The Telling and Retelling of History

Excerpts from the copy of The Lion's Share by Bernard Porter that I'm reading. The book is a brief history of British imperialism from 1850-1970, and is utterly entertaining, even more so than the usual history textbook. This has been enhanced by the vigourous scribbling in the book by a previous reader.

Page 24- On the proselytising of Christian missionaries in Britain's possessions:

Convinced of the literal truth of a 2,000-year old story which appears on the surface highly improbable, and not merely of its truth but also of its exclusive validity and its universal significance, they had for years been trying to convince the rest of the world to accept it too.

The words which appears on the surface highly improbable are underlined and a large "WHAT???" scribbled in the margin. Presumably the previous reader did not realise that in his/her protests he/she was merely demonstrating the same fundamentalist zeal as described by Porter. How ironic.

Page 56- On the relationship between Europeans and natives in Africa:

Natives did not 'die out' in Africa as they did, conveniently, in North America and Australasia, although the Xhosas had a good try in 1857 (when they slaughtered their own cattle to fulfil a magical propehecy that, if they did so, their warrior-ancestors- somehow confused with with the Russian army in the Crimea- would rise from the dead and drive the white men into the sea; the result was starvation and the end of the Xhosa nation as a united political force.)

Not to mention the end of beliefs in Xhosa superstition and of the leader who suggested that wise idea. Porter has an excellent dry wit that permeates the book.

Page 68- The beginning of a section entitled, The Opening Up Of Africa (note the title):

To Europeans in the first half if the nineteenth century Africa was still a virgin continent. They had caressed her coasts but not yet penetrated her interior...

Once again, the previous reader underlined the title, virgin, caressed, and penetrated. Christian morality or no, he/she still has a dirty mind.

And this is just the first two chapters... what more is to come?

Burns Night

Last night was Burns Night, in celebration of Robert Burns, his poetry and all things Scottish. The Hertford MCR had a Burns Night dinner, and I pronounce it the Best. Dinner. Ever.

Appetiser: Soft stinky cheese and salad.

Main course: Haggis, bashed taters and neeps.

Dessert: Cold oatmeal doused in whisky.

Most people skipped out on the haggis, for some reason. If you're not sure what haggis is, it is a Scottish dish consisting of a mixture of the minced heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the slaughtered animal. It is delicious. I had seconds and cleaned my plate.

Then came the dessert, the cold oatmeal in whisky. There's a name for this excellent dish, but no one could remember. It was delicious and I had two bowls. Curiously, most people took one bite, gagged, and pushed it away. I was tempted to have more, but the oatmeal was very filling, and I was looking forward to sampling more whisky, fruit and chocolate in the Octagon after the dinner, so I limited myself to two.

Privilege of Fame

I attended Joe Nye's talk last night entitled The Paradox of American Power. (Basically, the paradox is that America has more power than any other country on earth, so much that no other country can reach it, yet this power is still insufficient for it to effectively protect its interests and to achieve its goals). The talk was excellent and I enjoyed it very much. Joe Nye is very readable, and he speaks in a similar way- clearly and concisely.

After the talk I quietly and obediently lined up to get his autograph, having purchased a copy of his book. Just as I reached the head of the line, and he was about to turn to me and reach for my book, a young woman barged by me to the front of the line and said,

"Hi! I'm Chelsea Clinton!"

and got away with it.

I'm not quite sure what upset me more- the fact that someone used her name and fame to cut the queue and hold it up for five minutes while she chatted with someone famous and respected, or the fact that I couldn't do that myself.

I suppose fame acquired merely by inheriting a name and not achieved on one's own merits could be quite empty, with constant suspicion from others that one's own achievements were acquired wholly or in part because of that name, but still, it does make life easier. If you're smart in your own right, then you will turn it to your advantage and not allow it to burden you.

Also, when one gets used to having such an advantage, it becomes a crutch and when it is unable to help you then I suppose you are left helpless and on foreign ground.

I suppose I will have to take solace in the knowledge that my achievements are my own. The best thing to do would be to become famous and powerful in my own right.

Not quite there yet.

Back in Oxford

So here I am in Oxford. i.e.: Less time for blogging.

Confucius said, "I for my part am not one of those who have innate knowledge. I am simply one who loves the past and who is diligent in investigating it."

Benchley Updated

In honour of recent posts by Ryan (somewhat pessimistic) and by my sweetie (somewhat emotional), along with the new Bush economic proposal, here's a brief summary of my view on the Business and Financial Outlook for 2003. I would have done this a month ago, together with the other financial and business experts, but first I wanted to see if there was going to be a 2003 or not.

Just because a year has started off with a January 1 is no sign that it is going to continue on indefinitely through the rest of the days, after all.

But, it looks now, we are in for a year which will be known as 2003. Just what else it will be known as remains to be seen, but I have got a good name all worked up for it if it turns out to be like 2002- or, worse, 2001, the worse year on record in terms of sustained lows on the PJ personal happiness and enjoyment index. However, I am not here to talk dirty. Nor, at the risk of being redundant, am I here to talk about myself. I am here to outline the economic forces and currents which have contributed to the present business and financial situation and to predict their course during the year which is now well under way. In doing this I will stick closely to the formula followed by the 4,543,265 experts who have already preceded me in this prognostication. I haven't read them all, but I have got a fairly close idea of what they are driving at.

As I understand it (which is just about that much- or perhaps, if I may say so, even that much), there are several causes which are responsible for the recession of 2001/2 and which I will note in order of their legibility on this crumpled sheet of paper on which I noted them while in a drunken stupor last night:

Irrational exuberance, artificial control over commodity prices, mistatements in financial declarations, fiduciary misconduct, irrational exuberance, overproduction, inflation, deflation, sub-normal thyroid secretion (or "Platt's Disease"), too much triple sec, deflation, irrational exuberance, excess of charts with black lines, excess of charts with red lines, oil supply, terrorism, and irrational exuberance. Let us consider these, one by one, and then drop dead.

First, irrational exuberance. In 1997 (which brings us to 1998), the United States obviously produced too much of this commodity, resulting in an oversupply to the extent of almost two hundred and fifty million exuberant investors. In the following year, 2000, this had been increased by no less than sixty-eight million- or one million for each of the sixty-eight states in America. This increase, together with a simultaneous decrease in deflation, or consumer resistance, brought about a situation in which the world's markets found themselves faced with what amounted to, in round numbers, quite a pretty pickle.

Thus we see that this shortsighted policy of increasing interest rates, and at the same time decreasing interest rates (or "Platt's Disease") brought about a crisis in production (or distribution), which naturally led to an increase in interest from short-sellers (This is also known as socially responsible investing: given the increase in global warming, shorts-sellers profits are rising with the temperatures. As a result, sellers of trousers, long pants, are often unable to resist the temptation of cutting of the bottom half of their trousers and passing them off as shorts. Thus, it may be more socially responsible to invest in ice-cream, which is delicious and keeps you cool anyway.)

The fall in the rate of oil production which accompanied this ridiculous state of affairs naturally cut the purchasing power of the emergining economies of East Asia, in particular China and ASEAN but not including the Phillippines and countries which regard McDonald's as a status symbol. With the purchasing power of these countries decreasing, the importation of cheap labour from these countries and the export of production to cheaper labour to these same countries, it is no surprise that people got so that they didn't know if they were coming or going. Often they were doing both.

Allow me, then, to suggest the following changes in our economic system which should radically alter conditions for the better:

1. There will be, if I have anything to say about it, a remedy for overproduction in the marked decrease of greeting cards, one-size-fits-all baseball hats, vodka and red bull cocktails, business books claiming insight based on ancient Chinese philosophy, tops to toothpaste tubes, art deco furniture, and those annoying flyers which they keep handing out at Sim Lim Square (quite annoying, I assure you. Getting on or off the escalator is like running a gauntlet).

2. In 2003 I look for a decided betterment in the relation of bond to stock yields. That is, of stock to bond yields. The ratio, as near as I can make it out without my glasses, is 4.70% as compared to 5.76% (these figures are as of June 2002, and what a hot month that was! Blistering hot. Darn global warming). Now this ratio, together with the increase in deflation and the decrease in inflation which must inevitably come about with the unpleasant distribution of labour that exists at the present moment (I mention no names, but it begins with "P" and is a country knwon for the export of domestic help), will tend to break down the artificial control over commodity prices and possibly restore public confidence to the point where people will dare go out into the street and perhaps walk one block under police escort.

3. Tax cuts are needed to stimulate the economy. Tax increases are needed to balance budgets which, due to falling revenues because of the recession, are falling into deficit.

4. Now about oil. Oil seems to have a lot to do with world conditions, although with so much being spent on skin treatment and the unclogging of clogged pores you would think people would want to have less oil hanging around them. It must be that the oil is different from the nasty stuff that oozes from your skin and traps dirt (icky, icky stuff. I wash my face regularly and it still keeps coming back). The oil we hear about in financial quotations never comes in bundles of less than a million barrels, which frankly, sounds a little nauseating. When you get up into figures like that with just plain oil, you run the risk of sounding silly.

In fact, I am not sure that the whole financial and business structure on which our system is founded is not silly, with its billions of barrels and its trillions of tax cuts and nothing to show for it.

I am working on a plan now whereby we scrap the whole thing and begin all over again, with a checking account for a hundred thousand dollars in my name in a good, reputable, offshore bank. With a head start like that i ought to be able to get my own affairs cleaned up, and with my own affairs cleaned up I am sure that world affairs would look a lot rosier.

The Lord Of The Rings

Forget Peter Jackson, Elijah Wood, and Ian McKellan. I have just seen, without a doubt, the definitive version of The Lord of the Rings, and as an added bonus, they cover the whole movie in merely just under 9 minutes. Of course, the quality of the movie is so utterly fantastic that you will wish it was much longer. Watch out in particular for excellent casting on the part of Gollum/Sméagol. For all their talk of Andy Sirkis and his CGI-concealed acting, it fails to achieve the truly sinister aspect of Sméagol portrayed here.

Make sure you don't check the credits till after the movie is over!

A Touch of Greatness

It's not often you get to meet a real hero. It's even less often you meet a true Singaporean hero. Today, though, I met one.

J. B. Jeyaretnam, for those of you who are unfamiliar with Singaporean politics, was Singapore's first opposition member of parliament after the PAP first established complete control over parliament. After over a decade of complete PAP dominance, he defeated the PAP candidate in the Anson by-election on 31 October 1981, running as a candidate for the Worker's Party, which he founded. As a fiery, outspoken opposition MP, he was a constant thorn in the government's side- especially of prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, who appeared determined to drive him from political life. While he was returned to parliament in 1984, he was found guilty in 1986 of misusing party finances, barring him from practice as an attorney, and fined a sum which would have expelled him from parliament. He was disqualified from holding a seat until November 1991 and also barred from legal practice. When he later appealed to the Privy Council (the Commonwealth's highest court) against his disbarment, the judical committee ruled that he had been wrongly disbarred and that the Singapore court decision was a 'grevious injustice.' Our government's response was to abolish the Privy Council as Singapore's highest court and to refuse to reinstate him to parliament.

He finally returned to parliament in 1997 as a non-constituency member with no voting rights (NCMP seats are reserved for opposition politicians with the highest percentage of losing votes). However, he was again sued for defamation by prime minister Goh Chok Tong and ten other senior MPs and PAP members and found guilty. Subsequently, unable to pay the damages from another libel case, Mr. Jeyaretnam was disqualified from parliament.

Already 76, and suffering from ill-health, he has ceased to be a thorn in the government's side despite attracting a large amount of public sympathy for his plight. Yet he determinedly soldiers on, fighting for human rights for Singapore and staying true to his beliefs. He has attacked and sued and destroyed financially, yet keeps coming back, unbroken and undaunted. This is a man who would rather die on his feet and live on his knees, and this is the man I encountered today outside Centrepoint Shopping Mall, selling copies of his books, Make It Right For Singapore: Speeches in Parliament 1997-1999.

He noticed me immediately. It's not hard, I suppose, when busy shoppers are rushing by and avoiding eye contact, to notice this one kid who stares him right in the eye and is grinning like a loon. I, for my part, was thrilled to be in his presence. I promptly went over and introduced myself and started gushing about how I was a fan of his and how much I believed in him and respected what he did. He looked old, tired and ill, but his famous booming voice was strong and he looked visibly cheered to see this young punk fawning over him. On retrospect, it was a little embarrassing- me, all of 23 and behaving like a fanboy (to use fiona's term) over this aged 76 year old Indian. But how often do we get to meet and shake the hand of a true Singaporean hero!

I bought a book, of course, and had him autograph it "To P.J.", and happily went on my way. I hope I made his day. I know he made mine.