Multiple Choice Is The Bright Choice, Dummies.
July 12th, 2007Watching Chief Secretary Henry Tang become steadily at a loss for words at the universal suffrage Green Paper press conference was instructive. He was talking codswallap and codswallap is a notoriously difficult dialect to complete a sentence in. You begin with a certain bounce but then you begin to slow, the syntax slips,the larynx contracts, breath comes in spasms and you choke out the last few uncoupled words, wanting to be sick.
What Henry was trying to say was that because the people of Hong Kong were so very intelligent and intimately familiar with the arguments from long discussion, they would be able to form a democratic system of elections by picking out bits from this multiple choice paper presented to them by government.
There is no need for suggested structures or full blown models for them to walk around and poke at. They could tick sentences from those given, as you might in a woman’s magazine, cut them out with scissors and send them to the government. It is none too clear what the government is going to do with all these bits of paper but it is obviously the intelligent man’s approach according to Henry.
It highlights where the American Founding Fathers went wrong. They slaved over a model constitution and then asked assemblies of representatives to vote on it instead of devising a huge quiz and distributing it from New Hampshire to the Appalachians in the hope that something would turn up. What did you get? Government of the people, by the people , for the people and mistakes like Iraq. Not a good idea. What do we have? People like Philip Wong and James Tien and the West Kowloon development area. Let’s hope this Green Paper keeps us on that track.
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