a great plan because I'd not have to have $20k or more on hand to make the move.
That all fell apart, and if Pat is a right-wing loon, Dave is the same, in spades. Dave's Chinese, or more precisely Cantonese, probably third-generation American and fell for all the right-wing radio and loon sites Pat's apparently into.
Getting back to the email, I told Pat that no, sharia law is not coming to Puna, and no, the news about the "Israelis" shooting children and reporters isn't just an invention by what he called "al-jazzera" but is solidly documented.
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