From ‘GE: Lui Tuck Yew tells story about trees and mushrooms’, 30 April 2011, article by Rachel Kelly/Julia Ng in CNA online.
…Mr Lui also told supporters a story about a village which was sheltered by special tall trees (PAP) which protected it from storms. Yet the villagers were tempted by mushrooms which spouted only every five years.
He said: “The villagers asked, ‘Are these mushrooms any good? They are so pretty. Shall we remove some of these tall trees and allow the wild mushrooms (Opposition) to grow?’ And so the wise old man told them that these mushrooms may look pretty but some of them are poisonous, and ‘if you associate too closely with them, these wild mushrooms will weaken us, stunt our growth, and retard our development. Leave them alone, protect the trees, these trees are special trees’.”
If a tree falls down in a forest...
From cars and buses, the bad analogy bandwagon has made a turn towards horticulture this time. Other than the fact that these ‘special’ trees are protecting our little island village from natural disasters (actually it’s our geographical position, not the PAP that deserves credit), Lui Tuck Yew’s parable makes the PAP sound like the ancient magical Ents of Tokkien’s Lord of the Rings, craggy guardians of the forest, steadfast and wooden to the core, while the Opposition are ‘pretty-looking’ fungi leeching off the PAP’s holy sap. He’s right about the age of some of our more prominent ‘Ents’ though.
I have no idea if this story is made up, but no decent village elder will chop down trees in exchange for a field of giant mushrooms out of a Smurfs cartoon. Perhaps our minister needs some lessons in basic ecology, but to put it simply as I would to a child asking about wild plants; both the tree and the humble mushroom live in harmony as nature intended. The mushroom’s poison is a self-defence mechanism, not a weaponised chemical used to intoxicate humans or infect nearby trees. I’m no botanist but it would take a creeping plant to take root and strangle the PAP tree, not a dash of ‘pretty’ poisonous mushrooms which thrive on the shade of its host, which brings us to the biblical, and perhaps more accurate, metaphor of ‘seeds’, courtesy of our resident cabinet wordsmith SM Goh Chok Tong (‘Careful of the seed you sow’, 2 May 2006, Today)
It would have been fine if we left it as that, that no one knows what beast with a bark worse than its bite (groanworthy pun intended) would sprout out of Opposition seeds, which is sensible coming from SM Goh, if only someone else from PAP hadn’t already described in excruciating detail the kind of fruit that some PAP trees are bearing from the dismally titled article below (The Chiku Man 9 Oct 2004, Today). So there we have it, PAP newbies are unripe chikus, while Opposition are wild poisonous mushrooms. If a more palatable fruit has been chosen instead, say a rambutan, then it would have been harder for folks like myself to choose between the two. Just to take the mushroom analogy further, a mushroom’s poison could be turned into a useful medicine or chemical later if you just take some time to study it. A chiku, well, is just a tasteless way of packaging sugar, vitamins and minerals. No wonder the ground is ‘not too sweet’ this time.
Filed under: 2000s, 2011, Campaigns/Elections Tagged: | ge, lui tuck yew, Politicians, SM Goh Chok Tong
