A Bitter Taste the Morning After

Now, I've refrained from making any political comments on this blog due to the nature of my work and the fact that mothering a 3 month old sucks up most of my energy which goes to feeding and making disapproving comments at my husband.  But this is too much.

How does a person who receivws only 30-something percent of the valid votes, an obvious target of at worst, mass population dislike, and at best, depressed apathy, become the country's Head of State? That, in spite of running a campaign with as much appeal as BBC radio and spewing rhetoric that sounded like a broken record from the 1990s?

Easy, you would scoff, happens all the time, particularly if you live in America.

But this isn't America, land of the free, crazy and anything-goes!  This is Singapore, once a 40plus square kilometres stretch of beach and jungle that now houses 4 million people, a creaky transport system and absolutely no public dissent! Our one-party  Cabinet which has the mandate of the people who voted in ostensibly democratic elections has so far governed the country like the wise sages of China on the basis of their....well, wisdom.

Even in the years when you didn't get to vote, you let it slide because inside, you told yourself that the people in charge would do what was best for the country and what was fairest for you, the individual.  Even when you always had the niggling suspicion you were being forgotten in the collective or getting the short end of the stick (although without any reliable, hard evidence), you chose not to kick up a fuss because you still had a job and a so-so quality of life compared to the homeless in Manila.

Putting aside who would have made the "best President" or been the "best man" for the job (since these are pretty redundant issues for their ideological subjectivity), you would hope that a kind of justice could have prevailed on this morning of 28 August, that the man who got less than HALF the voting population's votes would not get to make a victory speech on a television station that isn't even capable of impartial, quality journalism (NB: we only have one television station).

So I feel, much like I did after the May polls, a profound sense of injustice, that a wrong has been done, but where no redress can be found for the collective grievance that must surely be weighing upon our island right now. You might blame Tan Jee Say and/or Tan Kin Lian for wading in and diluting Tan Cheng Bok's vote share. I don't, because I have to credit the establishment for their tactical prowess in allowing a 4-corner fight to begin with, no matter if it's intuitively ridiculous to have 4 candidates running for President of a country.

So you would understand if I am feeling a bit miffed at how the cards have played out. I assumed naively  that the will of 1.4 million people would have made a difference in denying the candidate whom MOST people did not want as President the seat.

Life will go on in the land of Big Brothers. Democracy once more perverted, and justice flouted in the name of first-past-the-post.