The Mexican dot dance
Dear Johnny,
Recently, you wrote about the Bush administration getting off its “tuckus,” but I think you meant to spell that tuches. I don’t think spellcheck does Yiddish yet. But my late, great Yiddishe amah told me in an e-mail from the great beyond that it’s tuches.
She even told me another phrase you might use in future columns: a tuches lecker is an ass kisser, one who shamelessly curries favor with superiors, she told me, and please pardon her French.
The second thing I want to pass on to you is this: You asked how President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) interview with Mexican newspaper El Sol de Mexico got into that daily in the first place, characterizing the mashup as a “strange choice of communications vehicle.”
The answer is quite easy to figure out. The boss of the newspaper, Mario Vazquez Rana, came to Taiwan in late August and was decorated with a medal called the Order of the Brilliant Star with Grand Cordon during a ceremony at the Presidential Office. It was Ma that did the decorating.
Connect the dots, Johnny. Ma gives a man a medal; a few days later his newspaper conveniently publishes the “interview” you were talking about.
“One hand washes the other,” as my amah would have put it, were she still alive. I am not sure how to say that in either Yiddish or Spanish, but I think that’s where the dots connect, no?
CHIAYI CHUCK
Johnny replies: Thanks for the information, Chuck.
But a problem remains. In the old days former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) would throw a cat among the pigeons every now and then by sitting down with a Japanese reporter and spilling his guts on matters he would never raise with the Taiwanese press.
It made sense. Lee grew up thinking he was Japanese. He speaks the language. He admires the culture. Selective commentary made him feel more powerful and influential.
Ma, Mexico. I’ve joined the dots, Chuck, like you said. But Ma doesn’t speak Spanish and has never been a lover of Hispanic culture. Is this the best that he can do? And it took a full week for the translation to come through!
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this