13-19 Apr, 2008
The Hong Kong Government will be “serious and responsible” about its involvement in the extremely exciting Olympic Games, declares Secretary for Home Affairs Tsang Tak-sing. This is a pity. It would be entertaining to see our leadership display the same degree of sincere commitment to the games as it does to political reform or air pollution, or match the sensible, clear-headed performance we so enjoyed during avian flu, SARS, Article 23 and other memorable great moments in governance. But we must accept that Beijing 2008 is on an altogether different level of importance.
And this is before the actual sport begins. It’s a while since I paid much attention, but I might watch some of it this time around. The synchronized swimming, the famous eventing event, and of course the whole underlying reason for this four-yearly extravaganza – the scantily clad, supple and nubile young Nadia Comaneci spreading her thighs apart right in our face. If that isn’t worth being serious and responsible for, what is?
Her lawyers seem to be claiming that the judge’s two-and-a-half-hour summing-up at the end of the 2005 trial left the poor jurors dazed and insensible to Kissel’s plight on that fateful day, trying to protect herself under threat from her baseball bat-wielding, cocaine-crazed, anal sex fiend husband. Which is where her ‘secret recipe’ comes in. The beverage would have left Robert Kissel comatose and harmless. They might have been better off pleading that her husband’s abusive wickedness had driven her nuts, but the earlier communication with her blue-collar lover back in the US and the effort involved in obtaining the Rohypnol suggested a non-diminished responsibility. I would have thought that being married to an investment banker would be a perfectly adequate defence in itself, but it is too late now for her counsel to make up for their oversight.
Still, it must be a welcome change to get out of Tai Lam Women’s Centre and come into town every day.
CNN, widely vilified by China’s xenophobic on-line youth for its supposedly biased Tibet/Olympic coverage, hits back by declaring the Chinese to be goons and thugs, and the country’s products junk. Beijing’s official spokesmen respond with the usual tear-jerking ‘hurt feelings’ bed-wetting, while the nationalist netizens pile on even more venomous hysteria. The remarks, which topped off a fairly uninteresting discussion, were clearly aimed at the Communist leadership, but why let that spoil a good orgy of mouth-frothing about racism? Anti-foreign public opinion is a tiger, which the Chinese Government is riding and mischievous Westerners are baiting with sharp sticks – and the entertainment gets even better in a few months when barbarian medal winners whip out Tibetan flags on the podium.
What better time, then, for Hong Kong to renew its enthusiasm for ‘national education’? To the traditional pro-Beijing community, whose relationship with the Party is a quasi-religious experience, this is a euphemism for ‘making Hong Kong people more patriotic’. To the British-trained secular or even skeptical bureaucrats, it is a euphemism for ‘making Beijing think we are making Hong Kong people more patriotic’. The focus is on the younger generation, because, as Ancient Greeks, Jesuits, Red Guards and others knew, that’s where the malleable minds are. Young Hongkongers, who flock to Shenzhen discos at weekends for the cheap drugs, will no doubt be fascinated to learn how the glorious motherland has opened up since 1978. Their parents – whose own parents ate grass and tree bark and swam through schools of sharks to get to the Big Lychee, and didn’t let them forget it – are the ones that see the Mainland as a dark place of unshaven, squatting, spitting, littering, line-breaking, baby-stealing, night-soil-collecting, chain-smoking despotism and despair.
So national education will soon become as typical a part of Hong Kong life as counterfeit Hello Kitty dolls, Canadian passports and overpaid civil servants with so little to do that they concoct sprawling memos pleading with busy educators to disrupt school schedules and get the kids to line the route of the Olympic Flame relay, studying the rules of eventing and singing Light the Passion, Share the Dream, and (in Appendix 3) suggesting a wide variety of stimulating and vividly imaginative learning activities.
SOMBER DUTIES await many time zones away. Would things have been better if a particular doctor’s prognosis had been more accurate? Would it have been easier if the quack had added that, when he said my father had a relatively short time left to live, by ‘two’ he meant ‘ten’, and by ‘months’ he meant ‘days’? Maybe not. One thing my father loathed was fuss and drama. Now I think about it, he might well have directed the helpless healer to exaggerate his life expectancy so he could avoid the tiresome farewells and zip out smartly when everyone’s backs were turned. In fact I am close to certain about it. Good idea. So entries to this diary will be sporadic over the next week or two – and that’s assuming a flawless first experience of Heathrow’s Terminal 5.
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