Happy Valentine’s Day and Rant

Happy Valentine’s Day. The pictured teddy bear wedding package, available at 7-Elevens around the island, originally featured a groom bear and a bride bear, so I bought another and replaced the bride bear with the other groom bear because I WANT TO DESTROY EVERY MARRIAGE IN AMERICA! LOL!!!1111OnEOzZZ

Sorry, I came perilously close to revealing The Gay Agenda there, and that just wouldn’t do. Seriously, I just thought it would be a cute thing to see. If I were a true activist I would organize an island-wide campaign to switch bride and groom bears surreptitiously in the stores themselves. As Taiwan isn’t the bastion of Puritanism that red-state America is, it probably wouldn’t cause much more than a few double-takes.

As for me, I’ll be spending Valentine’s Day alone again, or practicing Tai-chi as I usually do on Wednesdays. The whole spitting-on-swanboats thing is getting old anyway.

In other news, Ma Ying-jeou has been indicted after prosecutors discovered irregularities in the use of his special mayoral fund. While it’s not surprising that this happened (Ma’s been seen as the KMT’s presidential candidate for so long his opponents were bound to dig up something sooner or later to use against him), the fact that Ma made such a stupid mistake seems extraordinarily careless. I can only guess that he thought that the reality that declaring half of the office’s discretionary fund is SOP in Taiwan would somehow make him immune to prosecution. Either that or he truly didn’t know, which in many ways is just as worrying.

I expected Ma to resign from the KMT chairmanship after the indictment announcement, but it appears that he is still intent on running for the presidency despite a party rule that those indicted are not allowed to be nominated by the party for office. Ma himself came up with this rule years ago, so he of all people should be aware of its existence. Balls o’ steel, that man has. I was expecting Lien Chan to use this opportunity to regain the party chairmanship so that he could broker a Wang/Ma ticket, but it looks like this may not be the case. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Ma has been considered the KMT’s best chance at winning in 2008, but Wang would also have a pretty good shot, I think. In any case, speculation at this point is useless. The DPP got “lucky” twice due to bizarre circumstances that caused them to win the last two times, so I wouldn’t rule out some strange unforeseen incident doing the same thing this time around.

Meanwhile, Prince Roy wants to know my opinion on the DPP’s recent campaign to get rid of any reference to the terms “China” or “Chinese” in Taiwan.

Sigh.

Ok. Many media reports call this campaign one of “rectification,” which is of course a matter of opinion. This is actually just the latest in a thousand-year-old trend of dynastic thinking. One group gets in power and changes the money, the official designations, nomenclature, etc. on the claim that it is “rectifying” things. Then another group takes power and the pissing-on-trees starts all over again. Rinse, repeat. Imagine if each US administration issued different colored money with pictures of its heroes on it, and then changed all the official names of everything. Think of all the wasted time, effort and money that would result, time, money and effort that should be spent on improving concrete aspects of people’s lives. Ironically, the DPP in this instance is acting like just the latest in a long line of Chinese-style dynasties. Say what you will about Chiang Kai-shek, but a thousand-NT bill from his time looked like a thousand NT. A US 20-dollar bill features one of history’s most notorious mass-murderers, Andrew Jackson, but it looks like real money. We’re left with a bunch of kids stymied by a vaguely drawn globe.

But let’s say you’re hell-bent on getting rid of references to a certain culture and history. Ok. At the very least, you should make an effort to replace it with something solid and fair, something people can take some kind of assurance from in lieu of what they had before. The reason Taiwanese people have identity issues these days isn’t due to the influence of Chinese culture and history, which have been around ever since their ancestors brought it here with them from China starting centuries ago. No, the DPP, in its quest to remove these connections and associations that they feel threaten their political power base, simply hasn’t done a very good job of replacing them with anything significant. People are being told that the language they speak, the words they use, the customs they grew up with and the beliefs they’ve been taught are all now wrong and foreign and keeping them down. Fair enough, but in their absence, what’s left? Aborigines dancing for tourist dollars, a plethora of special reports on indigenous flora and fauna, and millions of people who have no clue who they are or what they believe in.

But back to the name-changing thing. Basically, it’s already 2007. The DPP may not be able to come up with a way to not be voted out of power next year, so now’s the time to do all the things on its to-do list. Chen wants his legacy, and the party doesn’t particularly care about the housekeeping since it’s the last night at the hotel.