Transcending rhetorics that blind

Something unprecedented happened just now when I was watching the National Day Parade on television over dinner just now.

As the cameras panned its focus into the crowds of people happily waving their flags to the tunes of the national songs in the various languages, I found myself tearing.

I teared because my nationalistic sentiments was being milked by the national songs. I teared also because I realised the irony of those words that were being sung. I teared because those words meant nothing, but constituted a certain ideological rhetoric.

Everything in the Singapore public sphere, has become a rhetoric -- from our claims to being a democracy and being transparent, to our multi-ethnic harmonious existence.

I teared because those people waving their flags are still happily deluded by all the rhetorics. If the people in power really want people to take the words of the national songs seriously, maybe they should start working out policies that adhere to the words of the songs.

Maybe it would be great, for once, to just mean what we sing.

I got reminded of something I read earlier today, the transcript of a David Marshall interview conducted in 1994 - when I was a kid, stressed up over doing well enough in my PSLE to get into Raffles Institution (which I didn't).

I particularly identified with something David Marshall said about being alienated from the government. He felt like a pariah just because he was a critic of the government.

The government doesn’t see I do respect them immensely. They don’t see I’m a genuine friend. They only see me as a critic and to be a critic is to be an enemy who must be erased and destroyed. There is no such thing as an honest critic to the PAP. It’s a blasphemy to criticise the emperor, spoilt son of heaven.

For all the Asian values they professed to espouse, they forget that one crucial dimension -- that 打是疼，骂是爱. This is a Chinese saying that may be directly translated to mean that you only criticise somebody if you love them enough to do so.

One wonder what good are friends who only say things you want to hear, and then abandon you when you are in dire need.

Marshall also said something that even hits at the illusion of apathy among youths. Again, a rhetoric that has been spouted for as long as I can remember, and something I have been trying to dispel time and time again in my short time as a pseudo-academic since I started my undergraduate studies.

So are youths not content? They are not anti. Our youths frankly, very honestly respect the pragmatic achievements of the government, and I’m grateful, but they feel empty.There isn’t this joy of living which youth expects and youth needs – to learn the joy of living. How do you teach it?

I think you teach it through respect for the individual. That’s our tragedy. If you want to put it in a nutshell, our tragedy is that we emphasise the primacy of society as against respect for the individual. Mind you, both are right.I mean both sides have the liberty.

Of course, there should be respect for the needs of society over the right of the individual but you must respect the individual too in seeking the expression of the needs of society. Here, we have no respect for the individual.

And then he went on to give a "fresh" perspective of the legal profession. I put fresh in inverted commas because Marshall was merely reiterating and reminding everybody of the essence of a profession that have been corrupted.

It is fresh not so much because it is new or anything illuminating. It is fresh because it has been forgotten, glossed over because people have been too preoccupied with other things.

A good example would be none other than LKY, who in today's Straits Times, was reported to have said in Singapore Law Gazette (I'll leave Mr Wang to explain how this says so much about ST as a media outlet who merely reproduces the SLG article as a reporting piece) that "remaining a lawyer would have been a meaningless existence" for him.

If you read the 2 comparative accounts of both David Marshall and Lee Kuan Yew, you would not fail to detect that while both men had very good intentions, the former comes across as being noble because he is utterly sincere and contrite, but the latter doesn't because he is a know-it-all with an elevated sense of his self-worth.

I don't know about you, but I just feel that it's so sad that a pure-bred Singaporean like me feels so estranged from my home country just because I love Singapore enough to be critical.

I am critical because I bother more about Singapore's existence, unlike some others, who bother more about their face, above everything else.

That was why I teared.