3 Annoying ppl

There have been a few people who have irritated me a lot over the last few years. The 3 that I am going to talk about today happen to be women. I don’t know if that’s a little too much of a coincidence. I guess guys know how to be furtive. They’re masters at it. They understand the male ego much much better than women do, even if they’re usually desensitised to everything else. I used to tell a woman friend, guys are generally less sensitive than women, except in one respect: the male ego. Guys are less likely to tread on another guy’s ego by accident, or if they do, they will usually sense it immediately. Women can be more insensitive about it.

Marie Antoinette. Yes, we have gratuitous picture of Kirsten Dunst here. I really like Kirsten Dunst and I think she’s sexy, even though a lot of people feel otherwise. She’s got this figure halfway between skinny and womanly, so she can gain a few pounds and she’ll still look really well rounded. OK, distractions aside, Marie Antoinette was guillotined during the French Revolution and will always be seen as a figure of aristocratic excess. She is not one of the 3 who irk me - she's not alive today, unlike those 3 I'm going to talk about. I don't know if it's misogynist to say that it's often women who are blithely oblivious when they say things that are extremely offensive. I guess people naturally give you more of the benefit of the doubt and even want to suck up to you when you're a women. I guess also that people want to "protect" you from the evils of the world. So what happens when a particular woman is herself an evil of the world?

Wee Shu Min. I think a lot of ink has been spilt over this. One part of me feels great and says “orbigood” over and over again at the pummelling that she’s getting. Another part of me says, “please stop being stupid. You are giving scholars a really really bad name.” I think one bad thing about “meritocracy” is that it completely desensitises people to the fact that life is unfair.

People with the right means can get their kids into the right school, and the peer pressure alone will automatically make their kids into better students. They’ll naturally have better ECA records, better grades. Of course much of what they achieve as students is down to natural ability. The fact that I have 4 As and 2 distinctions at the “A” level is partly down to my innate genius. But I know deep down that if I hadn’t been pushed I could have gotten 2 Cs instead, and that makes you barely able to get into NUS. It’s this extra lift which allows the student to be in an environment where all he needs to do is to focus on his schoolwork, the crucial thing that determines whether he’ll make it to that elite level of performance, or whether he’ll just be a little better than average: and as we all know, there are almost no rewards for being just better than average.

The worst aspect of this is that her father, the MP Wee Siew Kim went out to defend his daughter. So there is nothing wrong with what she wrote? Implicitly they know that there is a threat to the system which favours them. People knows that not everybody is getting served but nobody wants to rock the boat. Martin Luther King said that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. I could flip that phrase around and say “Justice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere”, and for Wee Siew Kim to even admit that there is a flaw in what his daughter wrote would show that there is a flaw in the system that made him what he is today. It is so much easier to say, “there’s nothing wrong with the system. It doesn’t need fixing” than to say, “we’ve had a fairly equal society for a long time but that’s not going to last. I don’t have the answers now but I’m trying”.

Mathilde Chua. One of the directors involved in the TT Durai / NKF incident. Did she have to go to jail? I don’t think she got sentenced. The image that struck me was that she was smiling defiantly as she walked in and out of the Supreme Court, as though through sheer force of will she could make people believe that everything was alright, it was a simple misunderstanding that could be resolved. (More about this fucked up attitude later.) Now you could keep that contemptuous attitude and pretend that you’re contrite. I will still give you marks for trying. This is obviously an “I’ve done nothing wrong” smile.

Lee Bee Wah. This recent debacle - what can you say? Only in Singapore can somebody so politically tone deaf get elected into Parliament. Yes, it was unfortunate that the “Singapore” men’s table tennis team gets short shrift. And it is possible that in spite of our success at the Olympics the team was fractured by a lack of cohesive spirit. But to conduct a massacre of your people right after Singapore ended a 48 year wait for an Olympic medal? That is completely ridiculous.

And just when you thought she was done shooting herself in the foot, she put the icing on the cake when a reporter asked her why she did this. These are puzzling decisions that can nevertheless be made more clear when the reasons behind them are explained. She probably elaborated a little but said something shockingly insensitive that the reporter picked up upon: “it’s time to move on”.

Now usually this is a phrase that is muttered by victims who want to forgive people for their crimes. Almost never by a person who did something extremely offensive in other peoples’ eyes. I’m quite sure that more than a few eyes bulged when they saw this comment. It’s time to move on! I slap you in the face once, you ask me what for, and I say “it’s time to move on”. It’s the equivalent of saying, “it’s not for you to ask such stupid questions like that. When I say the team manager has to go, he has to go. I don’t have to answer to you. Not your fucking business anyway.”

Well I already despise the practice of getting our politicians to head sports associations. Ho Peng Kee and Mah Bow Tan get involved with Singapore soccer, and to me it just looks like other people are doing the sweating on the field, and they are there soaking up the glory. I’m sure that there’s more to it than that, what with the organisational stuff: not easy to put your political career on the line and depend on results on the field. But usually it’s the MP in charge who gets some of the glory, and the sports team gets the blame if things go wrong. And my gut reaction to them is akin to those parents of child stars who get the reflected glory when things go well.

As for firing coaches who have just won something, I remember when Real Madrid fired Vincente Del Bosque right after he won a Champions League and League double. The message: “you’re fat and balding and not in line with the image that we want. We have Figo, Ronaldo, Zidane, Raul, Beckham, Roberto Carlos, we’re going to win Champions League every year anyway.” The retribution for that hubris was that a galaxy full of stars would have an empty trophy cabinet for the next few years. I think this is just.

To me it is a crime against the sacred order of things. I think about Oedipus killing his father (not knowing that it was his father), and being the original “bad motherfucker”. A crime so heinous that it begot the practice of stabbing your eyes out so that you don’t have to watch. I think about Voldemort killing a unicorn and drinking its blood for nourishment. And I believe that Barisan National is paying the price for its sin against Anwar.

If you wanted to give Lee Bee Wah the benefit of the doubt, maybe she thought that she had to do something about the fractious team spirit. But there could be some megalomania in here: one silver medal is not good enough. We must not be complacent. I am the anointed one to push you to greater heights. Now even the manner of the apology (front page Straits Times) is megalomanic. And still they don’t have the guts to sack her. Still she is smiling, and she has probably smiled her way out of trouble before. Still deep in her heart she has done nothing wrong and has probably done the right thing but overlooked taking care of the sensitivities of the well meaning but ignorant populace. Still, as long as her godfathers are still smiling on her, the will of the people “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world”. As for obtaining the reasons behind the sacking, wait long long.

As for the Ang Mo Kio GRC (members include Lee Bee Wah, Wee Siew Kim and PM Lee), in the last elections they got only 60% of the vote. While that will be seen as a landslide in some places (more specifically Anwar Ibrahim’s recent election) it was astoundingly mediocre. On one side you had a head of state. On the other side, the WP youth team. And people were predicting a margin of 70%.

But I guess you got geniuses like Wee Siew Kim and Lee Bee Wah on your team, that could explain it. And our good PM who likes his Mee Siam “mai hum”.