OK I do this meme from Shingo before it is too late.
1) How do you sleep at night?
Is your sleep affected by the national angst? Do you drop off easily, as you always did? Or does it take a while to get to sleep?
It’s very funny – I’m reading a biography of the Beatles now, which traces in great detail all the stuff that happened until 1970. John Lennon, who wrote the song “How Do You Sleep”, comes across a nasty brute. I used to like him a lot more, because I thought he was the idealistic Beatle, but now I think he just has a lot of psychological issues.
There was one time when I failed to get to sleep, and that was the day after I failed a maths test for the first time, and it was my F Maths "A" levels prelim. I didn’t sleep much that night. In the wee hours of the morning, there was this cricket, and it had this long plaintive wail. Nowadays when I hear that cricket (remember that in Pinocchio the cricket was the voice of the conscience) I remember this incident.
This was the exam that my parents told me was the most important one of my life (I think my father failed to get into uni because of his “A” levels, one of the big regrets of his life, even though he did his ACCA instead and it’s like a uni education. That year he gave me a lot of lectures about how important your “A” levels are, which is very unusual since it’s my mother who’s always on my back instead. If not for the ACCA he would not have met my mother and if not for that I would not exist. But I don't know if that's a good or bad thing.)
It was a kick up the backside I needed and for the rest of that prelim and for the “A”s itself it was pretty much straight As. Except for my GP. In order to make up for getting a B for my GP, I set up a blog. Actually not, but that’s a good story.
The only time I found it hard to get to sleep recently was the day before my marathon. Possibly it was all the food, but maybe it was the first time for a long time I had something to get worried about. (I would either finish it, in which case I would never run again, or I would fail, in which case I would have to train for another year.)
I’ve had my own room now for almost 20 years. I’m a night owl. I usually don’t like to sleep early. Usually by the time I get to sleep I’m so tired that I just drop. Otherwise I will read a book and it usually takes 5 minutes.
I don’t keep regular hours on weekends. If you go to a 24 hour place you get the whole place to yourself for you to lounge around a book. 3 am in the morning is the only time when Singapore is not an overcrowded place.
I’m not too worried about the economic crisis as of now, although I am aware that that could change any time.
2) What strategies, if needed, do you use to get to sleep? Pills? Sheep? Late night television shows? And/or...?
How can I put this delicately?
3) Do you wake up in the middle of the night, plagued by obsessive thoughts?
I sleep right under a window. My mattress is right in the middle of the floor. If a storm is coming, or if it suddenly gets cold and I don’t have a blanket, I wake up after a while. I have to do that. I have a thick woolen blanket that I bought in the States (I paid $2 for it, so it was a bargain.) and I can’t sleep in it for long unless the weather is cold. Sometimes there’s a draft, and I catch a cold.
4) What strategies do you have to get back to sleep?
See #2.
5) Are your dreams affected?
Yeh my dreams are usually edgy. Not in the sense of running away from monsters. More like being full of tension an indecision.
The other night, I dreamt that I was in Prague. (I once spent 3 weeks in there at one point). I met up with my sister there and we would be joining up with our parents. We hadn’t yet arranged with them where to meet. We would call them. We walked in and out of the hotel. Maybe I was reading a book. It was late autumn, and the weather was getting cold. We were supposed to wait at the end of a road or something. The landscape was what I imagined a communist country to be like: lots of factories out there doing nothing productive other than polluting the environment. Chilly wind. We were supposed to meet them at 8pm. It came and went. Did we call them? Maybe they didn’t know. We walked around for 1 hour looking for a phone. It was a bit of a dump yard, with a few pieces of abandoned furniture.
One very common feature in my dreams are large buildings, be they hospitals, or universities or apartment complexes. Or familiar rooms where there is a door you never saw before that leads somewhere else. (Think “Lion / Witch / Wardrobe”).
A lot of my dreams are like Kafka’s. If you read “The Trial”, there is a lot of walking around and scratching your head and wondering what the hell is going on. Should anybody be surprised that he is one of my favourite authors?
Prague! Prague was the city that Kafka lived in all his life. That most neurotic and anxious of the 20th century authors......
Saturday, 28 March 2009
Saturday, 21 March 2009
Reader
Hi folks, another fucking GP essay from me again.
Nat suggested that I go watch “The Reader” because you get a lot of Kate Winslet fucking in that movie. Now I have watched a lot of art movies in my time, not as much as some people, but quite a few. For a long time I have watched movies so that I could learn more about art, learn more about life from them. Then I transcended even that and thought, the truest test of a movie is what your personal reactions are towards that movie. It shouldn’t even be about a critic telling you what is art. It is something that you must viscerally experience for yourself.
Now what is the point here? The bottom line is, having watched so many movies for the right reasons, I reserve the right to watch a movie for no other purpose than to watch Kate Winslet fucking.
I suppose I have to blog about it a bit more nowadays because these days I hardly ever watch movies anymore.
Most of the reviews will tell you that this is an above average movie, with one great performance (Winslet’s, and she won a handful of acting prizes for this one) and it was adapted from a great novel.
Movie reviews have to be gingerly written: they must answer the essential question: “is this movie worth watching?” without giving away the plot details. So this is not a review but rather something that talks about what the movie is all about. So for those of you who intend to watch the movie but haven’t done so yet you won’t need to be reading this.
For the rest of you, there’s this German guy, born after the war. He’s 16 and he meets this nice bust conductor – sorry I meant bus conductor, and she takes him home. He’s sick. Then he brings her flowers. They meet and fuck. Then while she’s his lover, she insists that he read to her. They are lovers for a while. One day, she is promoted to have an office job. She is ashamed to admit that she is illiterate, and then she leaves town, ending her affair with the teenager in the process.
Later on, he’s a law student and he attends a seminar. It’s about the war crimes, tribunal, and there, he sees Kate Winslet being charged for being a concentration camp guard. It is torture for him to watch, because he still loves her. She is the only person among the defendants to admit that a book that was written about her was true. There are not a lot of things that you do as a concentration camp guard that counts as murder. But there was one incident, which involves a death march. The concentration camp inmates are locked up in the church for a night. Then one night, during a bombing raid, the church is set on fire. The inmates are burnt to death, except for the mother and daughter who survive to write the book, and press charges against the concentration camp guards.
The rest of the defendants pin all the blame on her, and insist that a report that was written about the incident was written by her. She is identified as the leader of the guards and gets 20 years instead of the 4 given to all the other guards.
In the last part of the movie, while she is in jail, the lawyer (he’s a lawyer now) makes recordings of books, and mails them to her in jail. Through the recordings, and comparing them with the words on a book that she borrows from the library, she
The book was published in 1995, which was the 50th anniversary of VE day. (That’s “victory in Europe”). I think that people are still getting around what happened during that war.
In that war, we discovered 2 horrible new developments in the history of man. From the holocaust, we found out that 20th century technology has enabled us to commit murder on a scale that is simply awe-inspiring. The holocaust in which 11 million people died, was murder committed in a very systematic fashion. The second nasty surprise is nuclear weapons, which can kill on an ever larger scale than the holocaust. Why bother to kill 11 million people over 4 years when you only need 4 seconds nowadays?
So at that time, the Holocaust was presented as an utterly unique event in mankind. In part, this view was put forward by Zionists who saw this as an utterly unique way to establish the state of Israel. One of the stated purposes of a homeland for the Jewish people was that you needed a place to house all the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Many Arabs were not that happy to be chased out of their own homeland, and the establishment of Israel in 1948 has caused a lot of unhappiness in that region ever since.
So much of this movie had been about how the Germans deal with the issue of guilt. You can contrast their attitude with the Japanese – we’re still waiting for them to get back to us and I think they’re smart enough to realize that if they can stall for time long enough for most of the war generation to be dead or dying, they never ever have to apologise because it’s all “overtaken by events”. I suppose that it’s German culture that people are very direct and forthright, so it was probably more possible that they would choose to examine these issues. But I digress.
This movie therefore is not entirely about Kate Winslet fucking, although I have to admit that it is a great selling point. It is about war guilt, and how the survivors deal with it. I read somewhere that a lot of people are outraged at the movie, because Kate Winslet is more concerned about her illiteracy rather than the fact that she killed a lot of people. This is the sort of movie which raises such controversial questions that nobody finds it remarkable that a 15 year old boy is fucking a 30 something woman.
But what of it? Would you be ashamed? We all are ashamed of something. Some deep dark secret. My parents are a little ashamed that they never got as much schooling as I did. I’m ashamed that I suck at Chinese. These are the sort of issues that are on-going rather than about what happened some time in the past. That’s the difference between her illiteracy and her being a concentration camp guard.
It’s true that Hannah is one of the more morally ambivalent people in the movie. On one hand she was a Nazi, although not a very high ranking one, and subsequently, not one who made a lot of decisions. She could just say that she was taking orders. Her testimony was a little more forthright than the rest of the defendants because she was possibly less able to understand the full implications of what the concentration camp was all about. People had to die, because “there were new ones coming in all the time”. So she was a classic taker of orders.
But you have to balance that against – here’s this nice woman who took a boy home because he was sick. If you wanted a black and white version of the concentration camp guard as the ultimate embodiment of evil, that would be extremely inconvenient.
Then in the trial it was mentioned that Kate Winslet would just pick a few of the more sickly people, and ask them to read to her. And then after that they typically ended up getting chosen for extermination. I supposed she really liked being read stories to. I would consider this to be a neutral thing – what does it matter since you’re always going to kill X number of people, whether those are the ones that you interact with on a more human level?
Another thing is that in the movie, the anti-Nazis were all painted in a fairly negative light. A classmate of the law student accused him of being soft and wondered why he was always staring at Kate Winslet. He did bring up a good point: so much of this happened every where, in every stratum of German society, because the Nazis were everywhere. And yet only Kate Winslet and her gang of camp guards were identified, and only then because some of the victims wrote a book.
As for the centerpiece of the charges against the camp guards – the locking the prisoners into a church while they burnt to death inside – the judge actually offers her a reason to say that she was scared of what the prisoners would do to her if she released them. But she just said that there would be chaos everywhere and she couldn’t let that happen. A more honest answer but her priorities look extremely lop-sided now.
It is very difficult to judge what people would have done in the heat of the moment. The person responsible for murder in this case is not Kate Winslet but the allied pilot who dropped the bomb. Clearly this is not a pre-meditated case of murder and it is not first degree murder. So Kate Winslet turns at the judge “What would you have done?” The judge does not answer. He is not there to answer questions. But it is a valid question, one that casts a shadow over the rest of the movie.
I suppose that a lot of Kate Winslet’s dumbness comes from her illiteracy. No doubt she’s great at fucking, but I would attribute a lot of her illogical behaviour to simply her being quite confused. I would guess she likes order, and likes wearing uniforms.
The lawyer was probably appalled that she would rather hide her illiteracy from other people than to reduce her sentence and deny that she was the author of a certain report. So there he almost wanted to come forward and say that he knows that she is illiterate and could not possibly have authored that report. But he steps back in the end and does nothing.
I always felt that this is a metaphor for what the rank and file of the Nazis were like. They were not especially evil people, rather they were just unable or unwilling to stand up to evil. They were moral cowards like him. He had plenty of other reasons not to reveal that she was illiterate. One was that she was ashamed of it. Another was that it was after all her own decision to make and she already made it. A third reasons is that he wanted to keep his affair with her a secret. Or he wasn’t prepared to face her again. Whatever it is, the parallels with the moral failure of being a Nazi is striking. This act of not interfering with her decision to condemn herself to 20 years in prison is one of the most important acts of the film, and influences a lot of things that take place later in the lawyer's life. Why is he a cold person? Why did he feel guilty and send her audio tapes of literature? Why did he feel very awkward about meeting her in person?
The other aspect of the movie was the secrets. The love affair was a secret. I know from first hand experience that when you keep secrets from people it really alienates you from them. There was so much about how, when the lawyer as a young boy got home after having lost his virginity 1 hour ago, he was looking at his family one by one, and he just couldn’t tell them anything. It probably made him very emotionally distant from his family, if he wasn't already that way. Was his family close? They were strict, to say the least. But they stuck together. He just wasn't able to form close relationships, which is why in the end he got divorced, and spends much of his older life going from 1 lover to another.
The scene where he finally meets Hannah is also very interesting. They finally meet in the prison canteen. Remember that the last time they met face to face they were still fucking each other. Now she's 60. The meeting is a little cold, and there is little joy left. He's talking about making arrangements for her.
She's fairly unrepentant about her actions during the war. She said one line which makes the movie quite controversial. “I have learnt that the dead are already dead”. She had also learnt how to read. Well good for her! I think in a way she never really understood what being a Nazi was all about. So many people don't think about it in terms of right and wrong. To her, she was just given instructions, and she was doing a job.
Later on, just before she is to be released, and when we're thinking, "how is she going to adapt to this new world?" She hangs herself. The book makes it clear that after reading about the Holocaust she starts to think more about, and is being tormented about her role in it. But it's more ambiguous in the movie. She says that she knows all about the dead. She has been both a prisoner and a guard. Is she a helpless person who stumbles through her life, and acquiesces to all the forces around her, or is she a moral agent?
There is a case to be made for her being a helpless person. She joined the prison guard because she was just looking for a job. She had an affair with the lawyer because she could tell he had a crush on her. She couldn't read and write, and she's shut away from most human civilisation as a result. (It is very difficult for anybody to understand what it's like to be illiterate. Most people think this is trivial but it's not.) She's not educated enough to make the same moral judgements that other people make when they are condemning her. She was the only prison guard to not understand, like the other prison guards on trial, that she should not have confessed to anything.
As for whether she was the ringleader of the guards, it is possible. She is a capable person, and it's not inconceivable that she was promoted to leader. But would they have made an illiterate person a leader? But I think we are meant to believe that the 200 who died in the church were locked in as the result of a collective decision.
The thing about the war, and the holocaust is to realise that while most people could have resisted evil, it is not easy for anybody at all. It was difficult enough getting by, and it would have taken great strength, courage, resources, wealth - everything - not to be a bad person in that war.
The other thing is that her stint as a guard took up maybe 1 or 2 years of her life. That's 1 or 2 years in an otherwise unremarkable and completely ordinary life. When you put somebody in jail, you are punishing a person. OK, she did evil things and they should be punished. But there are other reasons for putting people in jail that are not justified. You put a person in jail so that society can be safe from them. Hannah was a perfectly normal member of society in peacetime. There's no need to lock her away. OK, she fucks 15 year old boys, but 15 year old is not that young, 16 is legal in this country. The other rationale of prison is rehabilitation. Normal people leading normal lives don't need rehabilitation. There's very little reason for her to be in jail.
She was in jail, in lieu of all the other people who did equally horrible things, and went unpunished, because one of the victims wrote a book. It is OK to demand justice and the war crimes trials were good things. But they still distribute justice inequally, and we can still say that Hannah was unlucky.
Still, before she hangs herself, she bequeaths her life savings to the victim who wrote the book. It's for the lawyer to confront the victim who put her in jail.
The last scene is also very jarring. The lawyer takes the tin, and gives it to the Jewish daughter. And for a while it seems to her that he’s there to ask for absolution, and treats him with disdain. She has done well for herself, is ostentatiously wealthy, and has an apartment on Manhattan’s west side. For those who have never been to New York – it costs a shit load of money to live there. The hall is tastefully decorated with plenty of expensive art pieces. She’s done quite well for herself. Then she takes the attitude of a lot of former survivors of her generation, and refuses to forgive the Nazis. Very self-righteously, she lectures that “there is nothing good that comes out of being in a concentration camp. There is nothing that a concentration camp can teach you. It is not college.”
But later on, when she realizes that she is receiving the entire life savings of somebody who has just spent 20 years in jail, her attitude softens, and she finds that he’s not here to seek forgiveness. And after all, she put Kate Winslet in jail for 20 years. $7000 is just loose change to her, and she sets up a foundation to promote literacy. After all, she said it herself, and this is the moral of the story for “The Reader”: there is nothing that a concentration camp can teach you. It bears no resemblance to life elsewhere. There is no meaning to it. So stop being vindictive about the past and lay it to rest. Kate Winslet legacy to her also included a tin that contained the money, the sort of tin that the Jewish victim used to play with as a child. You could say that Kate Winslet, who took her normal life away from her is giving it back to her in that form of the tin. So the Jewish victim does the right thing and places the tin on the mantelpiece next to a picture of all her relatives who were exterminated in the Holocaust.
I think there are a lot of people who criticized this movie for “not realizing the gravity of Kate Winslet being a concentration camp guard”. They are missing the whole point of the story. The whole point is to chip away at the edifice and the “standard interpretation” of war guilt, and what to do with it when it’s over. The war didn’t last very long. The amount of time I’ve worked at my present job is equivalent to almost 2 Japanese occupations of Singapore. Kate Winslet worked as a concentration camp guard for not very long, and it’s not a large part of her life. We are surprised that she thinks that her lack of literacy is a larger problem but if we bother to put ourselves in her shoes we shouldn’t be.
Let's put it this way. If you threw me into jail, but gave me a pile of books to read - maybe I'm only saying this because I know nothing about jail - I wouldn't mind it at all. A monk's life, a bookworm's life, that was the life I led in America and in Singapore. There is almost no difference, it is normal. To be in there, but not be able to read - that would have been torture.
OK, so the contrast is artificial. One is a Nazi, who because of her role in the rank and file, rots in jail for 20 years. The other is a victim who has suffered greatly in her childhood, but has lived a great and fulfilling life thereafter. Who has lived the better life? Who has suffered more? The victim has done well, ironically from the publishing proceeds from selling her story. What does this tell you about real life, the life that goes on long after the war ends, where all the rules are different?
Some people have complained that the movie does not show any war scenes, and we only know about the war through what we already know elsewhere. This is an attempt to whitewash the past. But I think this is a refreshing point of view. We gain nothing by holding on to the past. In a way the past is inexorably separated from the present. Some people say that the past isn't over, it isn't even past. Fair enough, but on the other hand, why don't you want to get on with life?
My initial impression of the Jewish victim was repulsion, but now I feel that her attitude - I do not accept the money because that would mean absolution - is more or less correct. She allows him to set up a fund to promote literacy, although it is true that all Jews are literate.
The bad news, guys, is that the Holocaust is not a unique event in human history. We haven’t had a war on the scale of WWII since then but plenty of horrible things have taken place. We have had the Vietnam wars. The Congo wars. The Rwanda genocide. Cambodia. East Timor. It’s really ridiculous to call the Holocaust unique. It’s taking place over and over again. It’s a really unhealthy attitude to just call it incomprehensible, and then ban all attempts to analyse or comprehend the scale of what happened. This shut-the-fuck-up attitude is partly an attempt to put forward a standard interpretation of the Holocaust and not ever have it questioned. The Israelis have managed to get away with a disproportionate amount of violence against the Palestinians because many legitimate questions are swept away under the aegis of “do you dare question the sanctity of the Holocaust? Do you dare deny the centuries of Anti-Semitism?”
What I think is this: the real lessons of the Holocaust have not been learnt. The lessons that have been learnt are the wrong ones. We hold on to our stereotypical ideas about it - that it is a unique and unsurpassed event, that it is improper to rationalise and speak about it, improper to try and understand it. That is all wrong. That prevents us from learning the real lessons. It's not a one off that happened to Jewish people in the past. America, who has been most insistent about having the "proper" attitude towards the Holocaust had the power to prevent at least 1 of those mass murders from taking place, but it didn't. It took 50 years for there to be an international justice tribunal. They are - only now - trying the members of the Khmer Rouge for genocide. Now that is not a simple matter and it is a significant achievement, but there is so much more that could have been done.
What did the holocaust teach mankind about handling genocide before it happens? Not very much. What does it teach mankind about handling genocide after it happens? Not very much either. Japan still does not apologise. Turkey still denies that it mass murdered the Armenians. East Timor is still in a shitty state. There are still problems in Kosovo. Saddam Hussein still used chemical weapons on the Kurds.
Anyway I found a quote from the actual novel itself. It is worth reading:
"What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to make the horrors an object of inquiry is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?"
About Kate Winslet, I suppose this is the third movie that I’ve watched that features her fucking. The first was Titanic, the second was “Little Children”. If I watch “Revolutionary Road” then I suppose there will be a fourth. Winslet had a more impressive front during “Titanic”. Maybe I will watch Revolutionary Road.
Nat suggested that I go watch “The Reader” because you get a lot of Kate Winslet fucking in that movie. Now I have watched a lot of art movies in my time, not as much as some people, but quite a few. For a long time I have watched movies so that I could learn more about art, learn more about life from them. Then I transcended even that and thought, the truest test of a movie is what your personal reactions are towards that movie. It shouldn’t even be about a critic telling you what is art. It is something that you must viscerally experience for yourself.
Now what is the point here? The bottom line is, having watched so many movies for the right reasons, I reserve the right to watch a movie for no other purpose than to watch Kate Winslet fucking.
I suppose I have to blog about it a bit more nowadays because these days I hardly ever watch movies anymore.
Most of the reviews will tell you that this is an above average movie, with one great performance (Winslet’s, and she won a handful of acting prizes for this one) and it was adapted from a great novel.
Movie reviews have to be gingerly written: they must answer the essential question: “is this movie worth watching?” without giving away the plot details. So this is not a review but rather something that talks about what the movie is all about. So for those of you who intend to watch the movie but haven’t done so yet you won’t need to be reading this.
For the rest of you, there’s this German guy, born after the war. He’s 16 and he meets this nice bust conductor – sorry I meant bus conductor, and she takes him home. He’s sick. Then he brings her flowers. They meet and fuck. Then while she’s his lover, she insists that he read to her. They are lovers for a while. One day, she is promoted to have an office job. She is ashamed to admit that she is illiterate, and then she leaves town, ending her affair with the teenager in the process.
Later on, he’s a law student and he attends a seminar. It’s about the war crimes, tribunal, and there, he sees Kate Winslet being charged for being a concentration camp guard. It is torture for him to watch, because he still loves her. She is the only person among the defendants to admit that a book that was written about her was true. There are not a lot of things that you do as a concentration camp guard that counts as murder. But there was one incident, which involves a death march. The concentration camp inmates are locked up in the church for a night. Then one night, during a bombing raid, the church is set on fire. The inmates are burnt to death, except for the mother and daughter who survive to write the book, and press charges against the concentration camp guards.
The rest of the defendants pin all the blame on her, and insist that a report that was written about the incident was written by her. She is identified as the leader of the guards and gets 20 years instead of the 4 given to all the other guards.
In the last part of the movie, while she is in jail, the lawyer (he’s a lawyer now) makes recordings of books, and mails them to her in jail. Through the recordings, and comparing them with the words on a book that she borrows from the library, she
The book was published in 1995, which was the 50th anniversary of VE day. (That’s “victory in Europe”). I think that people are still getting around what happened during that war.
In that war, we discovered 2 horrible new developments in the history of man. From the holocaust, we found out that 20th century technology has enabled us to commit murder on a scale that is simply awe-inspiring. The holocaust in which 11 million people died, was murder committed in a very systematic fashion. The second nasty surprise is nuclear weapons, which can kill on an ever larger scale than the holocaust. Why bother to kill 11 million people over 4 years when you only need 4 seconds nowadays?
So at that time, the Holocaust was presented as an utterly unique event in mankind. In part, this view was put forward by Zionists who saw this as an utterly unique way to establish the state of Israel. One of the stated purposes of a homeland for the Jewish people was that you needed a place to house all the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Many Arabs were not that happy to be chased out of their own homeland, and the establishment of Israel in 1948 has caused a lot of unhappiness in that region ever since.
So much of this movie had been about how the Germans deal with the issue of guilt. You can contrast their attitude with the Japanese – we’re still waiting for them to get back to us and I think they’re smart enough to realize that if they can stall for time long enough for most of the war generation to be dead or dying, they never ever have to apologise because it’s all “overtaken by events”. I suppose that it’s German culture that people are very direct and forthright, so it was probably more possible that they would choose to examine these issues. But I digress.
This movie therefore is not entirely about Kate Winslet fucking, although I have to admit that it is a great selling point. It is about war guilt, and how the survivors deal with it. I read somewhere that a lot of people are outraged at the movie, because Kate Winslet is more concerned about her illiteracy rather than the fact that she killed a lot of people. This is the sort of movie which raises such controversial questions that nobody finds it remarkable that a 15 year old boy is fucking a 30 something woman.
But what of it? Would you be ashamed? We all are ashamed of something. Some deep dark secret. My parents are a little ashamed that they never got as much schooling as I did. I’m ashamed that I suck at Chinese. These are the sort of issues that are on-going rather than about what happened some time in the past. That’s the difference between her illiteracy and her being a concentration camp guard.
It’s true that Hannah is one of the more morally ambivalent people in the movie. On one hand she was a Nazi, although not a very high ranking one, and subsequently, not one who made a lot of decisions. She could just say that she was taking orders. Her testimony was a little more forthright than the rest of the defendants because she was possibly less able to understand the full implications of what the concentration camp was all about. People had to die, because “there were new ones coming in all the time”. So she was a classic taker of orders.
But you have to balance that against – here’s this nice woman who took a boy home because he was sick. If you wanted a black and white version of the concentration camp guard as the ultimate embodiment of evil, that would be extremely inconvenient.
Then in the trial it was mentioned that Kate Winslet would just pick a few of the more sickly people, and ask them to read to her. And then after that they typically ended up getting chosen for extermination. I supposed she really liked being read stories to. I would consider this to be a neutral thing – what does it matter since you’re always going to kill X number of people, whether those are the ones that you interact with on a more human level?
Another thing is that in the movie, the anti-Nazis were all painted in a fairly negative light. A classmate of the law student accused him of being soft and wondered why he was always staring at Kate Winslet. He did bring up a good point: so much of this happened every where, in every stratum of German society, because the Nazis were everywhere. And yet only Kate Winslet and her gang of camp guards were identified, and only then because some of the victims wrote a book.
As for the centerpiece of the charges against the camp guards – the locking the prisoners into a church while they burnt to death inside – the judge actually offers her a reason to say that she was scared of what the prisoners would do to her if she released them. But she just said that there would be chaos everywhere and she couldn’t let that happen. A more honest answer but her priorities look extremely lop-sided now.
It is very difficult to judge what people would have done in the heat of the moment. The person responsible for murder in this case is not Kate Winslet but the allied pilot who dropped the bomb. Clearly this is not a pre-meditated case of murder and it is not first degree murder. So Kate Winslet turns at the judge “What would you have done?” The judge does not answer. He is not there to answer questions. But it is a valid question, one that casts a shadow over the rest of the movie.
I suppose that a lot of Kate Winslet’s dumbness comes from her illiteracy. No doubt she’s great at fucking, but I would attribute a lot of her illogical behaviour to simply her being quite confused. I would guess she likes order, and likes wearing uniforms.
The lawyer was probably appalled that she would rather hide her illiteracy from other people than to reduce her sentence and deny that she was the author of a certain report. So there he almost wanted to come forward and say that he knows that she is illiterate and could not possibly have authored that report. But he steps back in the end and does nothing.
I always felt that this is a metaphor for what the rank and file of the Nazis were like. They were not especially evil people, rather they were just unable or unwilling to stand up to evil. They were moral cowards like him. He had plenty of other reasons not to reveal that she was illiterate. One was that she was ashamed of it. Another was that it was after all her own decision to make and she already made it. A third reasons is that he wanted to keep his affair with her a secret. Or he wasn’t prepared to face her again. Whatever it is, the parallels with the moral failure of being a Nazi is striking. This act of not interfering with her decision to condemn herself to 20 years in prison is one of the most important acts of the film, and influences a lot of things that take place later in the lawyer's life. Why is he a cold person? Why did he feel guilty and send her audio tapes of literature? Why did he feel very awkward about meeting her in person?
The other aspect of the movie was the secrets. The love affair was a secret. I know from first hand experience that when you keep secrets from people it really alienates you from them. There was so much about how, when the lawyer as a young boy got home after having lost his virginity 1 hour ago, he was looking at his family one by one, and he just couldn’t tell them anything. It probably made him very emotionally distant from his family, if he wasn't already that way. Was his family close? They were strict, to say the least. But they stuck together. He just wasn't able to form close relationships, which is why in the end he got divorced, and spends much of his older life going from 1 lover to another.
The scene where he finally meets Hannah is also very interesting. They finally meet in the prison canteen. Remember that the last time they met face to face they were still fucking each other. Now she's 60. The meeting is a little cold, and there is little joy left. He's talking about making arrangements for her.
She's fairly unrepentant about her actions during the war. She said one line which makes the movie quite controversial. “I have learnt that the dead are already dead”. She had also learnt how to read. Well good for her! I think in a way she never really understood what being a Nazi was all about. So many people don't think about it in terms of right and wrong. To her, she was just given instructions, and she was doing a job.
Later on, just before she is to be released, and when we're thinking, "how is she going to adapt to this new world?" She hangs herself. The book makes it clear that after reading about the Holocaust she starts to think more about, and is being tormented about her role in it. But it's more ambiguous in the movie. She says that she knows all about the dead. She has been both a prisoner and a guard. Is she a helpless person who stumbles through her life, and acquiesces to all the forces around her, or is she a moral agent?
There is a case to be made for her being a helpless person. She joined the prison guard because she was just looking for a job. She had an affair with the lawyer because she could tell he had a crush on her. She couldn't read and write, and she's shut away from most human civilisation as a result. (It is very difficult for anybody to understand what it's like to be illiterate. Most people think this is trivial but it's not.) She's not educated enough to make the same moral judgements that other people make when they are condemning her. She was the only prison guard to not understand, like the other prison guards on trial, that she should not have confessed to anything.
As for whether she was the ringleader of the guards, it is possible. She is a capable person, and it's not inconceivable that she was promoted to leader. But would they have made an illiterate person a leader? But I think we are meant to believe that the 200 who died in the church were locked in as the result of a collective decision.
The thing about the war, and the holocaust is to realise that while most people could have resisted evil, it is not easy for anybody at all. It was difficult enough getting by, and it would have taken great strength, courage, resources, wealth - everything - not to be a bad person in that war.
The other thing is that her stint as a guard took up maybe 1 or 2 years of her life. That's 1 or 2 years in an otherwise unremarkable and completely ordinary life. When you put somebody in jail, you are punishing a person. OK, she did evil things and they should be punished. But there are other reasons for putting people in jail that are not justified. You put a person in jail so that society can be safe from them. Hannah was a perfectly normal member of society in peacetime. There's no need to lock her away. OK, she fucks 15 year old boys, but 15 year old is not that young, 16 is legal in this country. The other rationale of prison is rehabilitation. Normal people leading normal lives don't need rehabilitation. There's very little reason for her to be in jail.
She was in jail, in lieu of all the other people who did equally horrible things, and went unpunished, because one of the victims wrote a book. It is OK to demand justice and the war crimes trials were good things. But they still distribute justice inequally, and we can still say that Hannah was unlucky.
Still, before she hangs herself, she bequeaths her life savings to the victim who wrote the book. It's for the lawyer to confront the victim who put her in jail.
The last scene is also very jarring. The lawyer takes the tin, and gives it to the Jewish daughter. And for a while it seems to her that he’s there to ask for absolution, and treats him with disdain. She has done well for herself, is ostentatiously wealthy, and has an apartment on Manhattan’s west side. For those who have never been to New York – it costs a shit load of money to live there. The hall is tastefully decorated with plenty of expensive art pieces. She’s done quite well for herself. Then she takes the attitude of a lot of former survivors of her generation, and refuses to forgive the Nazis. Very self-righteously, she lectures that “there is nothing good that comes out of being in a concentration camp. There is nothing that a concentration camp can teach you. It is not college.”
But later on, when she realizes that she is receiving the entire life savings of somebody who has just spent 20 years in jail, her attitude softens, and she finds that he’s not here to seek forgiveness. And after all, she put Kate Winslet in jail for 20 years. $7000 is just loose change to her, and she sets up a foundation to promote literacy. After all, she said it herself, and this is the moral of the story for “The Reader”: there is nothing that a concentration camp can teach you. It bears no resemblance to life elsewhere. There is no meaning to it. So stop being vindictive about the past and lay it to rest. Kate Winslet legacy to her also included a tin that contained the money, the sort of tin that the Jewish victim used to play with as a child. You could say that Kate Winslet, who took her normal life away from her is giving it back to her in that form of the tin. So the Jewish victim does the right thing and places the tin on the mantelpiece next to a picture of all her relatives who were exterminated in the Holocaust.
I think there are a lot of people who criticized this movie for “not realizing the gravity of Kate Winslet being a concentration camp guard”. They are missing the whole point of the story. The whole point is to chip away at the edifice and the “standard interpretation” of war guilt, and what to do with it when it’s over. The war didn’t last very long. The amount of time I’ve worked at my present job is equivalent to almost 2 Japanese occupations of Singapore. Kate Winslet worked as a concentration camp guard for not very long, and it’s not a large part of her life. We are surprised that she thinks that her lack of literacy is a larger problem but if we bother to put ourselves in her shoes we shouldn’t be.
Let's put it this way. If you threw me into jail, but gave me a pile of books to read - maybe I'm only saying this because I know nothing about jail - I wouldn't mind it at all. A monk's life, a bookworm's life, that was the life I led in America and in Singapore. There is almost no difference, it is normal. To be in there, but not be able to read - that would have been torture.
OK, so the contrast is artificial. One is a Nazi, who because of her role in the rank and file, rots in jail for 20 years. The other is a victim who has suffered greatly in her childhood, but has lived a great and fulfilling life thereafter. Who has lived the better life? Who has suffered more? The victim has done well, ironically from the publishing proceeds from selling her story. What does this tell you about real life, the life that goes on long after the war ends, where all the rules are different?
Some people have complained that the movie does not show any war scenes, and we only know about the war through what we already know elsewhere. This is an attempt to whitewash the past. But I think this is a refreshing point of view. We gain nothing by holding on to the past. In a way the past is inexorably separated from the present. Some people say that the past isn't over, it isn't even past. Fair enough, but on the other hand, why don't you want to get on with life?
My initial impression of the Jewish victim was repulsion, but now I feel that her attitude - I do not accept the money because that would mean absolution - is more or less correct. She allows him to set up a fund to promote literacy, although it is true that all Jews are literate.
The bad news, guys, is that the Holocaust is not a unique event in human history. We haven’t had a war on the scale of WWII since then but plenty of horrible things have taken place. We have had the Vietnam wars. The Congo wars. The Rwanda genocide. Cambodia. East Timor. It’s really ridiculous to call the Holocaust unique. It’s taking place over and over again. It’s a really unhealthy attitude to just call it incomprehensible, and then ban all attempts to analyse or comprehend the scale of what happened. This shut-the-fuck-up attitude is partly an attempt to put forward a standard interpretation of the Holocaust and not ever have it questioned. The Israelis have managed to get away with a disproportionate amount of violence against the Palestinians because many legitimate questions are swept away under the aegis of “do you dare question the sanctity of the Holocaust? Do you dare deny the centuries of Anti-Semitism?”
What I think is this: the real lessons of the Holocaust have not been learnt. The lessons that have been learnt are the wrong ones. We hold on to our stereotypical ideas about it - that it is a unique and unsurpassed event, that it is improper to rationalise and speak about it, improper to try and understand it. That is all wrong. That prevents us from learning the real lessons. It's not a one off that happened to Jewish people in the past. America, who has been most insistent about having the "proper" attitude towards the Holocaust had the power to prevent at least 1 of those mass murders from taking place, but it didn't. It took 50 years for there to be an international justice tribunal. They are - only now - trying the members of the Khmer Rouge for genocide. Now that is not a simple matter and it is a significant achievement, but there is so much more that could have been done.
What did the holocaust teach mankind about handling genocide before it happens? Not very much. What does it teach mankind about handling genocide after it happens? Not very much either. Japan still does not apologise. Turkey still denies that it mass murdered the Armenians. East Timor is still in a shitty state. There are still problems in Kosovo. Saddam Hussein still used chemical weapons on the Kurds.
Anyway I found a quote from the actual novel itself. It is worth reading:
"What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to make the horrors an object of inquiry is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?"
About Kate Winslet, I suppose this is the third movie that I’ve watched that features her fucking. The first was Titanic, the second was “Little Children”. If I watch “Revolutionary Road” then I suppose there will be a fourth. Winslet had a more impressive front during “Titanic”. Maybe I will watch Revolutionary Road.
Saturday, 14 March 2009
Face
We used to think about face a lot. The clich̩ is that Asians take giving face and having face very seriously. I used to think that this was particular to East Asians Рparticularly Chinese Japanese and Koreans.
That was until I found out about honour killings in the Muslim world. Not only the Arabs, but also North Africans, Iranians, Turks, Pakistanis, Central Asians have that to some extent. Being a terrorist is also an act of honour. Just as it used to be honourable to die for your country, so is it honourable to die for your 72 virgins. People in Gaza Strip used to boast about how there were more suicide bomber martyrs in our family than yours.
So, why don’t these angmohs have a concept of face? They don’t really have that much now, except – when you think about Vietnam, it was an unwinnable war, and was carried on because the Americans didn’t think it was good to be weak in front of the Russians. Putting that man on the moon was also about face, because it surely didn’t accomplish anything else. But that is on a national level. On an individual level there is less of this going on.
Except – when you open the history books and read about the courtly tradition, about knights and all that. People challenged each other to duels, with the expectation that one of the duellists was going to die. That was definitely about face. Sometimes duellists would meet up and agree to both miss each other, so that they could both consider their honours restored and nobody would have to die. Sometimes one person would show up and hope that the other wouldn’t, so that he could leave with his honour intact. You can also note that duelling went on in the wild west in America 100 years ago.
I suppose, then that the question to ask is: what went on in the last few hundred years, that made westerners feel that face was not so important anymore.
That was until I found out about honour killings in the Muslim world. Not only the Arabs, but also North Africans, Iranians, Turks, Pakistanis, Central Asians have that to some extent. Being a terrorist is also an act of honour. Just as it used to be honourable to die for your country, so is it honourable to die for your 72 virgins. People in Gaza Strip used to boast about how there were more suicide bomber martyrs in our family than yours.
So, why don’t these angmohs have a concept of face? They don’t really have that much now, except – when you think about Vietnam, it was an unwinnable war, and was carried on because the Americans didn’t think it was good to be weak in front of the Russians. Putting that man on the moon was also about face, because it surely didn’t accomplish anything else. But that is on a national level. On an individual level there is less of this going on.
Except – when you open the history books and read about the courtly tradition, about knights and all that. People challenged each other to duels, with the expectation that one of the duellists was going to die. That was definitely about face. Sometimes duellists would meet up and agree to both miss each other, so that they could both consider their honours restored and nobody would have to die. Sometimes one person would show up and hope that the other wouldn’t, so that he could leave with his honour intact. You can also note that duelling went on in the wild west in America 100 years ago.
I suppose, then that the question to ask is: what went on in the last few hundred years, that made westerners feel that face was not so important anymore.
Saturday, 7 March 2009
377A
I suppose people who I work for don’t read this blog I hope but even if they do this doesn’t really have anything directly to do with them.
I’ve never been a homophobe. Yes I definitely wouldn’t one of them to hit on me or rape me or whatever, but I don’t think it is wrong. I have never understood their arguments. You can get swayed by your visceral reactions to them but I believe what they do is their business, and is furthermore harmless. So I’ll be unambiguous about my stand: 377a is wrong. I am acquainted with around 5 gay people, and I see them as being harmless although it is true that they are probably more promiscuous than straight people.
The government defended its decision to keep 377A, saying that the majority of people in Singapore are still unable to accept homosexuality. I thought that was a bunch of crap until I started talking to people. Well, they’re right. I’m a little surprised to be finding myself surrounded by homophobes but there you go.
When I choose to be an engineer, I did that because I believed that engineering is an honest vocation. You don’t transfer $100 from point A to point B and keep $1, which is basically what a lot of banks do. You don’t take a piece of shit and dress it up so that people want to buy it which is what advertising (or policy making in the government) is all about. OK, everybody does dressing shit up to some extent but we don’t do much of it. However engineers are a fairly judgemental bunch. (This is itself a judgemental statement but what the heck). Are we to be surprised that a fairly large proportion of terrorists turn out to be engineering graduates? No. So here I am, surrounded by homophobes.
Next best thing is to try and figure out what goes into their minds.
“We have a certain set of values that we believe in. We uphold morality.”
OK, fair enough. But everybody has values, even people like me. What happens when values conflict with each other? Do we err on the side of the traditional? There is this tendency to do so. It is very ingrained in the Chinese culture. The young defers to the old. The ordinary folk defer to authority. There is no need to think so much.
Is that alright? But a lot of terrible things have happened in Communist China because people placed all their trust in Mao Zedong. I regard unquestioning obedience as being an extremely dangerous set of values to have in general. The most recent and extreme manifestation of this was the Cultural Revolution. And it must be said, I believe the Cultural Revolution would not have happened if people didn’t generally have values like this. It is part of our culture to have relatively unquestioning obedience to authority and that’s quite unfortunate.
“But there is no use talking about right or wrong otherwise you will never hear the end of the story”
Now this is something that is very interesting. This tells me that this guy thinks that the reason why you shouldn’t condone homosexuality does not have anything to do with whether something is right or wrong. People posit that there is something called “morality” which is somehow different from ethics, which says whether something is right or wrong. It is much more important to live your life according to the conventions of the society around you, rather than whether something is correct or not, or does harm to the society.
It is ironic that this guy is part of a team whose brief is to drive change in the corporation. But that is not surprising because we know that human beings are not by nature internally consistent.
I’m wondering if that is the way that Singaporeans think. It is not right. Nominally Singapore is a democracy, and there are values that are associated with being a democracy. It means that people participate in debating issues, rather than leave the “important people” to deal with the issues. It requires that much of the populace is educated. Normally this is no problem, but given what the education system is like, I am not fully convinced that the average Singaporean is taught, or is even encouraged to think for himself.
This attitude leads me question what is the real reason why Singapore purports to be a tolerant society. I do not believe the values of multi-culturalism in Singapore are the fundamental ones. Rather, the real reason why we want to be tolerant of each other is that we want to avoid ethnic strife and conflict. The true fundamental Singaporean value, thus, is expediency. We became a multi-ethnic society not through choice, but because it was inevitable. And so we manage, we lived with it. Having people of different backgrounds in our country almost makes us a better society, but in the end, not quite. We don’t ask too many questions of our neighbours. Do not poke our noses in each other’s affairs. Do not be rude. Just let the status quo be. If you do not like something, maybe you will get a kindly listening ear somewhere, and after that, often without anything being done to solve the problem, we know that we just have to “move on”. Shut the fuck up and don’t ask so many fucking stupid questions.
“homosexuality leads to a degradation in morals”
I’m not going to straight off disagree with this because it is not an obviously wrong thing to say. On the face of it, there is no reason why sticking your dick into somebody’s ass instead of somebody’s pussy is immoral, other than that some people find it disgusting.
There is one approach which is not a frivolous argument, however. Homosexuality is in some ways a threat to the traditional nuclear family structure. But the nuclear family is not so traditional. It wasn’t always that you had a couple being the head of a household, raising children in the same house. You used to have communes in China, like those places that you see in the movie “Kung Fu” (and I start to have an idea of where they got the idea of the HDB flat from). You used to have all the members in an extended family living in the same house.
A gay couple, though, are unlikely to have children, unless they are adopted from China or from an orphanage. But I suppose it would take a fairly open minded parent giving up a kid for adoption to allow them to get adopted by a gay couple. A few of us will never get used to the fact that when Daddy and Mummy were younger they used to fuck each other every night. So can you get your mind around the fact that Daddy and Daddy are fucking each other in the ass every night? But Johnny Cash sang in “A Boy Named Sue” of a father who would give a guy a girl’s name, just for kicks, so a fairly warped mind would do it just for fun.
The “standard model” for human life: just as you were brought up by parents who made great sacrifices for you, one day you will have children and do the same. Being a parent makes you a better person (although I personally know a few exceptions). The carrying out of parental duty is good training and the rearing of good children, and the moulding of them into good citizens of societies, is your gift to society. (I know that a few Palestinians are proud that their children will blow up a few Israelis up one day, but that is still consistent with the idea that your children will carry your way of life and your values, or part thereof, into the next generation.)
Society is built up of such bonds between people. The family is the basic unit of society. After that, bonds between people, and bonds between families. Your connection to your family is in a way a large part of your connection to society.
For some, a deviation from this whole package is a threat to society. Is this a valid viewpoint? Maybe. People - and I include gays in this view the gay lifestyle as one endless party / sex orgy. Perhaps there is something deeply abhorrent about this lifestyle. All good citizens should become parents so that they can spend most of their free time getting on their children’s asses for not studying hard enough.
But I do not think that homosexuals are all like that. I think that for many gay people they are condemned to a whole life of bachelorhood. This is not necessarily a bad thing – a few homosexuals do rise to the top of the corporate world because when compared to their straight peers who have families they can focus on their careers.
I also believe that a few people are bisexuals, but they choose homosexuality because it is a carefree life bereft of responsibilities. This is unfortunate and I would criticise this but not really a good enough reason to criminalise sodomy.
“We, as a society do not accept homosexuals. / The minority shouldn’t be telling the majority how to live our lives”
The human brain is wired in such a way that they have this conception of “us” and “them”. Human beings are by nature very tribal animals. It is simply an offshoot of our natural propensity to classify and order objects and people in order to make sense of this world, so we cannot avoid this. People who belong to our tribe are always “better” in some respect that somebody from the other tribe. There is this knee jerk hostility towards people of other categories. Xenophobia, racism, homophobia, sectarianism are all offshoots of this human tendency: since it is rooted in something as basic and fundamental as our cognition of the world around us, all these hateful tendencies will never be quelled.
For the majority, there is always going to be some incomprehension and hostility about homosexuals. Most people don’t belong to that tribe, and especially when your differences have to do with such provocative aspects like sexuality, there is going to be a somewhat explosive hostility towards them.
Singapore is in some ways has a very strange attitude towards minorities. The protection of minorities is deeply enshrined in our national values. Malays and Indians have the same legal status as Chinese, even though this does not automatically translate to socio- economic status. We pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion. Some people have included creed. Even if nobody treats the pledge as seriously these days, for the simple reason that nobody treats the concept of the nation as seriously these days, this is significant.
But we know that just because we are one united people regardless of race, language and religion, we are not one united people regardless of political affiliation. We know that if we probably will be detained without charge if we should pull whatever quote unquote Marxist conspiracies, even though we are just organising some NGOs. We know that the press has one set of protocols for covering PAP politicians, and another set for covering opposition ones. We also know that we are not one united people regardless of sexual orientation.
The argument that the minority cannot determine what the majority says is a specious one. We do not outlaw Indians and Malays, but somehow we are still able to outlaw homosexual acts. The argument that homosexuals are imposing their lifestyle on straight people is also rather crazy. In what way are you going to have to change your behaviour in the presence of homosexuals? Maybe you will cut down on the gay jokes, or maybe you won’t even have to. I will still be able to buy FHM. Maybe I will feel strange when I see a guy ogle over another guy (I’m trying to avoid the q word here) but I should be able to shut it out of my mind.
There are some issues that should be raised. It is a fairly recent phenomenon that a lot of us are living in diverse societies. What does it mean for us? It is always easier to live in a society where everybody is similar. It is always easier to identify with people who are similar to yourself. To be sure, living with a lot of strange people does make life more varied and stimulating, but not always more harmonious and happy.
The government wants to not rock the boat. Actually I can understand this. Singapore is going through a lot of changes. I don’t know why the government has opened the floodgates to immigrants to such an extent that they have now. I can understand that they want to manage all the foreigners that they have here without having to deal with gay rights at the same time.
I’m not going to completely reject Confucianism. I don’t think that it is completely wrong. There has to be a basis for society. People need some common values, and family is one of the strongest bonds between people. Confucius would claim that family ties have to be strong, but I don’t know what he would say about homosexuality. On one hand knowing him to be one of the most conservative thinkers around I expect him to disapprove. But then again with his emphasis on the cohesion of society I don’t expect him to cast them out either.
People have written books on the “Great Sorting”, where American society is being more segmentised, because they have the ability to either move house to towns where the prevailing culture is more reflective of their own values. Otherwise they spend a lot of time on the net befriending people whose values are more similar to their own. Paradoxically, even as the world becomes more diverse and varied, each community becomes more homogenous – and as a result, more divisive and conflicted. People talk less about a “nation” or a “society” and instead we have a landscape of conflicting interest groups engaged in perpetual war with each other. If we are made too aware of differences between people, this can cause people to slowly disengage from society, and it definitely has an impact on the cohesiveness of society. I do not think that it is a coincidence that the USA, which is one of the most diverse of countries, also has one of the most individualistic cultures. This is a dark side of the utopian concept of multi-culturalism that is not very often explored.
Actually I think that this is one reason why people should accept gays in society. We certainly do not want them to form special villages with a siege mentality and cause society to fragment even further.
I may be quite westernised but I am not uncritical of the way they think. I think that when they are so individualistic, they are also being quite myopic. I used to be like them – very distrustful of “society” or “the system” until it occurred to me that people distrust society mainly because they do not understand how society works. Then, what’s there to be proud of not understanding society? You cannot protect an individual’s right so much that he becomes immune from all criticism of his behaviour. In any given social setting, at any one time, somebody will lose and another person will gain, but it is fair if you believe that over a long time, things will balance themselves out.
So while I think that these people should get their gay rights, and I would condone them talking publicly about it in order to raise some awareness, you have to draw the line at people flaunting it in your face. I believe in being different because you are different, but I don’t believe in being different for the sake of being different. People sometimes want to show that they accept gays in order to assert their moral superiority, that’s a bit too much.
Alternatively there is the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy where you don’t ask people if they are gay, just befriend them and don’t think about it. Sometimes we Chinese don’t like to confront issues head on. Just live and let live. It is a quantum mechanics, where the answer to the question is not a “yes” or “no” until you measure it, and the act of measuring something will force the issue into being “yes” or “no”. There is some wisdom in this approach, but it is still not as ideal as everybody accepting everybody else.
“Homosexuals should not be serving in the SAF.”
I think we can agree that the military attracts a lot of macho people. There was this big storm with Bill Clinton who came up against Colin Powell and company when he proposed that there would be gays in the military. The backlash was so intense that in the end he settled for a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. Still, this gave a lot of ammunition to his critics who would for a long time afterwards point to this as proof that he was not a good leader.
A SAF guy I spoke to was vehemently opposed to homosexuals in combat. He is probably a homophobe himself which in Singapore probably not a big deal. His argument was that homosexuals do not make good officers. He probably doesn’t know his history. Homosexuality was prevalent in the Samurai elites in Japan. Alexander the Great, one of the greatest generals of all time, had a gay lover. In Athenian Greece, there was a company of gay people, the Theban army, who had a reputation for being one of the bravest fighters, because nobody wants to be a pussy in front of your gay lover.
Still, he had some valid points. If Singaporeans do not accept homosexuality, how can they accept gay person as a leader in a combat situation, where trust is something that will determine success or failure, life or death? Anyway the main thrust of this argument that homosexuality is not acceptable because convention does not accept it, is dealt with above.
We may or may not see homosexuals in combat, but maybe this is not as much a pressing issue about whether it is acceptable in civilian life.
I’ve never been a homophobe. Yes I definitely wouldn’t one of them to hit on me or rape me or whatever, but I don’t think it is wrong. I have never understood their arguments. You can get swayed by your visceral reactions to them but I believe what they do is their business, and is furthermore harmless. So I’ll be unambiguous about my stand: 377a is wrong. I am acquainted with around 5 gay people, and I see them as being harmless although it is true that they are probably more promiscuous than straight people.
The government defended its decision to keep 377A, saying that the majority of people in Singapore are still unable to accept homosexuality. I thought that was a bunch of crap until I started talking to people. Well, they’re right. I’m a little surprised to be finding myself surrounded by homophobes but there you go.
When I choose to be an engineer, I did that because I believed that engineering is an honest vocation. You don’t transfer $100 from point A to point B and keep $1, which is basically what a lot of banks do. You don’t take a piece of shit and dress it up so that people want to buy it which is what advertising (or policy making in the government) is all about. OK, everybody does dressing shit up to some extent but we don’t do much of it. However engineers are a fairly judgemental bunch. (This is itself a judgemental statement but what the heck). Are we to be surprised that a fairly large proportion of terrorists turn out to be engineering graduates? No. So here I am, surrounded by homophobes.
Next best thing is to try and figure out what goes into their minds.
“We have a certain set of values that we believe in. We uphold morality.”
OK, fair enough. But everybody has values, even people like me. What happens when values conflict with each other? Do we err on the side of the traditional? There is this tendency to do so. It is very ingrained in the Chinese culture. The young defers to the old. The ordinary folk defer to authority. There is no need to think so much.
Is that alright? But a lot of terrible things have happened in Communist China because people placed all their trust in Mao Zedong. I regard unquestioning obedience as being an extremely dangerous set of values to have in general. The most recent and extreme manifestation of this was the Cultural Revolution. And it must be said, I believe the Cultural Revolution would not have happened if people didn’t generally have values like this. It is part of our culture to have relatively unquestioning obedience to authority and that’s quite unfortunate.
“But there is no use talking about right or wrong otherwise you will never hear the end of the story”
Now this is something that is very interesting. This tells me that this guy thinks that the reason why you shouldn’t condone homosexuality does not have anything to do with whether something is right or wrong. People posit that there is something called “morality” which is somehow different from ethics, which says whether something is right or wrong. It is much more important to live your life according to the conventions of the society around you, rather than whether something is correct or not, or does harm to the society.
It is ironic that this guy is part of a team whose brief is to drive change in the corporation. But that is not surprising because we know that human beings are not by nature internally consistent.
I’m wondering if that is the way that Singaporeans think. It is not right. Nominally Singapore is a democracy, and there are values that are associated with being a democracy. It means that people participate in debating issues, rather than leave the “important people” to deal with the issues. It requires that much of the populace is educated. Normally this is no problem, but given what the education system is like, I am not fully convinced that the average Singaporean is taught, or is even encouraged to think for himself.
This attitude leads me question what is the real reason why Singapore purports to be a tolerant society. I do not believe the values of multi-culturalism in Singapore are the fundamental ones. Rather, the real reason why we want to be tolerant of each other is that we want to avoid ethnic strife and conflict. The true fundamental Singaporean value, thus, is expediency. We became a multi-ethnic society not through choice, but because it was inevitable. And so we manage, we lived with it. Having people of different backgrounds in our country almost makes us a better society, but in the end, not quite. We don’t ask too many questions of our neighbours. Do not poke our noses in each other’s affairs. Do not be rude. Just let the status quo be. If you do not like something, maybe you will get a kindly listening ear somewhere, and after that, often without anything being done to solve the problem, we know that we just have to “move on”. Shut the fuck up and don’t ask so many fucking stupid questions.
“homosexuality leads to a degradation in morals”
I’m not going to straight off disagree with this because it is not an obviously wrong thing to say. On the face of it, there is no reason why sticking your dick into somebody’s ass instead of somebody’s pussy is immoral, other than that some people find it disgusting.
There is one approach which is not a frivolous argument, however. Homosexuality is in some ways a threat to the traditional nuclear family structure. But the nuclear family is not so traditional. It wasn’t always that you had a couple being the head of a household, raising children in the same house. You used to have communes in China, like those places that you see in the movie “Kung Fu” (and I start to have an idea of where they got the idea of the HDB flat from). You used to have all the members in an extended family living in the same house.
A gay couple, though, are unlikely to have children, unless they are adopted from China or from an orphanage. But I suppose it would take a fairly open minded parent giving up a kid for adoption to allow them to get adopted by a gay couple. A few of us will never get used to the fact that when Daddy and Mummy were younger they used to fuck each other every night. So can you get your mind around the fact that Daddy and Daddy are fucking each other in the ass every night? But Johnny Cash sang in “A Boy Named Sue” of a father who would give a guy a girl’s name, just for kicks, so a fairly warped mind would do it just for fun.
The “standard model” for human life: just as you were brought up by parents who made great sacrifices for you, one day you will have children and do the same. Being a parent makes you a better person (although I personally know a few exceptions). The carrying out of parental duty is good training and the rearing of good children, and the moulding of them into good citizens of societies, is your gift to society. (I know that a few Palestinians are proud that their children will blow up a few Israelis up one day, but that is still consistent with the idea that your children will carry your way of life and your values, or part thereof, into the next generation.)
Society is built up of such bonds between people. The family is the basic unit of society. After that, bonds between people, and bonds between families. Your connection to your family is in a way a large part of your connection to society.
For some, a deviation from this whole package is a threat to society. Is this a valid viewpoint? Maybe. People - and I include gays in this view the gay lifestyle as one endless party / sex orgy. Perhaps there is something deeply abhorrent about this lifestyle. All good citizens should become parents so that they can spend most of their free time getting on their children’s asses for not studying hard enough.
But I do not think that homosexuals are all like that. I think that for many gay people they are condemned to a whole life of bachelorhood. This is not necessarily a bad thing – a few homosexuals do rise to the top of the corporate world because when compared to their straight peers who have families they can focus on their careers.
I also believe that a few people are bisexuals, but they choose homosexuality because it is a carefree life bereft of responsibilities. This is unfortunate and I would criticise this but not really a good enough reason to criminalise sodomy.
“We, as a society do not accept homosexuals. / The minority shouldn’t be telling the majority how to live our lives”
The human brain is wired in such a way that they have this conception of “us” and “them”. Human beings are by nature very tribal animals. It is simply an offshoot of our natural propensity to classify and order objects and people in order to make sense of this world, so we cannot avoid this. People who belong to our tribe are always “better” in some respect that somebody from the other tribe. There is this knee jerk hostility towards people of other categories. Xenophobia, racism, homophobia, sectarianism are all offshoots of this human tendency: since it is rooted in something as basic and fundamental as our cognition of the world around us, all these hateful tendencies will never be quelled.
For the majority, there is always going to be some incomprehension and hostility about homosexuals. Most people don’t belong to that tribe, and especially when your differences have to do with such provocative aspects like sexuality, there is going to be a somewhat explosive hostility towards them.
Singapore is in some ways has a very strange attitude towards minorities. The protection of minorities is deeply enshrined in our national values. Malays and Indians have the same legal status as Chinese, even though this does not automatically translate to socio- economic status. We pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion. Some people have included creed. Even if nobody treats the pledge as seriously these days, for the simple reason that nobody treats the concept of the nation as seriously these days, this is significant.
But we know that just because we are one united people regardless of race, language and religion, we are not one united people regardless of political affiliation. We know that if we probably will be detained without charge if we should pull whatever quote unquote Marxist conspiracies, even though we are just organising some NGOs. We know that the press has one set of protocols for covering PAP politicians, and another set for covering opposition ones. We also know that we are not one united people regardless of sexual orientation.
The argument that the minority cannot determine what the majority says is a specious one. We do not outlaw Indians and Malays, but somehow we are still able to outlaw homosexual acts. The argument that homosexuals are imposing their lifestyle on straight people is also rather crazy. In what way are you going to have to change your behaviour in the presence of homosexuals? Maybe you will cut down on the gay jokes, or maybe you won’t even have to. I will still be able to buy FHM. Maybe I will feel strange when I see a guy ogle over another guy (I’m trying to avoid the q word here) but I should be able to shut it out of my mind.
There are some issues that should be raised. It is a fairly recent phenomenon that a lot of us are living in diverse societies. What does it mean for us? It is always easier to live in a society where everybody is similar. It is always easier to identify with people who are similar to yourself. To be sure, living with a lot of strange people does make life more varied and stimulating, but not always more harmonious and happy.
The government wants to not rock the boat. Actually I can understand this. Singapore is going through a lot of changes. I don’t know why the government has opened the floodgates to immigrants to such an extent that they have now. I can understand that they want to manage all the foreigners that they have here without having to deal with gay rights at the same time.
I’m not going to completely reject Confucianism. I don’t think that it is completely wrong. There has to be a basis for society. People need some common values, and family is one of the strongest bonds between people. Confucius would claim that family ties have to be strong, but I don’t know what he would say about homosexuality. On one hand knowing him to be one of the most conservative thinkers around I expect him to disapprove. But then again with his emphasis on the cohesion of society I don’t expect him to cast them out either.
People have written books on the “Great Sorting”, where American society is being more segmentised, because they have the ability to either move house to towns where the prevailing culture is more reflective of their own values. Otherwise they spend a lot of time on the net befriending people whose values are more similar to their own. Paradoxically, even as the world becomes more diverse and varied, each community becomes more homogenous – and as a result, more divisive and conflicted. People talk less about a “nation” or a “society” and instead we have a landscape of conflicting interest groups engaged in perpetual war with each other. If we are made too aware of differences between people, this can cause people to slowly disengage from society, and it definitely has an impact on the cohesiveness of society. I do not think that it is a coincidence that the USA, which is one of the most diverse of countries, also has one of the most individualistic cultures. This is a dark side of the utopian concept of multi-culturalism that is not very often explored.
Actually I think that this is one reason why people should accept gays in society. We certainly do not want them to form special villages with a siege mentality and cause society to fragment even further.
I may be quite westernised but I am not uncritical of the way they think. I think that when they are so individualistic, they are also being quite myopic. I used to be like them – very distrustful of “society” or “the system” until it occurred to me that people distrust society mainly because they do not understand how society works. Then, what’s there to be proud of not understanding society? You cannot protect an individual’s right so much that he becomes immune from all criticism of his behaviour. In any given social setting, at any one time, somebody will lose and another person will gain, but it is fair if you believe that over a long time, things will balance themselves out.
So while I think that these people should get their gay rights, and I would condone them talking publicly about it in order to raise some awareness, you have to draw the line at people flaunting it in your face. I believe in being different because you are different, but I don’t believe in being different for the sake of being different. People sometimes want to show that they accept gays in order to assert their moral superiority, that’s a bit too much.
Alternatively there is the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy where you don’t ask people if they are gay, just befriend them and don’t think about it. Sometimes we Chinese don’t like to confront issues head on. Just live and let live. It is a quantum mechanics, where the answer to the question is not a “yes” or “no” until you measure it, and the act of measuring something will force the issue into being “yes” or “no”. There is some wisdom in this approach, but it is still not as ideal as everybody accepting everybody else.
“Homosexuals should not be serving in the SAF.”
I think we can agree that the military attracts a lot of macho people. There was this big storm with Bill Clinton who came up against Colin Powell and company when he proposed that there would be gays in the military. The backlash was so intense that in the end he settled for a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. Still, this gave a lot of ammunition to his critics who would for a long time afterwards point to this as proof that he was not a good leader.
A SAF guy I spoke to was vehemently opposed to homosexuals in combat. He is probably a homophobe himself which in Singapore probably not a big deal. His argument was that homosexuals do not make good officers. He probably doesn’t know his history. Homosexuality was prevalent in the Samurai elites in Japan. Alexander the Great, one of the greatest generals of all time, had a gay lover. In Athenian Greece, there was a company of gay people, the Theban army, who had a reputation for being one of the bravest fighters, because nobody wants to be a pussy in front of your gay lover.
Still, he had some valid points. If Singaporeans do not accept homosexuality, how can they accept gay person as a leader in a combat situation, where trust is something that will determine success or failure, life or death? Anyway the main thrust of this argument that homosexuality is not acceptable because convention does not accept it, is dealt with above.
We may or may not see homosexuals in combat, but maybe this is not as much a pressing issue about whether it is acceptable in civilian life.
Sunday, 1 March 2009
Ain't Too Proud to Beg
"Did she make you cry
Make you break down
Shatter your illusions of love
Is it over now--do you know how
Pick up the pieces and go home."
- "Gold Dust Woman", Fleetwood Mac
I think it was difficult for people to understand these things. I sat there, with 2 friends I had known since secondary school, in a context that was quite foreign. They definitely didn’t know how I was going to act when I had been in a relationship.
I sat there, catatonic. I had already passed the stage where you know that it is over. I had never believed that it was going to last forever. But I had not fully understood the implications of “it’s over”. A large part of the messiness is that there’s a lot of stuff that you had taken for granted and they’re suddenly not there anymore. You didn’t know that you would go nuts if you hadn’t heard from her for 3 days. And even when you did hear from her, it wouldn’t be the same as it used to be. And even if it was the same as what it used to be, it’s just the old stupid lines you used each other that sounded wonderful and fresh the first time around, but just end up sounding like some stupid parody a year later.
People contextualise things in very weird things. They keep on saying, “I want closure”. What does that mean? Probably you want things to be some happier state that it was in the past. But which past? The past before or after you met her? Or you just want the benefits (a person you can talk to, someone you can rely on, somebody you can bitch about your unhappiness to) to continue? Or you just want all this pain to go away? Can you wish the pain away by understanding the cause of it? Imagine that a car rolled over your leg, and you’re screaming your heart out. Then somebody comes over and contextualizes it for you. It was a Volvo. The driver was drinking and will probably go to jail. Boy that’s going to make the pain go away.
Then a remark came, probably meant to be sympathetic, came, and shook me out of my stupor: “look what she done to him man.”
It was something that took place in a vacuum. In a sense all relationships take place in a vacuum, something that I hadn’t fully appreciated before but understand now. People can’t really understand what you’re feeling (and even if they understand they can’t feel it.) In a sense they can’t really advice you very much. But in another sense they can because they can see a different point of view. All those crazy emotions that I went through during that time, I’m sure everybody else who has been in love for the first time would understand it. Something splendid. Something heroic. Something so truly out of this world and fresh that you are almost tempted to forget that almost every adult has had these emotions at some point or another. You think that the cavemen never felt what you were going through? It was a spiritual journey, a rite of passage.
And it wasn’t just that it was my first time going through this. It was special, dazzling, something that could not have happened if the guy was somebody else other than me, the girl was somebody else other than her. We continuously challenged each other, pushed each other on. We were unwilling to settle for mediocrity. We had to say the most romantic things, act out the grand sweeping gestures. We weren’t going to be the mediocre ones who just giggled out and blushingly blubbered the trivial banalities that people would look back upon and cringe. The sparks and fireworks were real. And that’s one aspect that I can look back upon without much bitterness.
But that seemingly innocuous comment jolted me, because it presented the situation in another way that I didn’t care for before, but I understood that that point of view mattered because people were going to see it that way. She had cheated me, and I was her helpless victim. Well some of it was just not true. It wasn’t unreciprocated. It was, in fact, one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. So why was I suddenly some kind of loser?
I had to snap out of it, quick. I had to change my course before all my gains turned into losses. If love was a fire, this one was devouring my house and all the things that it contained. What else did I have in my life other than this? Not much. How was I channeling my energy? Probably not very wisely. There were books to read, people to see, things to do and stuff to learn. I could not turn back while fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, even for just one last look. I had to run for my life.
What I did learn from this was that whereas it was not that difficult for me to get over my heartbreak, it was substantially more difficult to get over that blow to my ego. The phrase "ain't too proud to beg" unfortunately does not apply to me.
OK, some of you have the right to ask: why bother at all? You started a relationship with the expectation that it was not going to last? What sort of a cynical sick fuck does that? I only did it for the experience points.
The answers to the questions posed by Stevie Nicks at the beginning of the post (actually the song is about the withdrawal effects of drugs) - the answers are yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.
Ed's note: this is not a post about recent events.
Make you break down
Shatter your illusions of love
Is it over now--do you know how
Pick up the pieces and go home."
- "Gold Dust Woman", Fleetwood Mac
I think it was difficult for people to understand these things. I sat there, with 2 friends I had known since secondary school, in a context that was quite foreign. They definitely didn’t know how I was going to act when I had been in a relationship.
I sat there, catatonic. I had already passed the stage where you know that it is over. I had never believed that it was going to last forever. But I had not fully understood the implications of “it’s over”. A large part of the messiness is that there’s a lot of stuff that you had taken for granted and they’re suddenly not there anymore. You didn’t know that you would go nuts if you hadn’t heard from her for 3 days. And even when you did hear from her, it wouldn’t be the same as it used to be. And even if it was the same as what it used to be, it’s just the old stupid lines you used each other that sounded wonderful and fresh the first time around, but just end up sounding like some stupid parody a year later.
People contextualise things in very weird things. They keep on saying, “I want closure”. What does that mean? Probably you want things to be some happier state that it was in the past. But which past? The past before or after you met her? Or you just want the benefits (a person you can talk to, someone you can rely on, somebody you can bitch about your unhappiness to) to continue? Or you just want all this pain to go away? Can you wish the pain away by understanding the cause of it? Imagine that a car rolled over your leg, and you’re screaming your heart out. Then somebody comes over and contextualizes it for you. It was a Volvo. The driver was drinking and will probably go to jail. Boy that’s going to make the pain go away.
Then a remark came, probably meant to be sympathetic, came, and shook me out of my stupor: “look what she done to him man.”
It was something that took place in a vacuum. In a sense all relationships take place in a vacuum, something that I hadn’t fully appreciated before but understand now. People can’t really understand what you’re feeling (and even if they understand they can’t feel it.) In a sense they can’t really advice you very much. But in another sense they can because they can see a different point of view. All those crazy emotions that I went through during that time, I’m sure everybody else who has been in love for the first time would understand it. Something splendid. Something heroic. Something so truly out of this world and fresh that you are almost tempted to forget that almost every adult has had these emotions at some point or another. You think that the cavemen never felt what you were going through? It was a spiritual journey, a rite of passage.
And it wasn’t just that it was my first time going through this. It was special, dazzling, something that could not have happened if the guy was somebody else other than me, the girl was somebody else other than her. We continuously challenged each other, pushed each other on. We were unwilling to settle for mediocrity. We had to say the most romantic things, act out the grand sweeping gestures. We weren’t going to be the mediocre ones who just giggled out and blushingly blubbered the trivial banalities that people would look back upon and cringe. The sparks and fireworks were real. And that’s one aspect that I can look back upon without much bitterness.
But that seemingly innocuous comment jolted me, because it presented the situation in another way that I didn’t care for before, but I understood that that point of view mattered because people were going to see it that way. She had cheated me, and I was her helpless victim. Well some of it was just not true. It wasn’t unreciprocated. It was, in fact, one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. So why was I suddenly some kind of loser?
I had to snap out of it, quick. I had to change my course before all my gains turned into losses. If love was a fire, this one was devouring my house and all the things that it contained. What else did I have in my life other than this? Not much. How was I channeling my energy? Probably not very wisely. There were books to read, people to see, things to do and stuff to learn. I could not turn back while fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, even for just one last look. I had to run for my life.
What I did learn from this was that whereas it was not that difficult for me to get over my heartbreak, it was substantially more difficult to get over that blow to my ego. The phrase "ain't too proud to beg" unfortunately does not apply to me.
OK, some of you have the right to ask: why bother at all? You started a relationship with the expectation that it was not going to last? What sort of a cynical sick fuck does that? I only did it for the experience points.
The answers to the questions posed by Stevie Nicks at the beginning of the post (actually the song is about the withdrawal effects of drugs) - the answers are yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.
Ed's note: this is not a post about recent events.
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