Familiar as most readers are with my political affiliations you may be surprised by what I’m about to say. It’s not the kind of sentence that rolls easily off my tongue, especially as I haven’t had a drink today, but here goes:
You have to feel just a tad sorry for Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌).
There, I’ve said it.
I mean, it’s not his fault that he is the son of ultranationalist Peanutissimo worshipper, former general and martial law lover Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村). As the saying goes: “You don’t have a say in your DNA.”
Besides, Mayor Hau has benefited from an unfortunate twist of fate in that this was likely the only reason the reactionary residents of our good city put him in his present, comfy, office job. I’ve always said that the majority of Taipei residents are so blue that they would vote for a radioactive, maggot-ridden corpse over a Democratic Progressive Party candidate — as long as it was wearing a black, name-embroidered, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) sleeveless vest.
Nor is it that Hau the Younger is so devastatingly dull that he makes Heir Apparent Sean Lien (連勝文) appear like a young Hugh Hefner, or that he would benefit from a personality transplant from Sean’s father, honorary KMT China shill Lien Chan (連戰).
No, the reason I feel sorry for the beleaguered mayor of our capital city is that he has inherited the mother of all shit heaps from his predecessor and now Jellyfish-in-Chief Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). Yep, that’s right: the Maokong Gondola.
Most people in their lives have at some time or another had to deal with problems left behind by someone else.
Why, I remember a day long ago when my former roommate knocked up his betel-nut-seller girlfriend and skipped town. Only later, when her real boyfriend, the feared (but rather dim) “Knuckles” Chiang from Chiayi, turned up at the door and mistook me for the fleeing father did I realize the seriousness of the situation. It took me a very nervous few hours, a whole packet of Long Lifes and three-quarters of a bottle of Kaoliang to convince him otherwise.
So spare a thought for poor old Hau, who must be feeling like the lone untouchable who cleans the khazis at Mumbai Railway Station after he was left to deal with the biggest steaming heap of crap since that scene in Jurassic Park.
Hau’s troubles began late last month when Super Typhoon Jangmi washed away the base of one of the gondola’s support pillars, revealing an astounding lack of foresight in the project’s inception — and possible extreme negligence on the part of Ma.
In his haste to complete said cable car, possibly before he completed his second term (a target he missed by a few months), Ma designated the gondola a “major transportation construction project.” That is, it never underwent an environmental impact assessment.
If it had done so, who knows what geological data and noise pollution issues the assessment would have uncovered?
In his shaky defense of the project, Hau was forced to declare that support pillars for the gondola’s stations are safely set in igneous rock.
Reassuring, but even rocks have a habit of occasionally tumbling down mountainsides. Just ask the family whose car was crushed earlier this year when a chunk of rock the size of a small truck broke off during a storm and careened down a Keelung hillside. Well, you could ask them if they were still alive.
But no, the gondola is safe and absolutely no corners were cut during the expedited planning and construction process. That’s if you believe the talking heads at Taipei City Government.
All I can say is that if the engineers now inspecting the gondola doubt the system’s overall safety, I hope nearby Taipei Zoo has got some exhibition room after blowing its budget on panda accommodation, because a gigantic white elephant is coming your way, boys.
We would also know why, when launched in July last year, the gondola was able to boast that it was “the only cable car system in the world to run its entire course through a mountainous region.” The reason: No one else has ever been stupid enough to build one on shaky terrain in a land renowned for typhoons, electrical storms, earthquakes and mudslides.
Still, as the old Taiwanese proverb goes, “Concrete makes the world go round.”
Actually, that’s the issue in a nutshell. In case you hadn’t noticed, dear reader, it is the production and use of this other kind of “gray matter” that keeps the wheels of this great nation’s economy turning.
Why else would the government build brand spanking new four-lane freeways to backwater locales like Puli (埔里), a place that gets its fair share of tourists but only has 80,000 people? And what other reason could there be for the hare-brained scheme to build a freeway linking Ilan and Hualien straight through some of the steepest, highest, most seismically active blocks of rock in the world?
Yes. Concrete and the financial benefits associated with pouring thousands of tonnes of it over our beautiful landscape are the driving forces behind the nation’s next and much-delayed project, the Suhua Freeway.
Well, these and self-styled “Mr Hualien,” KMT Legislator Fu Kun-chi (傅崐萁).
Fu’s love for Hualien knows no bounds. Why, when Ma’s miraculous, economy-saving cross-strait flight charters were launched in July, this joker paid out of his own pocket for a couple of flights to land in Hualien, even though there was no demand.
For reasons that remain unknown (but everyone can guess), Fu is the most vocal proponent of the construction of the Suhua Freeway.
Fu bankrolls a free propaganda rag-cum-newspaper distributed in the Hualien area called the Eastern Express (東方快報), a publication that has played a large part in convincing many of the region’s residents that without the highway, Hualien faces an economic future worse than North Korea.
The law may prohibit politicians from being involved in the media, but that doesn’t stop Fu.
Many in Hualien have been so taken in by the paper’s arguments that they regularly blame the break-up of their marriages, their lack of job prospects or the failure of their kids to get a good education on the lack of a freeway.
Not a week goes by without old Fu pushing the case — and he was at it again this week in the legislature, grilling Minister of Transportation and Communications Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) about the latest plans for the road and digging up all his favorite arguments and tales of misery. By chance these were exactly the same ones that appeared in the pages of the Eastern Express.
The sad thing is, it’s beginning to look like Fu will eventually get his way, as this week the ministry announced new plans for an “alternative route” for a proxy freeway alignment and that it was optimistic construction would begin by the end of next year.
If, indeed, the plans pass the new, improved, rubber-stamp Environmental Impact Assessment Committee, then stand back and watch as more of Taiwan’s pristine environment disappears under — or is filled with — concrete faster than an Indigenous Defense Fighter leaves a radar screen.
If any misguided supporters of the Suhua Freeway are reading, and you do eventually get your way, I have a simple question for you.
Who are you going to blame when, a decade down the line, property prices have risen so high that your kids can’t afford to buy a house half the size of the one you’re living in?
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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