On the cable channel Super TV, there’s an evening talkshow hosted by the ubiquitous Cheng Hung-yi (鄭弘儀) called Xinwen Wawawa (新聞挖挖哇, or “Wow, look at the news we dug up”).
With his female foil Yu Meiren (于美人) on the opposite flank, Cheng heads a panel discussion on the day’s events or whatever they feel like talking about. It’s a user-friendly show, ranging from politics to sex problems to economics to entertainment gossip.
But my patience was tested a few weeks ago. One guest was a craniometry “expert” — but for faces. This aged fellow explained how the former first family’s corruption scandal was connected to the structures of their mugs. On the same show, a fortune teller deconstructed their fraying relationships according to the Chinese zodiac and the number of strokes in each of the characters of their Chinese names.
I will always respect Cheng for scoffing when Chen Yue-ching (陳月卿), the wife of National Security Council Secretary-General Su Chi (蘇起), claimed on his show a few years ago that Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) government was bugging her family’s home. But with these “traditional” analysts, Cheng isn’t so skeptical when they get going. Indeed, he’s very polite to them, and would never say anything like: “You’re a bunch of opportunistic shyster bullshit merchants.”
Still, Cheng’s show has a problem, and it’s got me thinking. One day I should do a breakdown of talkshow guests who make a killing from talking crap.
I am ashamed to say this, dear reader, but the majority of these TV dinner blabbermouths are journalists. As it happens, they are usually credited as “senior journalists” — to distinguish them from the unwashed riff-raff too busy making phone calls, writing stories and zipping around in taxis or on scooters without an expense account to appear on TV every other night of the week. You know, the ones who practice journalism.
Your average “senior journalist” is a man in his 40s to early 50s who bellows when talking in a normal voice would suffice; who carries extra packs of hair dye in case the odd gray hair creeps through; who loiters in studios chatting up production assistants no older than a Chinese gymnast (and failing miserably); and who displays a keen tolerance for ethical lapses by the stations that pay his wages.
None of these show ponies — not one — has filed a story from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Somalia, Zimbabwe or anywhere else that requires professional nous and putting one’s life on the line for one’s craft. If you say “Ciudad Juarez,” “Line of Control” or “Moro Islamic Liberation Front,” expect a blank response, then growing irritation.
There may be others, but I only know one Taiwanese reporter who has been to more than one of these destinations, and he works for the Public Television System. But you won’t see him on talkshows.
The presence of journalists on these programs is so overwhelming that when issues requiring training and serious expertise come up (law, medicine or engineering, say), you will be lucky to get one bona fide expert on the set, and even that poor soul will spend 50 minutes of the hour surrounded by “senior journalists” and cut-rate legislators relating dodgy anecdotes, idly speculating and rumor-peddling.
So maybe I’m being too hard on the practitioners of facial psychology, Chinese character divination and zodiac analysis. Fortune tellers, too, should be treated with more respect and given a forum for their views. At least they would dare to tell us which Chinese import is going to sicken how many and whom, and which typhoon is going to kill more Taiwanese than would have died in road accidents anyway.
They could also tell us where Taiwan as a nation is heading.
So let me lead the way. It’s time to do some soothsaying, peer into my liquid-crystal ball and dig through the entrails of this half-eaten fish that my mutt Punkspleen won’t touch.
The question: How will my beloved homeland fall to the Chicoms, and who will be responsible?
Oh yeah, it’s coming now ... I’ve got my thumb and index finger wrapped around one juicy bit of fish guts and ...
The economy gets worse and worse. Protests grow in Taipei, Kaohsiung and a hamlet in Kuantien Township (官田), Tainan County. Students spill into the streets complaining about the rates at KTVs. Prostitute collectives donate food and clothing to workers laid off from microchip factories. Shorn of sponsorship, Taiwan’s professional baseball league relocates to Vientiane.
There is unrest, but being Taiwan, it comes in the shape of screaming matches in taxis, mobs gathering after collisions between motorscooters and deadly intrigue at the local parent-teacher associations.
But something is afoot, something is in the air — something that can kick-start a new era of awareness and identity.
So what does the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which struggled for so long to find a new generation of Taiwanese Long Marchers, do about it?
After finally cottoning on to the value of public discontent, the youth vote and accidental irony, the DPP makes (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!) by The Beastie Boys its party anthem.
But just as it seems the dingbats in the DPP are on the verge of being flushed out and replaced by people with political ability, the curtain falls, the bell tolls and the game is up, dear reader — at least for the next 50 or 60 years.
Special Taiwanese Autonomous Province of China (STAPOC) Chief Executive Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) and STAPOC Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Lien Chan (連戰), flanked by Minister of Security Hung (“Jiang Qing”) Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) and Heir Apparent Sean Lien (連勝文), are outside the former and future provincial government building near Taichung, and they’re speaking to the nation.
Wu urges people to be calm and optimistic. China has been unified, the future looks fantastic and (weather permitting) celebratory barbecues will take place along the Love River in Kaohsiung and in the Guangfu II Stadium (formerly Taipei Arena). Most cross-strait administrative restrictions will continue for the moment, but it is expected that more contact between Chinese compatriots will transform the nation and the region into a model of peace and profitability.
The security minister says a number of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers will be confined to barracks in the former Presidential Office, and that their presence should be a source of comfort and pride. But she advises that they are exempt from constitutional and juridical purview and “all that other stuff lawyers keep going on about.”
Lien Chan says nothing, but is beaming, though the heat of the day has made his hair dye run a little down his temples.
Sean Lien belches.
Now I see other things: Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) has been refused entry into Taiwan after his 374th trip to Japan. He is soon to be joined — on the next few flights — by military and police officers promoted under the DPP government.
Oh, and all DPP county commissioners and Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) have been placed under house arrest and replaced by executive postings. Wu has invoked Article 39 of the Constitution and declared martial law (he calls it a “softer, kinder, more loving martial law than the one in which Uncle died”), revoked the referendum provision in the Constitution and by executive order redefined the free area of the Republic of China as coterminous with the People’s Republic of China, “including Outer Mongolia, South Tibet [Arunachal Pradesh], Liuqiu [Okinawa] and other occupied areas awaiting unification.”
US President Barack H. Obama is sympathetic to the few thousand protesters rounded up and threatened with a spell in the Spratlys gulag, but does nothing.
In his defense, Obama cites his Asia wonks (“They have a great love for the people of Asia”) and points to an amendment to his campaign slogan in late October 2008: Formerly “Change we can believe in,” it became “Change we can believe in, apart from State Department culture, academic deference to the Chinese Communist Party, the principle of trade before principle, and ‘Kissinger’s Law’ [there isn’t a Chinese ass not worth kissing].”
Vice President Joseph Biden is more upbeat, saying just how darn wonderful it will be to finally visit Taiwan, and gosh, how he has heard so much about Snake Alley and those pandas.
And what of ousted president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九)? My liquid-crystal ball is fuzzy on this question, but there are faint images of a broken, sullen man being spanked (and not erotically) by a woman in a tattered Cindy Lauper-era jean jacket before going off to work as a teacher’s assistant in the College of Law at Taiwan Provincial People’s University.
How did such a man as he fall from grace? I can’t say, though it’s safe to say it was an anemic coup — there was no blood to be shed.
STAPOC is approaching, my friends. But for all their love of speculation, not one single “senior journalist” has discussed this scenario and the implications it will have for social harmony, the economy or the law.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong: Maybe I’m just succumbing to industry best practice and engaging in tormented fantasies. The kind that would get China flunkies in the State Department lovely and warm down below.
Got something to tell Johnny? Go on, get it off your chest. Write to dearjohnny@taipeitimes.com, but be sure to put “Dear Johnny” in the subject line or he’ll mark your bouquets and brickbats as spam.
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