November 2005

You Hold White Elephants, They Uphold The Law

Front page news of The New Paper on Sept 3, 05 blared: “So brazen – Singapore matchmaker offers sex tours to Vietnam, students offered as escorts, older cilents (sic) primed with cobra blood, gall bladder.” Tabloid sensation aside, what’s so brazen about all that when bride buying from Vietnam is legalized in these parts? That’s precisely why those sex-tours operators have come to be, if you ask me. Even I can tell you it’s all part of a rudimentary form of entrepreneurial aspiration stemming from the authorization of bride buying that’s been approved on these shores. I’m not saying it’s okay to have the sex-tour operators but I can well understand why. Just that the press makes it sound so incredulous and how there’s no ‘cause-&-effect’ behind it. Ah, but of course, they wouldn’t dare point the finger that way – towards the powerful hand big-big. That, we all know, and I oso understand.

That same day in September, I had gone to McDonald’s for a cuppa and noticed on their playing video screen, dubbed Channel M, an official Singapore clip on volunteer workers and the teaching profession. What was shocking was that in one of the segments in that clip was a clear shot of a subject making a purchase at KFC! And McDonald’s didn’t mind having that being screened in their premises! Can you imagine a video ad of, say, Gucci being showed in a Versace store?  Goes to show what it’s like in Singapore!

Corporate investors, take note. Yes, general rules and ethics of competition is one thing but national agendas are clearly another that overrides even basic marketing codes, as that incident clearly shows. And no one, but NO ONE, will bother to point this out to you except yours truly! Point is, despite a so-called ‘open-ness’ towards speaking up, no one DARES. And for a good reason too!

Bruce Sterling, the American sci-fi author, who was in town recently, blogged the following observation about Singapore: “Now that I’m out of Singapore, I reckon it’s safe to allege that Singapore has tidy, authoritarian, city-state machine politics. Presumably, I won’t get sued for libel for saying this. I mean, it’s the truth. For me, the unsettling aspect of Singapore isn’t their repression, which is subtle and always nicely dressed in legalisms. No, the weird part is the public exhortations, the regime’s Taoist PR campaign. They’ve got some kind of genuine Techno-Confucian Mandate of Heaven thing going on” (ST, Sept 8, 05). Wah, here’s a guy that goes beyond the national contention of ‘industrial peace’ to include the mystical. But then, I have previously used the word ‘omniscient’ on the system, so… See, I told ya!

“Netizens were abuzz over a news story about five junior college students who were suspended for making rude remarks about their teachers and vice-principal on their blogs,” The Sunday Times reported on Oct 2, 05. One Humster blogger, in refuting the argument that the authority’s intervention was a sign of curbing free speech to spread fear in cyberspace, said: “Free speech is great in the hands of a person expressing his views. But it can be abused in the hands of a person expressing his angst.” (That, by the way, was the main contention of the report.) Oh, let’s get Humster to join the grassroots-leaders gang if he isn’t part of it already. Yah hor, must tell people what is free speech and what is angst. The two should be mutually exclusive! We are really at just that level of comprehension after all. No angst please, we are free speech advocates!

Two Indonesian maids, who were convicted of killing a local businesswoman-employer here, escaped the gallows. The murder charge was reduced to manslaughter. The judge “was convinced both women suffered a depression disorder, caused by loneliness, homesickness and money woes (and) an abnormality of mind that impaired their mental responsibility for the crime” (ST, Sept 6, 05). I do think that the judge’s verdict to spare the two women from gallows is good for international relations too. Good work, judge. After all, we must never lose sight of industrial peace in Singapore. Not that we don’t understand the plight of abused maids here in Singapore and why there’s so much bullying of subordinates on these shores. But shhhh!!!

“Hold that cynicism, please” – Ms. Chua Lee Hoong wrote in the ST on Sept 12, 05, referring to ‘the white elephant debate’. (Eight white elephant cutouts were placed on a road-divider outside the as-yet-unopened Buangkok MRT station as an alleged mischievous reaction to the PM’s comment that “we do not squander money on big white elephants that become financial burdens”.) Chua elaborated forth: “If the perpetrators are found to have been (mischievous) grassroots activists with the (ruling) People’s Action Party, and they are left off with a mild warning, will people say, ‘Double standards. It would have been different if it had been an opposition party’? If they are levied a stiff fine, will people say, ‘Oh, it’s all for show’? In other words, will the people insist on, Heads I win, tails you lose?”

Love the question. I feel that all my gripes are hereon justified by that show of petty national neurosis. Even Chua thinks there is a political angle to something as sundry as a prank. So it is a common sentiment in Singapore, then, that we do have a win-win rationale whenever we are given the opportunity to be arbiter. Of course, she will candidly ask the sensible question without bothering with the root-cause. And of course, if editorially spun in the national press, the argument will, at best, be a hen and egg situation. But like I’ve pointed out before, there is Cantonese saying that reflects the Biblical truth  – we are made of the like-ness of God, as in – like father, like son. And it’s never the other way around. So scowl on, all ye sng muay brothers and sisters of this uniquely win-win fine city… I’m afraid heads they win, tails you lose. And they WILL turn around and ask you why you behave in that sng muay way. I do the blink-blink. They do blinkers.

Chua ended her essay pointing out that “the police will have to show that it is impartial in enforcing the law, regardless of which political parties are involved”. Key word there – show. I think Chua herself has already mentioned the word in its appropriate context cited above. Don’t think I need to say more.

Thanks, Freud!