I’m feeling really insecure.
I haven’t felt this insecure since leaving the warm sac of fluid that Mama Neihu kindly provided me before finding myself slowly and painfully — pelvis first — entering the world.
Compared with now, I actually felt less insecure trying to convince little Grace Chao Shu-pao, a classmate in elementary school, that young Johnny would take her to the stars and back if she let me kiss her.
“No,” she said, raising her voice so her coterie of girlfriends could hear her clearly, “you’re a silly, boring boy and smelly and I don’t want to!”
Sigh. Now she’s married to a gormless, soon-to-retire section chief at the Construction and Planning Agency, which just goes to show: A Johnny only comes around once in your life.
Easy to say all this now and laugh it off, of course, but at the time I was quite upset. “God give me Grace,” I used to say before falling asleep together with my many brothers and sisters in our humble 1950s abode.
No, these days I’m gripped by the feeling that we’re losing control of our ability to control.
At least when you’re young and stupid and suffer rejection by a sweet little girl, the pain is real and honest ... and when your mother and father eventually realize something is wrong and you unload the details, they can offer soothing words that put you back on track. You can learn from the experience and improve your chances next time.
It’s called growing up. Maturation. Gaining control of your life. Something like that.
But now that we’re grown up, there’s no one to comfort us anymore.
Have you ever noticed how we Taiwanese have no bona fide national heroes? (The Yankees just won the World Series without Wang Chien-ming (王建民) because he couldn’t run over a base without hurting himself; sorry, folks, he’s no longer on my national hero payroll).
There’s no one that youngsters can really look up to and say: “Whatever the truth of that person’s private life, in his/her achievements he/she captures the essence of what it is to be Taiwanese. I see myself in such people and my hope for the future is in part sustained by their success.”
There are such heroes, of course, but they can’t become national heroes because there’s so little space for ideological consensus between the green and blue political worlds. Even nominally non-political figures such as Nobel laureate Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲) end up stained and symbolically demoted by their dabblings in politics.
In my beloved country, national hero status must be validated by political elements to be taken seriously in the media, so we’re at an impasse.
With no one to look up to, and with our good community under perennial threat, we have to reluctantly turn to people with power to sustain our confidence.
National Security Council (NSC) Secretary-General Su Chi (蘇起) is one of those people. Su has risen to a level of considerable power. But as I have mentioned a few times over the years, this gentleman’s behavior has left a lot to be desired. On record for spreading lies and paranoia on matters trivial (the Taipei Times’ purported subservience to the Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁)-era Presidential Office) to profound (the Bulletgate pamphlets that hit the desks of US congressmen), this man carries the gravest of responsibilities: protecting all our asses from Chicom encroachment.
Instead, these days Su seems to be acting as a political minder for President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), his increasingly embattled boss and old friend. Why else would he get caught up in — and personally issue an apology for — the debacle over the easing of US beef imports?
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