Freedom to be a Complain King

The Bill of Rights

1. The Singaporean Shall Have The Right To Bitch

2. The Singaporean’s Right to Bitch Shall Not Be Removed Without Due Effective Solutions Presented To His or Her Eye

3. The Singaporean’s Right To Bitch Will By Association Allow Other Individuals To Accentuate This Action

Well, enough of that. I could go on with a parchment and some ink on a quill ala Benjamin Franklin, but I’m no Singaporean counterpart of that great man.

As you all would have known, the Complaints Choir was banned from public performance and had to conduct their little ditty sessions in the Old Parliament House sans the Finnish professional singers and the Malaysian conductor. This TOC article has the lyrics to the Singapore leg of the Choir as well.

Hamburg has a Choir, Helsinki has one, Birmingham, Hamburg and St. Petersburg too. Are we any lesser than those nations? Definitely no.

It disgusts and rankles me to no end that the government or (some nameless-as-usual individual/group within the government) chooses to emphasize and maintain this “us vs them” mentality when it comes to issues of opinion, culture and thought.

You increase the quota for foreign migrant workers, residents, yet you refuse them the right to perform a harmless song about what it means to live in Singapore.

And if that’s not bad enough, you screw with us citizens and the international image of Singapore by playing such kindergarten games between the MFA and MHA in inter-department turf wars that even required the good offices of Paul Wolfowitz to mediate during the IMF-World Bank meetings.

These things have happened before, and it has happened again.

These double-standards reek really bad of incompetency, lip service and hypocrisy when it comes to the macrocosm of national interests.

Have you fellows actually thought of the damage and costs that such childish actions have brought upon Singapore?

We feel ashamed and aghast at headlines of every major news agency covering something so puerile as this.

What does it mean to attack what we have created by ourselves? The continued assault on Singlish, the never-ending attempt to co-opt creative ideas for anything under the sun by GLCs, the endless push to depoliticise the natural political landscape. All these are traditional or non-traditional attempts at removing what is grassroots’ created and replaced with top-down directed attempts at managed creativity and all that mumbo-jumbo which we do not need.

Don’t meddle with the culture within an individual. It is costly to rebuild should you spoil it in an attempt to deconstruct whatever makes it tick. You cannot always be in monopolistic control of the X-Factor.

If this is the kind of unsophisticated attempts at managing creativity and managing our grand narratives of national history, we don’t need your talents and can kindly do without them.

Singapore is not a place for childish office politics.

Bugger off.

(Just so you know, the above shows I’m just being a good old-fashioned Singaporean)

~ by celluloidrealitys on January 31, 2008.