Hawaiians Sign Petition Against Dodge Kahuna

http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Feb/04/ln/ln07a.html

[ Edited by: filslash 2008-09-10 13:50 ]

Signed! Thanx for the heads-up fil.

em

On 2004-02-04 21:41, emspace wrote:
Signed!

[ Edited by: filslash 2008-09-10 13:51 ]

I initially read that as "Hawaiians Sign Petition Against Basement Kahuna"!
What did BK do to get the islanders so riled?!

Trader Woody

Nice looking minivan. I wonder if the Spanish were angry when Mopar named another one of their cars in the 70's 'Cordoba'?

On 2004-02-05 07:05, Rattiki wrote:
Nice looking minivan. I wonder if the Spanish were angry when Mopar named another one of their cars in the 70's 'Cordoba'?

a closer analogy might be the san diego padres?

On 2004-02-05 07:36, Tiki Chris wrote:
a closer analogy might be the san diego padres?

I remember reading an article similar to this regarding the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins.

Are there even any Kahuna's living today?

JFC.

Are there even any Kahuna's living today?

It was a joke!

Sure, BAsement Kahuna is alive and well.

Guys, read the article:

"One who had not signed — but said he would — is Keola Lake, himself a kahuna nui, or high priest, who trains others as kahuna to supervise traditional Hawaiian rituals."

I think it is commendable to revive ancient traditions, but why does it always have to be done with this overdone political correctness, as he also says:

"It came out of the California culture, and 'Beach Blanket Bingo,' " he said, referring to the movies of the 1960s. "I find it offensive, especially now, because we finally got our own people who are practicing kahunas, the healers, and here are these guys making fun of it."

Why can't people accept that the essence of pop culture is trivialization, maybe careless, but not with the aim of "making fun of it".
As the Sufis say, the secret protects itself, those who are seriously interested in Hawaiian mysticism will not be misguided by Surf tradition terminology, just like modern Tiki culture has an outer and an inner value, making many more curious about authentic Polynesian culture than belitttling it.

I don't see how the name of this car will tarnish or trivialize the image of a 'real' Kahuna. Car manufacturers name their cars after things that are worth admiring, after all. You've never heard of a Pontiac Accountant, have you?

I for one would love it if they named a car after me... I'm still waiting for the launch of the Chevrolet Smartass.

A funny sidenote -

The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish speaking contries. 'Nova' means no go/doesn't work. Would you buy it?

Dang, I was hoping to have the fun of pilfering the Kahuna emblems, etc. from the vans when they came out.

It would have been the Tiki equivalent of ancient Native Americans returning to the camp with an eagle's feather.

I would have made a hip hop medallion on a thick chain with mine.

Maybe the "Haole" Minivan would have been more appropriate.

On 2004-02-05 11:57, Tiki_Bong wrote:
The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish speaking contries. 'Nova' means no go/doesn't work.

WRONG! See http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

A funny sidenote -

The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish speaking contries. 'Nova' means no go/doesn't work. Would you buy it?

Also... the Toyota MR2 never sold well in French speaking areas. MR2 sounds too much like "merde"

Okay. Alright. Dodge Moon Doggie it is.

Took me a second - MR2 in french is pronounced:

"Em-air-deux"

Now that is a car name story I can beleive!

PS. Someone sent me the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe today...

These are real products for sale:
Kahuna Sports Watch

Kahuna Golf Sandals

American Racing Kahuna Rims

Kona Kahuna Deluxe Bicycle

Maui Jim Kahuna Sunglasses

TILT - BIG KAHUNA HIPSTER PANTIES

And the grand finale!
You can own your very own Kahuna Restaurant on Ebay.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2363189801&category=15825

A Tiki Cheers To You

[ Edited by: Unga Bunga on 2004-02-05 17:43 ]

This, however, did happen in October:

It's game over for the Buick LaCrosse in Canada. A General Motors executive yesterday admitted that the future Buick model -- which is set to debut late next year -- will be re-named in Canada after GM learned LaCrosse is a Quebec slang term for masturbation.

The new mid-size sedan, which will replace the Buick Regal, will still go by the name LaCrosse in the U.S.

GM vice-chairman Bob Lutz, who was in Toronto yesterday to address a gathering of GM dealers, said he wasn't aware of LaCrosse's racy roots although he speaks French and spent three years living in Paris.

"I thought I knew every expression existing in the French language for self-gratification, including the crudest ones known to man," said the outspoken Lutz.

He told journalists the proposed name for the new Buick has caused "a slight problem with your francophone fellow Canadians."

On 2004-02-05 12:21, cynfulcynner wrote:

On 2004-02-05 11:57, Tiki_Bong wrote:
The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish speaking contries. 'Nova' means no go/doesn't work.

WRONG! See http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

Sorry CC,

But I must point your attention to a March, 2003 Rand study report that definatively determined that everything Bong says is sort of true!

and Ford Pintos never sold very well in in Spanish speaking countries because Pinto means - "slow moving object that explodes upon rear impact". Too bad American car buyers didn't know this.

There is a common Japanese canned beverage whose name is pronounced "cowpiss". I think that wouldn't sell too well in english speaking countries.
-Randy

And only a Moron would buy the new Nissan Murano...

My Hawaiian Dictionary Defines "Kahuna" as...
Expert Practitioner; sorcerer

I would think a true Hawaiian Kahuna would be proud to have a "woody" named for him.

I notice most of the people who signed, and were pretty eloquent about it, have Hawaiian names. Those who weighed in here suggesting it is a sign of excessive political correctness (God, I hate being accused of that!) - how many of you are haoles?

...maybe we ought to listen to what the Hawaiians have to say about it. My favorite being Joe who suggested the name "dumb haole".

:), em.

I think that immitation is the highest form of flatery. The Polypop palaces of the past that we all worship were probably the worst form of misusing or profiting from their culture. It is a kewl van and a fine tribute to "Polypop culture" IMO.

Personally what I think should really be addressed and publicized to the American public is the loss of their amazing culture and nation to the missionaries and a guy named Dole (& company/cronies and the Committee of Safety) that just had to grow the fruit of a South American bromiliad there (and well ok, sugar too). Unlike Puerto Rico (which is no longer inhabited by the original Arawaks), or Samoa they have NO chance of ever reclaiming that from our 'manifest destiny' :(

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/HAWAII/hawaii.html

[ Edited by: Rattiki on 2004-02-06 06:47 ]

Emspace, of COURSE the people signing the petition are Hawaiian. You don't expect the Finnish or the Amish to get upset about this do you?

Just because some Hawaiians signed it, doesn't mean they speak for all Hawaiians, be they eloquent or not.

[ Edited by: tikifish on 2004-02-06 06:48 ]

In a related story, the Department of Transportation has noted that the new Nissan "Armada" has a high likelihood of being run off the road by the new Jaguar "Lord Nelson"

On 2004-02-05 11:46, tikifish wrote:
You've never heard of a Pontiac Accountant, have you?

No, but I've always liked the Ford Prefect.

The problem with naming teams or cars after Native Americans or Hawaiians isn’t some surface PC boohoo Natives issue. It’s not even that people are making fun of us, it’s that they are taking away our humanity. It’s a deep and insidious problem. MOST people, not ALL, most have no Hawaiian dentist or Mohawk neighboor next door. The images they have of Indigenous Americans are taken from the media who almost always show us in the PAST tense. Usually depicted as savages, stupid ( Que es stupid en Espanol? Tonto es stupid en Espanol.) or even as noble people of the forest but almost always in a past tense as if we no longer exist. Sports mascots are usually animals or Indians? Putting Indians into this category makes them less than human. Just as animal is less than man, Indian is therefore less than white man.
Please look up Kike, Nigger and Redskin in your dictionary, these are all derogatory terms. The only reason you can have the Washington Redskins and not the New york Niggers is that natives are less than 1% of US population and have little political or social clout.
The fighting Illini of Illinois have as their mascot a white kid who puts on red face and fake Indian regalia and does a fake Indian dance while making war whoops and swinging a tomahawk. The dance was listed as authentic in their brochure until a couple of years ago. When Indians asked the university to cease this shameful behavior they replied that they were honoring and continuing the natives culture.
Imagine taking your child to the New York Niggers game and a white boy in black face comes out with a bone in his wig, thrusting a spear and doing a fake african dance while wearing leopard print skivvies and grunting, this is what Indians have to endure while we are honored.
Perhaps the descendants of the nazis in Germany should have a kikes team with a mascot called the kike. Hopefully those PC jews won’t get upset.
All this cartoon characterization and past tense and logo bearer status add up to a huge cloud of unreality or nonexistence over native peoples. If your auto mechanic Tony is Apache and doesn’t wear skins you’ll think Tony isn’t a REAL Indian. All this is just fine with the government who wishes the broken treaties not yet righted and the murders of millions would just go away. If Indians don’t exist in national Consciousness than there is no national concern, no movement and no change.
If all this sounds like bull to you here’s one last thing.
My cousin Shawna who is ¾ American Indian attended a college with no Indian mascot or team names, however, during homecoming week the school played a rival with an Indian mascot. This is what she and other Indians had to endure.( You might want to key up Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit now).
Walking down the main avenue of the campus past burnt effigies of Indians, lynched Indians, dismembered Indians etc.. HEE hee, that’s just good ol’ American fun isn’t it? You see it’s okay because IT was only mascots burnt and hung. IT was a human until you made IT a mascot and now it has lost IT’s humanity, IT is a thing, an animal, a cartoon, a logo, a new car, a helicopter, a sports team name.
When you name a car a Cherokee or Kahuna you dehumanize the real Cherokee or the real Kahuna, now he is a car, an item, an it.
Maybe the Kahuna doesn’t want to be the next JCPennney Fox . Maybe he wants Kahuna to represent a real and present human priest. Maybe we should listen.
P.S. No va is No go in Espanol.

Personally, I am shocked and outraged that Wonder Bread would crassly name their product after the culture I am affiliated with, demeaning it by association with a bland sandwich product for kids!!

-Randy

An unintelligent and uncompassionate response you made there aqua.

On 2004-02-06 12:02, Sneakytiki wrote:
The problem with naming teams or cars after Native Americans or Hawaiians isn’t some surface PC boohoo Natives issue. It’s not even that people are making fun of us, it’s that they are taking away our humanity. It’s a deep and insidious problem. MOST people, not ALL, most have no Hawaiian dentist or Mohawk neighboor next door. The images they have of Indigenous Americans are taken from the media who almost always show us in the PAST tense. (snip)

check out this thread regarding a maybe minutely positive change in the above-mentioned public attitudes...

http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=7589&forum=6&0

You are right, SneakyTiki, in all my love for the corny, tacky, in-bad-taste pop culture, one tends to forget that there are still many people out there that take these things for face value and do not see the irony.

I mean I LOVE to listen to Roy Orbison's "MEDICINE MAN", where every line is so chockful of bad clichees of American Indian culture that it would make your hairs stand on end, just as I love to listen to "SCHNICKEL-FRITZ presents AN EVENING AT SCHMIDT'S", the equivalent in German kitsch (MY culture).

Where it gets scary is when you see that with some people the historical fact of the injustice of the treatment of indigenous peoples, be it American Indian, Jewish, or Hawaiian, which any educated person takes as a given, has not registered, or worse, is even seen with revisionist candour.

Case in point is a write up of my book on Amazon, where I was describing part of the end of exotic idealization with:
"Exotica and Tiki style were denounced as contrived rituals of the imperialist establishment as the Vietnam war developed into an ugly mistake, with native huts and palm trees burning on T.V..."

and the person responds with: "...it had me wondering if they (the author) were tongue-in-cheek or were actually serious.."

Which gave me the creepy realization that there are some of us out there who might view the Vietnam war NOT as an ugly mistake, something I thought was an accepted historic fact (well, until the most recent display of collective amnesia regarding involvement in foreign affairs).

The tricky question is where to draw the line, so that political correctness does not stifle creativity and freedom of expression, but at the same time the argument AGAINST political correctness can not be abused by revisionist ignorants.

one more small problem is that in a message board format sometimes it's hard to infer irony or seriousness about a statement. thus "smilies" and such :) but there's still a disjuncture between intent and interpretation.

i totally agree with your statement tho bigbrotiki, it can be a fine line to walk... j$

[ Edited by: Sneakytiki on 2004-02-06 14:08 ]

I agree wholeheartedly bigbro. I think using sacred Kahunas as logos or names of peoples is crossing that line. For example I think the Dodge Aloha would be fine but Kahuna is out. The Navaho word for roadrunner is a cool idea but don't call the car a Navaho.
Enjoying watered down polynesian culture is fine, aloha shirts and hula skirts are fine but brown face paint is sad. It's a fine line but perhaps we should all think a bit before we act. PS I love your book. My dad is a Vietnam Vet.(Recon.) and as quick as I am to think the war was a mistake (especially as it was fought)I sometimes consider what would have happened if we had not taken a stand against communism in Vietnam and Korea. We were really fighting the Chinese and if we had not took a stand would they not have tried for Japan for Taiwan or for more? I know our motives and methods were unpure and if the Vietnamese majority had wanted Communism we should have butted out but perhaps the war did stop millions of others in other places to not have to endure the communist regime. This is what I try to tell myself to make the purple heart my father earned mean something. We'll never know what asia would be now without a US intervention. We only know of our dead and wounded and the Vietnamese who suffered and died. Perhaps it would have been worse without Vietnam. Probably not, but now that the wall is down and the USSR has disintegrated it's easy to dismiss the domino theory. I agree that the current admin. is forgetting Vietnam as well, watching troops die daily in Iraq is troubling to me as a vet. myself. I pray for our troops.

On 2004-02-05 14:16, Tiki_Bong wrote:

...But I must point your attention to a March, 2003 Rand study report that definatively determined that everything Bong says is sort of true!

Bong, Is that the same Rand Corporation whose studies proved the US would win a war in Southeast Asia?

*On 2004-02-06 12:02, Sneakytiki wrote:*The fighting Illini of Illinois have as their mascot a white kid who puts on red face and fake Indian regalia and does a fake Indian dance while making war whoops and swinging a tomahawk. The dance was listed as authentic in their brochure until a couple of years ago. When Indians asked the university to cease this shameful behavior they replied that they were honoring and continuing the natives culture.

Football teams and fans ignorant and insensitive? Not a big surprise to me. Here in Oakland we have the largest group of barbarians in the world - they're called Raider fans.

On 2004-02-06 14:41, Atomic Cocktail wrote:

On 2004-02-05 14:16, Tiki_Bong wrote:

...But I must point your attention to a March, 2003 Rand study report that definatively determined that everything Bong says is sort of true!

Bong, Is that the same Rand Corporation whose studies proved the US would win a war in Southeast Asia?

I thought we did win that war? (Poor LBJ)

On 2004-02-06 14:41, Atomic Cocktail wrote:

On 2004-02-05 14:16, Tiki_Bong wrote:

...But I must point your attention to a March, 2003 Rand study report that definatively determined that everything Bong says is sort of true!

Bong, Is that the same Rand Corporation whose studies proved the US would win a war in Southeast Asia?

I thought we did win that war? (Poor LBJ)

I heard this story last year, and I almost busted a gut laughing. A high school that was racially almost all American Indians adopted a "Fightning White Man" as a mascot.

Not only did nobody object or protest, they have sold over 10,000 T-shirts with the school name and their white man wearing a suit and tie mascot.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=265

http://www.gadflyonline.com/04-01-02/sports-white.html

Take a good look at the Cleveland Indians mascot on the top of that gadfly page. If it were an african American or asian american depicted in similar grotesque characature they'd be beating down the doors of every sports editorial with cries of racism. Since it's a true minority depicted, that is a very small percentage of the populace, one who couldn't even vote until the 1950's it's okay though. Nice! By the way the very,VERY small minority of Native Americans who think Indian mascots are good don't justify this BS anymore than that Israeli rabbi who said in the press a couple years back that the Jews who died in the holocaust were sinners in past lives and the genocide of Hitler was their just punishment. Just as 99.99% of Jews think he's a crackpot, so too Indigenous Americans think of this Comanchee mentioned in the other web site. Remember Hitler was 1/4 Jewish, does that mean Jews back anti semitism so hooray, full speed ahead for the rest of us? What a bunch of garbage!!
I'm sure the racist crowd loves this loser.

On 2004-02-06 15:24, Tiki_Bong wrote:

On 2004-02-06 14:41, Atomic Cocktail wrote:

On 2004-02-05 14:16, Tiki_Bong wrote:

...But I must point your attention to a March, 2003 Rand study report that definatively determined that everything Bong says is sort of true!

Bong, Is that the same Rand Corporation whose studies proved the US would win a war in Southeast Asia?

I thought we did win that war? (Poor LBJ)

Football and Vietnam...Hmmm

Howsabout "Linebacker" and Nixon...

Close that door Henry, its getting Chile in here.

[ Edited by: TikiGardener on 2004-02-06 21:25 ]

On 2004-02-06 11:45, tikibars wrote:
No, but I've always liked the Ford Prefect.

Fully loaded with Tiki Road Trip and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the glove box.

On 2004-02-06 23:54, Cultjam wrote:

On 2004-02-06 11:45, tikibars wrote:
No, but I've always liked the Ford Prefect.

Fully loaded with Tiki Road Trip and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the glove box.

Don't forget your towel, you hoopy frood.

TG

Ah yes Jab, Raiders fans are true barbarians, or at least they like to look the part. I saw some of them in the battle scenes from 'Lord Of the Rings/Return of the King". I think the producers recruited them straight out of the Black Hole.