One thing we failed to take into consideration in making that overconfident prediction was that Chen is an extraordinary man. When his wife, who is currently standing trial, was indicted for corruption two years ago, he wasn’t, simply because he was immune to prosecution. But prosecutors made it crystal clear he was an unindicted co-defendant who would be formally charged upon leaving office. If he were an ordinary man, like Chun Do Hwan or Roo Tae Woo of South Korea, he would shun public appearances at the very least, to feign repentance. Incidentally, Chun and Roo are both ex-presidents charged, tried, convicted and sentenced to life for corruption and then pardoned because they are truly repentant.

Not so, our President Chen. He began his presidential campaign for 2012, claiming he is the only one in Taiwan capable of beating President Ma Ying-jeou who is bound to seek a second term. When Special Counsel prosecutors began, belatedly, to look into the charges of corruption against him while he was president, he declared war on the judiciary, posing as a victim of political persecution. He never fails to accuse Ma of using prosecutors and judges as lackeys and hired ruffians to get him, the self-styled architect of a republic of Taiwan. When a few of these “lackeys and hired ruffians” ganged up to put him under detention for further questioning on charges of forgery, corruption and money laundering, he announced a hunger strike and called on supporters to rise up against his persecutors. In a ten-point statement his defense lawyer passed to the cheering crowd in front of the Taipei detention house where he is being held, the former president urged his pro-independence activist supporters to struggle on and promised final victory.

One may call it the greatest political farce on earth, but Chen the actor is playing his leading role in all earnest, though wishing in fact he might make good his escape from the long arm of the law. Or he may be trying to emulate a war hero turned traitor during the East Jin Dynasty (317-420). Marshal Huan Wen (312-373), who put up a puppet emperor and then tried to take over but died before he could, left a famous saying for his latter-day emulators. He quipped: “A hero, if unable to hand down his good name for a hundred generations, should keep his bad name remembered for ten thousand years.”

Don’t worry, President Chen. You will be remembered much longer than Huan Wen, as a hero who won reelection thanks to one homemade bullet that grazed your belly in 2004, and one who was put behind bars five years later as a defendant in a corruption and money-laundering case. Nobody knows for sure if you stage-managed the mysterious shooting in Tainan in which you were nominally wounded on the eve of the 2004 presidential election, but everyone is certain those sympathy votes got you reelected. If due process runs its course, probably in years, you could be remembered even longer as the first head of state in our history who was imprisoned for avarice and greed after he constitutionally bowed out.