Sitting in a taxi on a rainy afternoon, crawling along at a snail's pace in traffic. The radio is playing a news program, the presenter analyzing the latest developments. Basically, he's just reading out the day's newspaper stories, giving his own rather unique interpretation on events, his own consistent take. When I say his consistent take, I mean that he always ends up at the same conclusion, regardless of what piece of news he happens to be elucidating upon. Sometimes it does require him to twist things a bit, but he always manages to link the story with his central theme in the end.
A rainy day, traffic jam, cramped up in a cab: the unwilling audience to the rantings of the presenter as he preaches the "correct" interpretation of the day's events. It's impossible to turn your mind to anything else, to empty your mind. You feel your blood pressure going up and up: He's brainwashing you. There's no black and white. Your only option is to agree or point blank refuse to do so. There's no bringing an objective analysis to his monologue, because the more carefully you listen to his point of view, the more incensed you become.
"It's hard enough being caught up in traffic day in day out, do you really want to listen to this kind of rant? Wouldn't it be nicer to listen to music?" I ask the cabbie. "No choice, it's the same on all the channels," comes the reply.
But this is just an excuse. We still have Philharmonic Radio Taipei, and it's not as if there are no pop music shows, either. The fact is, fewer and fewer taxi drivers are tuning in to music programs. In the past, you used to get a good idea of the latest hits just by taking a cab. Over time, though, cab radios are telling us little more than what is happening in the day's paper. Young or old, taxi drivers are availing themselves all day long of radio presenters' interpretations of the latest national news.
Suddenly, I recalled a story told to me by a friend from Southeast Asia who settled in Taiwan years ago. When he was driving around with some visiting relatives one day, they asked him about the radio shows.
"How come you get nothing but talking on the radio here?" It was only then that he realized how much he had gotten used to hearing this kind of thing coming over the airwaves over the years.
This really is a curious social phenomenon in Taiwan. These "blessings" raining down from the heavens and spilling out into the hundreds of thousands of cabs and private cars around the island have created a kind of virtual collective consciousness. The whole of the public collectively receives the interpretations of these celebrity voices and their attacks on the government.
These presenters leaf through the papers throughout the week, drawing the same conclusions time and again, regardless of the actual content of the story. Hyperbolic conclusions bundled in dodgy logic; two-a-penny broadcasts with nothing new to say. These programs go out to countless people who listen every single day.
A good deal of Taiwanese complain that they are sick and tired of politics today, but given a choice of listening to music or current affairs programs, they opt for the latter, and in particular those that criticize the government. Back in the 1990s, in the last years of authoritarian rule under the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the whole island was caught up in politics.
In those days, Hsu Jung-chi (許榮棋) was the high priest of taxi drivers: In the space of a few hours he managed to get hundreds of cabbies to lay siege on the Ministry of Finance. Nowadays you don't hear so much of him. Even those taxi drivers usually seen as deep green supporters of the Democratic Progressive Party are tuning in less to deep green radio stations. They get their kicks now from chatting with other cabbies on the wireless.
During the martial law period, radio shows such as those by Hsu asked their audience to call in and participate in bashing the government. Nowadays the criticism is delivered exclusively by the host of the show, with the audience silently listening in. The fact that interactive shows are a thing of the past just goes to show that the current crop of celebrity presenters cannot command the same levels of audience participation as those in Hsu's day could.
The anti-blue radio programs of less than 10 years ago have changed into the anti-green ones of today, but you can't tell me that Taiwan's taxi drivers have all changed their political hue in that short period of time. It's possible that it wasn't really a matter of their politics, and just a reflection of their dissatisfaction with the times. It's also possible they are not quite as active as their counterparts of 10 years ago, but that they are still just as dissatisfied.
Even if the news broadcasts of the early 21st century are as full of the same kind of rubbish as they were at the end of the 20th, they are still proving popular among taxi drivers. These drivers are not into letting music soothe their worries away; they would prefer to have someone on the radio articulate their frustrations for them. Who knows whether this actually brings them out of the doldrums or makes them feel worse.
Maybe one day you will get in a cab and find the strains of music wafting out as you open the door, not the voice of some hysterical host.
When that happens, you will know that Taiwan has moved one step closer to being a normal society.
Ku Er-teh is a freelance writer.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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