Stark as daylight, luminous and harsh in equal measure

 Truly, ignorance is bliss ... but at what price ...

Meh

I feel like the ground has been pulled out from underneath my feet all over again. It really, really sucks.
But I guess this was bound to happen at some point, since you don't fundamentally agree on where home is. You can't have everything you want all the time, and whatever they propose to do is perfectly within their rights. They have already done a lot for you. Time to stop depending on them and face up to reality. 

PSI 300+ in Retrospect

It was so exciting when the PSI shot past 200, people demanded more PSI readings more often. And when the NEA didn't oblige there were promptly noises about how the government was dumbing down information for the people and treating them with kid gloves. Well that sounds plausible---the PAP's reputation on this front certainly doesn't help--- but then again maybe the government is honestly giving as much information as would be helpful to the average person. (Also: wait, what?)

It was also fairly entertaining to read an Indonesian minister complaining that Singapore was "behaving like a small child." Well, Mr. Laksono, you did sound very mature yourself. But then again you weren't alone, so oh well. At least there were some more rational voices out there (kind of.) Though now that the haze is over, how much of those voices and the very cogent and salient arguments that they made about longer-term underlying forces go heeded? 

It was also heartening to see people (my classmates, on Facebook oO ... probably also more people out there that I didn't hear about) organize things and try to come up solutions that didn't involve just complaining to the government and demanding action on their part. All in all it was a bit of a tempest in a teacup ... but baby steps are still important steps, in the context of this time and place. 

Less nostalgia more giant shopping malls

That seems to be the way things are going anyway. Is this kind of homogenisation inevitable? (Certainly it's not just happening where you are.) Is it really undesirable, and if so how? Discuss.

47 Years on a Knife's Edge

Happy birthday. It's been a good while now.
Some say you're an anomaly, a freak and accident of history, an artificial and unnatural country. Well, yes, but only, above all, because countries are artificial things by nature, imagined creations of the human mind. It's easier to see that reflected in the case of a tiny, young city-state---but at heart you're not any fundamentally stranger than even the so-called great powers and ancient nations of this world.
That tiny size does unfortunately make you somewhat more vulnerable---though at least insofar as it also makes you acutely aware of the same, it is not, unmitigatedly, a bad thing. We all live on a knife's edge and but by the grace of circumstance---and the more aware of that we are the less complacent and better prepared we'll be. There is no room for complacency. There never will be.

Elections in a Nutshell

The Intensely Local

Some time back I saw a photo essay on the Yawning Bread site introducing the sights between Lavendar and Kallang MRT stations. It had 44 photos, and advised tourists covering the area to '[give] yourself an entire afternoon to do so. The area is that rich.' What, really? An entire afternoon for that tiny stretch? But actually, after reading the photo essay, I realise that's entirely possible, especially for travellers from far away who may not have seen anything like HDB void decks, mosques, shophouses and the like. An entire afternoon would allow one to take in and savour all the tiny little details: the subtle decor touches on the HDB blocks, the more unusual shops, the history of the local mosque and its attached cemetery, the diversity of the people on the street ... things that could very well, and do, pass unnoticed for most people going about on their daily business.

So, in a way, how much diversity a place appears to hold also depends on how deeply you are prepared to look and how receptive you are. Even a tiny red spot on the map can hold a rich wealth of different views---you just need to open your eyes and see them.

Noblesse Oblige

Aristocracy is a state of mind. Despite your (not very) valiant attempts, Mr. and Ms. Lee, you're not quite there yet.

Insomnia

The last time in Bangkok, my guesthouse room was noisy 24 hours a day due to traffic from Rama IV just a few metres away and an all-night noodle stall downstairs. This time, my guesthouse room was noisy throughout the night due to the nightlife off Sukhumvit, but rather quiet in the morning when everyone was having their hangovers. I'm not complaining because both times I could sleep anyway.
But it did bring to mind someone's comment that Singapore still had some way to go before becoming a sleepless city. So maybe Bangkok is doing much better in this area. But I still don't get why it's so great to be a sleepless city. Since when was insomnia a good thing? Sleep is necessary rest, and it's just foolish to try and push oneself to keep going with as little sleep as possible. Now if some of a city's denizens wish to sleep in the day and carry on with their lives at night, that's perfectly fine. But if the number is small, it is only natural that the services available in the city at night are correspondingly sparser. No need to deliberately try and push for more nocturnal services to encourage more people to become nocturnal. Right?

Credit Where Due

Soon Marina East is going to be the New Downtown, but at the moment it is still a giant construction site. There are the towers of the Marina Bay Sands casino IR rising from the ground, the tunnels for the Marina Coastal Expressway being bored underground, scaffolds for future skyscrapers being erected and filled in, and lots of dust flying around. There are also lots and lots of foreign construction workers around. It's almost scary.
But I'm not trying to bash the Gahmen's immigration policies here. Rather, I would like to raise this point: Shouldn't these people be recognised for building Singapore's future? When Gahmen ministers go around parading their achievements ("I was instrumental in turning Marina Bay into the New Downtown area" or "I conceived of the casinos IRs" or whatever), shouldn't they share the credit equally with all those humble busyworkers who actually created what would otherwise be mere plans on pieces of paper? Of course the ministers would argue that the vision counts for much more, but what good is a vision that is never realised? And why, then, should those who make the vision a concrete reality be given short shrift?
The prevailing National Indoctrination Education narrative celebrates the hard work of coolies and construction workers in the past, and tells us that Singapore was built up from their contributions. Acknowledging their contributions is the least we could do to show our gratitude for them, and indeed it is a shame that many of these people were not at all recognised for their contributions in their lifetime. There is no reason why similar recognition should not be forthcoming now. To deny it on the niggling grounds of nationality would be narrow-minded in the extreme.

Tuesday

Monday was someone's birthday, but then he was learning to navigate masses of steel and aluminum along bitumen surfaces. So the lunch was on Tuesday instead, at Maxwell Food Centre. What a choice of place, but there was a famous chicken rice stall there. True to reputation the queue stretched all the way around the corner, and we waited around 15 minutes before reaching the front. Then we took another 5 minutes to find a seat. (Tissue paper packets used to chope seats are so very irritating. Grr.) The chicken rice was quite outstanding, though it could've been even better. The birthday boy commented that it was "over-rated". Possibly, yes.
After lunch we visited the Singapore City Gallery, since it was just next door and admission was free and both of us happen to be unemployed and therefore rather free at the moment. If you ever start to doubt that Singapore is still very much controlled by the Government, the Gallery is a good place to be reminded otherwise. Where else in the world does government plan and regulate land use so tightly, with such detail and thoroughness? Manhattan and the neighbourhoods of San Francisco arose entirely organically, and Europe's grand old city centres resulted more from historical evolution than government fiat, and both continue to be regulated with a light hand. Here, though, the whole environment, down to that bench in the park and the surrounding plants, is micromanaged by the government. This place is a SimCity on more than just a surface level.

Insomnia is Great

Yawning Bread, in describing a concert experience not too long ago, posits that Singapore is not yet a great city, at least in part because it is not a sleepless city.
His analysis of why most of the city still closes shop not too late at night and goes to sleep observing a natural, nocturnal schedule, is detailed and convincing. But the link between insomnia and greatness I fail to see very clearly.
Certainly "sleepless" suggests a restless and vibrant energy which could drive the city to achieve greatness, and the perpetual, unending bustle of a truly sleepless city can be in itself an attractive propsect, especially for Chinese so enamored of 热闹. Maybe many of the cities that people would commonly agree to call "great"---London, New York, Tokyo---do indeed have fairly lively cityscapes at any hour of their day.
But why should a city which went to sleep punctually at midnight every day and woke up again with the same energy, or rejuvenated, six or seven hours later, necessarily not be able to achieve "greatness"? Great cities in the past---Amsterdam in the sixteenth century, Cordoba in the twelfth or Alexandria at the turn of the last millenium, for example---were not always sleepless, although some---such as Kaifeng during the Song Dynasty---were.
The link is only clear if, as Yawning Bread seems to have done, it is included as part of the definition of "great" in the first place. What is the basis for this definition? It may be inconvenient for late-night discussions and conversation that public space shrinks so much in the wee hours, but is it not really just that: an incidental inconvenience, and not a fundamental flaw?
Yawning Bread's other yardstick for greatness, I agree with much more, and quote below:

A lot must come from cultural vibrancy, intellectual curiosity and an openness to things new, sometimes to the point of defying convention. The world has to be represented in the city: Different cultures, food, music and ideas from the far corners of the globe, yet in a place with a memory of a past -- a past that is not only respected, but also incessantly questioned. And all these must be out there on the street and in the public square ...

Maybe his point was that such vibrancy is hampered by the fact that the city goes to sleep every day. But really it is only the expression of the vibrancy that is a little muted for part of the day. Compared to the existence of such a beating, living heart in the first place, the city's sleeping habits, or lack thereof, are a completely trivial factor in its "greatness".

Renan's Nation and the Serenissima

Ernst Renan, in a more cynical moment, opined that a nation was merely a group of people united by a common mistaken view of history, and a dislike of their neighbours. But he also gave, in a lecture at the Sorbonne, a much more idealistic and hopeful conception of what a nation is.
After describing nation-states today as 'a historical result brought about by a series of convergent facts', and dismissing various conceptions of the nation---as a dynastic principle, as a racial, linguistic or religious community, as a community of common interest---as inadequate, he sets out his view: 'A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle ... the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice and devotion ... it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation's existence is ... a daily plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.' He describes a nation as something which is actively created and shaped by individual human beings, not something imposed upon them: 'Man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. A large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we call a nation.'
Renan's civic nation is just as pure an ideal as the perfectly competitive market: sounds wonderful in theory, but never quite realised in practise. For one, the state, often closely tacked onto the nation, is loath to allow the daily plebiscite to turn up any result not to its liking. And in the case of those (relatively) young states which emerged some fifty-odd years ago from the yoke of colonialism, how far can they be nations?
Renan described the two essential constituting ingredients of the 'spiritual principle' of the nation: 'the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories [and] the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.'
The Serenissima has had a fairly colourful history over its last 190 years, full of development, conflict and traumatic change. But before that? The Singapore History Gallery at the National Museum seems to have had a lot of thought put into it, and is quite well-designed and -curated, but the pre-1819 exhibits are evidently a bit sparse. To a large extent, the Serenissima's history before 1819 is lost in the mists, and has become more myth than anything else. Our 'rich legacy of memories' is not nearly, perhaps, as rich as the nations of Western Europe, or Vietnam, or Japan. Some may bring in the memories of the immigrants from their homelands, the memories of the great civilisations of East and South Asia ... but then such a legacy is no longer the common possession of all of the Serenissima's inhabitants. These memories figure in the recent history and culture of the Serenissima, and their visible footprints and influences will eventually enter the shared memory of the Singaporean nation ... but as yet they do not constitute this shared memory. Still we do have a common memory, still small perhaps, but growing, and we have indeed 'performed great deeds together', even if other, older nations have performed still more.
As for 'the wish to perform still more [great deeds]', I am sure it is not lacking; probably out of a medley of historical and economic concerns, no part of the population seems too eager to secede from Singapore and strike it out as a separate republic.
So, yes, we are a nation. Or at least, are on the way there ... 190 may look a paltry figure to some, but it is nothing to be scoffed at. Over time the legacy will only grow richer, and the 'large-scale solidarity' stronger ... hopefully. Would-be nation-building campaigners take note, this is where your job lies: to consolidate and build the common memory, and to encourage a continued common future. But you would never be able to make it happen alone, without time on your side.

The Region? What's That?

Every once in a while someone will lament how Singaporeans are woefully ignorant of their region. Harry did it again just recently, I believe. Nonetheless, lack of awareness of the surrounding region may not be a uniquely Singaporean problem.
Does it matter? Our neighbours are much, much larger: they have large resources of their own, reserves of land and forests and minerals, and multitudes of consumers, which we can only dream of. Their need for increased integration within ASEAN, economically and otherwise, may not far less pressing that ours. But surely they will be better off with the fruits of integration, even if they can live without it. And moreover, the matter will eventually impact us ...
Contrary to popular belief, it is actually possible to clap with one hand. It does, however, take significantly more effort, and the hand that is doing the clapping cramps up rather quickly. Similarly, continued co-operation and closer integration within ASEAN, which Singapore is so eager to see, is difficult to sustain by the efforts and enthusiasm of any one of its individual members alone. Awareness of the region amongst people throughout the region, then, not just here in the tiny Serenissima, should be a legitimate concern for policymakers and thinkers here, not just something that is vaguely interesting, but strictly not necessary, to ponder over.

An Insaitable Urge for Peanuts

Google's Brin, Page, and Schmidt work for a base salary of $1. Our Dear Senior Minister and Minister Mentor get salaries of five peanuts each, about equal to that of our Prime Minister. Brin, Page and Schmidt are running a corporate entity, for whom profit is a legitimate raison d'être. The SM and MM are involved in running a country, which, whatever your economic theories may be, should certainly, at least, be more than just a profit-seeking corporate entity. Brin, Page and Schmidt are still working at Google; the SM and MM were doing the PM's job before but had handed the post over to someone else some time ago.
Of course Messrs Brin, Page and Schmidt receive income in other forms, for example equity investment in their own company. But these things are entirely dependent on their company's performance. And, besides to repeat for the sake of emphasis, they haven't retired yet, so it is perfectly fair they should be receiving some sort of compensation for their work.
The SM(s) and MM posts are, on the other hand, posts for people who have left the more conventional portfolios in the Cabinet, but who just don't want to leave for some reason. Do you really have so little faith in your successors, that you insist on remaining in a formal position of power even after you've handed over the Prime Minister's post? Or perhaps you just really wish to remain to offer advice. Or, perhaps, others in the Government wish you to remain to offer advice. In which case, why do you insist on drawing such a ridiculous salary for it? Besides, there is no need for you to remain formally in order for you to continue to guide the current leadership in times of need.
How small a proportion of government expenditure the fifteen peanuts combined--two SMs and a MM--form is not a issue. By that logic, the Government could surely spare another one million a year, since it is such a small proportion of the national expenditure--not even two peanuts, for crying out loud--, and credit it to my bank account on my birthday? It would increase my welfare immeasurably, and be extremely competitive compensation for my service on Tekong. Of course, that is absurd. Similarly, the issue at hand is why you are drawing the large salary in the first place, not whether the country's finances can afford it.
Despite your title you are not a minister: you do not have a clearly defined area of responsibility or portfolio. You're more like an extremely experienced consultant. Of course consultants deserve renumeration for good advice. But how do we know all the your advice you have given or will give as a SM or MM is good? What if it is not? And it is bizarre in the extreme for any company, even more a country, to pay a consultant so much for advice that is not always solicited.
It is bad enough that you remain formally in the Government. By doing so you are sending a message that you have no faith in your successors, or that they have no faith in themselves, that they will never do as well as if you continued to guide them from within. It is even worse that you are drawing a salary for it equivalent to the Prime Minister's. By doing so you are telling us that you don't really care for your country and are only doing it for the money, or, more likely, that you are plain greedy, and even though your original intentions in remaining as SM or MM may have been less unnoble, you can't see why you should stop drawing those five peanuts a year, just because you can.

Big Gahmen

The PAP Government is a little too big. Not big in the sense of being bloated and overbureaucratic, but big in a more subtle, insidious way. It is so big it pops up everywhere, in politics and beyond; to use a mildly sinister metaphor, it is like an octopus with whose countless tentacles turn up in every nook and cranny.
Most of the Republic's home-grown corporate giants are Gahmen-linked in some way, usually through Temasek Holdings. Statutory boards and other parastatals dominate many aspects of the social and cultural arena. So much so that when NTUC FairPrice announces a textbook donation drive, some attack it as a political power-play.
It hit me too in the course of my recent reading: so many of the Singaporean works I encountered were endorsed, in some way, by the National Book Development Council, which is linked to the Government's National Arts Council. Moreover Singapore's only literary, or indeed cultural, honours, such as the Singapore Literature Prize or the Cultural Medallion, are given by the Government. Not private trusts and foundations established by or in the memory of great personnages, as happens in the West.
There is no denying that the Gahmen here does a lot of things. A lot. Is this necessarily a bad thing though?
It could be, if it competes with and/or stifles individual initiative. The Chicago school loved to remind us that government, not being subject to market forces, would be liable to slack and inefficiency, and that individuals reacting to incentive structures could often do better. They added, as a sort of corollary, that the government should therefore only be doing what individuals left to themselves could not, or would not, do -- provide public goods, regulate externalities, that sort of economic thing. So if there are actually NGOs around who were/are planning to run / actually running something similar to FairPrice's textbook donation programme, FairPrice should quit it and go back to grocering.
The Chicago school's argument does not apply entirely, because The Gahmen and its minions are actually quite efficient creatures by nature; FairPrice is probably running as decently tight a ship with its charity programmes as with its core business. But nonetheless, by continuing to duplicate what civic society could do, NTUC, and, if you wish though it is a bit of a stretch, by extension the PAP, are needlessly expending national resources and stifling civic initiative. And the Gahmen wonders how to instil a stronger sense of civic duty.
In other areas, though, perhaps indeed no one else has done much -- think culture, though I may simply be ignorant. In this case Gahmen intervention, and domination, is understandable and to some extent justifiable ... but still it should aim to nurture and eventually make way for civic involvement.
In the preceding argument "civic society" has been treated as something independent of the government. That is, unforunately, not entirely the case in Singapore, so deep and wide have the Gahmen's tentacles spread. Is NTUC part of the state, or civic society? It is a bit of both really. And to make matters worse, it is the only trade union around here. Singapore's civic society, too, is dominated by the Gahmen. Maybe this was simply the consequence of politics over the decades after Separation ... but it is certainly not a desirable state of affairs. The Government doing much, in addition to civic society, can be a good thing; the Gahmen doing much, because it has supplanted and become civic society as well as government, is definitely not.

Where's the Development?

Popped by the NUS Museums today lunchtime, since it was just nearby, and ambled through their main exhibition, Constructed Landscapes: Singapore In Southeast Asia. It was about Singapore's links to Southeast Asia, as exhibited in visual art; most of the works were by Singaporean artists, though not all. The exhibition was interesting but rather small. Too small to be truly intriguing. I think an extract from the sparse commentary is indicative:
'Memory ... The works in this exhibition do not conform to a single ideal of landscape. They are perspectives engendered by particular experiential and perceived moments, some of which are contradictory to one another. Each work reflects the particular artist's sense of location and the prevailing milieu.'
Around there are scattered works by various artists in various styles. Like a series of snapshots, whose subjects, angles and treatment were chosen all at random. Not completely at random, maybe, but random enough, at any rate, for the pattern to be not easily comprehended. Or a small sample of what should be a much larger, more coherent, more organic body of work.
So now the question I would like to ask is: does that larger body of work actually exist, or is this apparent lack of development the result of larger and stronger factors than just bad, stingy curating?

A Depressing Thought

'While in other countries, political parties come and go, but the country remains the rallying point for the people’s feelings, in Singapore, the Government has become synonymous with the country. Indeed, Singapore is often seen as the creation of the PAP, made to its image and likeness. Hence, dislike of the PAP, even though it does not translate into dislike of Singapore, effectively blocks out any spontaneous outpouring of patriotic emotion. ...If loyalty towards the country is blocked, it has to be directed elsewhere. In Singapore, it is directed at the good life which the country has come to represent. ... There is by now an almost adulatory quality about the attachment of Singaporeans to the affluence which their parents never knew and which came their way so quickly. ... This kind of loyalty is, of course meretricious. It changes with its object. Hence, when the good life diminishes, so will it. When the good life disappears, so may it. But the most insidious aspect is its mobility. It will uproot and move with the good life. Hence, if economic prosperity is no longer in Singapore but moves to Canada, Australia, the United States, China, it will re-locate itself accordingly. ... Such a volatile, mobile loyalty is of course a travesty of the patriotism it has displaced and a mockery of all the earnest effort that the Government and the people have put into the building of the country over three decades.

Even if such a sinister scenario does not arise, a growing emotive estrangement between the Government and the people is not a healthy thing. It could create a schizoid society where head is divorced from heart, where there is a double agenda and double book-keeping with people agreeing with the Government in public but saying something else in private.' - The PAP and the people - A Great Affective Divide (1994). (It really is a discredit to the Gahmen that they had to employ their sledgehammers and pound the table instead of delivering a similarly eloquent riposte.)

...

'If there are passionate Singaporeans working in Singapore, I have yet to meet them.'

Have we really all turned into a bunch of money-grubbers with no ideals whatsoever?

Is the Serenissima culturally barren?

Who says Singapore does not have a history worth recounting? As Tolstoy astutely noted, history is a little girl that one dresses up as one wishes. Every place has its stories, and this sunny island is no exception. We had our war heroes, we had political and ethnic strife, we had incredibly rapid economic transformation. As long as one is willing to listen, and as long as a good storyteller can be found, it is entirely possible to be regaled with a fairly colouful, even if relatively brief, history of Singapore.
Who says Singapore doesn't have a literature? For a midget country of about six million, the Singapore Collection in the National Library isn't too shabby. Maybe it is not so widely recognised in the mainstream English canon--if such a term still has any meaning in an age where English has become a global language and spawned local versions with their own literary canons everywhere--; perhaps its concerns and explorations are still limited to more local interests. But it is still a literature, concerned with aspects, no matter how narrow these aspects may be, of the human condition. Who knows, perhaps one day a Singaporean writer or dramatist or poet will break out of the local mould and produce a universal masterpiece.
The only reason why people would assert the non-existence of such integral parts of our cultural heritage is that they aren't willing to acknowledge them, because what they see doesn't quite fit their narrow preconceptions of what grand things like History and a Literary Canon should be like.

Now Las Vegas comes to you.

This is probably an hoary old chestnut by now, but I'll still say it anyway: -The taxi drove past the city on the Keppel Viaduct and Benjamin Sheares Bridge this morning, at about 6. The sky was still dark, but the Marina Bay area was brilliantly lit, making plainly visible to all the forest of cranes that's building the Integrated Resorts with casinos. The IRs are partly up already. They're starting to show a bit of a resemblance to the fine architecture along the Strip.
You bastards, you took the easy way out.
You could have tried to foster an entrepreneurial spirit. Or bet on the next major creative industry. Something, perhaps, a little more generative than gambling?
Of course it wouldn't have been easy. It would have taken a massive effort, massive funding, and there would be no guarantee of success. What if the whole thing failed? Singapore might just become an economic backwater eclipsed by all the giants rising around it. If that's not going to happen anyway, with or without gambling dens added.
Las Vegas is a surreal place. It feels removed from the real world, a giant amusement park for adults rather than a city where human beings live in. Now it seems that Marina Bay is going to become a mini Las Vegas.
Yes, surely Vegas does fulfil a function, not a very savoury function, perhaps, but still a necessary, even intriguing, one. But is it necessary to replicate it in miniature all over the world, including here in the Most Serene republic? There's already another, bigger replica relatively nearby. It's called Macau.
We don't need to turn all our homes into mere amusement parks, do we.