Squeaky Wheel

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

The drug-pushers have reappeared at certain street corners of Harlem, the neighbors have complained, and the cops flex their presence with mobile posts. But the policing is lackadaisical because the cops know it's a cat-and-mouse game. More, they know there is an international network of producers, suppliers, and middlemen behind the street-corner pushers, and it is the network that must be dismantled, and not the pushers, who are often addicts and victims themselves. 

Some problems appear so vast and complicated that we content ourselves by tackling their most immediate manifestations, instead of aiming at their sources. Our "solutions" fall hard on the little people, and not the powers-that-be. Worse, the problem is then blamed on the little people, thus obscuring the source of the problem and the lack of effective action on the part of the authorities. This is true of Harlem, but also of Singapore, the supposed model of state efficiency. In the debate about the legal execution of drug couriers, proponents of the death penalty focus on the victims of drug use, but overlook the victims of socioeconomic inequities in the couriers. 

This week I explained to my sixth-graders the saying "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." But I did not explain that the wheel belongs to a car, which is zooming down an expressway, in a national network of roads. If the car is heading in the wrong direction, or the building of the roads has devastated the natural environment or a historical legacy, greasing the wheel is not going to do much good. On the contrary.

*

The deadline for the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize has been extended to May 31! Now is your chance to submit your manuscript, if you have not done so already. Submission guidelines here.

Jee Leong Koh
May 19, 2022

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
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