Quotes of the Week

('Volcano' - a photo portrait B. E. N. Goren circa 2010)

Following a shouting match at the National Palace Museum over a Tibetan Buddhist exhibition that managed to entirely absent the Dalai Lama (e.g. An exhibition of catholic history without one pic of any of the Popes), Taiwan's increasingly politicised police spouted the following absurdities:

Although police said the activists should have applied for a permit before the demonstration, an officer told the Taipei Times it would not have been approved even if they had applied.

“We could not possibly have approved the application because it involved politics,” the officer said. (Does that mean all political protests are now to be disallowed?)

The officer could not explain why, if the application for the rally had been political in nature, it would have been turned down.
“You ask me based on which law?” he said. “Well, maybe I should not answer this question.”

Museum Southern Branch deputy director Lin Chen-feng (林振豐), who is in charge of the exhibition venue, said the museum would only deal with purely ­cultural and artistic issues.

“[The activists’] demands are political. That’s not something I can respond to,” he said.

Asked why a portrait of the Dalai Lama could not be considered a piece of art, Lin said he did not consider a person’s portrait art.

Mmmm ... a portrait is not art? That discounts the works of Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Turner, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso and Freud among many others. And that's just the European catalogue.

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Meanwhile ... somewhere on Mars ... Galactic Regional Leader Ma was busy defending DPP turncoat Yang and making more absurd claims:

“I know how to sell Taiwanese fruit and fish, but I am not capable of selling out Taiwan,” Ma said in Taichung County yesterday.

He visited a technology firm, which is supposed to benefit from the recently signed cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA).

Ma said he understood the ECFA was not a panacea, but it could help local businesses by removing competition barriers and improving Taiwan’s competitiveness.

“In the past, it was like our ­businesses were wearing iron shoes so they could not run fast,” he said.

“Now with the ECFA, they are wearing the lightest running shoes in the world so they can easily win the first prize,” he said.

Since the DPP were only in power for 8 years, I'm guessing that the 'iron shoes' Ma is referring to were fitted sometime in the 1970's and were used all the way through the 1980's and 1990's when the KMT were in absolute power. As for winning first prize ... it may be an analogy but it still smells with extreme fetidness of other pie-in-the-sky promises. '633' anyone?