A sinister character

Once upon a time, in the early 1970s, an ultra liberal, hippie mainland American got fed up with his country. With the Watergate scandal just beginning, with the Vietnam War coming to a close, stocks tumbling, inflation on the rise, an oil crisis looming–and all the rest of it–this ultra liberal hippie desperately wanted to get out of “the rat race”. He wanted to take it easy: to smoke dope, to commune with nature, and, above all, just to completely extricate himself from the strains of contemporary capitalistic society, with all of its attendant stress and competition.

So, one day, he resolved to just pack up and leave: to collect his John Lenin albums and move to a pristine Pacific Island paradise, where he would find his inner self, commune with nature, and relate to the quaint little brown natives, who would look up to him as the great, enlightened White man who had special social, economic and political status (higher Trust Territory government pay, for instance). Unfit for the US Marine Corps, he joined the Peace Corps instead.

Our idealistic hippie American was enchanted at the very sight of the Northern Marianas in the 1970s. He suddenly felt that all of his liberal dreams were finally coming true. At long last, here was a remote, undeveloped place under the US flag. He no longer had to struggle with the big American city life, with its greedy hustle and bustle, and all the other things preventing him from fulfilling his liberal John Lenin “Imagine” fantasies.

Our hippie American friend loved his first years in the islands. Virtually all of the island natives were ignorant, uneducated and impoverished. Only they did not know that they were impoverished. They were merely content to continue on with their subsistence living: fishing and farming, supplemented by USDA food products from the US federal government, who took care of things for the happy, smiling, friendly, stupid islanders.

Naturally, it wasn’t long before our hippie friend took to marrying one of the local girls. He thought he would go on to live happily ever after: an idyllic life, undisturbed on a tropical Pacific island paradise, when things suddenly turned for the worst.

Boom. Boom. Massive foreign investment and commercial development started taking place. A lucrative Japanese tourist trade established itself. All because the federal government had betrayed this particular liberal by allowing the natives greater local self-government, which it fully exploited through free enterprise.

A garment industry was also established. Real estate millionaires were created overnight. The previously subsistence and agrarian-oriented natives were suddenly thrust into American middle class status.

The liberal hated what was taking place. His special status was lost. Some of his own Peace Corps peers were “selling out,” becoming rich while he got left way behind. The wildlife preserve he had marked out for himself was being summarily wiped out.

His dream was shattered. And he has been a bitter man ever since, writing caustic letters to the editor, condemning all native politicians as corrupt, opposing all development projects, lambasting foreign investors and workers as the enemy, to be deported immediately, for the sake of preserving his little wildlife preserve–his zoo.

Instead of the warm, friendly, caring, compassionate, ignorant little brown Micronesian native islanders he was accustomed to, now he was dealing with bigger, richer, more assertive islanders, who were becoming more and more like the greedy, selfish, individualistic S.O.B. mainland Americans he had so desperately tried to escape a generation ago.

He still hopes to return to the past, however. He plans to seize upon the federalization issue as his ultimate redemption: as the prime means of putting the islanders back in their place. Kevin Efrain Offendo is the name I have for this kind of sordid, sinister character.

Beware.