What has Waxsol got to do with it?

Earlier this week, with the help of some Waxsol, I got rid of the ear wax in my left ear that had caused me much problem the last week.

A couple of drips of the wonder liquid and a night later, those irritating lumps just simply flowed out of my ear Tuesday morning when I was showering and washing the walls of my inner ear.

The world never sounded any clearer. Almost in the same breath, I wondered if Hurricane Katrina may have had such an effect on American society.

All throughout the last week or so, the aftermath of Katrina was gory. Everyday, my email inbox would scream a New York Times headline that had to do with how the hurricane had not only caused much of New Orleans to be submerged under water, but also revealed the faultlines of American domestic politics.

Race became the in word for a while, before former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell reasserted the voice of sanity when he said the problem was poverty, not race - that it so happens that an overwhelming majority of the poor is black and live in the South.

Singapore was even dragged into the picture. No, not how our SAF Chinooks helped in the evacuation. But how on Sept 14, NYT columnist Thomas L. Friedman commented how such a slow reaction to a hurricane would not have been possible if the same were to happen on our fair shores.

By the way, he wrote the article from Singapore. He was here as a guest speaker at one of the regular forums organised by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. You can access the webcast here.

Which is interesting, considering how I read Amartya Sen's rebuttal of the arguments of the Singapore School, advocated by the founding father of modern Singapore and grandfather of one of my school mates, Lee Kuan Yew.

Amartya Sen argues in "Freedoms And Needs" that in the course of human history, "famines have never afflicted any country that is independent, that goes to elections regularly, that has opposition parties to voice criticisms, that permits newspapers to report freely and to question the wisdom of government policies without extensive censorship."

He refers pertinently, in his own words, "to a general theory of the relationship between political liberty and economic properity (that) has been articulated in recent years by that unlikely theorist Lee Kuan Yew."

The "Lee Kuan Yew hypothesis" that has come to be known as the Singapore School of Thought in some circles, basically encapsulates the whole Asian values rebuttal, that there exists an essential conflict between political rights and economic performance.

Sen concludes his refreshing and comprehensive argument with these final words - at least in the reading contained in my reading pack for the Mass Media class I am taking in college.

Political rights are important not only for the fulfillment of needs, they are crucial also for the formulation of needs...The importance of political rights for the understanding of economic needds turns ultimately on seeing human beings as people with rights to exercise, not as parts of a "stock" or "population" that passively exists and must be looked after. What matters, finally, is how we see each other. - Amartya Sen, Freedom Favours Development, New Perspectives Quarterly Vol. 13 No. 4 (Fall 1996)

In Sen, we have an Asian rebutting the Asian values argument, which is why his words carry so much weight. Yet interestingly, here we have an ang-mo apparently extaulting the merits of the local government.

Indeed, Singapore believes so strongly that you have to get the best-qualified and least-corruptible people you can into senior positions in the government, judiciary and civil service that its pays its prime minister a salary of $1.1 million a year. It pays its cabinet ministers and Supreme Court justices just under $1 million a year, and pays judges and senior civil servants handsomely down the line. - Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, Sept 14, 2005

After encountering at least one email every week from SG Review slamming the high ministerial salaries ad naseum, the mainstream argument usually propagated by the local government suddenly sounds so refreshingly candid when an ang-mo actually says it.

And it is Friedman's brusque summary of what some of the Straits Times columnists had to say about Katrina that brought his point across to his audience across the Pacific, and on the Atlantic seaboard presumably.

Speaking of Katrina, Sumiko Tan, a columnist for the Sunday edition of The Straits Times in Singapore, wrote: "We were shocked at what we saw. Death and destruction from natural disaster is par for the course. But the pictures of dead people left uncollected on the streets, armed looters ransacking shops, survivors desperate to be rescued, racial divisions - these were truly out of sync with what we'd imagined the land of the free to be, even if we had encountered homelessness and violence on visits there. ... If America becomes so unglued when bad things happen in its own backyard, how can it fulfill its role as leader of the world?"

Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. "Today's conservatives," he wrote, "differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday's conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.

"The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. ... [But] it is not only government that doesn't show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn't show up either, sacrifice doesn't show up, pulling together doesn't show up, 'we're all in this together' doesn't show up."

Questions abound. Are we living in an illusion created by the political elites? Are we living in an metaphorical famine in Singapore? It would be interesting to see if the Singapore ministers would withstand public pressure to quit because of the MRT glitches or the spike in the number of Dengue fever cases - if there was any form of public pressure in the first place.

Just as Waxsol got rid of the blockage in my ear and allowed me to hear loud and clear again, Katrina exposed the failings of the Bush administration in America with such clarity that Bush and Rice were scrambling for some form of direction.

I can only hope that in the event of any castastrophe locally, the political fallout would not be on such a massive scale. But something tells me that the reverse may just be true.