The Fall

On impulse I picked up a book the other day. I actually considered buying a few other books, but they were thin enough that I could read them by borrowing them from the library. But this one caught my eye, “Savage Grace”, which was about how a really rich family met its downfall. It involved the incest between a mother and a son. Kinda perverse, which was why I wondered what the hell I was thinking. This will inspire me to write another blog entry about the meaning of being rich and famous, but for now, this entry is about peoples’ downfalls.

I never had a Christian name. When I was born, I was registered almost immediately, which explains why I have a really low NRIC number. My mother told my father the English name that she wanted to give me (It was “Jeremy”) but my father was half deaf, and went ahead to register me without the English name. (Now my father’s one good ear is beginning to fail him, and this is a source of friction in the family because everybody needs to raise their voice to make sure that he gets heard.)

There was another time when I thought I would get an English name. This time I chose Fred, as in Frederic Chopin, or Fred Flintstone, or George William Frederick Hegel (OK, I made that one up, because I was 8 at that time, I didn’t know Hegel).

However, that name did not suit me either. I felt uncomfortable with it. In fact, I feel uncomfortable with a lot of names because I don’t think they capture my personality very well. As you can see, in this blog, I actually named myself after a number. That’s OK, because we all know that numbers mean nothing. I don’t really like my real name either because I think it’s too egoistic. (Now the fact that I can be egoistic in real life does not mean that I like to have an egoistic name, and moreover all those of you who know me well understand that I am only egoistic half of the time, and the other half I am quite happy to remain anonymous.)

The last straw came when I had somebody in my class whose name was Frederick. I looked at myself, I looked at that guy, I didn’t dislike that guy, but he and I absolutely do not have anything in common with each other. That was the last I heard of that name. By secondary school, nobody knew that I ever used that name.

Well the other Frederick has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. I heard a few rumours a few years back concerning a messy divorce. But nothing very much, nothing substantial, and I cannot say anything for sure.

But based on what I have pieced together: the charge is believed to be about making advances to a female subordinate. It could be "sexual harrassment". Somebody had been mean enough to blag to the whole world about it, so people knew. I'm sure SAF officers commit indiscretions all the time, but as long as they can be kept silent, they will. Not for this guy, I suppose.

I knew the guy in primary school. We went to different secondary schools, so that’s the extent of my knowledge. He was a prefect back then, and he clearly had leadership potential. We always made fun of him because he always used to give a lot of speeches in class, and he was the one who always seemed to be a future politician. (Now you know why I say I have almost nothing in common with him.) In some ways, we were not wrong.

Yet there were quite a few people who detected something rather smarmy about him, some tendency to be too polished and insincere to people. I didn’t feel that, but what did I know in those days? So he was both widely liked and widely disliked. There was a lot of “Frederick, you know…” and then a rolling of eyes. And I knew that he was quite the lady's man, this was apparent right from the onset of puberty.

I wasn’t close friends with him. So I didn’t know him that well. But it’s not fun to see these sort of things happen to people you used to know from more than 20 years ago.

Edit:

An update on what I now know about the Frederick Teo incident. He was sentenced to a fine of $6000. Some ppl I was with felt that he got away with it lightly, but I think, given that people would be surprised to see him being charged for what is after all his own private business, that on balance, that is probably fair. I don't think that he's got a long term future in the SAF. I think they didn't punish him too much partly because this affair was a consensual affair.