Epilogue

. Epilogue

                                                                              (Updated 2-23-15)

     

Emerson rode his bicycle down to his favorite spot at the end of the Tan-Zih Sugarcane bike trail. He asked me to meet him there. He had a wonderful life of retirement, one most men would give their most precious possession to have. His entire adult life he had been trying to fulfill the promise of liberty his grandfather had escaped from the Bolsheviks and immigrated to America to seek. He found his favorite bench and took a swig of water from his canteen. In his pockets he had a smart phone, an MP3 player, a pen, two pieces of hard candy, one hundred Taiwan dollars, a book he was in the middle of, and a few sheets of blank paper to write on. What he didn’t have, he guessed, he didn’t really need; he was a happy man without it. He had worked for others since he was sixteen. Now, he didn’t have to answer to anyone but himself. His girlfriend loved his company and gave him his space. His children were grown adults with lives of their own; all but one wasn’t struggling with basic questions of existence; that singular man-child had made his complications all by himself.

He swabbed his forehead with a handkerchief, took another swig of water from his canteen and took out the novel, Erewhon by Samuel Butler which, spelled backwards, was “Nowhere.” The Taiwan sun dappled the bushes that reached overhead but didn’t hide the sight or scream of the jets coming in for a landing at Taichung Airport nearby. The dull green on the three displayed WW II tanks to his left weren’t shiny and didn’t reflect the sun into his eyes. A soft breeze blew the fragrance of magnolias his way. In the afternoon, he and his lady friend would visit a new Szechuan restaurant on the Westside. In the late afternoon, a class of delightful seven-year-old children would be in the room at the bushiban to learn English as a Second Language. He reflected on the life he had left in America for the very last time; he would never work there again or help organize workers; not one activist was calling on him in Taiwan, either. He took out his pen, leaned on the book, the folded scrap paper inside its cover, crossed his leg, and began to talk:

“I’ll tell you why it won’t work,” he said. “It won’t work because this isn’t a world where every man and woman has a vocation to the best of his or her ability. It won’t work because this isn’t a world with space for anyone but greedy bullies that make sure to have a way for no one but themselves. Satisfying lives for the multitude of working folk won’t ever happen. Listen to me.”

“The persons with the guns and the voting booths on their sides have been busy making sure no one gets over on them; they make sure they get the lion’s share of the money made from innovation and resources.”

“There was once a time when both sides on the class war struggled with similar weapons. It was easy then for the brave side with numbers to overcome the obstructions of the latter. That all ended with the inventions of guns. They were invented and sold to the highest bidders; the privileged class that needed them to guard the wealth.”

“The Industrial Revolution clumped the workers into one factory under one boss. There were bloody wars that the unions waged against the bosses to level the playing field; there was collective bargaining. Then, the bosses figured out how to get scabs to replace the workers and machinery to replace the scabs. Goons in Pinkerton uniforms beat the shit out of strikers or killed them outright with no repercussion from the judges they paid off. It was a struggle but with the guts of the Industrial Workers of the World, gains were made.”

“Until the union was ransacked, shattered, for telling workers to boycott the First World War, there was a way to a better life. Even after the war, workers marched on picket lines to victories and better working conditions. The strikes were bloody and the strikes were long. Then, in 1929 the stock market crashed and the veneer of prosperity was peeled off.” He drank from his water bottle.

“The Soviet Union was the inspiration and workers in America kept on winning concessions almost attaining socialism. That’s when the crafty U.S. President Roosevelt stole the socialist platform and created public works projects, the Fair Labor Standards Act which set a minimum wage, abolished child labor, and created the forty-hour work week.” He read on.

      “Another world war pitted anti-worker states against each other. The Nazis plundered Europe and the Japanese plundered Asia. The United States asked the world of workers to forgive their massacre of millions of Native Americans and the enslavement of millions of African Americans within their lifetime, in earshot of the Holocaust against the Jewish people. It was a war that had to be fought and who would deny it? One fascist side won and the other fascist side lost. The atomic bomb was used against the Japanese and fascism never lost again.”

      “America, with Hollywood propaganda, was the greatest machine of the mind for millions of ignorant bystanders on television and the silver screen. Not content with subjugating their own people, they reached out to people united in socialism beyond its borders, in Korea and China, and the Soviet bloc.  Through the Red Scare of Joe McCarthy, the will of the military-industrial complex, on and on, each peoples’ uprising became an opportunity to learn how to never let the people rise up again.”

      “From Vietnam through Cuba, Chile, they figured out how to use paranoia and Nixon’s resignation to sew the nation back together, pardoned as he was a hero eventually as the socialist tendencies of the U.S.S.R. and the People’s Republic of China receded under the laser beam threats of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars. It drove Russia’s economy into bankruptcy and enabled Deng Xiao-Ping to kill socialist mice with black or white cats. They bled the world dry with impressions of neo-liberal democracy where both sides of the coin are the same faces.”

      “Demonstrations continued where young people foolishly believed in democracy’s ghost. Laws were made to curtain civil disobedience and police forces were militarized. Each uprising was nothing more than a new opportunity to beat the workers down, marginalize them in part-time franchise jobs and sweatshops. The means of production was in the ruling class hands to insure their supremacy well into the future, hundreds of years from now, on planets light years away.”

      Emerson looked up to see the streaming jet liner passing overhead, tourists and business people returning from Hong Kong, China. He had run out of scrap paper; he turned a sheet over to conclude.

      “We, the Industrial Workers of the World, unbeknownst even to ourselves, have power in our hands and boycott in our feet. Workers can change the equation, workplace by workplace with each personal victory, united with our fellows and sisters, in unions, with collective decisions and rotating facilitation of leadership. An Animal Farm it doesn’t have to become. Farmer Jones can be banished forever. But it won’t work if we permit ourselves to be divided, distracted, allow ourselves to feel inferior materially. The urgency of youth cannot be wasted in public displays of top-down resentment. From the grassroots, we must grow together like a lawn of steel blades, un-subverted or co-opted.”

     I asked him if he wanted to stay with us; I would drive him back to Taipei. “No,” he said. “I will ride home from whence I came. I’m happy here.”

 I bid him farewell. He was discovered, where I’d left him, on the bench, the next morning.

Alleged gun maker in Chen Shui-bian assassination attempt returned to Taiwan (2013/01/25)

One of Taiwan’s most shocking and mysterious crimes is back in the spotlight. A fugitive linked to the 2004 assassination attempt on former President Chen Shui-bian was escorted back to Taiwan today. Tang Shou-yi had spent six years on the run before he was captured in China.
On the eve of the 2004 presidential election, former President Chen Shui-bian was shot while canvassing for votes in Tainan. The person who allegedly remodeled the gun used to shoot Chen is Tang Shou-yi. He fled to China in 2006 while on trial, and was recently captured in Xiamen. He was repatriated today.
After the shooting took place, investigators used the bullets to identify the gun then used the gun to trace the suspects. They identified Tainan resident Chen Yi-hsiung as the shooter, and Tang as the person who remodeled the gun and made the bullets.
Tang admitted to the accusations levied against him, but while on the run sent a DVD to Taiwan in which he retracted his confession. Tang claimed that prosecutors told him to confess and then flee.
Tang Shou-yi (Dec. 4, 2006)
319 Suspect
The agreement we reached was for me to keep the truth to myself and agree with what they said. They also told me not to remain in Taiwan.
In unrelated incidents Tang was sentenced to one year, four months for fraud and other crimes. Now that he’s back in Taiwan, he will begin serving those sentences.

 The End