Musings: 'Nuff Po, Huff Po

Has anyone else noticed that the primary purpose of Huffington Post Hawaii seems to be encouraging people to move to the Islands?

I'm not talking about articles promoting travel to Hawaii — though Huff Po-HI has plenty of those — but pieces like “How to Escape from New York and Move to Hawaii” and “Here's How You Know It's About Time You Considered Moving to Hawaii.”

The latter is representative of the painfully banal approach that Huff Po-HI typically takes to relocating to Hawaii: your life sucks, the weather sucks, you're bored and then voila, “you Google image search pictures of Hawaii” — because of course you're not interested in substance, only superficiality — and whattaya know, you find all these gorgeous photos of the Islands on the Huff Po-HI website.

Why is the Huffington Post trying to dumb down and pimp Hawaii, turn it into a parody, reinforce all the worst stereotypes, misperceptions? 

Like this blog post on “6 Reasons Hawaii Will Ruin Your Life,” which uses goofy photos to illustrate such statements as: “who needs a career path” and “work ethic? forget about it” and “Soon, you'll find that you have less in common with your friends and more in common with those drifters sitting on the sidewalk.”

WTF?

And this “escape to paradise” post that proclaims:

I've brought that Aloha Spirit into my own life by using the pineapple as a welcoming symbol throughout my home. My dogs are named Maui and Tiki in honor of our love of Hawaii. I've also written a series about a young woman vacationing in Hawaii for the summer who meets the local heartthrob surfer. Along with discovering paradise, they find love set among the beauty of these tropical islands.

Auwe.

Sadly, this kind of distorted imagery is not a rare occurrence. In the three months since Huffington Post piggybacked on Civil Beat to launch a Hawaii edition, it's published precious little of substance and more than 30 pieces extolling the virtues of the Islands. They've included such puffery as adventure travel on Maui, surf cars, “glamping” (upscale camping) in the Islands, “lucky we live Hawaii,” and even a photo series on vog entitled “who knew air pollution could look this good?”

Typically, they're photo-rich, content-limited and substance-challenged.

And if they don't have articles of their own, they'll run something from Forbes, or the New York Times. Main thing, just keep the message out there: come to Hawaii, and stay.

Though some are authored blog posts, many more run without any byline, raising the question: who is writing this palaver, and why? How come there's this drive to lure more people to Hawaii to live, when we don't exactly have an abundance of jobs or housing?

Like the post “Honey, Let's Move to Hawaii." Or “The Coolest Jobs In Hawaii Might Make You Reconsider Your Career Choice” — yes, you, too, could be a beloved helicopter pilot, a property manager for a lavish estate or even a farmer, so long as you don't grow GMOs. 

Which leads us to the anti-GMO issue, the only topic, besides relocating, that Huff Po-HI has covered with a vengeance.

Do you suppose there's any connection between that emphasis, and the two-part, real estate agent-penned post on “Making the Dream of Living in Hawaii a Reality”? Or Civil Beat owner Pierre Omidiyar's plans to develop a super upscale resort and homes on Hanalei Ridge? (Which is the subject of a Star-Advertiser poll today.)

And keep in mind that this is the photo they used to illustrate a "farm" in those "cool career choices:"

The last time Hawaii was the focus of a major push to encourage new residents was more than a century ago, when the plantation owners went shopping for cheap field labor.

So what do the fabulously wealthy Arianna Huffington and Pierre Omidiyar have in mind with their current campaign? What might they be seeking to gain from encouraging folks to pack up and move to Hawaii, where the newbies typically hunker down together and rarely assimilate? Is this an attempt to further dilute local culture, to create a block of voters who primarily value Hawaii for its climate and recreation, who have no ties to this place aside from the deed to their house? 

Or is it simply the 21st Century expression of the same desire that drove the planters: accumulating money and power through the land?

As a friend observed: Whatever happened to that bumper sticker, nofogetfogohome?