COUNTERPOINT
Liberalism on a wobbly road

Robert M. Rees
Moderator of 'Olelo Television's "Counterpoint" and Hawai'i Public Radio's "Talk of the Islands"

Liberalism, once a grand ideological amalgam of toleration, individualism and liberty, has become instead a series of knee-jerk reactions based more on the whims of other-directed groupies than on thought. A recent sequence of events illustrates the decay:

• The leadership at the University of Hawai'i closes its eyes while a politically incorrect course, "An Alternative View of Hawaiian Sovereignty," is canceled because of a terrorist threat from someone who objects to the views of the lecturer.
• The ACLU of Hawai'i votes not to invite U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to debate the ACLU's national president because of its determination that Thomas is an "Uncle Tom" not worthy of a forum. Only when confronted with national ridicule does the local group change its mind.
• Supporters of the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission proffer that its procedures, to be fair, must favor one side over the other.
• Leading Democrats campaign against Hawai'i's Death With Dignity bill because its emphasis on personal liberty might generate an electoral backlash.
• The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in San Francisco defames former Gov. Ben Cayetano by suggesting that the governor's opposition to a demand for "unequivocal support for the state of Israel" might be grounded in anti-Semitism.

Recently, the Honolulu Community-Media Council weighed in with its own version — all diversity good, all capitalism bad — of inside-out liberalism.

The council, in August, wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to protest ownership of two of Honolulu's top four TV stations, KGMB and KHON, by one company, Emmis Communications. Warned an apparently prescient council about something that hadn't yet happened, "(T)his loss of an independent broadcast news source is having a chilling effect on the diversity of voices ..."

When this writer took exception to the council's letter as hysterical hyperbole that discredited its own view, one council member responded with liberalism's now characteristic use of innuendo designed, well, to have a chilling effect on the diversity of voices. Purred this certifiable liberal, "Of course we're all sensitive that when the Media Council takes on the owner of two of the top four TV stations, some of our members will be concerned about jeopardizing their personal prospects (Bob?) ..."

It wasn't until almost three months after it had sent its premature judgment to the FCC that the council sought the view of the senior vice president for Emmis in Hawai'i, Rick Blangiardi.

Blangiardi was invited to talk to the council in what was viewed by some council members as an opportunity for the righteous to stone one of the Philistines. Taking no chances, the council took the unusual step of introducing its guest to its luncheon crowd with a rebuttal to what the council thought he might say.

What followed was a stern lecture by Blangiardi, a cyclone reminiscent of Mark Twain's Colonel Sherburn in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" when Sherburn stood up to a lynch mob: "The idea of you lynching anybody! It's amusing ... why, a man's safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind — as long as it's daytime and you're not behind him."

Perhaps sensing that he wasn't in a lion's den so much as a tank of intellectually spineless jellyfish, Blangiardi pointedly demanded, "Let's stop languishing in our own limitations."

He went on to state that broadcast news in Hawai'i has sunk to new lows, and that he intends to fix that, but needs money to do it. "You deserve better," he said to his audience. "The state of TV news does not come close to what it should be."

The battle was over. The liberals in the audience didn't have a principle to stand on, and most fell silent.

And so it goes as liberalism, a once great system of thought now degraded by years of politically correct togetherness and all together now knee-jerk reactions, becomes in Orwellian fashion the very antithesis of what it used to be.