{"id":413,"date":"2009-08-20T12:47:31","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T10:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=413"},"modified":"2015-04-21T00:07:52","modified_gmt":"2015-04-20T22:07:52","slug":"happy-birthday-hawaii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/happy-birthday-hawaii\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy birthday, Hawaii!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you don&#8217;t know how many states are in the United States, here&#8217;s an easy way to remember. This Friday <span id=\"tooltip551e1de122e6d\">marks<\/span> exactly 50 years since America added its final, 50th, state: Hawaii.<\/p>\n<p>The country was ready: the growing availability of air travel in the 1960s made Hawaii a popular vacation <span id=\"tooltip551e1de123255\">spot<\/span> for those who could afford it. Those who couldn&#8217;t were soon fascinated by the <span id=\"tooltip551e1de12363d\">vivid<\/span> imagery of the TV crime series <i>Hawaii Five-O<\/i>, named for Hawaii being the 50th state. Its <span id=\"tooltip551e1de123a25\">opening sequence<\/span> has to be one of the greatest of all time.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/AepyGm9Me6w\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Visitors to the islands \u2014 five to six hours by air from Los Angeles \u2014 are still greeted as they were on TV, by Hawaiians in grass skirts putting a lei, or <span id=\"tooltip551e1de123e0c\">necklace<\/span> of flowers, around their neck.<\/p>\n<p>With its <a title=\"Hawaii State Parks official site, with photos\" href=\"http:\/\/www.hawaiistateparks.org\" target=\"_blank\">rainforests<\/a>, <span id=\"tooltip551e1de1241f3\">live<\/span> volcanoes, unusual animals, <a title=\"Mauna Kea Observatory (Wikipedia)\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mauna_Kea_Observatory\" target=\"_blank\">very large telescopes<\/a>, and flowers in all colors of the <span id=\"tooltip551e1de1245dd\">rainbow<\/span>, Hawaii is a very exotic place. To some, it&#8217;s more <span id=\"tooltip551e1de1249c0\">a state of mind<\/span> than a state of the US.<\/p>\n<p>American commercial interests had fought hard to gain control of what, until 1893, had been the independent Kingdom of Hawaii. In that year, they <span id=\"tooltip551e1de124da9\">overthrew<\/span> the queen \u2014 an act for which President Clinton and Congress <a title=\"Apology Resolution (Wikipedia)\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Apology_Resolution\" target=\"_blank\">apologized<\/a> in 1993 \u2014 and the resulting power vacuum led to Hawaii being <span id=\"tooltip551e1de125195\">annexed<\/span> by the United States in 1898 without any kind of <span id=\"tooltip551e1de12557c\">treaty<\/span>. Today, several organizations, such as the <a title=\"Hawaiian Kingdom\" href=\"http:\/\/www.hawaiiankingdom.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Hawaiian Kingdom Government<\/a>, are trying to <span id=\"tooltip551e1de125963\">restore<\/span> <span id=\"tooltip551e1de125d49\">sovereignty<\/span> to the &#8220;<span id=\"tooltip551e1de126130\">occupied<\/span>&#8221; islands by complaining to the United Nations (which won&#8217;t hear their case).<\/p>\n<div class=\"simplePullQuote right\"><p>People had kind of forgotten about Hawaii until Obama came along<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Hawaii&#8217;s place on American maps, inside a little box in the corner, next to Alaska, makes it seem like an <span id=\"tooltip551e1de126517\">afterthought<\/span>. In fact, Hawaii had kind of <span id=\"tooltip551e1de1268fe\">fallen off the map<\/span>, so to speak, until last year, when it became clear that Barack Obama was born there.<\/p>\n<p>Well, it became clear to most people. Hawaii is now the focus of Internet <span id=\"tooltip551e1de126ce9\">conspiracy theorists<\/span> who strongly believe that Barack Obama is not qualified to be president because he is, somehow, not American. They typically make one or more of the <a title=\"Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories (Wikipedia)\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories\" target=\"_blank\">following claims<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Obama has not publicly produced the original birth certificate proving where he was born, but rather a copy from a later date.<\/li>\n<li>A Hawaiian newspaper announcement of his birth in 1961, like anything in print, is not to be trusted.<\/li>\n<li>Even if he was born there, Hawaii is too far away from the <span id=\"tooltip551e1de1270cf\">mainland<\/span> to really count as part of America.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span id=\"tooltip551e1de1274b7\">Never mind<\/span> that Hawaii was American enough \u2014 even before it was a state \u2014 to <a title=\"The Perilous Fight: Pearl Harbor (PBS)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/perilousfight\/battlefield\/pearl_harbor\/\" target=\"_blank\">get the US into World War II<\/a>. And <span id=\"tooltip551e1de1278a2\">for the record<\/span>, Congress decided <span id=\"tooltip551e1de127c8b\">unanimously<\/span> in 2008 that both Obama and his rival, John McCain \u2014 born in a US colony, the <a title=\"Panama Canal Zone (Wikipedia)\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Panama_Canal_Zone\" target=\"_blank\">Panama Canal Zone<\/a> \u2014 counted as American citizens for the purpose of the election.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;birth conspiracy theorists&#8221;, commonly called &#8220;birthers&#8221;, were far <span id=\"tooltip551e1de128078\">on the fringe<\/span> last year, and nobody paid them much attention. Over the past several months, however, they have <span id=\"tooltip551e1de12845b\">gained a lot of momentum<\/span> by joining a growing rebellion against what they imagine to be Obama&#8217;s secret plan \u2014 developed since his childhood \u2014 to turn the United States into a Muslim socialist nation in which black people will be made the ruling class.<\/p>\n<p>Part one of his <span id=\"tooltip551e1de128844\">diabolical scheme<\/span> is to allow people without <span id=\"tooltip551e1de128c2c\">health insurance<\/span> to buy it. I&#8217;ll tell you more about that next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you don&#8217;t know how many states are in the United States, here&#8217;s an easy way to remember. This Friday marks exactly 50 years since America added its final, 50th, state: Hawaii. The country was ready: the growing availability of air travel in the 1960s made Hawaii a popular vacation spot for those who could afford it. Those who couldn&#8217;t <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/happy-birthday-hawaii\/\">&#8230; >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,28],"tags":[27,193,155,174,22,59,105,86],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1264,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions\/1264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}