Crisis in American Democracy?

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.

4 people died after pro-Trump rioters breached the US Capitol yesterday, watched with horror around the world. Since November Trump and his allies have been attacking the presidential election results in the courts and the media relentlessly. After the Capitol was secured against the insurrection, Congress reconvened late last night to certify the electoral college vote count. Joining the rioters in their treasonous act, 6 GOP senators and 121 GOP House members voted to reject Arizona's result.

The sound and the fury can easily create a sense of panic that American democracy is in a crisis. However, the sense of crisis is uncalled for, as professor of journalism and political science Peter Beinart explains. Beinart points out that the Republicans are not doing something new. They're merely giving a new form to an old idea that animated the framing of the Constitution: the idea that "only some Americans deserve to vote." If the present trouble is considered a crisis, then American democracy has been in crisis since its birth.

A better understanding of the American past undergirds a personal decison in this week's essay "Saying Goodbye to America," published on SP Blog. Essayist Jonathan Chan was born in Manhattan of a Chinese Malaysian father and a South Korean mother. The couple were married in St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue. Growing up in Singapore, Chan would visit his paternal grandparents in Houston, Texas, regularly. Such links to the US gave Chan a special pride in being American until his study of the country's history and literature persuades him to give up his American citizenship in favor of retaining his Singaporean one. The story of Singapore-US immigration is usually one-directional, from east to west. More rarely told is the story of the reverse direction.

We hope you will join us for the first Second Saturdays gathering of the year, taking place this Saturday. Gregory Pardlo and Grace Talusan are reading from their new memoirs. See details below. RSVP Jee at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org for the Zoom link.

This year Singapore Unbound will not hearken to the dramatic rhetoric of crisis, and the longed-for afterwards of relief. Instead, we will continue to deepen our understanding of the past and present, and endeavor to meet the understanding with deeper presentations of literature and the arts. We hope you will join us in our endeavors.

Jee Leong Koh
January 7, 2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Thumboo's "Ulysses by the Merlion"

I've just revised a poem written years ago, a poem that delineates the different responses of four readers, of different generations, to the seminal nationalistic poem by Edwin Thumboo . Thumboo is reckoned to be the first major Singaporean poet writing in English. First, Thumboo's poem, then followed by mine. ULYSSES BY THE MERLION (for Maurice Baker) I have sailed many waters, Skirted islands of fire, Contended with Circe Who loved the squeal of pigs; Passed Scylla and Charybdis To seven years with Calypso, Heaved in battle against the gods. Beneath it all I kept faith with Ithaca, travelled, Travelled and travelled, Suffering much, enjoying a little; Met strange people singing New myths; made myths myself. But this lion of the sea Salt-maned, scaly, wondrous of tail, Touched with power, insistent On this brief promontory... Puzzles. Nothing, nothing in my days Foreshadowed this Half-beast, half-fish, This powerful creature of land and sea. Peoples settled here, Brought to th
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic
Read more

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Examples from ar
Read more