Journal 9/8/1978
P1 Stop it
This is the second time it happened, and maybe, in fifty years time or so when it is alleged that another attempt at resettlement will be possible, we may very well have a chance to do this crap again. This is the big deal week all the newsmen came from around the world — special invitation no less, from the Mr. Administering Authority — to watch the resettlement group be removed (by force, if necessary) from Bikini and sent back to “temporary’” exile again on Kili Island. A Japanese television guy named Kunioka and me discussed the scene over several cups of toilet producing coffee in a Majuro eatery not so long ago. It was just before the government-organized special media boat left to film the forced second going. “Oh, Joe, you mean you’re serious, you mean you are not going to go to Bikini?” he said when I told him I thought all the media coverage was a set up and that there really wasn’t a story in the people leaving Bikini. “Don’t you see the pathos, the drama? Don’t you see this is an island that will be vacant for the next fifty years and here are these people being taken off their own island? This is very dramatic. This is the type of stuff that sells on television. Never mind the millions of hungry starving people in India or places like that — this is Bikini and this is drama,” he said. I told him that I didn’t agree — and added that in my mind everyone was working hard to make the Bikini people media victims, including the (US) administering authority. And then I said to myself that what I am saying must sound stupid because it just doesn’t seem practical to believe that the administering authority would actually connive to get coverage of a forced evacuation that they were ultimately responsible for. But why did the government go out of its way to hire a ship and organize this trip with so many representatives of mass media from various countries around the world? Was it the hope that by over exposure the whole thing would fizzle, leaving little of interest for the general public to be concerned about? Or was it that the government had sent the news hounds sniffing and baying at the wrong trail intentionally in the hope that by creating a news furor over the trite issue of a mere 135 people (many of them not really Bikinians at all but simply government transplants supported in Bikini to give the body count impression that Bikini was successfully reinhabited) being removed from a clearly dangerous environment that the real underlying problem could be left untouched, filed, available for “cautious and necessary” scientific scrutiny? Or was it simply that the media got itself invited to Bikini by the administering authority for the simple purpose of intimidating the islanders who may want to stay on by the unstated argument that “intelligent world opinion is here to see you leave because, after all, you are going to leave, aren’t you?” Unfortunately, I never got a satisfactory answer for myself despite long consideration and deliberation between my ears. —Joe Murphy
Journal 9/20/1991
P1 Marshalls joins UN
The Republic of the Marshall Islands was officially admitted to the United Nations September 18 in an historic vote taken among its members at the UN headquarters in New York City. “Admission to the UN confirms before the world community the full restoration of our sovereignty,” said President Amata Kabua.
Journal 9/23/2011
P10 MOE lowers passing grade
To get enough freshmen for the new school year, Ministry of Education lowered the eighth grade passing test score. The passing rate for last year’s high school entrance test by MOE was 53 out of 100, with is an ‘F” level. Sometimes, when in dire need of students for high schools, a passing is allowed at a 30 cutoff score.