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‘Appendectomy’ too good for KMT’s Alex Tsai
By Lee Hsiao-feng 李筱峰
A few years ago, as I was driving my car through the wild animal park at Leofoo Village amusement park, two monkeys suddenly jumped onto my hood, giving me quite a shock. I immediately slammed on the brakes and was very worried that the monkeys would be crushed underneath my car if it were to move. After waiting for a long time, the monkeys finally left and only then did I start to drive again.
During the Sunflower movement, two people jumped onto the hood of a luxury sedan that had just started to drive off. Given the speed the vehicle was eventually traveling at, these people would have been crushed and killed had they fallen off.
When I first heard about this, I wondered how such an evil driver could exist. Then when I listened to the full report, I heard that the car belonged to Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元). Tsai was in the car at that time and given that he is smart enough to make as much money as he has, it is hard to imagine that he did not know that what he was doing could have resulted in death — he even told his driver to speed up. So, just what was going on?
One of the people on the hood of Tsai’s car was a film director surnamed Lin (林). Lin and others had tried to stop Tsai outside the Legislative Yuan in Taipei to force him to respond to demands they had made regarding the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮). However, Tsai’s car drove off and Lin jumped onto its hood. It is conceivable that Tsai was furious about someone trying to stop him, so much so that he did not even care if his car crushed someone to death.
Tsai said the director and the “rioters” were trying to attack him and destroy his car, which is why he asked his driver to keep going and “take the rioters” to the local police station, where he could file a report against them. When Tsai was asked if he was afraid of killing anyone by continuing to drive, Tsai answered that he had a police officer in the car and that the officer was capable of making any decisions as the circumstances demanded.
It is difficult to understand why the police officer accompanying Tsai did not deal with the “rioters” as soon as they appeared. Also, given that a police officer was in Tsai’s car, surely the officer could have reported the incident to the authorities straight away. It is also very strange why they had to drive such a long way, breaking traffic rules, ignoring orders from traffic police to stop and risking lives.
So who was the police officer in Tsai’s car and why was the officer so cold-blooded as to fail to tell the driver to stop? The officer, who was in serious dereliction of his duties, has not been punished by his superiors, nor have prosecutors decided to investigate the case. Likewise, up until now, the judiciary has ignored the incident. Only the public has looked into what went on.
Tsai has filed a lawsuit against the director, who could have died under the wheels of his car. Even more shocking is his treatment of a mother and son who were driving an SUV when the incident happened. Upon seeing the situation, they used their vehicle to block Tsai’s car in the hope of getting the people on the hood off safely. Tsai did not listen to their pleas and afterwards filed a lawsuit against the mother and son. What sort of world is it when a legislator sues members of the public for trying to save the lives of their fellow human beings?
Given the nature of Taiwanese, the nation should not have such poor legislators. More than 50 years ago, former National Taiwan University philosophy professor Yin Hai-kuang (殷海光) told Peng Ming-min (彭明敏), once an adviser to former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), that the honest, pure and simple nature of Taiwanese had been destroyed by the KMT.
Tsai is one of the legislators on the list of a campaign called the “appendectomy project.” However, judging from his recent actions, it would seem that stopping at merely removing his appendix would be too good for him.
Lee Hsiao-feng is a professor at National Taipei University’s Graduate School of Taiwanese Culture.
Translated by Drew Cameron
source: Taipei Times
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