Nearly three months after the earthquake in Haiti, the Taiwanese government is still trotting out its staid stance on debt relief: The money is owed to private institutions and cannot be just be cancelled. Like those boorish MRT-shovers, vacuous gaze, mouths slightly agape, government bigwigs and lackeys across the board just pretend anyone who challenges them is not there.
MOFA mouthpiece Joanne Ou is case in point. The lass could talk the scales off a Formosan pangolin without ever approaching the point, sound-bite after irrelevant sound-bite blathering forth from her cakehole ad infinitum. Woe betide anyone who has the temerity to interrupt these sententious soliquies. They’ll find themselves admonished with a terse: “I haven’t actually finished yet.” One shouldn’t be surprised. Ou has set already set out her stall regarding inappropriate language.
Meanwhile, we get nauseatingly fawning pieces like this. I don’t want to get ad hominem on the author but some of this is borderline personality cult in its cringeworthiness. And most importantly,while admittedly setting up at least a strawman of dissent (“perceived prevarication”, “howls of derision”), the same frustrating evasion ensues (the “Ma silenced the critics” graf is quite remarkable in its unintentional irony).
Which, leaving aside the issue of debt cancellation, brings me to a observation by a Taiwan-based Latin American journalist chum of mine: “Someone really needs to tell Taiwan that it’s bad form to boast and beat one’s chest after sending rescue and relief personnel and supplies to a country that has suffered a major natural disaster.
