“Amateurs!” My favorite line from “The Phantom of the Opera,” delivered derisively by Piangi the tenor toward the management of the Paris Opera. I can only imagine him delivering the same line to many of the groups currently running things in our state of Hawaii.
As a theater manager, I’ve discovered life lessons hidden in plain sight in stage plays, and what I am witnessing statewide right now is the equivalent of those “two former junk dealers turned theatre producers,” trying to run a complicated business in which they have no real experience; simple mistakes, made by well-meaning people in authority, which are easily avoidable, often expensive and ultimately very embarrassing.
It’s even more galling when you’re dealing with executives who are paid large sums of money at the same time that other divisions in their business are getting obscenely minimal funding.
Is it really happening that after that legendary screw-up of a good idea called the Hawaii Superferry, that a massive public works project was rammed through without completing the required environmental studies?
It’s always amazed me that our state Legislature is only part-time. Half of the year they have to work for another business to make a living. That permanently keeps our biggest governing body as “amateurs,” doesn’t it?
How many years have we been running state elections here? Is it not possible to have some kind of continuity of knowledge and experience to keep voting debacles from occurring, or do we have to keep training new “amateurs”?
In “The Music Man,” Professor Harold Hill cons the rubes and hicks by scaring them with fearful statements about what disasters will befall their children because there is a pool table in their community.
Spread fear, uncertainty and doubt among the information-poor public and they will fall in line and do whatever you say. Ah, the old Flim-Flam man … from the turn-of-the-last-century. Couldn’t happen to us modern sophisticates, could it?
As they say in “The Sting,” you can’t con an honest man.
Yet when somebody says, “I know somebody who knows somebody who can make you a lot more money … all you need to do is give me some of your cash for a short while and you’ll get it back multiplied … ” — well, what rube would possibly fall for that these days?
I hope I do speak with a voice of all the islands when I demand that the embarrassment just stop.
As taxpayers we are barely getting by in our own lives and trying to duck telephone and Internet scams; we shouldn’t also have to worry about the most significant operations in our state repeatedly making the same simple mistakes and getting shut down or scammed as well.
