fish of the day

In the morning I sat quietly for some time. Old Chen brought lunch in: one bowl of vegetables, one bowl of steamed fish. The eyes of the fish were white and hard, and its mouth was open just like those people who want to eat human beings. After a few mouthfuls I could not tell whether the slippery morsels were fish or human flesh, so I brought it all up.

早上，我靜坐了一會兒。陳老五送進飯來，一碗菜，一碗蒸魚；這魚的眼睛，白而且硬，張著嘴，同那一夥想吃人的人一樣。吃了幾筷，滑溜溜的不知是魚是人，便把他兜肚連腸的吐出。


from Lu Xun's (魯迅) "Diary of a Madman" (狂人日記)

new (additional) stanza for alternative version of "To Dancing Girl"

additional stanza "To Dancing Girl"

once
in my Hongkong hotel room
then Italy and South America
with just a hit on the icon clicker
you helped dispel my gloom

UK Green Party MP elected

China Post editorial:

Small parties — important, irrelevant or dangerous?

As The China Post went to press last night, the United Kingdom was still without a new government, despite polls closing last Thursday evening. Normally the new prime minister would visit the queen the following morning to get her assent, and then begin his new term of office, which can last for up to five years.

For the first time in almost half a century, however, Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system, which tends to give exaggerated power to the two main parties, has produced a hung parliament. With the third-largest party, the Liberal Democrats, holding the balance of power and demanding electoral reform so that its habitual 20-25 percent of the vote is never again translated into less than 10 percent of legislators, negotiations are still taking place.

One result that is clear, however, is that after decades of trying, the Green Party has its first member of the national parliament, Caroline Lucas, who was elected in Brighton. Without having improved its share of support, which remained consistent at about 1 percent, the party has perhaps come of age through its adoption of some of the strategies of its more established competitors. For example, it focused a disproportionate amount of party resources on its two most winnable seats, Brighton and Norwich. Furthermore, having eschewed the concept of party leader for ideological reasons throughout most of its history, it recently adopted such a figurehead, with Lucas being elected to the post.

Perhaps it was the growing specter of climate change that provided the final nudge to persuade voters of the Green Party's relevance.

But although the Green Party might sound nice, middle-class and cuddly, behind its voter-friendly name it has a radical agenda by no means limited to environmental protection, preventing climate change, or even opposing nuclear power stations.

The party's mission statement begins: “Life on Earth is under immense pressure. It is human activity, more than anything else, which is threatening the well-being of the environment on which we depend. Conventional politics has failed us because its values are fundamentally flawed.”

From this plausible beginning, the Green Party of England and Wales is led down an increasingly left-wing path. Encouraging more sustainable transportation not only means advocacy of buses and trains, but is also translated into re-nationalization of the train network and punitive taxes on fuel.

Without using the word socialism, the Greens also campaign for increased levels of income tax on richer people, increased corporation tax on big businesses, and “eco taxes” on polluters. They seek to reduce drug companies' influence on Britain's health service, and community self-reliance to treat and prevent a growing mental health crisis they claim is caused by the market-driven culture.

Greens see economic growth and mass consumption of the capitalist lifestyle as incompatible with the planet's finite resources, and so promote a sustainable economy.

The only sense in which the Green Party is “republican” is in seeking an end to the constitutional role of the British monarchy.

Given these left-wing standpoints of the UK and other green parties, it is ironic that their most influential moment was probably in helping George W. Bush into office in 2000. U.S. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader received 2.74 percent of the popular vote, almost 3 million in total, making the party third-largest nationwide. But it was in Florida, where Bush defeated Al Gore by just 537 votes, that the almost 100,000 votes cast for Nader led many supporters to accuse the Green Party of spoiling the election for the Democratic Party. A decade on, there is still much bad blood between the two sides.

But what, if anything, has all of this to do with Taiwan? Not much perhaps. Taiwan's Green Party is minute, even by comparison with the UK's, and musters only handfuls of supporters to its events.

More importantly, Taiwanese political parties have surely learned the danger of third-party politics. The KMT learned the hardest way, with incumbent Huang Ta-chou losing the 1994 Taipei City mayoral election to the Democratic Progressive Party's Chen Shui-bian, when what is now called the pan-Blue vote was split by Chao Shao-kong of the New Party. This was followed in the 2000 presidential election with James Soong, who left the KMT to stand as an independent, spoiling the election for the KMT's Lien Chan, once again allowing Chen to slip in the back door with less than 40 percent of the total vote.

Now it is the opposition DPP that is in danger of learning this lesson through defeat, as it tries to maintain discipline in its own ranks in advance of the yearend elections.

So while neither the UK nor Taiwan Green Party has anything like enough influence to cause an electoral upset, the issues of democracy, hung parliaments and third-party politics should not be ignored by our political combatants.

fish of the day

fishing boat moored at Zhuwei (竹圍)

new verse

To Dancing Girl

(inspired by “To Mary Pickford” by Vachel Lindsay)

Oh,
Dancing Girl with face divine,
not year by year but ’most every day
I summon your spirit by clicking play
to be my valentine

There is an alternative version of this poem,
<--which has an additional stanza here [click here];
the original is still the "correct" version, however.

so
I will call you my Mary
though you answer to “naked_teen_stripper”
"we’ll be together forever"
you spin to Set Me Free
and
I know you’re not dancing to get me down
it was your gift to someone other
perhaps your high-school lover
now a freshman in a distant town
or
were you drunk on tequila and did it for a dare
or a junkie forced to strip for your joy
or did some guy lie that he worked for Playboy
just to trick you out of your underwear?
no
I’m sure I can see from the way your eyes shine
that it was done for love all right
and for two or three minutes each morning or night
I’ll believe that you're my valentine

China Post editorial:

Lessons to be learned from the UK election

The British electorate will go to the ballots on Thursday to choose its next national government. Following the economic downturn, a corruption scandal involving members of parliament, poor ratings and an infamous “bigoted”gaff by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, pre-election polls strongly suggest that there will be a change of administration after 13 years of rule by the center-left Labour Party.

This could give the Conservative Party its first chance at government since 1997, or the Liberals (now rebranded as Liberal Democrats) its first since 1915. The most likely result, however, may be a hung parliament, resulting in a coalition of Labour and Liberals or of Conservatives and Liberals.

Given that there is no difference of policy regarding Taiwan between any of the main parties, and since the UK has no “Taiwan Relations Act” offering protection against a belligerent and possibly dangerous neighbor, is this of any relevance to Taiwan?

Perhaps there are two or three lessons the British learned during this spring's election campaign that the Taiwanese electorate and their would-be representatives can share, and maybe another they can draw for themselves.

The first lesson is that despite having one of the oldest and longest-established legislatures and having been the model for many emerging democracies around the world — hence Britain's epithet the Mother of Parliaments — its own democracy is far from perfect.

Its first-past-the-post system, in which the victor is selected from a multi-candidate single-member electoral district, without any transfer of votes, means that the Labour Party could conceivably receive the third-largest share of the ballot but gain, not just enough parliamentary seats to be the largest party, but even have more than half, and therefore be able to continue its single-party rule.

The Liberal Party has historically suffered from this situation, with its share of the votes not translated into an equivalent number of MPs. People are less willing to “waste” their votes on a third party, it argues, and so cast their ballots for one of the big two. Not surprisingly, the Liberals have long been proponents of electoral reform, advocating some form of proportional representation (PR).

This move has been resisted by the Labour and Conservative parties, which have dominated Britain's political landscape for the last century. They argue that while PR might appear more democratic, it actually gives exaggerated influence to centrist parties that hold a balance of power. Moreover, Britain's experience with coalition governments has not been positive.

Democracy is not one single thing. Thus Taiwan did not become democratic with the popular election of its president, it became more democratic. Moreover, democratic systems must be defended against reversals, but equally they must be re-evaluated and, where necessary, updated.

Taiwan is experiencing just such a re-evaluation at present as the main opposition parties push for a referendum on the issue of signing an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement with China. While referendums — as a limited form of direct democracy — appear to be more democratic, they can give exaggerated influence to well-funded and well-organized pressure groups. And in theory at least, they are inconsistent with the role of a parliament in a representative democracy.

In Britain, for example, despite repeated calls for and promises of referendums, they are rarely used. The last national one — on whether to join the European Economic Community — was held in 1975.

The second lesson learned by British parliamentarians was that public tolerance of corrupt or merely self-serving representatives has a limit. The fact that the Liberal Party has gained significant ground over the last few weeks, so that there is now a more-or-less three-way split between the main parties, has little to do with politics and is largely due to fallout from the MPs' expenses scandal. That elected representatives were siphoning off tens of thousands of pounds (millions of NT dollars) under claims for second homes or “secretarial services” by family members while calling for the public to tighten their belts to aid economic recovery was clearly too much for many to stomach.

The Liberals' leap up the polls also resulted from the performance of their leader, Nick Clegg, in the UK's first public presidential-style public debate, which was shown live on primetime television.

One final observation Taiwan's parties might make of the British electoral landscape is that the historically left-wing Labour Party moved step-after-step towards the center through the 18 years of Conservative rule from 1979 to 1997. Similarly over the last decade, the Conservative Party has drifted from the right toward the center to make itself electable.

Although such left-right analysis is not so relevant to Taiwan's political scene, the confrontational stances and scare tactics adopted by the political parties here could be toned down. Perhaps a similar shift toward a common middle ground could help to heal the mutual antipathy and social conflict in Taiwan.

back on the hill

most temples on Shitoushan (獅頭山) only open to the public on Sundays

so I went back for a second look

(still not awed, I have to admit)

this one is nice, the baroque Ling Xia Cave (靈霞洞 )