National Gay Parades

For a country that believes that it isn’t ready for legalizing homosexuality, Singapore is pretty gay. Every year we put up the campiest, kitschiest, most gay event this side of the Mardi Gras called the National Day Parade. And to ensure the very highest levels of gay quotient we appoint drama queens like Dick Lee, Glen Goei and Ivan Heng as ‘creative directors’. We then get thousands of people dressed in a colourful assortment of chicken feathers, tin foil and body-hugging sequined tops to frolic with each other as fireworks light the night sky. Every performer has enough make-up to fit right at home in Changi Village on a Saturday night while the SAF parachuters demonstrate that it is literally “raining men”. And to complete the wet dream, men dressed in uniform march in and out of the stadium waving their big oily guns at everyone. NDP is gay. It is as gay as Elton John dancing in black leather thongs in San Francisco. Its time the NDP planning committee comes out of its closet.

And that is what I love about this goddamn country; the contradictions. Ask any conservative Singaporean about whether we should change the way NDP is celebrated to, say a mega concert and a big BBQ, and you’ll get a chorus of protests. These folks, so resistant to change, prefer to cling on to the gayest possible mode of celebration.

The latest media hoo-ha (the local media likes to create fake controversies to fill up its pages in the absence of investigative journalism) is the howls of protests against the new NDP song What do you see? by local rock band Electrico. It’s not the greatest song in the world but it marks a progressive change from the rest of the kitschy nonsense like Count on Me Singapore or Stand Up for Singapore. People who tear up when singing the latter two songs most probably also own The Sound of Music DVD (director’s cut), ABBA’s Greatest Hits, and know the words to every Barry Manilow song…ever. Nothing makes me more agitated, more unpatriotic than the strains of “there was a time when people said that Singapore won’t make it…but we did”. And when its sung by 60,000 flag-waving Singaporeans who queued overnight for their tickets all dressed in their red $9.90 Giordano T-shirts, well it’s just like a sweet natured version of the Nuremberg Rally isn’t it?

NDPs are depressing. They remind me of everything that is orchestrated, superficial, rehearsed, practiced, and devised from top-down in Singapore. They are artificial cauldrons of whipped up frenzy and heightened emotions where quick spasms of ecstasy are mistaken for patriotism. Not too dissimilar from how churches use music to stir up mass feelings of elated bliss. At the end of the day NDPs are pure theatre.

 I would like to put out a suggestion to readers. Celebrate National Day differently this year. Think back to your childhood. Go to a location, a space or a building that first springs to mind. It could be an old estate, a torn down building, an empty parking lot where your old school used to stand, the beach or even a lonely road you used to take to primary school. Ponder for a while how far you have come since, how far this country has come, and what sacrifices it has made to achieve what it has. Ask yourself if these sacrifices have been worthwhile, both for yourself and the country. Get to know yourself a bit. I promise you, it’ll be more meaningful than watching grown men jiggling in tights and foundation.

Exploring Backyards

Many years ago, in her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, film theorist Laura Mulvey described two main ways in which women were portrayed on screen – “voyeuristically” and “fetishistically”. The former portrayed women as the archetypal ‘whore”, while the later saw them portrayed as “madonnas”.

 Feminist studies have developed since. We have learnt about the “male gaze”, that is, the way things or bodies are arranged for men to look at, and how the female body is often used as a vehicle for a variety of purposes such as sex, violence, beauty, suppression and marginalisation. And in this post-feminist, post-AWARE age, it is always surprising to see good old fashion sexism.

The advertisement above is for Malaysia’s new budget airlines Firefly. It’s not an obscure advertisement and can be found in the 6 Jul 2009 issue of TODAY. It exhorts us to explore Malaysia’s ‘backyard’ but instead of stereotypical visuals of sleepy idyllic kampongs, we have an array of air hostesses’ bums to choose from. More than merely sexually suggestive, it is an indication of how the female body has also come to signify Asian culture and how heterosexual ideas of sex still remain.

Ever since the late 1970s, scholars have observed how colonial perspectives have always cast Asian or Eastern culture as a feminine one. Docile, submissive and subservient, the mild mannered natives often served the needs of white men. Such perspectives have, of course, not died but have been reincarnated as neo-colonial mindsets that present Asian culture and women as objects of fun and delight for white men, most effectively illustrated by the famous Singapore Girl in pictures such as this:

 

But while such overt displays of sexism are not uncommon, the Firefly advert seems to hint at something more. The bum that is the object of sexual desire must belong to a woman, and not a man. Malaysia has several sites of tradition from religiosity to patriarchal sentiments, and they continue to impress upon everyone, both in law and in advert, that anal sex is only permissible between man and woman. The woman’s body has become a signpost for a society’s conservative fantasies.

It is too easy to observe that sex sells or that one must capitalise on one’s selling points. These types of arguments are fine for big soul-less corporations that only care for the bottomline. But as communities made up of women, children and other vulnerable people, it is important to reflect on how we are portraying ourselves to others. It is a delicious irony that capitalism and mass consumerism have succeeded where liberalism has failed - displaying sex and sexuality in public spaces.

But as the global financial crisis has shown, while market logic and capitalism may still be the best methods for the distribution of wealth and advancement of societies, they need to be regulated and checked. And if this is true for financial instruments, it is also true for advertisments. Especially airline ones.

Citizen Shoppers

Singapore is a nation trapped in a shopping mall.

If new malls like ION and Orchard Central are not spouting out like fresh H1N1 cases, then old ones like Wisma Atria and Tanglin Mall are constantly going under the knife for a new lease of life. As a people, we are obsessed not with buying lots of things, but with the shopping experience. Sure, we enjoy the act of purchasing, but buying alone does not drive Singaporeans to malls. It’s the long-drawn foreplay of purchase that we crave.

We crave the experience of being in a crowd, of being mesmerized by bright coloured lights, of being entranced but uncommitted to fresh shinny shoes, clothes, belts, bags and the lot. We love to play the role of the urban butterfly, flitting from one cold mannequin to another, absorbing the sensory experience of loud bad music, reveling in the masochistic joy of the dull ache in our feet while secretly enjoying the annoyance from blank sales assistants. It’s the ultimate non-confrontational, passive activism. It is so Singaporean.

 Arguments from nurture are always tricky. Do dog owners grow to look like their Chihuahuas, or do they choose Chihuahuas that look like them? Similarly, do we love shopping because we’re so damn politically neutered or does shopping divert our energy from politics and civil society? It is not a completely pedantic question because while the joys of mass consumption have indeed spawned generations of mindless consumers everywhere in the world, it has also produced an anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation, anti-establishment backlash we don’t get here.

From groups like The Third Position, Peoples Global Action, or publications like Adbusters magazine and No Logo, it is clear that the consumer experience has its fair share of heretics. But why not in Singapore?

Could it be because our entire national survival is predicated on shopping? Here in Singapore, national survival is synonymous with economic survival. Economic survival is only possible with capitalism and globalization. Singapore is the ultimate ‘capital city’ and we have to shop to safeguard our national sovereignty.

And we really do perform as Singapore citizens as we move from mall to mall, sucking in the stale air-con, gazing the endless advertising façade of beautiful people looking out to nowhere in particular. It is pure politics in motion. We hear the PM saying something on TV but don’t quite listen hard enough. We have PAP MPs posing in carefully crafted photos in The Straits Times as they advertise their competence and grassroots connection. We are captivated by the officious droning from Parliament because like elevator music we cannot escape it but cannot quite explain why we want to.

It’s wrong to say that shopping is Singapore’s favourite pastime. A pastime is something you do when you’re free, when you’re released from the chores of life, something you do for pleasure. Here in Singapore, we live a shopper’s existence.

Tweaking the NCMP scheme

I have a recurring dream. Lying in a beautiful green meadow, the fluffy clouds suddenly turn into rich mocha ice-cream. The sky begins to drizzle crushed nuts and M&Ms on the ice-cream as great big dollops of it fall into my open mouth. The flowers on the ground open up their petals to reveal cheap Cadbury chocolate as the petals turn into Kettle potato crisps. I eat and eat without ever getting sick. I’ve never known such bliss. And then I wake up. The echoing void in me is resounding. The disappointment is crushing.

And so I felt a sense of déjà vu on Wednesday when PM Lee Hsien Loong announced proposed changes to the country’s electoral system. This was to encourage a wider range of views in Parliament, including opposition and non-government views.

The changes were in three forms. Firstly, to increase the number of Opposition MPs in Parliament to at nine for every term; secondly, to make the Nominated MP scheme a permanent one; and thirdly, to increase the number of Single-Member Constituencies (SMCs), reduce the number of six-member Group Representative Constituencies (GRCs), and increasing the number of five-member GRCs. 

The public reaction has generally been positive. Academics, observers and commentators have noted that these are small steps towards a more open political sphere.

But why announce the changes now?

According to PM Lee, these changes are announced now in order that they may be debated and discussed before the next General Elections scheduled by 2011.

But could there be some strategic agenda behind it?

There has been a clear and irrefutable trend in neighbouring countries in recent times towards greater democratization. Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia have all undergone greater political liberalization in the past few years, and have seen greater Oppositional representatives in respective parliaments. More importantly, such events have been closely watched by young Singaporeans. On platforms like Internet forums and public seminars, many Singaporeans have openly wondered why Singapore has not yet achieved such political liberalization and when would it do so? There can be no doubt that the People’s Action Party (PAP) is aware of such aspirations from the young.

This must be worrying for the PAP. Fearing that amongst the young and restless there may be a change-for-change’s sake attitude, PM Lee has made a pre-emptive strike.

These changes may be a matter of keeping up with the Jones’, politically speaking. It makes better sense to have these pre-emptive changes before the comparisons between the one-party state and more politically pluralistic neighbours become too loud, thus acting like a political valve that releases pent up pressure from idealistic young Singaporeans clamouring for more Opposition in Parliament. Such a move ensures that Singapore’s political system, while not completely liberal, does not lag too far behind the zeitgeist.

The introduction of more Opposition into Parliament must surely be to sharpen the response, debating skills and reasoning of PAP backbenchers. Some of the reasoning of PAP MPs in the last few days has been truly shocking not only for their intellectual poverty but also for their lack of original thought. PM Lee must surely be uncomfortably aware of this. However, will more Opposition lead to better debates?

I doubt it. It is more likely that the current bunch of PAP MPs will develop a siege mentality and become even more defensive. The lines between us-and-them will be more clearly drawn.

Lastly, the announcement of such changes also comes before the APEC Summit in November. This would invariable win the city-state some good press coverage given the inevitable reportage on the restrictions to protest groups which will be descending on to Singapore.

Of the three changes, the increase in NCMP seats has garnered the most attention. This is because, together with the compulsory nine NMP seats, there will be a guaranteed 18 non-PAP MPs in Parliament. This is unprecedented since 1965.

The number of NCMPs will now be increased from a maximum of six to nine. There are three real consequences.

Firstly, the message sent to voters will be this: there is no need to cast your ballot for the opposition because some will get in as NCMPs anyway. In actual terms this would spell a dip in the popular vote for the Opposition. It is a psychological gain for the PAP.

Secondly, with more NCMP seats up for grabs, different Opposition parties will find it harder to agree amongst themselves which constituencies to contests and which to avoid. There would be more 3-corner or even 4-corner fights. This would of course split the Opposition vote and benefit the PAP. Take for example Aljunied GRC in the last election. The PAP team won 56 per cent of the votes, while the Worker’s Party won 44 per cent. With the promise of two NCMP seats up for grabs in GRCs, other Opposition parties will be tempted to contest in Aljunied too as it is popularly perceived as the weakest GRC. This would surely cut the Worker’s Party’s 44 per cent share.

Thirdly, meanwhile there are also strategic gains too. NCMPs have limited voting rights. The more Opposition MPs that come under the NCMP scheme means that there will be more opposition MPs in Parliament who cannot vote on constitutional matters, public funds, no confidence motion or to remove the President. Ultimately it means more Opposition MPs with fewer voting rights.

 Sigh. Dreams are a bitch. 

Making the Opposition’s Case; or Shoot. Foot. Yours.

The level of debate in Parliament has never been particularly high. With PAP MPs the overwhelming majority, robust debate in the house is as common as entertainment is on Mediacorp.

And the government knows this too. When birds of the same feather flock together, all dressed in white plumage, there is bound to be group-think and very shoddy reasoning. Which is why the NMP scheme was introduced in 1990 to inject quality into parliamentary exchange. Nevertheless we’re still susceptible to the occasional clanger. 

Low Thia Khiang’s suggestion two days ago that an effective opposition can provide checks and balances on the ruling PAP party created a storm in the proverbial teacup.

The Worker’s Party leader was speaking in response to Goh Chok Tong’s recent teaser that the government would refine the political system to keep pace with society. Any changes however, according to Goh, needed to abide by three things – fairness to all political parties (at this point I had to duck because the flying pig zoomed dangerously overhead); ensuring a strong government; and protecting harmony, unity and economic growth.

For Low, a strong opposition served as viable recourse for Singaporeans if the PAP were to a) abuse its power; b) trample on people’s rights; and c) become corrupt.

As sure as the sun rises and The Straits Times winning SPH’s newspaper of the year, PAP backbenchers rose to rebut Low. Indranee Rajah and Josephine Teo being the most prominent of the lot. Rajah argued that Low’s premise was flawed. According to her,

 He’s really saying just in case PAP becomes corrupt in the future, then people had better vote for the opposition now. But if you apply the same logic, then the argument can also be made that if you vote in the opposition, then they may become corrupt in the future, so in order to avoid that, you might as well vote for PAP now.

 Going by Mr Low’s argument, the logical outcome is that in every other country in the world with an opposition it should be squeaky clean, and in Singapore, in which a large majority of the Parliament comes from a single party, then Singapore should be the most corrupt country in the world. That as we know is not the case.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/431930/1/.html

Firstly, this is probably the most selective form of arguing one can hope to witness. Instead of addressing Low’s overall argument – that a strong opposition would be a viable alternative should the PAP falter – she chose to harp on just one point, corruption, in the hope that this would be enough to discredit his broader argument. It’s an old lawyer’s trick; find a loose thread in your opponent’s argument and then put the spotlight on it, however small the thread, in order to cast doubt over the rest of the argument.

It may work fine in the courtroom but such forms of intellectual disingenuousness really have no place in Parliament. They lack earnestness and sincerity, and rely on facetious point-scoring. Cheap lawyer tricks are like two-bit magicians, they bedazzle the kids but thinking adults ought to know better.

Secondly, while she correctly argues that a two-party system does not guarantee that there will be no corruption, she goes on to shoot her own foot with her reasoning. Just because a two-party system is no guarantee, does not mean that a one-party system necessarily is! Just because our one-party system has been relatively corruption free does not mean it will remain this way forever. It’s your garden variety red herring argument. A bit like saying, oh, white bread is no good so that means brown bread is very good. It makes as much sense as Zoe, Fann and the three brain cells they share.

Josephine Teo’s contribution was not much better. She wondered, 

Is it better for Singapore to support an opposition – even if it is not up to mark – in the hope that it could govern well when it overthrows a corrupt PAP? Or is it better to make sure that the PAP does not fail Singaporeans, that it has the strongest team to serve Singaporeans?  

This is a typical false dilemma fallacy. Why can’t we nurture a strong opposition that is able to takeover if the PAP fails? Why do we have to choose between a weak opposition and a dominant PAP? But to push the envelope further, what would Teo propose we do if for some reason the PAP fails even after all our best efforts to ensure it doesn’t? What then? No contingency plan? Doesn’t sound very PAP-like does it?

In the end, while the MPs debated back and forth over the last two days, the best argument for a strong opposition came, ironically, from the shoddy reasoning of the PAP MPs themselves. Low didn’t really need to push too hard. All he had to do was to dangle the bait and let the PAP MPs, so lacking in debating experience, make the case for him. To be fair, he probably did this unwittingly given his awkwardness as a public speaker. But the point he made, intentionally or not, remains – the case for a strong viable opposition is made most forcefully by PAP MPs who do not believe that the PAP will ever fail.

 

Wong’s Last Word

By now everyone would have read DPM Wong Kan Seng’s interview on religion, politics and civil society. If we’re truthful, it was less of an interview and more of the PAP government trying to have the last word on the AWARE saga.

Knowing the precise moment to have the last word is, of course, an art. You speak too early and your words will be drowned by the on-going row - the impact is lost. Speak  too late and everyone would have moved on - you become irrelevant. Just as timing is vital for comedians, so too for politicians. 

It’s an art that the PAP government has long mastered. With the aid of a compliant press, Wong’s rhetoric is uncritically accepted as the government’s “genuinely centrist positions on such matters” (The Straits Times, editorial, 16 May 09). The problem is not whether the government is centrist or not. I think it is, but saying the PAP is centrist is like saying vanilla is ’ok’ – true but hardly earthshaking. The question of whether this “centrist” rhetoric is riddled with internal contradictions begs to be asked, and without a critical press we are left mired in analytical poverty.

Wong made three key points in his “interview”. Firstly, religion and politics don’t mix. Secondly, the government does not respond to lobbying. Thirdly, the local media’s coverage of the event was too “extensive and breathless”.

The first point was blunt to the point of being meaningless. We already have laws that prevent religion from mixing with politics – the 1991 Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act and the ban on religious-based political parties. With these laws, pulpit politics and religious politicking are outlawed so the point is a non-starter.

The AWARE saga was not about religion mixing with politics but with civil society. It was about a religious agenda hijacking a secular-liberal NGO. And this is where things get murky for there is surely nothing wrong with religion playing a part in civil society since, as Wong himself admitted, religious groups may be a force for social good for the community.

Beyond this, it’s highly unrealistic to expect a firewall between religion and politics. Reality is more complex than that. After all, our political views are influenced by a variety of elements like our class, ethnicity, as well as religion, if any. The real question is how religious folks can translate their religious-political views into secular terms such that people of different faiths as well as free thinkers can engage with them. So, instead of saying that homosexuality is wrong because the Bible says so, they should say the majority of Singaporeans are conservative and many are not ready to see these alternative lifestyles paraded in front of them. Only then can there be dialogue and reason-based argument.

Wong’s second point on lobbying is puzzling. Of course, like any severe father, the PAP government doesn’t like to have its authority challenged. Fathers don’t like whining children, patriarchal states don’t like lobbying. But wait a minute, isn’t the Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP) scheme an institutionalized process of procedural lobbying? The NMP scheme began in 1992 but when the response was disappointing, Wong himself, then leader of the house, suggested that different constituencies could nominate expert individuals to speak for them in Parliament. These constituencies are divided into business, arts and culture, academia and so on. This is lobbying in all but name.

Furthermore, Thio Su Mien and her lot have shown that lobbying has worked. Initially dismissive of her accusations that the Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE) programme promoted lesbianism, the MOE has now suspended AWARE as an external vendor of CSE. Wong may be strong in his anti-lobbying rhetoric but the reality shows that not only does it take place but, more encouragingly, it also produces results!    

Lastly, Wong believes that the press was excessive in the AWARE coverage. Personally, I think the wide coverage was justified given that the whole episode contained several crucial themes that served as signposts for where the country was heading but I can understand how someone totally uninterested in the saga may see it as excessive. However the fault lies in the fact that we have no press diversity.

If we had press diversity, we would have had alternatives to turn to if we had found the AWARE saga overblown or tedious. Moreover, press diversity would also have served as a check against the biases of newspapers.

But instead we have a homogeneous ‘nation-building’ press. And as we have seen, such a press, without any viable competitor, runs the risk of excessive coverage and unchecked ideological bias because it has no idea of what people want beyond what it can offer. The government encourages competition in every sector but the press and it’s just delightfully ironic that the government is complaining about something it has nurtured.

The problem with wanting the last word is that people tend to have the time and space to dwell on it. And if you don’t say something smart or pertinent, it really shows.

It ain’t easy being Singaporean

It ain’t easy being Singaporean.

Your life is run by a series of acronyms like ERP, COE, CPF, PSLE, NS, PMS; you have to endure the relentless tropical heat; you have nothing to read but The Straits Times; your national culture consists of shopping and whining (I’m nothing if not patriotic); and it’s still considered a crime to strangle Gurmit Singh. You get called names like ‘little red dot’, ‘useless piece of snot’ and even Jacky Chan craps all over you. Let’s face it, when a man who made his living jumping around like a monkey says you have “no self-respect”, well, it ain’t been a good week.

 But still, you try. The great Romantic poet John Keats once wrote:

It matters not what the crowd bays

Or what the angry gods may say

For all that matters is the heart

And the values you cling hard

What beautiful lines. It means that regardless of what people may say or think about you, what matters is what you believe in. Words deserving of colourful embroidery indeed. Ok, I completely made the lines up. Keats never said that. I could have looked him up but I really can’t be bothered. Laziness is one of my many charms. But don’t let that take anything from the message. It’s still pertinent.

And so I try, as a citizen, to narrow the gulf between our national values and what we do as a country. After all, if morality means practicing what you preach, then being a great country means practicing what you teach. Under George Bush, America tore up their Constitution, practiced torture, invaded the wrong country and became the pariah of the international community. Under Barack Obama, America is heeding the call of its ideals and founding principles and, in the process, is becoming great again.  

I think a little red dot can be great too. I think greatness is not limited to the measure of size and might, but the loftiness of one’s ideals and one’s faithfulness to them. By this definition, Singapore can be great.

And so I turn my eyes towards our ‘Shared values’. Phrases like “Nation before community and society above self” ring so sweet. They stir up a sense of pride deep inside. They make me want to do something. Oh shut up, it’s true. They really do make me want to give of myself.

But then I see our ministers’ legendary salaries and their need to “facilitate the recruitment and retention of the quality of talent we need for the government and public sector.” My enthusiasm becomes more flaccid than an 80 year old man in a cold shower.

What about Shared value #3 -“Community support and respect for the individual”? Pretty uncontroversial, we can’t go wrong here. 377A, AWARE new exco, Thio Su Mien – enuff said.

What about Asian values and Confucian ethics ? I think to myself, well, perhaps cynicism aside, the clarion call to be moral, ethical and righteous, regardless of their political intent, is worth heeding. My cynicism is about to slip away when I also recall our on-going manufacture of landmines, their sale to war-torn countries, our economic dealings with the Myanmar junta, our medical offerings to Robert Mugabe, and most recently, our welcome of North Korean President Kim Yong Nam. Ah well, you know what they say, we’re just a little red dot and must look out for our national interests.

Pragmatism is a wonderful device. It allows you to do anything you want, however you want, and then blame it on reality. It’s an excuse for abandoning higher morals and ethics without looking like a dick. It makes you a man because you’re seen to be ‘realistic’ and ’grounded’. It’s the ultimate backstage pass, allowing you to bypass everyone to get straight to the goodies. And being pragmatic also means that you have to pretend to have values, whether shared or of the Asian variety because there are idealistic saps out there who, believe it or not, romanticise principles. It’s just pragmatic to be an ethical Confucianist.

It’s hard being Singaporean. It’s damn hard. Screw it. I’m going shopping.

Terror-rible Experts

If there is one thing worse than terrorists, its terrorist experts. Ever since Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ began, every half-baked academic/analyst has fashioned himself into a media whore ‘terrorist expert’. It’s a highly rewarding job in this post September 11 world. Governments are jittery, people are panicky and all you need to do is go ‘Boo! Terrorists!’ and you’ll get more media attention than Thio Su Mien walking naked down Holland Village. (That may actually qualify as an act of terrorism).

‘Terrorism experts’ today remind me of snake oil sales men of yore. They talk about ailments they know absolutely nothing about, holler in thunderous tones, warn that the itch in your inner thigh marks the return of SARS, and then recommend cheap cooking oil to rub over your body. All for $10 bucks a vial. Fear is what keeps ‘terrorist experts’ in business. Without the fear of IMMINENT ATTACK, where are they going to get their funding?

And it’s all so simple. Everyone can be a ‘terrorist expert’. All you need to do is to speak vaguely and be as ambiguous as possible. Here, let me give it a go.

 “Mas Selamat is a terrorist with a high level of skills, a man with deep resolve. Only a small number of such terrorists have the ability and know-how, and it shows that Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia is under persistent danger. JI is a group that’s always expanding,… always working and he’s been able to connect with some JI members.”

There, how hard was that? I said absolutely nothing that cannot be lifted of any newspaper. I must be a ‘terrorist expert’. So how did I fare in the Basic Terrorist Expert Test? Check with the model answer below.

 “Mas Selamat is a terrorist with a very high degree of experience, and a man with tremendous determination. There are very few terrorists of that competence and capability, and it demonstrates that Singapore and the region faces a continuous threat. JI is a group that’s constantly growing,… constantly active and he’s been able to link up with a number of JI members”

 Dr Rohan Gunaratna [http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/427853/1/.html]

Not bad eh? I’m getting my Anti-terrorism Proficiency Badge in the mail tomorrow. Will sew it next to my crotch. You kids can play this game at home too. Just circle the appropriate word: Mas Selamat/Osama bin Laden/Derek Hong is a very dangerous man. He has bombed an airport/twin towers/gay spas to spread fear and to establish a caliphate/KFC empire/24 hour chapel over the region. He is very skilled and hardened, and is a high ranking member of the very insidious/happy-go-lucky/self-help group called the Jema’ah Islamiyah/al Qaeda/Chingay Parade. He is currently building a network of terror/call girls/terror call girls in order to infiltrate Singapore/Southeast Asia/the universe and beyond. He must be closely watched.

 If these office-dwelling air-con loving pot-belly ‘experts’ are so knowledgeable, how come they could not even pin-point the country Mas Selamat was in? He’s in Java, no he’s in Pattaya; he’s in Surabaya, perhaps Batam. There was more confusion amongst these experts than MOE and the sex education programme!

Intelligence work is boring. It’s about following leads that 90 per cent of the time lead nowhere. It’s about undercover work and monotonous stakeouts, missing your family and wishing you didn’t sign up with the Ministry of Home Affairs as you bake in the hot sun watching innocuous-looking people. The real experts are ISD intelligence officers and grunts who will not be named because they cannot be named, not some well-paid blowhard talking a lot but saying absolutely nothing.

How to win an EOGM and lotsa friends

So Josie and her Pussycats have been slapped down. The Christian community is reeling in half shame, half relief. The liberals are having drunken sex, the conservatives are crossing themselves, and we’re all happy that Singapore civil society is not always about whether or not it’s ok to eat sharks’ fin soup. Oh the excitement, the thrill, the sight of thousands of women screaming and jostling at a non-SALE event.

 The lull after the AWARE EOGM is like the ennui that comes after the end of the EPL season. What do we do now? Who’s going to entertain us? How are we going to fill up the echoing void we call life? Perhaps we can ponder over the invaluable lessons this big catfight has thrown up. After all, retrospection is best done as early as possible, right before hindsight sets in.

 Things could have been very different. If the vote went the other way we would be looking at a very conservative AWARE. So where did Josie and her Pussycats go wrong? Five easy lessons on how not to lose an EOGM and win many many friends.

Leave your teddy bear at home

Religious beliefs and private morality are like worn-out urine-stained teddy bears from your childhood. It provides comfort and assurance. It gives you that warm feeling that can only be replicated when a Catholic priest touches your bum. But you don’t go about carrying your old teddy bears to the office or dinner parties. Like teddy bears, religious morality should be kept at home or the church, and not paraded like you’re a 5 year old child all over again. By all means, play with your teddy bear at home. Feed it, talk to it, stroke it, hug it, pray with it, but don’t wave its arm at me and ask me to say ‘hi’ to it.

Be open about your girlfriends

Having six members of your exco coming from the same church is not a tactical takeover. It’s a classical psychoanalytical explanation for lesbianism. Look, you share the same background, come from the same ethnic group, you glance furtively at each other, you all dress alike, you deny you know each other, you protect each other, you yell at others who yell at one of you… let’s face it, Freud will tell you to get off his couch and stop wasting his time. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having girl cliques. The ‘old guard’ is a well known girl clique. But be open about it.

Don’t sell fear  

The key galvanizing point in this whole saga was that AWARE was promoting lesbianism and homosexuality in schools. The fear was that there would be “an entire generation of lesbians”. It’s a bit like saying teaching mathematics in school will lead to an entire generation of mathematicians. But that’s the Christian right for you, small on reason, big on fear. Religion is basically the selling of two valuable commodities – fear and guilt. If you can launder these two emotions in tandem, people gladly do anything you ask.

In truth, the sex education programme by AWARE was devised with the consultation of teachers and religious leaders. But this fact was an inconvenient truth for the Christian right. Furthermore, the quoted passages about keeping the term ‘homosexuality’, ‘sexy’ and ‘lesbianism’ neutral were not even in the actual syllabus but from the instructor’s guide which students had no access to. Finally, as one sex educator observed, teachers spent 30 minutes talking about abstinence and only about 2 minutes on homosexuality, but guess which whips the Christian right into a frenzy?

Your Pastor must not be living in La-la Land

Church of our Saviour Pastor Derek Hong was quoted as saying “It’s not a crusade against the people but there’s a line that God has drawn for us, and we don’t want our nation crossing that line.” Well, Pastor Numbnuts, Christians in Singapore only make up 14.9 per cent of the population, so your God is hardly in the majority. To believe that your Christian God has drawn a line in the sand for Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims and atheists is nothing short of arrogant. Our friend was this close to having the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act shoved up where the sun don’t shine. 

Your puppet master must not, preferably, be a psycho

I think God has a Thio Su Mien complex. Is there anyone quite as breathtakingly egoistic and self-centred as the Nutty Professor? I mean calling yourself ‘Feminist Mentor’ should be a crime against imagination. Pretty soon everyone’s going to use the term to denote authority, even ministers! Oh, ok scratch that.

But the lesson here is simple. If you want to orchestrate a takeover, make sure your puppet master is not completely psycho. She believed she could not ‘surface’ in the early stages and she believes this battle is nothing less than a spiritual warfare between Good and Evil, and that the Devil is behind Constance Singham, Braema Mathi, Dana Lam and the rest of the ‘old guard’. But worse of all, she actually believes that her successful career makes her a feminist.

Illusions of grandeur are nothing new. Napoleon, Hitler, Moses, parking wardens, they all suffer from it. It’s a personality defect that’s all too common. But when it’s coupled to another equally common defect – the belief that one is absolutely 100 per cent unrelentingly morally right, it becomes a very dangerous combination. Dr Thio is not uncommon in believing she is great. She is not uncommon in believing she is on the right side of morality; all Christians feel that way. She only became such a public caricature when she exhibited both defects simultaneously.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Josie and her Pussycats lost public sympathy because of two personalities – Derek Hong and Thio Su Mien. The emergence of these two people effectively swung public opinion against the ‘new exco’. Dr John Chew, head of the National Council of Churches, was forced come out and distance the Christian faith from Hong, while thanks to Thio’s “respect your elders” outburst, Khaw Boon Wan’s silly suggestion to ship our parents to JB actually sounds reasonable.

At the end of the day, when Josie and Kittycats look back, they would do well to realise that they’ve been arrogant, misguided and utterly intolerant. But unfortunately, as with all folks who believe they are doing God’s work on earth, they’ll think that the sinners of Singapore are hardened of heart and just aren’t ready to embrace the word of God. Amen.

Singapore’s ‘Culture Wars’: Fragmenting Politics

Every Singaporean longs for the day when ‘race’ and ‘religion’ cease to be markers of difference in society. And to a large extent they have. For most post-1965 Singaporeans, the politics of ‘race’ and ‘religion’ are but ancient and anecdotal lessons hermeneutically sealed in history textbooks unlike the stark realities of a bygone era their parents grew up in. Through a combination of stern warnings from the People’s Action Party (PAP) government and institutions like the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act of 1991, race and religion have never played a significant role in civil society or electoral politics since independence. That’s the good news.

 

The not-so-bad news is that new issues have emerged over the last decade or so to replace the traditional faultlines of ‘race’ and ‘religion’. A growing list of hot button issues like homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, the casinos, censorship and so on, has become integral to the politics of identity in contemporary Singapore. These hot-button issues have a tendency to divide Singaporeans, irrespective of age, gender or ethnicity, based on their ideological worldview of these lifestyle choices.

Such politics of division are, of course, not new. The American ‘culture wars’ first caught the popular imagination when presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan delivered his famous campaign speech to the Republican National Convention in 1992. Referring to liberal ideologies over controversial issues as abortion, affirmative action, and arts funding, Buchanan urged Republicans to declare “a war for the nation’s soul.” In his book Culture Wars: The Struggle for America, sociologist James Davison Hunter examined the phenomenon as the struggle between the ‘orthodox’ (conservative or traditional) and ‘progressive’ (liberal or modern) camps in spheres of interests like law, education, arts, the family, and politics. For Hunter, the ‘culture wars’ were unlike conventional religious and cultural conflicts that historically divided the nation between the religious and the secular but along ‘orthodox’ and ‘progressive’ ideological worldviews that cut across established moral and religious communities.

These hot button issues are complex because they contain a wide variety of polarities. Take the AWARE saga for example. The conflict currently playing out is not just a straightforward struggle between the pro-gay and anti-gay camps, but also between orthodox and progressive Christians, not to mention between civic secularists and cultural conservatives. The 2007 debate over Section 377A of the Penal Code was similarly complex. The casino debate in 2004 was also more than a conflict between religious and non-religious people but also between moral conservatives and cultural libertarians, and between conservative economists and economic pragmatists. On the immediate horizon is the workshop on so-called ‘end-of-life’ issues by the euthanasia expert Philip Nitschke to be held next month. Dr Nitschke, head of Exit International, a centre that promotes euthanasia, will speak on concerns such as advanced medical directives and will be sure to provoke a backlash.

Simply put, as Singapore confirms its status as a global city, as it engages with the growing influx of ideas and institutions, it will be increasingly become more fragmented along ‘orthodox’ and ‘progressive’ worldviews which, in turn, have a multitude of agenda and interests behind them.

This is why Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Vivian Balakrishnan’s recent observation in the wake of the AWARE saga misses the point. He was quoted in the local media as saying: 

If you allow these single issues [the gay issue] to dominate and hijack your agenda, I think you are not going succeed and it’s going to be counter productive.

But such ‘single issues’ are both deep and wide in terms of the agenda behind them. 377A and the casino debate were also ‘single issues’ that carried deeply held beliefs by a wide variety of camps. These hot button issues are not ‘single issues’ or one-off debates but symptoms of an on-going conflict between orthodoxy and progressives.

This conflict may not necessarily be a bad thing. These hot button issues will make policy-decisions more complicated. It will make Singapore politics more sophisticated because the PAP will have to speak to a variety of constituents and decide which to court. There would be more bargaining and negotiating as the ruling party will have no choice but to bear in mind the deeply held values of a wide array of people. This fragmentation of identities will lead to a fragmentation of politics.