5. The Paramilitary Crucible

PHOTO:  Larry Manetti, Roger Mosley and Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I.
Symbols, Myth and TV in Hawai'i

5. The Paramilitary Crucible
Film and TV often personalize paramilitary conflict, boiling down social and geographic struggle to the mano a mano show down of kill or be killed. Such dramatic fare tends to be highly pedagogic and idealized in nature. In the foundational period of network TV, the audience learns the repercussions of deviance, as socially acceptable “types” win out in clear-cut battles of good versus evil.

Paramilitary TV allows for an exploration of law and order issues in a controlled environment, with a predictable level of resolution. Like the proto-hero Cook, Steele and Lopaka, McGarrett, Dano (James MacAuthor) and Magnum all carry pistols into battle, extend and consolidate the frontiers of far-flung empires, are the agents of secret missions and elite societies, represent and wield cutting-edge technology, function ideologically as Euro “gods” in Hawai`i space, and inevitably resolve crisises in a timely manner. The Hawai`i TV hero has three additional functions, often explicitly stated, if not always implied, which relate to on-going nationalist issues. The Hawai`i TV hero has a mission to prevent foreign infiltration, protect American lives and property, and promote a safe haven for tourist excursion and romance.

Tourism in the islands matured in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Noel Kent in his 1983 study notes that tourism quite literally took over the island economy after World War Two, eclipsing plantation agriculture. While the preoccupation with tourism is relatively recent, the proprietary desirability of Hawai`i was framed as a mission of progress as early as 1837. “Annexation,” wrote the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, a Honolulu business periodical, would mean “national prosperity instead of adversity. It means a glorious life of the people instead of gradual decay and death.” While Caucasian businessmen viewed annexation as a guaranteed economic bonanza, the military saw it as essential foreign policy. Admiral DuPont, U.S. Navy, 1851:

It is impossible to estimate too highly the value and importance of the Hawaiian Islands... Should circumstances ever place them in our hands they would prove the most important acquisition connected with our commercial and naval supremacy in those seas.

In the 1860’s Secretary of State William Seward mapped out a plan, whereby Hawai`i, Midway, Samoa, the Philippines, Alaska and the Aleutians would function as stepping stones to the vast markets of Asia. An American supported coup usurped Hawaiian sovereignty in 1893. By 1898, the year of annexation, the first U.S. military camp, Camp McKinley, was established at the foot of Diamond Head Crater, and in 1908 the U.S. government began construction of a naval base at Pearl Harbor for the vaunted Pacific Fleet.

The proprietary relationship between the military and the broadcast industry during its incubatory radio and TV phases, as well as its government-enforced monopoly and oligopoly phases, directly affected how content was developed for the big three networks. In its vanguard position as a symbol of the Westward reach of the American Empire, the first cycle was especially subject to pedagogic and political pressures. The space of Hawai`i became a space to make statements about such topics as U.S. race relations, the second world war, Japanese imperialism, the Korean war, Vietnam, psychological warfare, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, the cold war, the vanishing Native, ecological terrorism, hippies, drugs, modern sex, women’s liberation, feminism, ageism, gangs, mobsters, labor relations, communism, multiculturalism, the new American male, democracy and the melting pot thesis. In the 570 episodes that make up the first cycle, a new Hawai`i mythos would take shape less constrained by continental distance and oceanic space than it was by institutional expectations. The confirmation and seeming finality of Hawai`i statehood in 1959 opened the way for the mythology of the American nation and its own “peculiar” idiosyncrasies and iconographies to dominate narrative discourse about the region for the remainder of the 20th century.