Cavalierio

Reflections on the guillotine

2009-12-07T18:42:00.008+08:00

Some compelling words by Albert Camus in his eloquent 'Reflections on the Guillotine'. The original essay is much longer, and worth its every word.

I'll leave you with some abridged paragraphs: ___

"The survival of such a primitive rite [the death penalty] has been made possible among us only by the thoughtlessness or ignorance of the public, which reacts only with the ceremonial phrases that have been drilled into it. When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. But if the penalty is intended to be exemplary, how can a furtive assassination committed at night in a prison courtyard be exemplary? A law is applied without being thought out and the condemned die in the name of a theory in which the executioners do not believe.

If society justifies the death penalty by the necessity of the example, it must justify itself by making the publicity necessary. Yet, the power of intimidation reaches only the quiet individuals who are not drawn toward crime and has no effect on the hardened ones who need to be softened. And the condemned is cut in two, not so much for the crime he committed but by virtue of all the crimes that might have been and were not committed, that can be and will not be committed. The sweeping uncertainty in this case authorizes the most implacable certainty.

In order to continue claiming that the guillotine is exemplary, the State is consequently led to multiply very real murders in the hope of avoiding a possible murder which, as far as it knows or ever will know, may never be perpetrated. An odd law, to be sure, which knows the murder it commits and will never know the one it prevents. This punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge. Whoever has done me harm must suffer harm... whoever has killed must die. This is an emotion, and a particularly violent one, not a principle.

Beheading is not simply death. It is murder, to be sure. But it adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, which is in itself a source of moral suffering more terrible than death. Hence there is no equivalence. What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? The devastating, degrading fear that is imposed on the condemned for months or years is a punishment more terrible than death, and one that was not imposed on the victim. Two deaths are inflicted on him, the first being worse than the second, whereas he killed but once.

... Without absolute innocence, there is no supreme judge. Now, we have all done wrong in our lives even if that wrong, without falling within the jurisdiction of the laws, went as far as the unknown crime. There are no just people - merely hearts more or less lacking in justice. Living at least allows us a little of the good that will make up in part for the evil we have added to the world. Such a right to live, which allows a chance to make amends, is the natural right of every man, even the worst man. The lowest of criminals and the most upright of judges meet side by side, equally wretched in their solidarity. Without that right, moral life is utterly impossible. None among us is authorized to despair of a single man, except after his death, which transforms his life into destiny and then permits a definitive judgement. But pronouncing the definitive judgement before his death, decreeing the closing of accounts when the creditor is still alive, is no man's right. On this limit, at least, whoever judges absolutely condemns himself absolutely."

___ And Camus cites the Italian philosopher Beccarria, who sums up the illogicality, and thus the grossest injustice, of the death penalty:

"If it is important to give the people proofs of power often, then executions must be frequent; but crimes will have to be frequent too, and this will prove that the death penalty does not make the complete impression that it should, whence it results that it is both useless and necessary."

___

It seems, beneath the surety and self-righteousness of those who support the death penalty, lies an ignorant, irrational, and impenetrable blank where no rational argument is possible. And I think this is the greater crime regarding the death penalty.

To those who are raising awareness against state murder, fighting the fight and saving a life, I lend you my moral support here from where I am.

when lapdogs bark

2009-11-29T17:01:00.009+08:00

What's with these condescending headlines, Straits Times?

Wasn't there just another one a few weeks ago? 'Stop whining and start serving the customer'?

Maybe the whining would stop when the Straits Times stop infantalizing Singaporeans?

Maybe for a start, tell Sumiko Tan to stop whining? Go tell her, Man Sun, she's just next door. Go. Stop whining yourself too. :)

We the citizens of no country

2009-11-02T16:58:00.001+08:00

Remember when you were a child, you earnestly believed in the tales that adults told? The monsters under your bed that would awaken if you didn’t sleep by nine. The ghastly diseases that would beset you if you didn’t eat your greens. The policemen who were always ready to catch you if you didn’t behave yourself.

There was always something that adults wanted you to do, for your own good. Usually something that you disliked. Or else. . .

So there was a sense of déjà vu when the law minister K. Shanmugam exclaimed to a group of American lawyers last week that Singapore was ‘a city, not a country’.

***

Singapore, our poor nation, has suffered from much ignominy lately. Initially it was simply tarring the Opposition – any opposition – with an unpatriotic brush. It was childish behaviour indeed. Then, the brush strokes got bolder, and some Opposition members went bankrupt. They said it was needed to Protect Reputations. Then they went for the Pledge, tarnishing and tearing it up like a painter trampling on his own canvas.

And now, for all our efforts and sacrifices put into creating a precious piece of country, we are told that we are not a country after all. It sounded vulgar; sounded like a shirking of responsibility, like a dereliction of duty.

Singapore, if you are not my country, who is?

And it is a heartening affirmation of a nation’s strength and spirit, that despite all the terrible things said and done to it by the people in power, Singapore rises like a nation when the occasion calls.

Perhaps nationalism is a red-herring after all – there is no need to create it, and impossible to destroy it. Our nationhood will always be there whether we want it or not.

But Shanmugam’s occasion was not a call for or against nation-building. Neither was it an occasion to quibble over the definitions of sovereignty. We know that Singapore is a nation and a country. It can, and it will.

Shanmugam’s motive was less lofty: he was arguing that Singapore’s political system shouldn’t be measured against the yardsticks of ‘a normal country’, where Singapore would invariably appear undemocratic. Instead, he argued, Singapore should be compared to ‘cities’ like Chicago, San Fransisco, and New York City – cities that have enduring one-party rule. Cities that are democratic.

Surely, then, Singapore is democratic too?

***

Sometimes when we reach into the crux of the matter, we find that it is the old chestnut again. The old self-serving chestnut of authoritarian rulers pretending to be a democracy, twisting logic to suit one’s power.

Surely, Shanmugam is aware that differences abound between the Singapore government and the mayor-council of Chicago? The differences in duty, accountability and constitution, and indeed the differences in political systems and electoral processes? One serves a city, the other a country; one is free and the other not free?

Chicago’s mayor is a representative of the inhabitants of Chicago, not the state of Illinois, nor the United States of America. The Singapore government governs the city, state and country, and governs without the systemic transparency and constitutional checks found in its American city and federal counterparts. The Singapore government exacts taxes, guards the treasury, maintains peace and declares war. It presides over a country of us and no one else.

Thus, Shanmugam’s argument is essentially a spurious one, and he probably knows it too.

Because his was a nimble manoeuvre to camouflage, indeed explain away, the PAP's illiberal governance and unsavoury tactics. For it would be hard to imagine American cities adopting these illiberal strategies, entrenching these controls, and legitimizing these gerrymandering inventions of the PAP. These American mayors wouldn’t be elected to office in the first place, much less remain in power.

His was a nimble manoeuvre made possible by size and founded on difference: Singapore is not a country; it is a city. It is small. It is different.

And this is the wonderful thing about being small. Like a city. We can be vulnerable. We must be vulnerable. And we must do the things that big countries do not do. Because we are different; we’re small; we’re vulnerable.

And so we are.

It is a wonderfully circular and unfalsifiable reasoning that can be used to justify pretty much anything the regime desires, really. Twisting logic to suit one’s power. Or else, or perdition looms. The nation is always in peril.

And this is how the PAP has exploited Singapore’s city-size and turned it into its greatest asset.

***

Perhaps, Shanmugam’s (and Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong’s) articulations are meant to smoothen the road for the APEC meetings next week, where the international spotlight would once again fall upon Singapore. Fall upon its brilliantly-authoritarian and nominally-democratic government. The usual smiles, scoffs, and scuffles.

So the government’s PR-machinery anticipates the impending attacks and fires the first salvo, hoping to prevent a repeat of its disastrous handling of international opinion during the IMF-World Bank meetings here in 2006: when foreign civil society activists were threatened with arrests and banished to Batam. When the then World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz chided Singapore for being ‘authoritarian’. When PM Lee Hsien Loong’s four million smiles turned into Seelan Palay’s four hundred frowns. When Singapore became a laughing stock of the world.

So in the end, the answers that Shanmugam provided to his American guests last week, about our press, our judiciary, our political system, were non-answers really. Pertinent questions explained away in a camouflage of rational non-responses.

Like why there is a National Presses & Printing Act and press monopoly, and why SPH’s management shares provide the Singapore government with so much proxy power, amongst other interesting connections. It was a bit rich to dismiss Reporters without Borders’ indictment of Singapore’s mainstream media while lauding the findings from Transparency International. If one wanted to quibble over methodologies, aren’t both as guilty? Or is there a double-standard that no one wants to point out?

Like why there’re such high numbers of part-time High and Supreme Court judges on contracts, amongst other dirty linens hung out by the International Bar Association, by the numerous esteemed English, Canadian and Australian counsels. Like why Kangaroo T-shirts are charged and sued but not the English silks.

Like why Singapore simply cannot let go of itself and be fair, transparent, and truly democratic. Like proper country. Perhaps Shanmugam knew he didn’t have a case.

Or perhaps, Shanmugam had no need to provide answers. After all, Singapore’s illiberal regime did create the Great Singapore Model. Despite the odds, contradictions and false dichotomies. The Great Singapore Model that brought the WTO, IMF-World Bank, and APEC to Singapore. The Great Singapore Model that brought Singapore from Third World to First.

After all, Singapore is unique. It is a city, not a country. It is small, it is vulnerable.

And you wonder when Singapore would grow up.

***

As you enter adulthood, you reflect on those horrible tales of monsters and diseases and policemen that those adults told, and you laugh them off now because, really, how silly you had been. There was no danger out there.

But you weren’t silly. You were a child.

We like to think of children as inept and ignorant things that we can bend to our wishes so long as we instill fear in them. But children possess immense wisdom. They enter first into this earth, and are more experienced in the ways of the world than the adults who come later. They may be more easily frightened, but they also know that the truth will soon be out.

This is why when adults play on children’s fears, adults often look like children themselves. Fearful, vulnerable, and small. And oftentimes the child looks on, unperturbed, nonchalant. As Wordsworth once cried, the Child is father of the Man.

And it is testament to a child’s purity of heart and generosity of spirit, that he and she is ever willing to forgive these frightful, ignoble adults, despite all that they have said and done in the false name of their goodness. Adults who stymied and almost scarred a child for life. Adults who never got to grow up.

Fascism that works

2009-11-01T16:35:00.000+08:00

He was a leader who held a nation in his thrall.

From the excesses of empire and occupation, he arose with a voice so clear it could not but give his people hope, give his people dreams. He arose and gave them such ravishings of riches never before imagined. He had no fixed ideology, only a vision, and an acute sense of what would work or not. He used coercive methods, stoked the fears of communist plots. But he did arise democratically. Later, he discovered that the law could be used to stop the Opposition from entering parliament. The law could be used to maintain dominance, to do wrong. Entirely legal, entirely legitimate. It helped to have an extravagant propaganda machinery in his hands.

And he followed his vision as long as the destination was a nation strong and free.

Although he upheld the principles of private property, and his people given an illusion of private ownership, most of it belonged to the State. That is, after numerous land grabs and forced evictions. The state colluded with private capital, chanelling economic growth through top-down regulations and contracts, through prolonged working hours and suppressed wages. State-owned enterprises controlled the economy, the labour movement was quelled in the name of unity, and the capitalist class was feted accordingly. This nationalist autarchy was an efficient blend of capitalism and socialism, a Third Way ahead of its time, a shining emblem of a corporate state. By necessity, the masses were reduced to a kind of serfdom. Hostage to the state, servants to capital. But no matter, for the means justified the ends.

This was a society based on the doctrinal trilogy of order, discipline, and hierarchy. Based on the elites of the few and the mobilization of the masses. To this end, the elites – belonging to a certain race – had to be born. Their births and citizenship were encouraged. On the other end, the inferior had to be prevented. Their births were reduced, residency curtailed, and some others sterilized. Of course, homosexuals were persecuted. An elitist, racist, and sexist society was thus nurtured by a state-wide eugenicist programme, determining marriage, immigration, and first birth. So as to proliferate the favoured types and races, so as to achieve a nation strong and free.

Such a nation naturally needed a strong leader. A father of founding fathers the mantle of legends and myths. And how indeed he made good his promises to make his people strong again. How triumphant they were, how prosperous, and how they loved him so. The father embodied in one people and one nation, exalted in its youths and cultivated in its men.

Such were his people then, like a flock waiting for their messiah, for national rebirth, such stirring, incandescent passions, that they were willing to condone the wrongs that he did and the evils that he wrought. Such was the compelling power of his particular fascism, the extent of their dehumanization, to have his nation so ravished by riches, so enthralled by visions, so fascinated by the always present, always beautiful fantasy of unity, of sacrifice, so as to achieve a nation strong, glorious, and free.

***

And know this story of Hitler well. The tragic intoxication of a nation with his dreams. The imperative of war. The gas chambers. A solution, as long as it worked. The means justified the ends. Even better if they were within the law – his laws. The unimaginable possibilities of evil. But he did not live happily ever after, thankfully, and gone with him was his particular fascism.

Today, even though patently-fascist organizations operate in many countries, they are few in number, generally weak, and virtually ostracized by mainstream society. To garner electoral support, they have to first de-fascistize themselves and become more moderate – such is the ideological dilemma that they face. (This containment, though, is only effective in functioning democracies.) Nonetheless, it will be difficult for another Hitler to emerge. The times have changed. Gone are the days of great wars, racial domination, and imperial conquests – conditions that created a certain kind of fascism. Today, Hitler is a lesson to be learnt, but not an example to be followed.

This does not mean, however, that fascism does not manifest itself in other forms, in lesser degrees, certain qualities adopted, changing and moving along with the times. Fascism’s definitions have always been fluid; it has never been a coherent set of philosophy. Look more closely, less literally, and you might just detect its presence; transformed and reproduced into other morphologies, lambent, like a dark promise.

***

There is, above all, the amazing stereotyping of all the fascist propaganda material known to us. Not only does each individual speaker incessantly repeat the same pattern again and again, but different speakers use the same clichés. Most importantly, of course, is the dichotomy of black and white, foe and friend.

- Theodor Adorno, Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda

And the essential face of fascism remains the same: the cult of leadership and its coterie of yes-men, elite rule and mass mobilization, authoritarianism and a depoliticized bureaucracy, assertive nationalism, statist economics, a propagandistic mass media, and an emasculated labour movement (thereby enjoying the support of the rich). More dangerously: the ruling elites’ belief of an innate human inequality, of socio-biological eugenics, state-sanctioned executions, the inculcation of military virtues, the insidious sense of siege, a nation if not preparing for war, at war, then ever-ready to wage a war – all inoculated in the name of efficiency and advancement. Of survival. Totalizing state power for an ultimate vision of utopia, for fascism is after all a politics of vision.

So the stirring mass displays of precision and one-ness, the impressive weaponry and grand infrastructure, the fireworks that swathe the sky and surge one’s heart, and of course, always, the timeless image of the messiah. In all these, the youth on the centre-stage, the Father’s youths, for fascism exalts the youth. Like the National Day 2009 music video “What do you see?” with a curious, conspicuous absence of the old, as if the nation consists only of young, smiling boys and girls, precious children of the State. Like the old who ‘would not conveniently die off’, labeled too, inhumanely, as a ‘silver tsunami’. Such illuminating connotations of obstinacy, of recalcitrance, of catastrophe associated with the elderly.

Once more from Adorno:

[A]ll fascist agitators dwell upon the imminence of catastrophes of some kind. Whereas they warn of impending danger, they and their listeners get a thrill out of the idea of inevitable doom.

Or else, or perdition looms. The nation is always in peril.

In fascist regimes, where individual lives are insignificant, it is unsurprising that citizens are treated with contempt, offenders punished punitively, criminals executed swiftly, for brutal regimes breed a brutal people. Of course, the people soothe themselves (but what else can they do?): it’s a necessary evil, it’s for the greater good, lest the great nation falls. It’s that smell of blood and the thrill of doom.

But fascism doesn’t just flourish in authoritarian regimes. 20^th century European fascism did thrive in an era of democracy; and as recent as 2008, Austria's far-right Freedom Party continued to win seats in its parliament – such are the disturbing signs of the times. While mainstream Austrians and the international community expressed their alarm at this development, they could do little to prevent George W. Bush’s post-9/11 America from racially profiling its citizens, passing the Patriot Act, and continually invoking the fantasy of a united nation – the fascist inflections in democratic America. But at least there were critical awareness and vigorous debates in those countries.

***

Compared to times past, much of contemporary fascism is subtler, more banal – it has avoided its previous mistakes, adopted its best practices. It helps authoritarian regimes to better themselves.

As a diffusion of capitalism – and capitalism having become a celebrated ideology the world over, splendent in its neo-liberal variant – fascism remains a potent poison. No longer just administered by military adventurism, or even the more contemporary ‘wars’ of religious extremism and the fears of terrorism, there is also now the lure of consumerist comfort. A politics of fear combined with a culture of contentment to lull us into embracing a dictatorship of competence (fascism as blithely defined by Pierre Bourdieu).

Thus, to be rich is glorious, and life is after all incomplete without shopping. In certain quarters, it can be dressed up as ‘good governance’. Fascism by any other name now comes in even more attractive versions. But fascism is fascism however demure it appears.

Thus, before we can curb what Susan Sontag has called the ‘fascist longings in our midst’, for fascism is always compelling, always alluring, we have to first be willing to countenance its banality of riches, to recognize its swastika in yet another guise, and to call it by its only rightful name. For before one submits to temptation, the temptation to its unimaginable possibilities, one is first susceptible to it. Fascism inures, it inoculates, it makes one susceptible.

Compared to its versions of past failures and full regalia, ours is a fascism that holds us tighter in its thrall. And it is not just because one lives in an authoritarian state. But that this time, it is ribboned with a smug, enticing smile: Ours is a fascism that bestows us the good life. Ours is a fascism that works.

This is the lyre and the legacy of fascism. From Third Reich to First.

Requiem for a dream

2009-09-19T18:07:00.005+08:00

I was a schoolteacher for a time. The hours were long and the work was grueling. But I enjoyed every moment of it. The students – for it was always about the students – had made the job possible. In many ways, they made me possible. It was, as the cliché goes, the most wonderful time of my life.

I still keep in touch with some of them. And lately – it must be that time of the year again – they were asking me about what subjects to take in JC, in university. The sad thing is, they were constantly evaluating their choices in view of a ‘future career’. Thus, their subjects had to be ‘relevant’, ‘useful’. For some of them, their parents forbade them to even consider the Polytechnic. I thought it ludicrous, and felt a little rueful. They were basing their education on appearances, on an imagined future job that might well change, that they might not be interested in, or that might not even exist by then. Were they planning for a future life of frustrations and regrets?

It is not wrong – a career and a future are important considerations. But it is sad – they are only sixteen. And it can turn cruel when, without their realizing, their future becomes futile. By then it might be too late – living out a life not one to call their own, dreaming of someone else's dreams.

And so it was a nice surprise to hear PM Lee telling students at the recent NTU forum to ‘dare to dream’, to ‘surprise yourself with what you achieve and create a better future for all of us.’ It was surprising not because such things even needed to be told – and told to university students. It was surprising for its familiar echo of what he had said in 2004: during his first National Day Rally speech, PM Lee urged a freer Singapore. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ were those promising words.

In the ensuing five years, we have had ample opportunities to admire how our garden city has bloomed: the New Media has a new lasso, the Films Act gained some sophistication, the Public Order Act transforms one into an illegal assembly, and T-shirts with marsupial prints are roundly sent to jail. And these blooms merely skim the soil of the more sturdy trunks and deeper roots of control, censorship, and surveillance. I must have repeated these examples too many times. But some things simply never change.

***

We are not actually an apathetic people. At the cusp of our independence, in the fifties and sixties, Singapore was a hotbed of social, commercial, and political activities. The women were active in politics; community and entrepreneurial spirit were sustained by the countless merchants in their shops, hawkers by their stalls, and peddlers on the streets. The kampungs were little paradise for kids. They were a home for all. Artists, poets, singers and painters were all dreaming up their various different reality. Singapore looked like a proper city then; authentic, lively, and inspiring. So where have all the flowers gone?

It is not that our children do not dream, for to dream is only human. It is what happens to their dreaming as we put them through the State’s dehumanizing system, through those indoctrination camps pretending to be schools, where cold, economistic rationalism reigns supreme, must reign supreme. It is this same system that renders politics into mere administration, citizens into populations, into collective waged labour, and art and dreams in the state’s own image: cold, economistic, utilitarian. It is not the absence of revolution and tumult that there’s a dearth of political leaders. It is this illiberal, dehumanizing system that douses political fire. All our fire.

A few years ago, when Singapore decided to be a 'renaissance city', its methods were predictable: it conjured a Renaissance Masterplan. And dotted throughout the edict were words like: hardware, software, systematic introduction, documentation, upgrade, benchmarking, baselines, multiplier effect.

But these are not the noble names of art. They are not the phrases of inspiration, passion, and the singular vision. They are the language of civil servants and technocrats, the meaningless jargon of econometrics.

And yet and yet, in Singapore, art cannot be a wildflower. One ‘must be realistic’, intones the Straits Times: ‘If you do not plan on becoming a concert soloist, there are enough job opportunities in the arts and arts-related fields. As Singapore gears up to be a creative hub, the number of jobs in the creative industry can only grow.’[1]

Can one plan on becoming a concert soloist? And so art becomes a ‘job opportunity’ in a country ‘geared up’ for art. Art as an investment. Art to enrich the State (now a ‘creative hub’). This is how the state dreams its dreams – the hubbub in a technocracy, the fallacies, the diktats (the fantasia of dictators). And so let a hundred artists bloom.

But Art is not an investment. It cannot be geared up. Art refuses dictation.

Like dreams, it is free. It has to be.

***

I am reminded of the story of three Singaporean boys – Cheng Yu, Keegan, and Wen Yi. Two promising pianists and a passionate actor. They were boys who dreamt, even if tentatively:

When Cheng Yu was thirteen, he won the first prize and the Marion S. Gray Outstanding Musician Award at the prestigious Bartok-Kabalevsky International Piano Competition in America. That was in 1998. Ten years later, he ended up a medical student at NUS. Couldn’t he have gone on to become a pianist of acclaim, and be alive in his dreams? No. Cheng Yu’s father had threatened to ‘become a beggar’ if he continued to study music.

Not only do we ourselves stop dreaming, we stop our loved ones from dreaming too.

Then there is Keegan. Like Cheng Yu, Keegan had also won the Marion S. Gray Outstanding Musician Award – the second Singaporean to do so. Like Cheng Yu, he also wanted to study music. But no, This time it was the State. He had to complete his full-time National Service first. ‘I tried to practise while in NS but there was hardly any time,’ Keegan said. ‘I felt quite bad about it initially; there is regret. But never mind, I have learnt to move on.’ When Keegan completes his NS, he will switch to business studies. But never mind. He has learnt the language of reality, of pragmatism. The lingua franca of Singapore.

They all have, because they must. Their respective fathers insisted on that. Nafa's lost boys, as the media termed them. Father's missing sons. Except, they're still here, in captivity, kept by other people's dreams.

Except for one. The one who got away and never came back:

Wen Yi was a fifteen year-old student. He wanted to switch his CCA from track-and-field to drama. But his parents objected to it. Sports medals count, because they can be counted. Theatre and drama can't.

When passion meets pragmatism, the choice can be hard to bear.

So Wen Yi enacted, in real life, from his original script, his ‘final act of rebellion’. Like a good artist, the day before, he had sent out his invite, and the play had to go on: ‘Will you as a friend accompany me on this day?’

And from the eleventh-floor bedroom window of his home, he turned to brave his invisible audience.

Wen Yi reminded me of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

… Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,

We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call;

So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.

Except for Wen Yi, it was no dream, there was no awakening, and there was no more restoring of amends.

Wen Yi stands atop his window ledge and falls away.[2]

***

They say art mirrors reality. Doesn't it?

Some of us wonder why Wen Yi ended his life over such a seemingly small matter. We wonder why Cheng Yu and Keegan couldn't cut a compromise, or resume their pursuits afterwards. But after what?

For some others, they wonder why, in Singapore, dreams are made out to be a small matter, that dreams have to relentlessly be haunted by reality. And whose reality is it?

So we shake our heads and slant our glances. A life is gone, and perhaps, we all know why.

Perhaps in Singapore, it is better not to dream.

There is this marvelous song by Faye Wong, called 开到荼蘼 [kāi dào tú mí]. It is sung with incredible panache and voice, the lyrics are exquisite and steeped in the Buddhist philosophy of transcendence. Near the song’s end, it describes how a resplendent promise made by a loved one can send one’s heart a fluttering, just like how a flower blooms. But inevitably, just like every flower, every blossom – that very apex of beauty and hope – is also when that flower meets its death. 心花怒放 | 却开到荼蘼. Let a hundred flowers bloom indeed.

When we wonder, where have all the flowers gone – the musicians, artists, writers – it's not hard to find them. Beneath the swathes of engineers and accountants, doctors and lawyers, there are those piles of abandoned hopes and deserted dreams. Occasionally, a wistful soul might catch a momentary glimpse of that other life. The life that might have been, but now hidden in the shade or withered on the vine. And in the end, they themselves, too, like those detritus of dreams, would be buried under, in someone else’s happiness, prosperity, and eventually be forgotten, as if none of them had ever lived.

***

My advice to my former students was simple (but what else can I say?): Look around you, look at the adults, at your own parents. Working in their jobs, living out a daily drudgery, dreaming of another life. So why not wake up to that other life that you dream about?

Wouldn’t they then be more worldly-wise, more dreamful? More fluent in laughter, in passion, in love? Wouldn’t they be happier then, however their future might turn out?

But perhaps even that is too much to ask. Too idealistic. Not practical, not pragmatic. Dream on, we like to say. This is why PM Lee’s dare to dream is revealing in itself. Against the reality of Singapore, it sounds almost like a taunt: to sleep, perchance to dream, but only if you dare. For those who do, the awakening is often rude; it is the bright daylight of Singapore. And for that they are fortunate. Because for some others, their dreams disperse without the consolation of morning.

Article first appeared in The Online Citizen.

[1] The Straits Times, “Careers in the Arts”, 14 December 2008.

[2] The Straits Times, “Boy Jumped over CCA”, 27 November 2008.

***

Once Upon a Time in Singapore

2009-08-24T15:39:00.004+08:00

There was a time not too long ago, when we clenched our fists upon our hearts, and pledged ourselves as one united people. Regardless of race, place, and united by Time, 8:22 was a rousing moment towards the sublime. Across the country, a fusillade of imagined community. An image so rare, of Singaporean unity. Imagine, a nation. An imagination. An image, a magic, coming true at 8:22.

But Singapore won’t make it, a wise man said. And he duly rose up from his living grave, to bring his highfalutin flock back down to earth. And how swiftly that vertiginous paradise disappeared. The tenets of our Pledge, the wise man said, are grandiose ideals that, if undemolished, would demolish Singapore.

And from the highest office of the land came this lowest living lie. That a democratic nation would destroy Singapore. It was a wonderment how a nation’s founding father would fight so forcefully against the founding of a nation.

***

When we think of nations, Benedict Anderson’s classic formulation often comes to mind, where a nation is a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ that only exists in a people’s collective imagination.[1] Nations as imagined communities. Might MM Lee be right that our nation is really a fantasy.

But Anderson’s treatise is not the final word. Nations are European inventions, one of many forms of political organizations, of creating communities. But what about us?, the political theorist Partha Chatterjee wondered – the once-colonized, the bastard children of Empire who have no choice of nations other than from those bequeathed by Europe – what do we have left to imagine? Europe has already written for us our colonial and postcolonial scripts of victory and failure, resistance and destiny. ‘Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.’[2]

A nation, conjured by one's imagination. More important for a nation, the freedom of imagination. And freedom, in PAP parlance, an abomination. Unsurprisingly, we remain colonized subjects. It’s Empire once more.

***

It is this connection between nations and the freedom of imagination that allows us to understand MM Lee’s outburst. It has little to do with the Constitutional sanctity of the Malays’ indigenous rights.

Examine closely MM Lee’s well-documented eugenicist views on the ‘superiority’ of the Chinese ‘race’, his political intervention in the Association of Muslim Professionals’ (AMP) in 2000, as well as the various frank academic writings about the Malay community, and we’ll notice how his supposed Constitutional considerations evaporate. In any case, parliamentary dominance ensures that the Constitution can be arbitrarily amended, as it has been. And we wonder if Singapore really has a ‘Constitution’. We might well pay MM Lee a backhanded compliment when we say that he is above parliamentary and Constitutional powers, but that’s merely typical of tyrants and their regimes. Can there be harmony in the race between freedom and tyranny?

Rather, the true Pledge of our nation, as desired by NMP Viswa Sadasivan, strike right into the heart of the PAP’s strategy of divide and rule. The sociologist Chua Beng-Huat offers a perceptive reading: instituting multi-racialism enables, no – compels, the Singapore state to ‘set itself structurally above race’, giving the state enormous political leverage. A multi-racial Singapore would then necessitate the enactment and enforcement of racial harmony. This is a masterstroke that corrals Singaporeans into the paradoxical logic of deterrence: ‘it is because of deterrence that misdeeds are kept low, if not entirely erased – thus, deterrence must continue; however, since deterrence is never lifted, the validity of the assumption that, if lifted, misdeeds will indeed break out is never tested – thus deterrence continues.’[3]

‘Racial harmony’, like most other PAP political strategies, serves two simultaneous functions. First, a regime of power surveilling a compartmentalized citizenry. Its elaborate walls surreptitiously woven into discriminatory legislation, housing quotas, NS deployment, education trajectories and traps – the major institutions that govern the state, control the populace, and shape our assorted fates. Second, every strategy, invariably self-serving, cumulatively strengthens and entrenches its political dominance. That we don’t even notice how the necessity of ‘racial harmony’ conveniently requires a GRC system, is testament to MM Lee’s brilliance. ‘Racial harmony’ is not just that. It institutionalizes gerrymandering, legitimates control, and perpetuates a Chinese-dominated political party/-country/-nation.[4]

Thus, to pledge a Singaporean identity regardless of race is already to position oneself politically against the state.

Among the plethora of contradictions in Singapore politics, the cruellest must be this: The regime’s control is so complete that even displays of patriotism, like fulfilling the ideals of our Pledge that we hold so dearly, is also a brazen act of high treason.

No wonder then, we dare not pledge ourselves too seriously. For the freedom of imagination is to imagine a nation free from the PAP.

***

The late S. Rajaratnam is now well-known for having penned our Pledge. What is less-remembered, is his disappointment, publicly expressed in 1990, with how Singapore had turned out: our materialism, philistinism; and how we have become a soulless, unthinking flock. A people reduced to waged labour.

But his greatest disappointment was with the PAP’s insidious strategy to racialize Singaporeans. He believed the CMIO policy would end our quest for a united nation, a Singaporean Singapore: ‘At this rate there will be a long ethnic queue of Singapore citizens proclaiming Sikh identity … Ceylon Tamil identity … Indian Tamil identity … Cantonese identity … Hokkien identity – and goodbye Singapore identity.’[5]

For us, Rajaratnam’s hard-hitting speech illuminates how the PAP that had led us in the first decades is no longer the PAP that is leading us now. Passion, conviction, and that roaring fire have been replaced by a cold-hearted elitism and the rampant profiteering of Singapore Inc.

***

Our National Day celebrations are resplendent affairs. Clothed in fascist irrationalism, luminous in their silken totalitarian complexion, they’re our annual thanksgiving dear supreme leader, Fatherland’s only son. Tightly-scripted and controlled, these celebrations’ surging militarism overwhelm our senses, appealing to our basic instincts for survival, for war, their pomp and pageantry paced to perfection.

But underneath these grand gestures, there are some realities that we overlook. For most of us, the words of our national anthem remain a foreign mystery – a mystery we’re in no hurry to resolve. We recite our Pledge; it is fluent, but empty. The significance of our flag – the five stars and the crescent – is gazed past with ignorance, with diffidence. Sometimes it is hung backside-front, upside-down (although that is not necessarily a bad thing). If we were honest with ourselves we would admit that our nationalism rings hollow, our patriotism shallow.

I am no nationalist, but I share Rajaratnam’s 1990 sentiments: ‘…after nearly 20 years of growing prosperity, peace and better education, a Singapore identity must be even more deeply-rooted and indelible than in 1971. If not, there must be something seriously wrong with our nation-building process.’[6]

Yet another twenty years have passed, and little has changed. Our nation remains imagination-free.

***

National Day Rallies: images and stories of yore, again and again, Time past and Time future. Reminders of how we came, from Third World to First, and who had brought us here. But this arrival is a mirage. If our existence is dependent on PAP rule, without whom…, then arrival will always be a mirage. And our government and its nation-building press would have failed our people. A Singapore that cannot survive without the PAP is a failed Singapore. And Time would have passed us by.

That Rally night, a glossy, contrived theatre, puppets and marionettes coming with strings attached, everybody performing perfectly to canned laughter. That Rally night, a treat to fabulous fantasies, foreign islands in a faraway time. But ask, here and now in our Singapore for a democratic society…, and see how the lights go out, the curtains come down, and how hearty laughter takes a bow. Night falls, and fear, timeless fear, is invoked. The fear of racial riots. The fear of our perdition. The fear of a Singapore without the PAP. Those faded, black-and-white photographs of old Singapore coming alive in their rowdiest kaleidoscopes. Unrealistic, unpragmatic, ungracious, irrational fear, ruthlessly untouched by Time.

So we haven’t arrived. Time exploded, and we remain in 1965. The chimera of skyscrapers and the reality of slums.

***

After four decades of nation-nothing and wasted years, perhaps we do have to start over. Rebuild our own nation, on our own terms, on our own earth. The story of Singapore cannot be told by just one man. It cannot be just one story, where we live on one man’s island, one man’s vision, while our imaginations remain colonized, forever trapped in his time, living our lives as voiceless people in a lifeless story. A nation is possible, and it is already in our thoughts. Remember our Pledge, and remember 8:22.

And we’ll imagine better. We have to imagine truer, in fragments, in freedom. To MM Lee our deepest gratitude, who has given Singapore the best as well as the worst, and so whose rightful name shall always come to be our messiah and curse. But the lovely night can only last so long.

An age has passed, and time belongs to a new day now. For us to render a Singapore that is not the fraudulent Pax Singaporeana built on money, exploitation, appearances, and fear. But a nation that is forged from our own hands, hearts, and dreams. Just like how it was, once upon a time in Singapore.

[1] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1983.

[2] Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1998.

[3] Chua Beng Huat, “Multicultiralism in Singapore: An Instrument of Social Control”, Race & Class, 44:3, 2003, pp. 58-77.

[4] For more on the structural disadvantages that the non-Chinese minorities face as a result of PAP policies, see Michael D. Barr and Zlatko Skrbis, Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity, and the Nation-Building Project, Copenhagen, NIAS Press, 2008; Lily Zubaidah Rahim, The Singapore Dilemma: The Political and Educational Marginality of the Malay Community, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1998; Christopher Tremewan, The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994. It is unsurprising that most of the trenchant analyses of Singapore politics are conducted by foreign academics and not local ones.

[5] The Straits Times, “Raja Wants Revival of ‘Singaporean Singapore’”, 11 March 1990.

[6] ibid.

About Temasek, and of course, the Straits Times

2009-07-30T19:44:00.007+08:00

Just when would we say, a lie is a lie, a wrong is a wrong, and enough is enough?

***

Excellent article from The Age/SMH:

Lumbered with the boss's wife

Eric Ellis

July 30, 2009

SINGAPOREANS aren’t usually given to open criticism of the Lee family that has ruled them for half a century. Rightly or wrongly, some presume that in their tightly controlled island state, walls have ears, and one never knows who is listening.

But this time it’s different. Singaporeans are deeply displeased with their Prime Minister’s wife, Ho Ching. She has run Temasek Holdings, the state-owned fund, since 2002, and has presided over a spectacular series of misjudgments that have lost Singaporeans billions.

There was the murky $3 billion deal she made in Bangkok in 2006, to buy then Thai PM Thaksin Shinawatra out of his telco. Ho’s massive plunges into European and American banks ended in tears last year when Temasek lost a third of its $100 billion portfolio. In Australia, Ho lost Temasek’s entire $400 million stake she’d plunged into Eddie Groves’ ABC Learning Centres, among other missteps.

So much for her much-lauded ‘‘Superwoman’’ smarts and vision when the state appointed her, even though her pre-Temasek record at Temasek-owned arms supplier Singapore Technologies was hardly Sorosesque. Today, Singaporeans are sick of Ho and have been for some time. They want her out of Temasek, lest she create any more financial havoc for them.

Except she’s not going. In a February ‘‘transition’’ — not a sacking, as Temasek spun furiously — Ho was supposed to hand over Temasek to Chip Goodyear, the 51-year-old American (and North Melbourne supporter) who pointed BHP-Billiton at China for four years and made billions.

The big idea was that Goodyear would fix the mess Ho made in banking and tilt Singapore into the booming China and India growth stories, which meant placing Temasek at the middle of big regional resources plays. But that, too, has ended in tears, when Temasek last week cited ‘‘strategic differences,’’ announcing it was "mutually agreed" Goodyear would not become CEO.

It seems clear that after five months hanging around the Temasek office, Goodyear has been paid millions for his life-long silence.

But only a few days earlier, Goodyear was doing the rounds of Temasek satellites mapping out his vision. One CEO I spoke to expressed shock, saying he had been on the ‘‘same page’’ as Goodyear and was looking forward to working with him. The implication was clear: Goodyear was a genuine businessperson whereas Ho was not.

That was mid-July. A week later, Chip was chopped. Temasek’s board met the weekend before last, then announced Goodyear was gone. So what happened?

The Government-controlled Straits Times said Goodyear’s proposals to shake up Temasek were viewed as "too risky" by the board. Too risky? Ho’s bad bets in banks lost Temasek around $30 billion. What could be riskier than that?

More likely is the take doing the rounds of Singapore’s banking and business communities. Local insiders, under few illusions that little happens at Temasek without Government say-so, say the Government has been spooked by the arrest in China of Rio-Tinto executive Stern Hu.

Temasek hired Goodyear because they wanted him to do for it what he had done at BHP, expertly play China, which is far more politically important for an Asian nation such as tiny Chinese-dominated Singapore than it is for a global mining giant. But after the Chinese Government arrested Hu and sent a message it was taking back control of its resources management, it wouldn’t do now, they say, for a foreigner who knows so much about Chinese resources to front mostly Singapore Inc’s ambitions in China.

The handling of Goodyear has deeply embarrassed Singapore and seems to give lie to the fiction that Temasek operates transparently and separately from Government policy. And knowing how deep runs the anger among its readers that Ho has squandered a big chunk of their nest egg, even the normally lap-dog Straits Times was moved to ask how ‘‘private sector’’ can Temasek really be, commenting: ‘‘Like it or not, Temasek cannot get away from the fact that it is inextricably linked to the Singapore Government’’.

It’s shaken up the arcane world of sovereign wealth funds too, where Temasek liked to portray itself as the model for emerging wealthy states. Delegations from around the world made pilgrimages to Singapore to see how it was done, how their state’s strategic jewels can be packaged and managed into an investment vehicle that maintained the illusion it was somehow separated from the Government. Journalists describing Temasek as "Government-controlled" invited a welter of complaints to their editors from Temasek’s spinners who demanded it be benignly referenced as an "Asian investment company" with no references to the Government whatsoever, and certainly not to describe the family connections of Ho’s. Failure to comply would mean an outlet would be blackballed by Temasek, which in Singapore ultimately suggests a libel suit no media company has ever won there.

East Timor decided the Temasek model wasn’t for them, and chose a Norwegian-inspired transparent route for its now $6 billion petroleum royalties pile. In many respects, it’s actually a model for Temasek. Certainly, the East Timorese fund made more money than Temasek has recently — it invested in boring US treasury bonds while Ho was plunging billions into Merrill Lynch.

Unsurprisingly, Temasek’s model appeals more to the more authoritarian and less democratic of states, such as Kazakhstan which, like Singapore, is run along family lines.

Now Singapore Inc is in a pickle. It said it wants to internationalise Temasek, and appointing the much-respected Goodyear was a huge – and widely welcomed – statement. Now it’s stuck with the bumbling Ho, for at least another year, which simply deepens the market’s conviction that dealing with Temasek is akin to de facto dealing with the Government.

Temasek says it is continuing its international search for a new boss. But after Goodyear’s bad year at Temasek, why would anyone want to go there?

Singapore, the safe, safe, city

2009-07-17T17:04:00.005+08:00

There is another sky,

Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there

-- Emily Dickinson

Singapore is a safe city, we like to say. Say it often enough, loudly enough, and strangely, it becomes actual enough, safe in our factual fantasy.

***

Singapore is a safe city, because there is “an absence of desperate poverty”, says Kishore Mahbubani. Singapore is a safe city, because “the government has created an ‘ecosystem’ that resulted in this high level of personal safety.” In safe city Singapore, there is low crime, few murders. Singaporeans earn their daily bread, diligently, honestly, safely. Singapore is a safe city because of the government. Because of the government, there’s enough bread to go around, unlike places like Switzerland and New York City, where Mr Kishore Mahbubani was almost mugged mercilessly. Singapore is a safe city.

***

Singapore is a safe city. The mornings are calm and the streets are tender. We’re not like those willy-nilly liberal democracies, where crazy rioters run amok almost, like, daily. We have little patience for such fluffy frivolities. Singapore is a safe city. Three’s a crowd and two’s a company, and one is now an illegal assembly. Ask for permission to speak publicly, lest you be rounded into prison, seething privately. Refrain from speaking up for the downtrodden, like foreign workers or the Opposition, however they tempt you seditiously, for you might be detained, indefinitely, by Internal Security.

***

Singapore is a safe city because of its “tough attitudes on law and order”, says Kishore Mahbubani. In this safe city, we whip teenage boys for being teenage boys, and we hang drug mules on transit, young as a foal, foolish as the young. No foreign president or prime minister can persuade a presidential pardon. Because, pardon me, Singapore is a safe city. What is one death amidst so much safety? This safe city depends on draconian laws being executed punitively. Laws that hover above Singapore, keeping us safe, safe-keeping our thriving economy, compromising neither sovereignty nor survivability. Singapore is a safe city.

***

Singapore is a safe city. We’re an international financial centre, located strategically in a region of endless possibilities. Billions of dollars of private wealth funds are parked here safely, ill-gotten money guarded legally. VIPs from other dictatorships visit us regularly, like Burma’s Prime Minister General Soe Win, and Zimbabwe’s Mr Mugabe. Singapore is a safe city. Dictators and their cronies come here for our medical facilities, our shopping and dining activities. Singapore is a safe city. Get well soon General Soe Win, and enjoy our hospitality Mr Mugabe. The holiday will do you good, surely. Singapore is a safe city. The powerful are protected, and the powerful go scot-free. These give them tranquil peace of mind, and all these are made known publicly. There is no lack at all of white-washed transparency.

***

Singapore is a safe city. There are no famines, tsunamis, or other unthinkable catastrophes. Our water is safe to drink, and our enemies are kept at bay. Singapore is a safe city. There are no wars here, as NS has long been made compulsory. We have a strong and mighty army, standing and waiting, ever on the ready. Singapore is a safe city. Except, maybe, when army boys die while on serious duty. Killed by a grenade or collided with a frigate, dunked by commandos or crushed by a Rover. But all these are rather secondary, really, because Singapore is a safe city, must be a safe city. That’s why NS is made compulsory – a dire necessity – even if our boys might die while on peace-time duty. It’s all for the sake of our beloved country, Singapore, this safe, safe, city.

***

Singapore is a safe city. The government plays it safe, and safety measures are taken seriously. Key institutions of the state, from the bureaucracy to the judiciary to the universities, are bosom buddies of our unique democracy. Our main press is headed by a former minister, and our newspaper editors are hired from the spy agencies. Singapore is a safe city, and safety measures are taken very seriously. Even when our first-rate bureaucracy has been a little bit tardy: ‘Lax in managing public funds and opt for convenience’, thunders the Auditor-General fiercely. While it may seem like a dereliction of duty, it is not the civil servants’ fault, surely. Because Singapore is a safe city, and our bookish bureaucracy is merely sitting there, comfortably, reproducing templates, going by the book, prudently, meekly, safely.

***

Singapore is a safe city. But “despite all our successes,” Singaporeans “should not be complacent”, says Kishore Mahbubani. Indeed, we must not. We must be on our toes and we must pull up our socks. But we must also toe the line, and we must not rock the boat too much. Otherwise, waves of clear and present danger will arise, and Singapore, the safe city, will perish just so easily. Singapore is a safe city. But O such fragility. Naturally, Singaporeans play it safely, and safety measures are taken just as seriously. We shift our glances as we whisper about the PAP. We clam up when we’re invited by the Opposition parties. We follow the rules and do as we’re told. We keep up with the Joneses, and we keep down our high jinks.

Our Father, thou art in Singapore. Give us this day our OB markers, and forgive us our careless trespasses, as we forgive those who threaten us with knuckle-dusters. Lead us not into Sedition, but deliver us away from Perdition.

This way, Singapore will be a safe city, is a safe city, and our people will be brought to salvation – by the PAP – eventually.

***

Singapore is a safe city. Say it often enough, loudly enough, hopefully and daily, and it will become, truly, a miracle of the Singapore Story.

But what do you say, Mr Kishore Mahbubani, if I don’t want to live in a safe city, where people’s voices have no say, T-shirts imprisoned, and human beings hanged. What do you say, Mr Kishore Mahbubani, if I don’t want to live in a safe city, that forces upon me the false dichotomy of liberty versus poverty, ruling party over democracy. What do you say, Mr Kishore Mahbubani, if I don’t want to live in a safe city, safe to the point of stifling sterility, safe in a pool of stagnant conformity, safe in a tomb of lifeless mediocrity. O Mr Kishore Mahbubani, hallowed be thy name, thy Singapore come, thy will be done. Lead me not into this safe, safe, city, but save me from this insane, insufferable, imperialism of safety.

Superfluous were the sun

When excellence is dead;

He were superfluous every day,

For every day is said

That syllable whose faith

Just saves it from despair,

And whose 'I'll meet you' hesitates

If love inquire, 'Where?'

Upon his dateless fame

Our periods may lie,

As stars that drop anonymous

From an abundant sky.

-- Emily Dickinson

The Emperor’s new clothes

2009-05-29T13:07:00.001+08:00

In a letter that appeared in the Straits Times forum online (“Whatever the issue, let’s learn to argue well”, 27 May 09), Ms Lisa Li, a GP teacher, made the case for arguing well. She says, “… given that Singapore will always have a diversity of views which cannot ever be fully censored, I suspect we will not stop arguing. Our best course of action is to learn to argue well.”

Her letter was a riposte to the individual(s) who had lodged a complaint with the MOE – her employer – about an earlier article she had written and posted on her Facebook page. In that article, she had refuted the notion that discussing homosexuality during GP lessons equated with promoting it. More importantly, she had also dispelled the fallacies surrounding notions of homosexuality, ‘social norms’, and ‘mainstream society’ – (fallacies that the ministry implicitly supported) – and made the plea for critical thought. Her argument later became relevant to those who chose to lodge a complaint instead of reasoning with her. She said, “To my knowledge, what I wrote was based on reason and anyone who disagreed with my logic, facts or opinions could easily have rebutted me openly.”

What is of note here is that because of a complaint to the ministry, she ‘had to’ remove that note. This is an act of censorship that is directly linked to the government’s gag on civil servants. Civil servants are legally-bound from publicly expressing their personal opinions on government policies. And Ms Li’s opinions had run counter to the government’s positions.

To be censored and then plead for free debate in a heavily censored newspaper is a comical case of cruel irony.

***

But yet, this is only one of many forms of censorship and control that can be found throughout the Singapore state: the array of legislation and licensing (be they procedural or arbitrary), the invisible and retroactive OB markers, the propagandized education system, and the strict and hierarchical society, just to name a few, that culminate, purposefully, in the docile (but productive) Singaporean and the all-powerful (and wealthy) government.

To put forth this question: Why this degree of control? And to this extent! Perhaps this would reveal the fact that for all the sugar-coated rhetoric about more openness, the ruling regime’s continued control takes precedence over the societal benefits that a freer-thinking and critical nation can bring about. (That might of course bring about the downfall of the exalted PAP.)

Ms Halimah Yacob, MP and deputy secretary-general of NTUC, was quoted a few days ago about how workers can cope in today’s volatile world: “We need to look hard at our education system and see how best to produce workers who don't just work hard but know how to think out of the box and ask questions.”

Our students leave school not knowing how to ask questions?

The inability to ask questions accompanies the failure to think critically. Though in Singapore, to ask questions and to think critically might be to risk teeing off reason from treason. Just ask the late JBJ, the exiled Francis Seow and Tang Liang Hong, the incarcerated Chia Thye Poh, even our beloved larrikin Chee Soon Juan. Is it any wonder then that we have adults telling each other to ‘shut up and sit down’, themselves behaving like infants, though quite resembling how the government treats its citizens?

Perhaps our education system has failed us, becoming also a front for indoctrination, serving more the government of the day than the betterment of society – and creating not a little dependence, condoning the assorted discrimination, and helping to perpetuate a sometimes injustice.

The MOE’s stance regarding the discussion of homosexuality during GP lessons is instructive in this respect. It states: “GP lessons are meant to promote critical thinking and discussion on contemporary issues. [However, they should also] adhere to social norms and values of our mainstream society.”

This is a glaringly incommensurable position to take. For the essence of critical thinking is to thoroughly evaluate, even denounce, what might happen to be majoritarian dogma. To be asked to be critical but yet having to toe the status quo is not only to navel-gaze, it is disabling intellectually and politically, and it makes a sham out of the purposes of education.

This instance of navel-gazing is best exemplified in the government’s decision to retain Section 377A of the penal code that criminalizes homosexual activities. Ostensibly, this law remains because of the rumblings of the ‘conservative majority’, who in turn makes up ‘our conservative society’. But the government seldom pays heed to this ‘conservative majority’, (if it even exists), and will not hesitate to resort to force if necessary, to get its way, to get things done. In any case, this ‘conservative majority’ is the segment of Singaporean population that is most amenable to political control and manipulation. After all, they are the perfect product of the Great Singapore System. The model most dependent on the government.

In reality, 377A demonstrates how the government exploits and perpetuates for its own purposes, social prejudices and bigotry. These are misconceptions that the government can effectively eradicate, and morally-speaking, it should.

But it does not, because 377A is a critical foundation for the ruling regime’s ideological control over the state, the various phallic paragons of masculinity: the ‘traditional patriarchal family’ as a microcosm of patriarchal Singaporean society made traditional. These become structures of control that feminize, and therefore deracinate, what is not a mirror-image of pater-PAP – that is male, Chinese, heterosexual, socio-economically and educationally privileged. It is through the false notion of the ‘traditional family’ that enables the State to home in to our own true families so that the Singaporean nation can be micro-managed and panoptically-controlled, in fact intimately so.

When it comes to tradition, rare in Singapore is what that can claim to be tradition-al. This is because ‘traditional’, or, ‘Confucian’/‘Asian’ if you prefer – all social inventions in themselves – is merely a euphemism for the efficacious modus operandi that ultimately enables the ruling regime to harvest the financial riches bequeathed through the neoliberal global economic system that is wholly controlled by the West. That is, the un-traditional, liberal, individualistic, ‘decadent’ West that our supposed Asian traditions and conservative families and ‘Confucian’ government are so disdainful of.

Abolishing 377A would unravel the entire fabric with which the ruling regime clothes itself – garbed for power and for wealth. Hence the fabrication of fallacies such as the ‘conservative majority’, ‘traditional values’, and ‘critical thought (but, please,) within the status quo’.

***

To return to Ms Li’s contention and to take it further, the crux of the issue is not about the importance of critical thinking, of learning to argue well. To do so, one must first be able to argue without recriminations and repercussions, especially from the State. To have a place to practice, to speak truth to power, so to speak.

For when critical thinking meets the climate of fear, it is unsurprising which one gains the upper hand. For those who argue for critical thinking and for arguing well, shall have to first argue against wanton censorship, unjust laws, and illiberal state power (and perhaps a 'shut up and sit down' education system too) – trappings that Ms Li’s admirable arguments have inevitably fallen victim to. In other words, they shall have to argue against an empire of control that consolidate the power of the PAP.

The crux of the issue, then, is a singular argument for fulfilling the ideals of democracy. Distilled to its essence, it is really about the human spirit free. Real democracy, that is, missing in this current country. Not the farcical model dressed in the pretty but superficial label of ‘Liberalization’, soon to be brocaded with more NCMPs, permanent NMPs, and fewer and smaller GRCs. These are merely the predictable alterations made possible by a Parliament that can tailor the Constitution according to its desired fashions, and a Party that retains domination and tyranny as its inner linings, all so as to better fit its finery of power, its permanence of kings.

Why is the measure of love loss?

2009-05-01T20:50:00.033+08:00

Beyond the ridiculous phrases being bandied around by Thio Su Mien and her followers, like “promoting a homosexual lifestyle”, as if sexual orientation is a choice, or worse, as if it’s a credit card to be promoted with freebies and loyalty points to be redeemed: portion of your Kingdom, scare tactics of Hell. Beyond the bigotry and homophobia and blatant lies being promoted, what the Aware saga demonstrates is that "Singapore" and "Citizenship" are defined not by those who practice them in everyday life, but by those who are in positions to manipulate social and sexual identities for personal and political gain.

The ruling classes invoke the legendary Heartland against an emerging liberal middle class. And see how this Heartland comes alive!

And Aware's former leaders, in their reluctance to take an unequivocal stand – i.e. of course, lesbian outreach should be a part of any woman's support/outreach/activist organization – have allowed Thio and gang to dictate the terms of the debate: “Do we want to talk about/provide support to lesbians?” ("Yes! Go on! I dare you!")

And to regain power and authority, the former leaders seem willing to play into Thio’s hands. And with that, Thio could effectively manoeuvre Old Aware into at best an "inclusiveness" agenda, and at worst, a "hetero-sexist" one. And into a particular defeat.

See how this heartland comes alive.

This is why, even if Thio and gang were displaced (they should be, and good riddance), the moral panic button so piously pushed by Thio will have prevented lesbian outreach for years to come. From now on, Aware’s education outreach programmes for schools will be even more closely monitored, despite this issue.

But more importantly, this moral panic (together with all of us who have unwittingly participated in it) has created a demon – homosexuality – out of homosexuality, that can be, and will be, used to justify social control and the cavalier hardening of social mores.

This is why, even if Thio and gang were displaced, they would have had achieved their goal. The Thios are good for this: dog whistle politics. They say/do all this stuff as NMPs, professors, lawyers, "human rights activists". Then the government steps in to calm and reassure. Key segments of the electorate are assuaged and satisfied that "Singapore is still conservative". Because this salves everyone's fraught, bigoted souls. And lesbians will continue to exist, to contribute to the country’s economic progress, to partake of Singapore’s culture of contentment. But are reminded to be invisible. Ditto the gays.

To those of you who say you cannot 'accept' gays and lesbians: Why? They're just like you - they live, they breathe, they fall in love. They wish for the little mercies that you receive daily. Love is love wherever you find it, in whomever you find. As long as it is true. Why should love be predicated on hate?

And with this, completes an unfortunate chapter, if not a wholly disheartening tragi-comedy: the classic Eve Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet. A never-ending closing of the circle.

The biggest losers in this saga are not Aware, New or Old. Not the Thios. Not the gays and the lesbians. The biggest losers are the Thio-supporters, lay and religious alike: the so-called Anti-gays, the nicknamed “Heartlanders”.

They who swiftly and dutifully respond when called. See how this heartland comes alive.

Because, guess, who’s the biggest winner of this all.

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.

-- Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

Why is the measure of love loss?

-- Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Silenced, defenceless

2009-04-22T09:51:00.005+08:00

I found an island in your arms,
a country in your eyes,
arms that chain, eyes that lie.
Break on through to the other side.

- Jim Morrison

The Public Order Act is not just about maintaining our racial and religious ‘harmony’. Harmony can be maintained, if it must, with the existing laws, as they always have been maintained, with a grip so ironical that one wonders if our vaunted ‘harmony’ even exists.

The POA is also not just about the impending APEC meetings or Youth Olympics and the protesters that accompany these events, for the POA is here to stay.

The POA is about preserving the dominance of the PAP. For this reason, the POA is about us, the citizens.

With the Internet, citizens have managed to reclaim some of their voices, and they are starting to speak and be heard. Nary a week now goes by without the government’s mis-steps being exposed and scrutinized by netizens, and the mainstream media’s chicanery continually unmasked. Now, the PAP’s pedigree no longer appears so distinguished and its record no longer that sterling, and the mainstream media little more than a lackey of the government. That is, a government whose largely fabricated aura, abetted by the media propagandists’ daily worship, has been diminished exponentially.

And right that it has. Our government is just like any good government there is elsewhere – filled with fallible men, prone to err. And like any government there is elsewhere, its natural impulses are to power and tyranny.

This is why democracy, and the structures that uphold it must be built, must prevail. Democracy is vital, it is neither a distant promise nor a compromise. It starts with having free and fair elections, that will give rise to a strong Opposition, and it ends with a freer people. Currently, all three elude us.

With the Internet, awakened and enlightened citizens who can now see the government for what it really is, might be galvanized to action, and threaten the PAP’s hold on power. This is why the POA is enacted, to contain dissent, to suppress action, to shackle the citizen.

But this absolute ease of tyranny – see how the POA was like an edict read out in parliament to overwhelming ‘ayes’, rather than being the contentious piece of legislation that must be deliberated and debated over – did not emerge overnight. The government’s successive legislations and insidious tweakings over the last four decades – on public order, on defamation rulings, on the GRCs, the plethora of licensing and restrictive laws governing the broadcast and print media, ‘public entertainment’ and civil society, not to mention the enormous discretionary powers the government has behind those laws – have gradually but surely strengthened the PAP’s grip on the country, entrenched its power in- and outside parliament, weakened the key institutions of the state, and silenced the citizen. In that sense, we have already been muzzled long ago. Taken together, they create for better and worse, the Singapore that we live in today.

It is this absolute ease of tyranny that manifests itself in the stark but facile choice (or is it a playful taunt?) posed to us by the law minister: “Well, ask yourself two questions: in our region, which country would you rather be in? And among the countries in the world which became independent in the 1950s and 1960s, which country would you rather be in?”

You would rather live in Singapore, wouldn’t you? Anyway, where else can you go?

There are those who simply cannot leave, there are those who truly want to remain. But to remain is to perpetually duel, conscience with cowardice, conscience with contentment. To be made to sing its cadaveric songs of nationalism. To remain is to live in oppression. This is sad, and this is wrong.

From the law minister once more, as reported by TODAY: it boils down to how much Singaporeans trust the Government – bearing in mind the limitations and geo-political challenge that a small country faces.

This is not pleading trust. This is delivering a thin-veiled threat, once more playing the vulnerability game, and inciting the siege mentality created by them – trust us, or else.

For you would rather live in Singapore, wouldn’t you? Anyway, where else can you go?

Trust them, or live in oppression. What a generous choice. What a mockery of trust it makes. And what does it make of us?

Rather, it is the government itself who does not trust its people. From our NRICs to our health records on public computers, from racial profiling to academic streaming, from NS disciplining to scholarship bondage, from HDB flat allocation and CPF lock-ups, to the neighbours’ constant gaze through grilled-windows from the opposite block, to how to love our lovers so as to propagate the state’s ideal family structure, to 24/7 surveillance online and offline, all with the threat of the ISA and the knocking in the night a recurring spectre in our minds. All culminating in this country’s pervasive, undignified, climate of fear, every step a landmine of a legislation, every step the high wall of state condescension, every step once more into the inescapable arms of the government.

This is not about trust. It is about the regime’s ability to exert and collect power. Power undergirded by a politics of deep mistrust, subjecting citizens to living in a prosperous state of constant intimidation and surveil. While they pry into all our personal affairs and indiscretions that everyone has, threatening to expose them, incarcerating you for them. Everyone a potential hostage, while their own infractions are placed above their panoptical power, beyond scrutiny. While they gently cajole: Trust us, or else.

Or else, the government can trust us for once, no? The docile, disciplined, depoliticized Singaporean, produced, processed, labeled and sorted, all for the benefit of Singapore Inc. And to whom does Singapore Inc. benefit?

If we bemoan our current state, it is also because we have ourselves to blame.

Honour freedom. The POA and those who support it, dishonour it.

Freedom is not, unless you have bought into the government’s rhetoric, a lofty word – it is a basic need, without which citizens are bereft of dignity. The so-called politics of bread and butter is at one with the right to liberty: together, they constitute a proper, fuller life. One less, and it’s half a life. Why would dignity discriminate?

Albert Camus once observed: there are no two politics, there is only one, and it is the one that makes a commitment – the politics of honour. And indeed there can be no freedom without honour. Honour in words, honour in deed, honour in our hearts.

No heart, no honour. Not unlike those moneyed men in white.

Honour freedom. Today the government goes for them whom you think isn’t about you. (Where were we when the Opposition members were intimidated and bankrupted?) As if it’s none of your business, as if oppression is just fine. Tomorrow they’ll come for you, and you alone. They will, simply because they can, and they will, because you had let them.

Remember the saying: a nation of sheep begets a government of wolves? See how quickly the laws are amended and passed. This is our parliament of men in white, representing not the people but themselves. See how swiftly your basic rights have disappeared.

And why? Because we blind ourselves to the fact that the numerous laws passed ostensibly to maintain peace and prosperity, also invariably constrain the Opposition, crush dissent, and ensure the continued dominance of the PAP. Because you have been trained to disdain freedom, and because you have been encouraged to love your own servitude and bondage. This is the most powerful form of control, indoctrination at its best.

If we bemoan our current state, it is also because we have ourselves to blame.

The Opposition is weak because we kept silent, and so we kept them weak. Taunting them, we bluffed ourselves, feeling secure in our hypocrisy and timidity. Serves them right, we chide. In the end, this has not served us well. And now when we speak, if at all, we speak the language of disappointment, of anger, of disillusionment, of despair.

Each law that is passed is a gag and a tightening of the noose around your necks. The POA is only one of many examples, and no doubt many more will come, cumulatively, oppressively.

Forty years of independence, and we’re as dependent as ever if not more. Our nation-building efforts built a tyrannical regime instead. This is what happens when you remain silent. You will be silenced, and you will be defenceless.

The Opposition has spoken out against the POA – they always have. Go with the Opposition, that’s a start. Honour those who honour freedom, their strength lies in your hands.

Honour your own freedom too, for much is at stake. To be able to walk free and be heard, with fervour without fear.

Because freedom is not a lofty word.

Shame Sham Shanmugam

2009-04-14T19:52:00.014+08:00

"At the heart of the Public Order Act is one key philosophy.

Second Minister for Home Affairs, Mr K Shanmugam, said: "The approach is to seek the optimal balance between the freedom to exercise political rights while not affecting public safety security and not affecting stability.

"Have we gotten that balance right? Well, ask yourselves two questions. In our region, which country would you rather be in? And amongst the countries in the world which became independent in the 1950s and 60s, which country would you rather be in?"

-- CNA, "Parliament passes new Bill to manage law and order", 14 Apr 09

___

To read Shanmugam's speech in full is to be thoroughly amazed by a speech that is replete with elementary false-dilemmas and double-speak. Predictably, the nation-building propagandists are all out spinning happy stories about what seem to me more like a dictatorship passing, through its sham 'parliament', an edict that further tightens the noose around the citizens' necks.

And of course, as with many other laws in Singapore passed ostensibly to maintain peace, stability, and prosperity, these laws also invariably constrain the Opposition, crush dissent, and ensure the continued dominance of the ruling regime.

While we perch comfortably on the fences: "we really want to support the Opposition, but Tsk Tsk, they are so weak, and such a bunch of losers. "

Without really asking why. Without realising who the real losers are. Tsk Tsk.

But above all, what is most fascinating is how Singaporeans themselves - docile, disciplined, depoliticised - allow these despisable things to be done to them, so unabashedly, so easily, and they carry on with their daily lives as if nothing is happening. As if it's none of their concern. As if oppression is just fine.

Grovel

2009-04-01T22:34:00.004+08:00

From the Straits Times Editorial, 1 April 2009 (is this an April Fool's joke?) --

The promotion that Singaporeans would be most delighted with is that of Mr Teo Chee Hean, now a Deputy Prime Minister in place of Professor S. Jayakumar, whom the PM has retained for his overview counsel in public law and security issues. Mr Teo's handling of the demanding education and defence portfolios is ability quantified. His military background comes in handy when state security looms large everywhere. But it is his quality of exuding confidence and making people feel reassured, the grace under pressure and his strength of character that mark him as an outstanding leader. Of the tasks he has said he will help the PM with, that of keeping the Government and the people in tune with each other in unsettling times is a job he is trained for. If there is an abrupt change in domestic circumstances, he could step up to the top job without causing undue governing stresses. All told, his move up to DPM is calculated to reassure Singaporeans that government is seamless, for want of a less hoary word.

With such fawning hagiography, it's no wonder mere mortals can become hoary gods.

Disadvantageous Mandarin

2009-03-20T19:16:00.002+08:00

A response to MM Lee

There is a lot to be said for Singaporean-Chinese, myself included, to be ascribed a ‘mother tongue’ that is not really our mothers' (or for that matter, our fathers'), one that we have to learn from scratch, in effect as a second-language, and one with which we have little affinity.

What is more lamentable is the fact that these decisions are borne out of unquestioned, state-mandated economic necessity, and subsequently implemented with such swift ruthlessness. Cold, hard-headed decisions that, without our realizing, put a stopper to our personal relations and halt our life stories. How many times have I found great difficulty in conversing with my grandparents, who were by then too old to abandon their original tongues and acquire new ones, while I on the other hand had been discouraged from speaking in their native ones (i.e. my real mother tongue[s]), and force-fed a foreign language called Mandarin.

Singapore prides itself on arriving from ‘Third World to First’ in one generation – (have we really?) – this is the same reason for our extraordinary ability to extinguish our rich southern Chinese heritage, one that is as old as centuries if not the millennia, in a single generation.

Is this something that we, that is to say, Singaporean-Chinese, in the name of economic achievement should be proud of?

I doubt that our ability to speak Mandarin has been, as MM Lee would have us believe, a ‘key advantage’. As academic Linda Lim remarked in an interview with the Straits Times last week, our self-appointed role as conduits to China and India is counter-productive, if not redundant. And after expending so much energies and resources into its teaching and learning, how many of us are truly proficient in Mandarin, beyond the rudimentary phrases needed to get one past the wet market?

Having to master both English and Mandarin without a ‘natural’ cultural-linguistic environment that is necessary for one to be proficient in either language has resulted in us floundering in both. Drowned in this process is our chance and ability to master our true ‘mother-tongues’. It is well-known that the Mainlander Chinese and the Westerners constantly mock our lightweight grasp of Mandarin and English, and, for those doing business in China, they are taking Mandarin lessons to make up for their linguistic lack. Beneath these foreign mockery is the sneering at our cultural ignorance, superficiality, and philistinism. Further, if the ability to speak Mandarin is such an economic asset, why do our education policies prevent our non-Chinese compatriots from learning it? And should Singaporeans be learning Mandarin just so we can ‘bring value-add to China’?

Such vulgar economic justifications for ‘national survival’, for learning languages, for effacing cultures.

Whatever the material benefits I might reap by way of Singapore’s ‘economic usefulness’ to the rest of the world, I derive no dignity in being treated as a cog in a machine, as a means to an end. I would gladly trade, pardon the pun, GDP growth with the ability to speak my native language (it is neither English nor Mandarin) even if it is the most economically unviable language in the world. For that matter, I would be proud to be a Singaporean even if it is the poorest country there is around. What consolation does it bring, to be able to speak to 1.3 billion Chinese all over China if I cannot even engage in a proper conversation with my own family?

That is not to say we should not have encouraged the learning of Mandarin. But it certainly could have been implemented in a less mechanistic manner, and for less utilitarian reasons. It is for these very reasons that we do not want to, or we are unable to, appreciate the value of a language and the beauty inherent in all languages, that exist beyond the jargon and jarring phrases of multinational companies and Internet data banks and global financial-speak.

The choice of languages learnt need neither be government-sanctioned nor mutually-exclusive. Contrary to what the government and the media would like us to think, we are not the only country that adopts a bilingual policy. But compared to other such countries, we are far from being as successful. Learning from them, we might realize that mastering Mandarin need not have come at the expense of our ancestral tongues. Our lack of fluency in multiple languages is not just due to biological limitations (which is far from being a fact). Ill-conceived, flip-flopping government policies and crass economic rationale for learning (or un-learning) languages have contributed to this predicament too.

In two generations Mandarin would be our mother tongue, proclaims MM Lee proudly. But with our appalling level of proficiency in Mandarin, it is not hard to foresee how much and what kind of a ‘mother tongue’ it is going to be. It will probably not be much.

Is the sole value of a language its ‘usefulness’? I don’t think so. On the one hand, use-value is subjective, personal, and should not be decided for me by, of all things, the state. On the parallel, the value of language is in language itself. Languages do not appear out of thin air – we human beings create them, keep them alive, and they live for a simple reason – above being basic tools of communication, they are expressions of our emotions, our humanness. Expressions that, like culture and the arts, live outside the world of money.

We would have been better-off leaving our language habits alone, and letting our ‘adulterated Hokkien-Teochew’ languages evolve on their own. And why not? Languages, like cultures, are living things and they evolve all the time. And over time, our aesthetic sensibilities are honed along with our constant polishing of our tongues, and from where the beauty and poetry in the language emerge. This is true for all languages, from the first grunt in the dark cave eons ago, to the final stanza in the gilded library just now. And why, our Singlish vernacular might one day become high language too, with its inimitable trove of stories and sonnets. If only we would let it, and let our local poets light the way.

But of course, such frivolous pursuits have no place in a country where economic necessity and cultural cringe must prevail. While the sun of the British empire might have set, and the Middle Kingdom's might yet arise, it seems as long as the ruling regime's socio-economic ideologies persist blindingly, Singaporeans will always remain colonial subjects, servants to capital.

The way we have gone about picking 'winning' languages and experimenting with them as one would in a laboratory, it is what kills language. But not only that – as fellow TOC contributor Deng Chao noted recently, what is wiped out is more than our Teochew, Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hainanese languages. Gone with them would be the irreplaceable and age-old cultural treasures of folklore, poetry, aphorisms and histories, riches that are later infused with the tropical air of the Straits Settlement – a natural confluence of cultures. What is wiped out will be life itself, supplanted by the mediocre, the vulgar and the kitsch.

One day I might become a grandparent too, but what would the world be like then? I do not want to punt on the vagaries of the market or the flow of global finance. I certainly do not want to be enslaved by them. Small as Singapore is, there nonetheless are things that do not and cannot have a price tag. The ability and the freedom to speak, for instance. Invaluable things.

Am I romanticizing the village?

But how did the village come to be something pejorative in the Singaporean imagination?

What kind of a city are we still building anyway?

Looking at my grandparents, I do wonder what their Singaporean world has been like, for them to one morning find themselves strangers in their own land, unable to be understood and unable to understand, the foreign chatter on the streets, and recounting life stories in a voice whose sweetness their loved ones would never know.

And how much are Singaporeans and our nation, for all our economic growth and material riches the poorer for it, living on benighted money, leaving our history behind.

Govt is God

2009-02-26T20:56:00.005+08:00

Just get on with it

Perhaps I slept too long or Australia has morphed into Alice's Wonderland, but please tell me why schools should erect plaques or roadside signs or arrange ceremonies to thank the Education Minister for rebuilding their schools.

Silly me, I thought that was what government was for, to use our taxes to provide services that we are all entitled to. Does this mean that if the Government bails out banks and other financial institutions and I use them, I need to donate a plaque of thanks?

What is happening to this country? It's our money. The Government is employed by us to spend money on programs that meet our needs. Why do we need to erect monuments to thank them?

Marion Harper, Reservoir
The Age, 26 Feb 09

I like to think that Ms Harper was thinking of Singapore too when she wrote her letter, and that the ST would publish it in the name of nation-building.

Snow

2009-02-21T06:13:00.005+08:00

Cavalierio: Hey Molly, come and see the snow.

Molly: Snow? What snow?

Cavalierio: You've to come out to see it. Hurry. February's coming to an end.

Molly: I see no snow. The sun is shining. Shining oppressively, probably in cahoots with the government.

Cavalierio: Is the sunlight hiding the snow? You can see the flakes falling out from nowhere just above. Look closely, past the timezone, where the red roof juts into the sky.

Molly: Ah, yes, these light falling things. Where do they come from?

Cavalierio: She once said that every snowflake is different.

Molly: Who?

Cavalierio: She said, If that were true, how could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

Molly: By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember.

Cavalierio: You remember what she said after all.

Molly: Look at how they fall onto the ground, so gently, like a whisper.

Cavalierio: Then they disappear.

Molly: They do, into the past, where there're only abandoned secrets, stubborn nostalgia, and everything to forget.

Total Defence | Total Control

2009-02-14T17:59:00.007+08:00

"Each Monday, about 1,500 students at Pei Hwa Secondary School - levels 1 to 5 - sit in the parade square to read The Straits Times. Teachers then follow up with discussions about the news during English lessons, spending at least an hour each week on current events.There is also an increased focus on national education. Singapore's historical sites and people who have made an impact are featured weekly in Big Changes and Big Heroes."

-- 'ST's school magazines talk about issues close to students' hearts', Straits Times, 23 Jan 09

Morning assembly. You find yourself back in Primary school, sitting in the large quadrangle. All two thousand of you, from Primary One through Six, silently reading the Little Red Dot magazine. The magazine introduces you to the breezy Dot Values family members, who tell you stories, and make you laugh. And you learn about your country Singapore, about the world, and about Singapore’s place on this planet called Big Big World. You learn that Singapore is small – a little red dot.

Afterwards, in Social Studies class, you learn about Total Defence. You don’t really understand what it means, but it feels like something important. You remember that the Dot Values family had mentioned it. And you like the thought of Singapore already, because you are just like Singapore: small. A pristine little dot in this Big Big World.

Later, when you go on to Secondary school, the Little Red Dot is replaced by the IN magazine. From IN, you continue learning about Singapore. You have grown much bigger. But somehow, Singapore still seems so small. And so vulnerable. A new word. You are reminded about Total Defence. You talk about it in History class, in Social Studies, in Civics and Moral Education class. You read about it in your English Language and Mother Tongue comprehension passages.

When you outgrow the IN magazine and start reading the newspapers, you continue to encounter these words: Singapore was vulnerable then; it is still vulnerable now; and it will always be vulnerable. And as time passes, they become part of your daily vocabulary.

You learn to repeat these maxims without giving them another thought, without missing another beat: Vulnerable Singapore, always a Little Red Dot. Always vulnerable, always Little and Red.

*

"The new features are designed to be a must-have in the classroom and have been developed with input from teachers."

-- 'Little Red Dot packs a punch', Straits Times, 5 Jan 09

*

"Other programmes include teaching students how to be 'eyes and ears' on the ground in the fight against terror and how different Government agencies respond to a crisis. ...

Explaining the move, Brig-Gen (NS) Chua said that such education should start with school-aged children."

-- 'Children taught 'resilience', Straits Times, 2 Feb 09

This narrative of vulnerability justifies many things, amongst which are authoritarian government and Total Defence. One reinforces the other, and this suits the ruling regime just fine. This narrative consequently renders the doctrine of Total Defence compelling, logical, and systematic.

And circular too: Singapore is vulnerable; hence a strong military force must be built. But in order to build it, a strong economy must sustained. And in turn, a strong economy requires protection from a strong military. However, as Singapore is ‘small’ and ‘vulnerable’, Total Defence is necessary to build up that strong military – and that economy – and that neverending vulnerability – and Total Defence – Etc. – Repeat – and etc. - Repeat.

These words link together, forming a chain and a logical fallacy – no matter what Singapore does, it is always ‘vulnerable’, always ‘fragile’, always needing protection.

But is it simply because Singapore is ‘small’? Or it is because when it suits us, we think ourselves small; and when it doesn’t, we think not?

Size can be a matter of perspective. Can it also be an excuse too?

This is not a call to cancel National Service, military build-up, and Total Defence. They are necessary, perhaps. But it is important that we unpack the terms and assumptions coded within these narratives – codes that we have come to internalize. This is because the discourse of ‘vulnerability’ can perpetuate a fiction of it. And as this fiction encircles Singapore, it can potentially become an enclosure for Singaporeans.

Singapore may indeed be vulnerable – as is every other sovereign state, strong and weak, big and small. But perhaps consider a few parallel possibilities and realities: Consider the possibility that our sense of vulnerability is an overestimation that eventuates the self-fulfilling prophecies of realpolitik and belligerent diplomacy – and that our security dilemmas have become intractable insecurity dilemmas fanning regional arms races.

Consider also the possibility that in addition to its objective of ‘defending’ Singapore, MINDEF might have become a vast military-industrial complex facilitating vested interests in arms manufacturing and defence science research (some of which might not be adhering to international conventions), fueling the economy and feeding on itself – and that there are other ways of instituting NS and organizing the country’s defence capabilities.

Most importantly, consider the possibility that the argument for a strong military based on the tenuous description of vulnerability has abetted the ruling regime’s authoritarian impulse for total control – and that Total Defence is the fulcrum for this function.

* * *

On one level, Total Defence is deployed as a comprehensive framework for national defence. On another level, the inscription of Total Defence is both a representation, and a production of it, including a production of a knowledge about it. At the same time, Total Defence operates as an empty signifier – part ambiguous and part invisible. We know what Total Defence refers to, but we do not know what it means. Thus anything can be used to invoke Total Defence – from vulnerability to sedition to terrorism to nationalism. It is kept inchoate so that this hallowed space – the script of Total Defence – can be scripted according to the desires of Power, emanating from the State.

Thus, given the nature of Total Defence (‘Total’), and its proclaimed objective (‘Defence’), whoever inscribes Total Defence holds the power to conscript its subject – the nation – totally.

This inscription of ‘Total Defence’ is essentially a totalitarian one. It is conferred by decree in the name of national defence and elaborated across the spectrum of Singaporean society. As a result, it brooks no objection, it obliterates defiance, and it commands complete obedience. Interestingly, Total Defence achieves its supreme function of control during peacetime.

Consequently, quite apart from enhancing military capability, Total Defence also ensures that propaganda is seamlessly and synergistically spread through the apparently neutral channels of society.

For example, through Total Defence, the Shared Values ideology is propagated, National Education and curricula are crafted, joining uniformed groups in schools are encouraged, mass media programmes are scripted, the National Day Parades are staged. Invariably, these culminate in the programming of our minds with the permanent avatar of the PAP.

Through Total Defence, the rhetoric of racial and religious ‘harmony’ is perpetuated, and through which social control is exerted. Consider how our curious phenomena of racial and religious ‘harmony’ are little more than hollow performances, and genuine attempts foster ‘harmony’ are countenanced by the State’s apparatus of control. Are we necessarily harmonious simply because we do not (because we’re not allowed to) talk about it?

Through Total Defence, a reliant, compliant, and disciplined population is continually moulded under the dominance, and for the dominance, of the State. Simultaneously, the fate of the Party becomes entwined with that of the nation, such that we equate the elimination of the Party with the death of the nation. Such it might live on, shaping lives and controlling minds.

The siege mentality that Total Defence conditions in Singaporeans, predisposes them – from soldier, to Leader – towards an increased readiness to enter a war. That is, a war that can potentially be avoided. This conditioning militarizes the nation by glorifying, and then naturalizing, the particular language and semiotics of war into civic life, making palatable, even desirable, Singapore’s brutalist form of compulsory conscription that stretches beyond the two years and into a lifetime.

Accordingly, full-time NS has been consecrated as a ‘ritual’, and romanticized as a ‘rite of passage’, and where boys shall be transformed, not into ordinary men, but valorized guardians of the land.

But if Singapore must be defended and loved, then it must be defended and loved critically and self-consciously, not blindly and automatically. Not least when it is under a dominant one-party state and adopting the disturbing strategy of pre-emptive first strike. This strategy is underpinned by offensive operations and weaponry, along with a doctrine of pre-emption that, when put into effect, they contravene international law. This strategy is also in itself an admission that Singapore is ultimately indefensible.

Nation before community and Society above self? Perhaps this is so that the ‘self’ can be mechanized – the men bear arms, the women bear children, and for the sake of survival, we all bear with it.

Comprehensive conscription of the nation, under the fluttering flag of Total Defence, in the service of the State.

* * *

‘What will you defend?’ is this year’s slogan for Total Defence. There is a semantic slippage and sleight-of-word here, and perhaps they will go unnoticed. First, the question naturalizes Total Defence, and assumes the omnipresence of conflict. It demands your uncontested loyalty. It precludes the possibility of refusal, of resistance.

Isn’t the question “~~What~~ Will you defend?” a legitimate one too?

Can one say “No”?

Second, if you must go to war, you defend your loved ones. You defend people. You defend yourself. You defend the ‘who’. ‘What’ is a pronoun that intuitively leads one to articulate an inanimate object. A ‘thing’.

When you are asked, ‘What will you defend?’, the desired answer might be, I (the ‘who’) will defend (my ‘home’) Singapore (the ‘what’).

Even if ‘Singapore’ is not articulated, this unnoticeable linguistic dissonance ensures that ‘Singapore’ looms at the back of the respondent’s subconscious. This is a psychological subterfuge that one needs to interrogate, because this is a question that privileges objects and mechanizes people.

Singapore is a construct, a concept, an abstract. And if you must defend as abstract a concept as a constructed country, then it seems moral to defend a democratic one – one where you have a stake, rather than one whose stake has been thrust upon you – an inanimate and powerless ‘you’.

In Singapore, where Party – Government – State – Nation have been conflated into one entity – PAP – is this unity? Or is this totalitarianism?

Are you defending the nation, or are you being used by the nation to defend it?

To answer this question, that is also to reflect upon what it means to be a citizen, the architecture of Total Defence has to be deconstructed. Total Defence weaves, through an order of things and archaeology of knowledge, a particular (His)tory of Singapore. This artifice in turn embeds in the nation, comprehensive structures that shape, discipline, and punish. It enhances and is enhanced by the State. It then evacuates the altruistic substance of ‘Total Defence’, and replaces it with its own ideological agendas of de-politicization and de-humanization, further consolidating and entrenching total control.

In Singapore, when you think a thought and express an opinion, how free is it from year after year of overt and subliminal State conditioning?

This process of conditioning stretches back decades. Back to when you were a child sitting in the school quadrangle reading a colourful little magazine, unaware of the surreptitious maneuvres that were leading you to One prayer of Progress.

Unaware that your life was being slowly but surely shaped in One vision of Modernity.

And unaware that the allure of Total Defence is also, through the rouged lips of One Nation, a captivating camouflage for Total Indoctrination.

The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.

-- Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag

Just ask (from See Nao)

2009-02-03T11:10:00.010+08:00

Dear Cavalierio,

I am writing to you in one of my many last moments of desperation. As you would know, I usually write to Molly. But of late it seems that this wondrous phenomenon that is Singapore is taking away her ability, time and inspiration to correspond with me. I am not necessarily saying that you are more able and have more time and inspiration than Ms Molly, but as I’ve said, I am in my many last moments of desperation. So I hope you would be as obliging as Molly.

You see, ever since I lost all my savings in those High Notes investment schemes, I have been living from hand to mouth. Furthermore, it doesn’t help that the majority of the Straits Times news these days are about the depressing economy. I wonder what their agenda is. So anyway, imagine my delight when I read that PM Lee vows to help the needy: he will make sure that everyone who needs help, will get help. I do admire the ability of the ST to take our leaders’ rhetoric to ever-greater heights. To say they’re the government’s mouthpiece seems like a misnomer when they sometimes sound more like a Politburo choral group with loudhailers. The only other singer I know who uses a loudhailer to sing is Faye Wong. But I’m not sure if Faye belongs to the CCP Politburo. I’m also not sure if ST propagandists can sing like comrade Faye Wong, loudhailers or nohailers.

Sorry to digress. I read and re-read the article, and could not find any details about how to get help. In short, the article seems to be short of details. But the PM did say something about resisting the urge to have a crutch mentality. Yet at the same time, the ST lays the blame on us: “many Singaporeans in need of government aid are either unaware that they can get help, or do not know where to turn.” O Cavalierio, I’m confused. If Singaporeans aren’t aware of the availability and the avenues for help, how can Singaporeans ever develop a crutch mentality? Given your undesirable obsessions with metaphors and the mental, can you kindly provide some advice?

Yours perfidiously,

Lee See Nao (Mr.)

----------------------------------

Dearest See Nao,

Cavalierio advises you to stay calm. Molly can’t be attending to your whiny-Wee-whims all the time, especially in these dire times of ungolden lunacy. Blogging for a nation of hum sup admirers can take its toll, and you might rather write Molly some romantic sonnets to salve her bereft, yearning soul.

As for your investment losses, all I can say is: what to do, serves you right. But now, we’re in a speedboat in hostile sea, and protecting our billions of reserves is more important than the million that you lost. As you would have no doubt read what PM Lee said: “When the sun comes out again, we will emerge stronger, readier, more competitive and able to do better for our children and for our future.” So close your eyes and sit tight, have faith as always, and if you do make it out alive, forget about what had happened, and move on. If you perish, then I reckon your problem is resolved.

I have to disagree with your biased opinions about the ST. It is a responsible, nation-building press of utmost honour and integrity. For one, it never plagiarizes. Second, its main agenda is to constantly provide readers with good news and updates about how wonderful our leaders are, so that we’ll have little to worry, and happily live our happy lives on our happy sunny island where happiness abounds happily. This is not an agenda as much as a unique virtue. As the ST has already informed you, when PM Lee says he ‘will’ do something, he is actually making a ‘vow’. So, See Nao, if you say you ‘will’ seek their assistance, it’s as good having vowed to do so.

If the ST’s headlines are as avowedly reliable as the previous one (and all other previous ones), then it seems that if you need help, all you need to do is just ask, and it shall be given. It's that easy, really. I wonder where you got the notion from, that you cannot ask for help when you need it. Should they enquire about the amount that you need, and whether you plan to eat your meals at the hawker centre, the foodcourt, or the restaurant, do inform them that you will either eat at the hawker centre, the foodcourt, or the restaurant , as long as there’re enough left for a decent haircut. (I trust that you have mastered the Wong Kan Seng Method of answering MCQs, and the Lim Hng Kiang Dialectics de Hirsute). After all, you need to look presentable when you go for job interviews at the foodcourt. Do not learn from that poor guy who simply threw himself in front of the MRT train. You see, it’s his fault that he stopped asking for help when help is actually so easily available. All you need to do, remember, is just ask. If you don't, then it's your fault. If you do, but are rejected, it's also your fault for failing to qualify, regardless of the excuses that you may have.

As for the crutch mentality, See Nao, you need to have a mentality to begin with before you can acquire a crutch.

Yours superfluously,

Cavalierio de la Satirique Innocenté

Orison of odium

2009-01-25T10:32:00.024+08:00

In the midst of our CNY celebrations of luck, prosperity, and family reunion, or for our non-Chinese friends, a few days’ respite from another work-a-day, let us not forget that death is here and always.

And that in Singapore, Disneyland with the death penalty, Death is a known Hour to some.

And to some others, Death can be a wished-for spectacle. Death as Edifying Entertainment:

Kudos to death row coverage

I refer to the report, 'One-Eyed Dragon wanted to help others' (Jan 11), and commend the excellent coverage of the hanging of triad leader Tan Chor Jin.

Going behind the walls of Changi Prison and reporting the news was a good move. The report was a good attempt at highlighting what goes on in death row. Many people do not know what transpires behind the walls. Hopefully, in future, there can be more coverage highlighting the last moments of the man to be hanged, as well as the reaction of public officials.

I hope the Ministry of Health, prison officials and representatives of the various religious organisations can work out something that is acceptable to all parties concerned to encourage death row prisoners to donate their organs after death. But in the final analysis, the man to be hanged, and his close family members, should make the final decision.

-- Jasbir Singh, ST 25 Jan 09

In the past, public executions were possible because the rulers had absolute power. The spectacle of those executions served as a deterrent and a warning to all. It also instilled into the commoners the fear of the absolute ruler, thus further reinforcing the ruler’s power. As totalitarian rule gradually diminished in the last century, capital punishment, where carried out, had to become more opaque affairs. Graphic (re)presentations of death-row criminals had the unwelcome effect of undermining state power. The power of the State to exact revenge. The power of the State to kill. Thus newspaper reports of capital punishment usually revealed only the barebones of the said cases, functioning as a panoptical reminder of the State's power to unleash violence upon its own people, without necessarily risking the liberal public’s backlash.

Should I agree with the above writer - in supporting the death penalty, and in his suggestion of voyeurism - then pardon me for being a citizen of a state that kills efficiently and with impunity. Pardon me for being a citizen of a state that has no room for magnanimity, and with a people possessing no ability to forgive. Pardon me for bearing witness to my country’s crime.

Should I agree with the above writer, then, should the day comes that he might kill another man in a fit of inexplicable, irrational, incendiary fury, and is unmitigatedly sentenced to death, and is compelled to sign away his body parts in powerless, walled-off circumstances away from daylight, should the day comes, that he latches unto penitence and feels remorse, but yet shall never find pardon and that precious stroke of redemption, should the day comes, that he knows that the hour of his Death is tomorrow’s sunrise, and each second is an excruciating eternity to that spectacular Hour that will be relished by a cheering, waiting crowd, brimming with curiosity and anticipation, salivating with the writer's last moments and celebrating with his Death, should that regretful day comes, I shall remain ashamed of my country as an abattoir, I shall remain ashamed of myself as an abettor, and I shall remain adamant in the face of that writer’s impending, wrongful Death, that my sympathies for him shall abhorrently, but absolutely remain with me.

新年快乐

心年快乐

Discordant note - Pax Singaporeana

2009-01-22T07:54:00.056+08:00

Civil servants should remember the values of the Singapore Public Service: 'Integrity, Service, Excellence'. Our first duty is to serve Singapore and Singaporeans, and we should always conduct ourselves with decorum and humility. Everything takes its marking from this.

- Minister Teo Chee Hean

Remember the values. But how are these values evaluated? Through the billions in Singapore’s economy. To serve Singaporeans. But in turn, what do Singaporeans serve? To increase the billions in Singapore’s economy. Who holds the key to those billions, and where have all those billions... gone?

To serve Singapore. But what is Singapore?

Remember the values. Just do not forget Singapore’s economy: everything takes its marking from this. Remember to remember. Singapore is an economy.

Minister Teo’s words were a rebuke to Perm Sec Tan Yong Soon, not so much for his unbecoming deeds, as for revealing a fact that is the ivory echelons of the State. Revelations that have political ramifications in these sensitive times. Because the ruling regime and the state have become one. In fact, there is nothing unbecoming of what Tan did. In order to uphold the values of Integrity, Service, Excellence, the Civil Service, it has been argued, needs to be remunerated well. And when you are remunerated well, you shall find well-heeled places worthy of your munificence. If one reads Tan’s article more carefully, one would find little, if nothing, boastful about his vacation. It was presented rather as a matter-of-fact. Earnestly, he presented another world of Singapore. One that eats her cake in Paris. He was only and truthfully being himself.

MP Charles Chong offered a gem of wisdom:

Maybe it made lesser mortals envious and they thought maybe he was a little bit boastful.

He tried to clarify these scorching words afterwards, replacing ‘they' with ‘us’. But it was already too late. He had unwittingly let slip an ‘us’ and ‘them’, as there indeed is. And MP Charles is not with us. Whether or not he is 'they' or 'us', or even whether such a binary is meaningful in the first place, is not as important as what those words signify, what that very slippage conveys. His words encapsulate the meaning of Singapore: your worth as a citizen as measured by your economic utility. Your value as a human being as determined by your wealth. Otherwise, you are merely a lesser mortal. It is no less generous a sobriquet than a mere ‘digit’. If you can ignore the politically incorrect-ness, you will see that these otherwise innocuous tropes carry the simple ontology that is Singapore. The essential core from which such lexical violence and contempt are regularly, earnestly, and impudently unleashed upon Singaporeans, and essentially the same core that explains why Singaporeans regularly, earnestly, and resolutely accept such treatment.

This is a natural outcome of ‘meritocracy’. Because the logical conclusion to meritocracy is elitism (from elitism), what more elitism in an authoritarian regime based on eugenics and fascist ideology. And meritocracy lies in the heart of the Singapore Dream. Meritocracy, the supposed backrock of Singapore’s civil service, exemplified to perfection in the generations of schoolkids pressured to ace the successive decades of imperial examinations, enticed with scholarships, entrapped by high salaries, before finally entering the permanent, cloistered halls of the government elite.

Serve Singapore and Singaporeans? Conduct myself with decorum and humility? But why should I? I worked for it. I made it. I am the nation’s best, without whom my nation shall perish. I deserve all these. Why should I be denied, or hide my rightful entitlements? The Civil Service is the Singapore Dream. And the Singapore Dream lives to be flaunted. The Singapore Dream makes the idea of Singapore possible. It makes the Singaporean life bearable. This is the pact that Singaporeans have willingly signed.

But what if, for the majority of Singaporeans, our meritocracy is a farce, and the Singapore Dream an illusion?

Meritocracy, another form of elitism, appearing more legitimate; the parallel maneouvres of 'intelligence' over 'wealth' AND 'intelligence'=wealth. Thus harder to displace. But as a mode of organising society, it is untenable over the long run. And our initially 'meritocratic' structures are showing signs of atrophy. But until then, our ‘meritorious’ will continue to rise and lead, according to narrow, pre-demarcated categories of merit, within restraining structures that reinforce these categories. Categories that are, predictably, an exact replica of our founding fathers: male, heterosexual, mostly Chinese, English-schooled, overseas-educated. Categories that have replicated themselves in the successive decades, entrenched the system, systematised the government, governed a nation's mind. Categories that reproduced the power that spun its own silk of power, power that strengthened its own silk web. Arachnidan power that stultified a nation's growth. Let these meritorious ones ‘rightfully’ rise to riches. And the remnants shall deservingly fall back, lucky just to live. Just be thankful you're a Singaporean.

This is the discordant note: rich civil servants – the meritorious, the elites – serving the people. No, the lesser mortals. There is little disagreement that civil servants need to be rewarded well. The concerns in these Straits Times Forum letters, writing in support of Tan Yong Soon, they are mistaken. The point is not about civil servants spending their own money during their own time.

What is harder not to pick apart, is the plethora of false justifications proffered, so that they could be remunerated excessively. Without high salaries, no capable minds would join the service, and therefore Singapore would perish? Laughable that a bureaucracy brimming with the best and the brightest cannot hold up the country. Or has the ruling regime monopolised the bureaucracy, indeed the Singaporean society, and held it all hostage? Or is it a case of Love thy country, But love thy money more? Or see, hear, and speak no politics perhaps? Singapore is not the only country fraught with dangers and feeding only 4 million mouths. But while others institutionalise a democratic form of government, and create a more egalitarian society, our successive cohorts of supposedly well-educated Singaporeans are made increasingly dependent on the ruling regime, made increasingly materialistic. That we have no natural resources? People are natural resources, and natural resources do not necessarily ensure prosperity and progress. Singapore is vulnerable? It might be less so if you reduce your overwrought sense of siege. Singapore is no longer that vulnerable. Singapore is unique? So is every other country. But that has not stopped us from trying to export our 'Singapore Model' to China and the developing world. The spreading wings of Singapore. The Singapore Flyer; Pax Singaporeana. Cheered on by our happy fellow Singaporeans, drunk with false nationalistic pride, numbed with collective fear, fed on fallacies and spin.

We do not like to hear the elites saying, "Let them eat cake." Yet, we like to have our cake, and eat it too.

Strip away all these hollow justifications, and that kind of salary figures would be difficult to justify. The ruling regime's achievements no longer that stellar, and in fact, you realise Singapore can survive without the ruling regime. That it is strong only because it deliberately kept everyone else weak and dependent. That it is holding Singapore back.

When top civil servants are paid according to market rates, they naturally live and think like kings. Especially when our civil service have been subsumed under the one-party system. Especially when the civil service is not the free market. Permanence and protection, along with the other usual perks. Why not? Thus, decorum, humility, and public service will be tokenistic, belaboured, if not incommensurable. If not a facade. In Singapore, there are few civil servants. Mainly mercenaries and elite mandarins. Every man for himself. No Singapore nation, but Singapore Inc. And the mandarins serve the king. Everything takes its marking from this.

That is why the likes of Tan Yong Soon will always be simultaneously envied and resented. Not because Tan and the elites have succeeded, but because the system that produces them is unjustifiably unfair. And because the system of rewards is fundamentally based on misguided values. That is why there shall always be two Singapores residing in two different worlds, hopefully the twain never shall meet. That is why the inaugural words of President Obama will always make the self-serving leaders of Singapore feel small. Undeserving. And phony.

Two days ago, in Washington D.C., there were no flashy special effects, no flamboyant promises, no contrived flourish of letting a hundred flowers bloom. There were no need to. Just a man and his single dream to serve. Just a man standing in front of his country, graceful to those he defeated, thankful for His grace, and grateful to his country and her people for this opportunity to serve and to lead. This is heartfelt sincerity. Obama is a priceless symbol of America. A pure inspiration.

His words spoke to Singapore too, not to criticise, but to show how she could be better. Truer. Greater. Perhaps that is why when Singaporeans watched Obama’s inauguration, they rivered more than a tear. They forgot for a moment that they were Singaporean. For a few breaths, it was as though everyone was an American, and Obama was their president. They were lost, and Obama was leading them home.

Then, they remembered to remember. They were Singaporean. They were all that Singapore today stood for. And for what and for whom does Singapore stand? The way Obama rose to power, he would have been persecuted in Singapore even before he started. Passion, idealism, inspiration. Persecuted. Thorns on the side. And so those Singaporeans, perched in front of their LCD screens half a world away, imagined, if only, that Singapore was a place where thorns could grow with roses. Thorns supporting that cusp of enfolding petals and sweet nectar. Thorns protecting the very life of that rose.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

- President Obama, Inauguration Address, 20 January 2009

The state of mind | MP set in flames

2009-01-14T12:41:00.043+08:00

There is in literature a slipstream of works that impresses upon the reader the character more than the plot or the story. The reader rides on the horseback of him the character as he (usually a ‘he’) gallops into the adventure. Somewhere along, that character subtly morphs to become the story. Don Quixote comes to mind. Later incarnations of this quixotic fellow exploit roughly the same formula and gain literary fame, if not cult status. Holden Caulfield and his angst-ridden jaunt through Central Park, Leopold Bloom’s clock-ticking day in Dublin, Mrs Dalloway’s wispy amble in and out of Hyde Park, the inexplicable trials and tribulations of K. These works pay their tributes to Dostoevsky, and Knut Hamsun especially, who in turn were inspired by Cervantes. Of course, all of them had received their tutelage from the epic grandmaster of the Odyssey, Homer.

What gradually shifted away from Homer and through the millennia, was that the odyssey of Odysseus became Odysseus the Odyssey. Why would one be interested in Mrs Dalloway’s quest for a perfect party this evening, or in Holden’s midnight gallivant of nothing? Because the primal seduction of language aside, if you believe Freud, we’re ids and egos interested in ourselves. These works, in presenting their characters, lead us into the slipstreams-of-consciousness. They plot out the timeless topography of the human condition. I am the I in the I in this and that fictional guise. More importantly, the interior geography of the I becomes a representation of, a comment about, the external territory of the state one is living in. That is, the state of one’s mind and the state of one’s country, both as a condition of the self.

Amongst these novels that delve into psychology, Dostoevsky is probably the one most consistently interested psychiatry, and that informed a separate tributary of existentialism. To Dostoevsky, the chronic psychosis of Russia of that time was starkly personified in his fictional characters, from the Underground Man to Raskolnikov.

The subject of psychiatry is seeing resurgence, with the unfortunate incident of MP Seng Han Thong being set in flames. Not long ago, psychosis helped to politically destroy one of our former presidents, Devan Nair. Should such similar strategies be employed, then whatever the 'psychiatric condition' of the perpetrator Ong Kah Chua and his ‘real’ motivations that shall emerge in due course will be a red herring, if not irrelevant. It will be fascinating to observe how the Singapore state might, in the coming weeks, exploit psychosis for political ends, much in the Foucauldian vein. The state’s objective in this instance would be to eliminate any hint that two of the ruling party’s pillars of governmentality – anti-welfarism and politician-people grassroots meetings – are failing. That even if Ong had been clear-headed during the time leading to his committed crime, he would still be labelled irrational. His psychiatric assessment (taken at face value) and the court's sentencing would provide some answers however vague.

I do not condone what Ong had done. But the the patterns of the state kicking into gear are already emerging. There is the media scramble to spin Seng as an honest to goodness MP. We are fed frequent updates of Seng, and thus know more about his condition than we do about Ong. Other than that Ong has a psychiatric history, and that he has swiftly been charged, no words have come from Ong, or from people who know him well, for example his family members. Each day passes with the plight of Seng appearing increasingly unfortunate, as the media milks maximum public sympathy and stokes moral outrage from its trusty backrock of middle Singapore.

The dimension of Ong has been deliberately silenced. Remember the psychosis but not the man, and hidden will be the link between the two. The signifier de-signified, a sign of state machination at work.

Wong Kan Seng’s statements have been the most significant so far, and his words imply two sets of laws, one for the common man and one for PAP politicians. You are also expected to act rationally even when you are mental. As Molly has characteristically pointed out, this is nonsense. What is most revealing is in Wong’s emphatic iteration that Ong shall be severely dealt with, that Ong’s vicious act will meet with a foregone conclusion. This is before Ong’s mental state has been ascertained, that could potentially be an intervening, if vindicating, factor in the court’s deliberations. This is before the courts have spoken. Is our Home Affairs minister a psychiatrist and a district judge now?

Sliding along the edges of this episode is the obvious fact that the state’s exhortation to self-reliance through gainful employment can only succeed to the extent that one is physically and mentally able. How is someone with a condition like Ong to find work or to remain in employment? How is someone like Ong to ask for help?

Governmentality in Singapore has been engineered so that the only access the people have to political expediency is through parliament, with the MP as conduit. But there are the residents’ complaints of absent and unavailable MPs, and the occasions where MPs cannot bring about desired outcomes. There is the possibility that meeting the MP is in fact not an efficient, if effective process of political interaction and bargaining, that in reality it merely gives the semblance of a helping hand. MPs as politics as administration, and somewhere along this impersonal process of ministration, politics disappears. Why ask, if help is a mirage?

Violence, always a political act, always a raw demonstration of power. And for the powerless, people like Ong, how else can they reclaim the political, if not with violence? Violence to yourself when you hurl yourself in front of the oncoming train, or violence to he who violated you. You hurl a flame into the state's paragon of politics. You hope to set alight the pyre of your fate. You hope to be heard. In that regard, irrationality becomes subjective. What may be irrational to you might not be to the other. What may be irrational in deed may not be in its intent. What may be then, may not be now. And the political does not end with death – it is ignited and re-ignited from amongst the demos. These are the sparks that the state will do its utmost to souse, as it is doing now.

Virginia Woolf wrote a most sober Mrs Dalloway while weaving in and out of her bouts of insanity. Dostoevsky sketched out the most psychotic of characters that had method in their madness. The mental, the insane, the mad, they nonetheless reside in a simultaneous reality - life, still as lived - although a step apart from ours.

But whose? Is it even about insanity in the first place? (Perhaps to be mad in a crazy world is not necessarily insanity, especially if we can/should get to know the character, follow his odyssey, and assess his condition.)

One might never know if Ong is truly schizophrenic, or to what extent that he is. Modern states have been all too happy to ascribe the charge of irrationality and insanity to those who do not conduct themselves in accordance to decree. Unwittingly, Ong entered this temple on his own. What remains to be seen is to what extent the state will sacrifice Ong on the altar of PAP deities as a warning to the rest of the non-believers, insane or otherwise. Remember? This is rational Singapore. Island of practicalities, realism and pragmatism. The thin red line between reason and treason.

Ironically, the evacuated p s y c h o s i s of Ong personifies/symbolises the Singapore state’s condition. The state, of mind - opaque, inexplicable, inversely irrational, utterly dehumanised. Except that we have no Dostoevsky of our own to hold up an authorial light. Only psychiatrists in the employ of an authoritarian state.

This is the state of mind that, like madness anywhere, it will deny. The state of mind that precisely triggers irrational acts, and bouts of insanity. The state of mind that could potentially return the lost picture of politics burning at its brightest flame: the quixotic assassination of power to revive the political, the politicians’ forgotten fear of the demos, the political fire not seen since the heady days of decolonization and Independence, the fire of desperation, the politics of delirium.

When they occur, do we isolate the character - or worse, the character's psychosis - from the story, forgetting that the character holds the story. Forgetting that the story is the key to the character's psychosis. Forgetting that we are not Dostoevsky.

Forgetting that Dostoevsky was not and cannot be the State.

Justice looking for a name

2009-01-09T17:39:00.030+08:00

The Scream is Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s most famous painting. I was in Oslo the last two weeks, spending Christmas and the New Year with old friends up in the mountain cabins snowed over with snow, and took the rare opportunity to one day slip into the National Art Gallery in the city to see this painting in its original.

They say a painting is all silence, and all presence, but never silenced. Like justice. That world there, living on the canvas, does not speak in the name of language. It only equivocates. A true piece of art, even though it only equivocates, can make a statement, can make a name for itself. It can be understood, if only we let it. Because art is not an alien creation minted in the unfathomable service of money – it is an expression of our humanness. So you stand in front of a painting, and you confront it, you question it: Why. This colour. This diagonal. Why. This intensity. Here and not there. Why. This light. Why. This boy, this pallor, this crease, this fold. Why.

Why do Singapore's courts crucify those who question its truth?

The questions become an interrogation of yourself and your own truth, because the painting cannot speak. It equivocates, and you make a meaning out of it, through your own eyes, upon your own tongue, thinking in your own mind, feeling with your own haert. If a painting cannot speak a word – a soundful of a word – how can it scream? And when it screams, how can you hear? This: you stare and you stare at the scream and let the painting melt away. Glowing colours, undulating lines, simple life forms and the sea and sky and you, crystalising in your depths within, until you see, feel, and hear, right in front of you, in the name of that singular scream searing through your self.

When artists paint, it is an expression of their feelings, usually of pain. When artists paint, it is a message in a bottle, in it a letter for you to unfold. And within it a lover's name that you hold.

Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.

- Jeanette Winterson

They say that Lady Justice is blindfolded. But sometimes her blindfolds are off. And sometimes, she is made blind. Like God, human beings make her in their own image. Like God, human beings speak for her. But unlike God, human beings are here and fallible.

Through justice, ‘truth’ is revealed. Through justice, power is illuminated. In whose name, who reveals, and who illuminates? When you question the authority of justice, like you would the jurisdiction of art, the onus is upon her – justice and art – to equivocate her truth. You question it, painting and truth; you interrogate it, justice and truth.

And you indict it, Singapore and its unravelling of justice: why does its Lady Justice crucify those who question its truth?

Through an indictment of justice, justice is conceded, confessed, and declared. And justice is freed. But when power is used to stopper the questions, and impose upon all its own truth, that is not a painting or a revelation of justice. That is a scream that can neither be seen nor heard. That is injustice in its every letter: it is 'justice' because it tells you that it is; it is a 'scream' because it tells you that it is. It is not the painting that is silenced. It is you who are censored. It is the truth that no one believes in. It is the truth imperiled and justice imprisoned.

And The Scream lives on unheard.

Actually, Munch had painted another piece, that is less well-known, less well-liked, but that is my favourite. It is a self-portrait. Self-portraits of artists are infinitely intriguing pieces of art, because they reveal more about the artist’s heart than any other. Munch’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette has his face turned towards you. His sombre clothes are blended into the darkness behind, and his lower torso melts into a sepulchral mist, as if he were an apparition, a ghostly yet vivid mirror of his self. Why are only his face and hand illuminated? And why is he gazing so intently at you? Why is his hand placed, seemingly so gently, upon his heart? The face, the hand, and the heart of the artist and his singular piece of art, what is the portrait of the artist saying to you?

No one knows, though you might. And neither do Munch nor his paintings impose their truths upon you. Truth, painted. You the viewer, stare and stare it down. You question it, you interrogate it, and you indict it, the painted truth. Only then can its truth be revealed in its full colour, the painted truth unveiled.

Only then can an artist do art the truth and justice that it deserves. And only then can one in the name of one's heart, feel the truth, and believe in it.

So indict it, Singapore and its unravelling of justice. Why does its Lady Justice crucify those who question its truth?

Until then, it is you who are censored, it is justice unbelieved, it is art that lives in shame, and it is injustice without another name.

Disgrace | The Life & Times Chua Lee Hoong*

2009-01-06T22:06:00.008+08:00

One of the characteristics of the esteemed novelist J.M. Coetzee's prose style is his use of the rhetorical question. Rather, questions – in the plural – posed where he wishes to provoke thought, to cast doubt, to suspend his reader's initial prejudice, and to hint, only just, at what his own predilections might be. Questions leading questions, leading the reader, and no answer in sight, until the reader realises that an answer is neither the point nor destination – the question is.

Questions, when posed skillfully, artfully, are like a chessmaster's move of pieces across the checkered maze, each move a question, each question an answer, though the question is the answer. And before your eyes, Coetzee's last question in his novel would have maneuvred you into his delicate checkmate, leading you no other way but to his final sentence – an exquisite master's piece – a laurel written just for you.

While Chua Lee Hoong of the Straits Times is nowhere near being a prose stylist, nor is she a seasoned chess player, she does harbour pretensions to be court advisor to the ruling regime. But subtlety is not her forte; subterfuge is. Thus when she pours scorn on the Internet only yet again ('Political Challenges for 2009', ST 3 Jan 09), it reminds one that journalism is merely a gambit for her more duplicitous ambitions. Chua Lee Hoong is not a journalist; certainly not of a class of the more respectable newspapers, but rather like a pawn columnist of a party newsletter. Pity her subordinates.

But when Chua Lee Hoong releases a frenetic spray of questions about the Internet – and nine at one go, no least, it looks as if she is sweeping her hand across the chess board and sending those pieces – Kings, Queens, Bishops and Knights – scattering onto the ground before her opponent can move into awaiting victory. It is as if a caught and cornered spy had desperately held onto her pistol for that one last rackling into the indifferent sky, before being engulfed by the advancing night. And you begin to suspect that she is more worried about what is left of her ignominious career as the Straits Times' doyenne of propaganda and regime apologia than the yearly maturity and vindication of the Singaporean blogosphere:

What proportion of Singaporeans turn to it for news and views? How much of an influence does the Internet have on their lives? How much does it affect their thinking? How is the local blogosphere evolving? What impact does it have on national discourse? Five to 10 years from now, what will it be like? Will the Internet's reach attain some kind of equilibrium and stabilise? Under what circumstances or in what kind of societies will the Internet be at its most influential, and what least?

There are no answers to all of Chua Lee Hoong's questions above. The answers will only bear out on hindsight with the passing of time, chance, and technology, and with empirical research. But they do appear to portend the imminent demise, if not an attenuated influence, of the printed newspaper. So, more importantly, there are no answers to her questions because hers are not questions. They are flares of SOS to her masters, and entreaties for the containment of online socio-political commentary.

Subtlety is not her forte; subterfuge is. Especially when night is settling in fast.

* * *

Chua Lee Hoong had one more question, however. It was actually her first:

The problem with the Internet is reliability: To what extent can you trust what you read online? Whether due to ignorance, mischief or sheer absence of quality control, much of what is written online has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

This is a genuine question, and well worth thinking about. And the answers are multiple. The Internet is reliable, and it is not. It can be reliable, and it can not. Rather, its reliability is not that important. Writings on the Internet require the discerning eye as much as the Straits Times needs similar scrutiny – the latter all the more so. Discerning eyes are just what this country needs. What are indispensable are the Internet and the Singaporean bloggers' ability to break the monopoly of information control, debate-framing, and the manufacturing of consent, and to expose the spin, hype, and chicanery of venal scribes and fawners from the mainstream media.

The Internet is not the perfect mass medium, and it need not be. Being an excellent one is enough for its purpose. Its inconsistency, unpredictability, and dilettantism are precisely its strengths. Its excellence and political potency cease only when individuals no longer blog, participate in forum discussions, forward that incriminating email, access a plethora of info-news websites – professional and amateur, local and foreign – and continually comment, debate, and quarrel, post pictures and put up videos and form communities. Its potential for political change is anywhere and everywhere.

But political activism is neutered at its heart when individuals forget that change comes not just from the arena of parliament and street protests, but also from the sitting and thinking individual. The personal is the political, and the political is in the quotidian and in the everyday. Action originates from one's thought, conscience, and consciousness. An impassioned thought is in itself activism.

Taken together, they constitute the truer citizen, one that perpetually questions received wisdom, rips up underlying assumptions, and resists and unmasks the artifice, injustice, and sophistry emanating from those enthroned in the white chambers of power.

Taken together, you rebuff the vacuous regurgitation of propaganda by those indoctrinated ones, and you expose their shallow, hollow, and spurious patriotism.

But politics, conscience, and activism are numbed when one receives news and information solely from the mainstream media. The Ugly Singaporean has come to be one of the enduring appellations of the country's citizenry, and one suspects that the numerous unbecoming, even mortifying traits, of the average Singaporean are precisely cultivated by a daily imbibing of those craven, mediocre, and less than hounourable newspapers. It breeds an infantile Singaporean society that constantly needs a PAP government to, in Chua Lee Hoong's ominously revealing words, educate a new generation of Singaporeans on what governing Singapore entails. Do we need any more propaganda? And from which other national paper can one find a journalist of Chua Lee Hoong's ilk that holds such a condescending view of her compatriots?

While the Straits Times need not strive to be the perfect national daily, a stratospheric aspiration, given its current pedestrian standards and dictated modus operandi, it need not be pathetic either. At least it should not be a national disgrace.

Since the Straits Times has abdicated its role as the paramount purveyor and conduit of critical, independent thought, then the Internet should attempt that role. As long as you have something original to say, the keyboard is yours.

The alternative is the perpetuation of the illusion that the Straits Times is the model example of an objective newspaper and the epitome of truthful reporting. Illusion, because these are non-existent standards that Singaporeans have been duped into believing.

There is no such thing as an objective viewpoint, a balanced opinion, or a non-partisan position, just as there exists no fiery ice, or for that matter, icy fire. There is only a voice that is yours and yours only – better still an enlightened one – and whether or not it will be quashed.

You, the subject; You, the subjective. And You should never be subjected.

There is no letting of facts to speak for themselves. Facts do not speak for themselves – You do. And truth is what you make of it. This is why there must be a proliferation of objectives, viewpoints, and objecting viewpoints, unbalanced opinions and partisan positions, to demolish the innumerable half-truths in here, and to debate the many-multiple truths out there. This is why freedom of speech is a fundamental birthright and not a conferred reward. And this is how Singaporeans can then begin to grow a mind of their own, abandon their puerile diapers, and finally grow up. This is why the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act has first to go. This is why our nation-building media has failed.

The alternative is the one-dimensional drivel that you get from the Straits Times every morning.

The alternative is the dumbed-down Singaporean citizen that receives its daily insult without even realising it.

The alternative is the Internet. But you have to make it so, because You are in the Net. This space is yours – from cyberspace, to actual space.

* * *

So to pose Chua Lee Hoong's question back to herself: The problem with the Straits Times is reliability: To what extent can you trust what you read in print?

I believe Reporters sans Frontieres has a few answers dating from 2003, each year a damning echo to the Straits Times, each ranking – take your pick, 144th? 147th? 140th? 146th? 141st? or the latest 154th? – a plangent riposte to Chua Lee Hoong. They make a mockery of every word that she types.

The problem with the Straits Times is precisely one of reliability, in addition to its sub-par journalism, in prose, style, and substance. Prose style is what separates a merely excellent argument from an absolutely brilliant one. Writing is always a tribute to poetry, and an argument for the splendour of literature – but when it comes to the Straits Times, what style, what substance, and what argument? Beyond its incessant self-glorification and vanity revamps of adding more vibrant colours and tweaking trivial typefaces, what quality sentence and thought can be found flowing from the Straits Times? Its newsroom is bereft of courage, critical minds, and an affinity with the English language – a microcosm of the embarrassing Singaporean society that it has been complicit in moulding. A press that is cloying and not free is an unreliable press, a shackled Chua Lee Hoong is an unreliable witness, and dignity slips from the totem poles of both.

To what extent can you trust what the Straits Times prints?

I may be no Coetzee, and this may be no rhetorical question. Following the RSF's rankings, I'll hazard an easy answer: To the extent that you trust what Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and China print.

To what extent can you trust what the Straits Times prints?

To the extent that Chua Lee Hoong and fellow sycophants at the Straits Times will continue to move their substandard, groveling, and gutless pieces of 'journalism' through the square tiles of international opinion and press rankings, blocked by the stubborn Kings on their right, and mocked by the Net Rookies on their left, until they have nowhere and no way but to fall into their deserved, divined, and rightful tomb, that is their laurelled checkmate at the end.

我像是一颗棋
进退任由你决定
我不是你眼中唯一将领
却是不起眼的小兵

我像是一颗棋子
来去全不由自己
举手无回你从不曾犹豫
我却受控在你手里

- 王菲 | 棋子

* * *

*The title is borrowed from the two Booker Prize-winning novels of Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace, and The Life & Times of Michael K. The characters in the novels bear no resemblance to Ms Chua Lee Hoong.

Entry first posted in The Online Citizen.

Writing home | To the memory of JBJ

2009-01-03T18:17:00.001+08:00

Evening brought the breeze, channelled by the concrete blocks, blowing across Singapore. Evening set the birds chattering, as if desperate for one last word before darkness silenced them. Evening brought light, flooding the corridors of the concrete blocks and lining the roads. The daytime of tinted windows and air-conditioning was giving way to the night-time of flourescent tubes and halogen headlights. White then red flashed from the cars speeding past on the road outside Ah Leong's window.

Across the country, televisions were coming on … Husbands greeted wives and changed channels. Children greeted mothers and clamoured for dinner. Ah Leong stood at the window and looked out, trying to fix all Singapore in his gaze.

In the hazy distance, the skyline of the central business district stood in quiet repose, an august ovation to the country's wealth and prosperity, a singular metaphor for Singapore.

Your eye caught a plane slanting from the southwest, tiny from afar, slowly descending over the scattered islets. Then it turned from round the Marina Bay area, cruised along East Coast park, and disappeared among the thicket of buildings and trees.

It reminded you of being on a plane once, returning from a holiday, and how Singapore looked from above as the plane neared its shores. First the cosy cluster of skyscrapers appear, gleaming in the late afternoon light; then the neat landscape of trees, fronted by new condominiums and repainted HDB flats; and then the red-roofed terrace houses of Tanah Merah, the neat white boxes of Changi Business Park, each view the gentle turning of a page, before you landed on the tarmac. Changi Airport. You felt a rising pride. Singapore was already resplendent in your mind, and Singapore was not just Singapore. It was the garden city, it was the oasis in Southeast Asia, a buzzing metropolis, a city of possibilities, it was the legion epithets from the saga of modernity, Singapore as knight examplar, and you, citizen, were the custodian of her lustrous honour.

But what was Singapore really like, as seen on the ground, beneath the sleek taglines dreamt up by the Tourism Board, behind the daily spiel from its contemptible, state-controlled media, beyond its inebriated and indoctrinated citizenry from amidst its shopping malls and skyscrapers? What was Singapore really like, as lived?

'Welcome home,' the demure Singapore Girl exuded through the announcement.

The passenger beside you turned around, and said, 'Doesn't Singapore look like a wonderful Legoland?'

Yes, you said.. 'Wonderland. Unreal City.'

* * *

There was a time when Singapore appeared indubitable to you, almost paradisal. Everything worked, you were told. Worked like indefatigable clockwork. Everyone was housed, everyone received an education, everyone carved out a career. It was the life; the life to have, and the life to live. You saw it for yourself. You lived it; you lived it up. And so did everyone else. Little did you know, it was only a life to live and dream the permitted dreams. That time was like a previous life now.

Once, while you were still living in that previous time and its prescribed dreams, you were walking through a lunch hour crowd, and a voice thundered out from nowhere. You turned to that voice, and caught an elderly man with unusual sideburns, gazing at the flowing throng. He had on his face an absorbing expression, and he was holding on to a book.

'Make it right! Make it right for Singapore!'

It was that thunder again. It was as if he was declaring independence..

You paused for a moment, standing a few steps away, taking him in. You were curious. There was nothing wrong with Singapore, you thought. Everything was right in their places.

You looked around at the passing crowd, crisp shirts, shopping bags, after lunch, and all of them seemed to agree with you. Life was right. They ignored him. You felt vindicated.

Was that man a lunatic?

You were curious about why that man was there, standing like a stubborn sunset against another burning sun. What was it he saw in Singapore that was wrong, that had to be made right? But you were afraid of approaching him. You did not know why you were afraid. You just were. So instead of plucking his story off his waving hand for a few dollars, you went away and got his story off other people's mouths and through another's eyes.

He was a London-educated lawyer, a former magistrate, and an opposition member of parliament – the first one. He spoke against the government. He was sued for defamation, and he was made a bankrupt. He lost his silk and his robes. Now he was a lone figure beneath this gleaming city, peddling his stories.

You wanted to know what that man had done, who had risen so high only to have been reduced to this ground. The readings that you had gathered revealed little and gave no real answers. So you cast wider your search, for materials not available easily, for perspectives not presented in the mainstream channels, for books the local bookshops did not stock. You wondered why they were not easily found.

As you read on, another story of your country beckoned, another Singapore, one that was seen through that fiery man's eyes. It was the Singapore that you had not noticed, or felt was inconsequential, or did not care much for and thus abstracted and erased from your mind.. You do that to images that either disturbed or that you did not comprehend – ignoring them was easier on the eye, and they would be absent from your mind. It made life look rosier. As you read on you felt an awakening that gradually obliterated the glittering Singapore that you thought you had always known, the white-washed Singapore.

Put together, it was a fuller painting of your country, blemished, imperfect, but one that was more authentic, and one that had heart and character, like that masterpiece of oil on canvas, bravely true to its faults and thus so precious, rather than an amateur's attempt at perfect reproduction, barely true, and merely producing pastiche.

And you thought how ignorant you otherwise must have been, how one-dimensional, how shallow.. And how easy, to half-asleep through your life that only lives and dreams the permitted dreams.

* * *

There was also a personal story of that man, his story, intricately intertwined with the myriad recent histories of your country. It was one of courage and of conviction, told from another side, but that was seldom heard.

You thought very few Singaporeans came near this man's achievements. Even fewer who had that kind of courage and convictions. He understood and meant every word of Majulah Singapura. He recited the Pledge not as a pledge of dependence; not as emptiness or distraction. He dared live out his convictions in a country that convicted those beliefs. He resolutely countenanced not only the powerful, but also the powerless and the weak, who had viewed him either with disdain, or dared not look him in his eye, though his irises never lost that gleam like a child's.

Why was there no place here for someone like that man, you wondered. Someone who had courage, convictions, and humanity, flowers so rare in this country. Was it right for convictions to come head on with the white night of power, only to wither and lose, everything and all, and for what reason?

Truth, justice, and liberty; grand words but for whom?

That man could have lived the high life of the state, amongst the legal fraternity and high society. But he did not, for that would have compelled him to close an eye, to bury his beliefs, and to forget one's heart. So he left that lofty circle to be amongst ordinary citizens like you, who could only dream of attaining a flake of what he once upon a time had, in riches and in poverty. Where he could have earned millions, you made him pay millions, because he dared to speak up for you, when you were wavering in hesitation and in fear. Because he was willing to give up all that most of you would never have, not with all the dreams in the world.

When this man died, his name was whiter than white, a colour above those draped always in white. He had no slush funds, no secret bank accounts; how to, when he had nowhere and no wish to hide? Decades of ruthless hounding and smearing, and not bone in his closet, not a stain on his clothes. And you wondered how many among the cloistered powerful in Singapore could hold on to as pristine a flake as his.

Why were they so afraid of him, and what were they afraid of?

This great man died of heart failure. But was it only his heart that had failed him?

* * *

Across the sky, it was almost pitch dark now, except for the Singapore below you, all ablaze with lights, presenting this luminous tapestry on the horizontal, hanging a different view of Singapore.

This country could indeed appear different if only you would contemplate it with your own eyes – your own – and under a different light.

You thought of that man and his lone voice, a pure plume of sound, rising quick above the diffident crowd, 'Make it right! Make it right for Singapore!' And you remembered that you would not have had this other glimpse of the Singapore that you now see, that had been kept away from you, by others as well as by yourself, had you not paused for just a moment that afternoon in the city, and pondered about that man's words, and about the Singapore that you smugly thought you had always known.

Still standing on your reverie by the window, your recollecting gaze kindled one more memory, one that told the story of how you came to pause moments, of pausing moments stopping time, and how, like magic carpets and gems of literature, they could take you to another world.

You were thirteen, a teenager, you were finding yourself a stranger in this world, alone, very afraid, and you were trying to find your own secret hiding place. It was the school library, the perfect place for pausing moments, and getting lost in your own searching world. One time, your running fingers along the bookshelves stopped you at a slim novel, First Loves. It was a story about Ah Leong, a Singaporean teenager, just like you, written by a certain Philip Jeyaretnam. As you read it, you felt connected to Ah Leong, his adventures and his feelings, and you laughed at all those vivid thoughts of his, because you knew where he was coming from. The two of you grew up in the same place. You knew all about the sunset that he saw. It was the sun of your own land.

The things you read once upon a time often come to rest at a certain corner in your mind, not as forgotten relics or aimless dust, but as returning motifs of particular images and specific sensibilities, that unbeknownst to you, had palpated your base emotions, guided your thoughts, and influenced your self.. Reading a novel about your own country, written by your fellowman, you discovered through crafted words and local language, through the familiar scenes and remembered corners, a more authentic, and a more enduring soul of the place, the place you that would like to call home, with a sunlight that only you would know. Even as the ground beneath you shifted, the places transformed, or even disappear, there was always a pellucid Singapore in your memory to home in to, across time, wherever you were, however far, however Singapore changed.

As you grew up, there were many times that you walked home in those rusted evenings and remembered Ah Leong, standing there by his window as the evening brought breeze, as he tried to fix all Singapore in his gaze. In a way, he was like your older brother heading first where later you would go: finishing school, falling in love, landing your first job, having your first kiss; all the familiar moments of Singapore that you had duly lived, and always that homely colour of evening.

In a way, you were Ah Leong, already written into a story without your knowing.

Without your knowing; has it been so long ago, when you had first read a book that spoke to you, heart to heart, and told you a story about home, reviving your childhood memories and conjuring your future time, all from a single opening line: The evening brought breeze, channelled by the concrete blocks, blowing across Singapore …

And you were thankful for that second of serendipity, for thereon, your evenings had often brought along with them, those precious reflections of light; those that bided time, dappled your conscience, and led you to see and imagine a different, a truer, and a more heartfelt Singapore. Those that led you to ponder a moment the words of that lone man, all fire and all heart, hidden in the chary crowd, in the sun of your own land, pure voice above them all.

Kindly support the JBJ Scholarship Fund for Postgraduate Study in Law and Human Rights.

For more information, please contact: Mr Kenneth Jeyaretnam (kjeyaretnam@gmail.com)

In between the silence

2008-12-21T22:12:00.007+08:00

In popular banter, in coffeeshops, during taxi-rides, Singapore is often likened to a dynasty, a fiefdom, a monarchy. The benevolent emperor is aging, and the crown prince has ascended the throne. The new king of Singapore Inc., the sovereign and his wealth funds, the powerful little kingdom, its imperium across the continents. These are compelling images, revealing the people’s underlying pride and patriotism. They also reflect conventional sentiments of high office in absolute power. While people may partake in these jokes, their laughter nevertheless stem from a niggling discomfort, that this might indeed be a reality for them. The unease of the powerless. When the laughter dies down, there is always a furtive silence.

When the town councils’ investment losses came to light, there was a preceding silence, only broken three weeks later in parliament, broken by a question. Then the widespread unhappiness, and the queries raged. The fires fought by the foot soldiers – tarrying back and forth to douse and shield – only served to further spread the flames. The leaders stepped aback. They referred the residents to the town councils, the town councils deferred to the government, in between, the silence, and the people were left wondering where the leadership was. It was a surreal time to be in Singapore, this hollowed, depoliticised bureaucracy, cruising on autopilot, gliding on invisible leadership.

Grace Fu was right. Our responses were knee-jerk reactions. The town councils are at no risk of going bust, and really, residents have not lost much money. The investment lessons to be learnt in this episode are not just one for the town councils, but for the financial world at large. Singapore, its institutions, and its people have merely, like the rest of the world, been sucked into this frenzied paradigm of greed. There are victims, and there are victims of victims. And in the coming time, the town councils will be more transparent, their charges delayed or not increased, more frequent maintenance and upgrading works, and it all will pass.

What will not pass, however, is the root of these anger that will find places to flourish no matter what. It is not about the town councils. It is about that goliath of an arrogance that the government has come to exemplify. Hence, each mis-step, mistake, or gaffe from them will invariably proliferate into a garden of dissatisfaction.

It is that classic affective divide again, recurring, widening, ever dividing. Except that since Catherine Lim’s public affair with the State, there have been fourteen more years of increasing contempt, conceit, and swagger of the leaders and their millionaire mandarins.

Proceeding in tandem was a different world, a world that had been slowly transforming the Singaporean consciousness. The state propaganda machinery was continually unmasked and under siege. That great affective divide had ruptured into a colossal chasm: the Wee Shu Min affair with another Singaporean serf, the NKF and its peanuts, Yawning Bread and that photograph, the fixing of the opposition, Mr Brown’s rendezvous with Ms Bhavani, bak chor mee and PM Lee’s mee siam, Mas Selamat and our complacency, Chua Lee Hoong and why she hates them, the rising costs of rising costs, the huge government salaries and their huge investment losses, all sprung from the fount of burgeoning hubris, further germinated by the Internet’s wind, hyperlinks, and solidarity.

Little Davids were incessantly whipped, stripped and paraded around in the public square, and the growing Sunday crowd was beginning to tire and feel uneasy. They wondered who would be hauled up next.

But this hubris is merely taking Singapore’s system of government to its logical conclusion. Total power is arrogant; it is corruptible, and it is begrudged too. The knee-jerk resentments are but symptoms of desperation: life savings, lives, and futures are at stake, in the hands of a government that is appearing not to be as sterling as they say. Or have we only now begun to see?

Hence the desperate calls for transparency, we do not want to be kept in the dark. But it will not come by itself. Hence the empty calls for a stronger opposition. But it will not allow one. Hence the feeble yells to liberalise. Give and take, a little tango, and it is still back to No, No, and No.

When the individuals lost their life-savings, there were desperate calls for help. It was a cudgel that the leaders should have taken up. Instead, they were chastised by Lee Kuan Yew that they had invested with their open eyes, so they had only themselves to blame. When the town council’s losses were exposed, presumably the bright ones had also invested with their bright eyes. But those were public coffers, and so the public roared. It was not about the town councils.

Hence this wringing anger. The government cannot be, and the present system cannot hold. Life savings, lives, and futures are at stake. The people are losing sight of their savings, the government its duty; it is losing their money, and the people are on the losing side, corralled on an island, and nowhere to go.

It was predictable that Khaw Boon Wan stepped in. He is an earnest man, his devotion to his religion appeals to the public, and he speaks with empathy. People’s anger are soothed somewhat. He can say that the town councils have absolute transparency, that there are no secrets, and still be credulous.

But complete openness, transparency, and accountability in the present Singapore are a contradiction, an impossibility and a false hope. These are hallmarks of a functioning democracy. They seldom accompany a king, God’s regent upon earth, governing by divine right. If change can only come from the ruling party, and that any countervailing opposition would be crushed, as PM Lee had intimated, illuminating his totalitarian impulses, how can those qualities prevail, how can this kingdom hold?

In Singapore, when they tell you there are no secrets, it might just be true. Secrets are contained in whispers, they thrive on rumours. But in Singapore, there is only silence, self-silence, enforced silence, the silenced all, killers of secrets. As long as you do not say a word or question too hard. . . Occasionally, there would be the averted eyes, hidden thoughts, and the willed amnesia. There would be the always present fear. But there are no secrets. The secret police take care of that. So the emperor’s new clothes can be admired in all its nakedness. They are transparent enough, they cannot be anymore transparent. Anymore, and the emperor would be no more.

The people's question is hanging still. It is an old question, a perennial, a Roman one: In Absolute Singapore, who can guard the king and guardians?

The emperor?

How can this kingdom hold?

Expectedly, the silence is cutting out in the deafening air, this furtive silence, the silenced, and all the silenced disquiet, silent testaments to that always present fear, raising this curious transparent glass of silence, waiting, yet to be broken by their king.

Mother machine

2008-12-19T20:45:00.018+08:00

Last week there was a Straits Times story about a family with four kids. It’s a regular feature that seeks public donations for the paper’s school pocket money fund. An altruistic enough endeavour, and 8,000 needy kids receive their pocket money from the ST.

What is more illuminating, though, is the parallel narrative that runs along the portrayal of a family in financial need. A more subliminal narrative, but none the less potent.

As we read the article, we are led into the Lim’s ‘sparsely-furnished’ household and its assorted intimate details. Mr Lim is a contractor. He earns $1,600 a month. But it is insufficient, so he moonlights for another one, two, hundred dollars. Mrs Lim is a housewife. She stopped schooling after primary six, and as a result finds it hard to get a job. Both parents are constantly looking for additional means to provide for their children, with education being the foremost concern. ‘I can’t even read some of the children’s books; the words are so difficult,’ said Mrs Lim. Forget too, about tuition. ‘No money – no need to talk about tuition.’

These form a story, but there is another story, a subtle reminder.

When Lee Kuan Yew spoke at a conference in Singapore two months ago, he reaffirmed his long-held belief that intelligent babies came from intelligent mothers, and intelligent mothers are so, when they attain a university degree. It is an old belief, stretching back decades. Once, on the anniversary of the nation’s birth, Lee posited what he saw as a seminal crisis of national proportions: graduate mothers were failing in their duty to produce 1.65 quality children. As a consequence, technological progress would halt, the economy would suffer, government would falter, and the country would perish.

Never mind that it was a skewed study: ‘It was an awful truth!' Never mind that the debate is far from done: ‘You marry a non-graduate, then you’re going to worry whether your son and daughter is going to make it to the university.’ Never mind that intelligence comes in different forms, that intelligence is not the only reason to life, and that life is not all a digit in an economy. And economy does not a nation make.

Never mind that it was you who erected policies and penetrated society in such a forceful manner that it cannot but submit and mindblowingly come true.

As the Lim children grow up, they would find life a little harder. It has been designed to be so. Some schools would be out of reach. There would be little social and education support at school. An education system that is driven by private tuition would put them at a greater disadvantage. From young they would be streamed continually, every stream leading them a little further from that headstart, a little further from the university, before it all converges into a torrent of foregone conclusions.

All from a mere education system.

Imagine all the other systems, all those embracing arms and cajoling strokes of the government and its institutions that have spread themselves across the state and spellbound your minds, conjuring your foregone conclusions.

It doesn’t mean the children wouldn’t succeed; just that success would come in spite of the odds. That’s the way it’s made out to be. Looking around us, we get to see only a relative picture: your success relative to mine, her failure relative to yours. If she failed, it’s her fault. She didn’t work hard enough. If she met with success, it’s because of the system… too? The wonderful myth of meritocracy. So is it the individual or the system? I’ll know if it’s both when I can falsify Singapore. But the absolute numbers are kept away, hidden. The absolute successes are ensconced in the ivory echelons of the state. Occasionally, an exception to the system would be paraded in a triumphant celebration of meritocracy. It numbs our disquiet and lights up hope for the rest of us, and we forget that in a true meritocracy - a system not without its own problems and contradictions - these parades are redundant.

So, we have no sense of perspectives. Lee Kuan Yew was right when he said this in parliament when he was begging for more coins. We have no sense of perspectives because we have no way of weighing the relative with the absolute. This way Singapore is unfalsifiable. Things are so, because it says so. It says so because it can. It can, because it's Absolute Singapore.

When readers read about the Lim household, there’ll be genuine pathos, no doubt. But there’ll also be a contrapuntal voice, that admonishing voice conveyed in the looming timbre of the Father: Remember Singapore. Are you a graduate? Look at them and their plight. Are you like them?

Are you sure want to be like them?

Remember now and not too long ago, the tax penalties, the exorbitant hospital charges, the forced abortions, the clipped fallopian tubes, the public put-downs, the permanent stigmas? Forget those lives that could have led, for want of a better word, a better life.

Never mind a life, as long as you produce quality genes for your fatherland.

Society above self. The self is a machine.

Look at them and their plight. Are you a graduate? Remember this is Singapore. Know your place in society, and take your pick: strata, structures, strictures, streaming, schools and scholarships, Singapore society's strangleholds. Your station in life, closed and chosen even before you were born. Anything after is a continuous struggle against, the comparison with, the constant judgement, and a ceaseless proving of yourself. In the end, some may make it, many don't. Because one man had an obsession with utopia, and made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So as to achieve happiness, prosperity, and progress for our nation.

An earlier version was posted at theonlinecitizen.com

Molly has written about another family with a similar tale, this time inflected not just by class and sexuality, but also race and religion. I reckon only seditious bloggers dare take on these inflammatory topics. :) Nonetheless they're different pages in the same book.

Jobs aplenty!

2008-12-16T05:06:00.020+08:00

'Oh, yes, Mrs Stitch.'
'...I absolutely loved Waste of Time. We read it aloud at Blakewell. The headless abbott is grand ... I put it in the Prime Minister's room.'
'Did he read it?'
'Well, I don't think he reads much.'
'Terracotta is too long, madam, and there is no r.'

- Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

Newspaper headlines are naughty little things. They seduce readers with keywords, slogans and messages without needing readers to actually read the articles, especially when they are slightly esoteric and scantly erotic. And our mighty media can turn a local minority community's event into a State of the Number of Jobs Address, setting the scene, casting the gloom, holding up the light, galvanising a nation, a clarion call to arms, inspiring one and all, and all with an innocent headline.

But read on and danger lurks, for our media's content is neither for the timorous nor the critical. Despite the gloomy economic outlook, jobs are still aplenty. Hear, hear! Every ministry will rev up (rev up!) its hiring and spending plans. Spending plans! Because the bureaucracy can be expanded to absorb the jobless! (They who shall be exorcised by state employment!) And it won’t go into the red! Hallelujah! Most civil service organizations ride on the backs of the private sector, but fear not! Singapore’s civil service is the private sector! Anything to embellish the unemployment rate! Anything to render welfare A Dirty Word! And the Little Red Dot, World Class in a Garden City, A Gracious Society, A Nation in Harmony, Regardless of Race, Language, or Religion, Upturns the Downturn, arrives from Third World to First, Again and Again, Again and Triumphs, and Triumphs Ever Again!

O do not wonder why Mr Tharman said: "In the hotel sector, front line jobs, service jobs, quite a lot of jobs are available so Singaporeans need to have the confidence so that they can obtain those jobs. We can provide them some training," for he's Tha-Man! Never be tempted to think that the hotel and service industries are the most volatile during economic downturns! Never suggest that they've been filled up by Foreign Talents!

O do not refer to MOM's analysis of the third quarter of 2008, one that the Straits Times reports as signaling ‘the growing depth of the economic crisis’! Read not the warnings of analysts! (“…expect more … it is just the tip of the retrenchment iceberg.”) O Ssssshhhhh!!! We are no Oliver Twist!

Belief! Have faith in our A-team cabinet, the crème-de-la-crème of Singapore, with a fearless reputation so solid and fragile! They shall overcome, and overcome they shall! No one shall Do Them In! Indeed, no one can! The service sector is likely to continue to hire in the fourth quarter for the year-end festivities! And so it shall be, a happy Christmas and a Merriest New Year! Spend! Spend and All Shalt be Well! Spend, and Thou Shalt have Jobs for Now!

After that, what then? Fear ever not! The media can always craft another sunny headline! For, as the poet T.S. Eliot once opined, next year's words await another voice! As long as the headlines shine forth: “Finance Minister says many jobs still available despite weak economic outlook” in its myriad of colours, never mind that the articles are disjointed! Never notice that they bear little relevance to the original events! Just remember that there’re silver linings, even if they don’t make sense! As long as a minister says so, it therefore must be true! Our respected, nation-building media will never mislead its Dear (R)eaders with insidious propaganda or inept journalism!

O Read the headlines with our open eyes! Remember the headlines in our deepest minds! And recite the headlines till the day we die! With headlines in our heads, and hopes in our hearts of hearts, we shall all unite, Singapore Heartbeat! and march to the thoughts of Dear Eternal Mentor, and his forever beating heart! O well! Oh well! Orwell! This way we're all Singaporeans now! One People, One Nation, One Singapore!!!

(And the Little Red Dot, World Class in a Garden City, A Gracious Society, A Nation in Harmony, Regardless of Race, Language, or Religion, Upturns the Downturn, arrives from Third World to First, Again and Again, Again and Triumphs, and Triumphs Ever Again!)

The keys to.

2008-12-02T00:24:00.000+08:00

There's a story, always a story, behind, beneath, in the folds, that has to be told. They say that everyone has a story, always a story, that's like Finnegans Wake, A way a lone a last a loved a long the . . . that's like a neverending breath.

Here's mine: one day, a long time ago, they took away my magic flute. An end.

And along went too, my neverending breath. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! And so on, and so on, and the rest, is about the return of my lost music, a finish to that last exhalation.

And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.

- Finnegans Wake, James Joyce