Disneyland with the Death Penalty Page 2

  Singapore’s other primal passion is eating, and it really is fairly difficult to find any food in Singapore about which to complain. About the closest you could come would be the observation that it’s all very traditional fare of one kind or another, but that hardly seems fair. If there’s one thing you can live without in Singapore, it’s a Wolfgang Puck pizza. The food in Singapore, particularly the endless variety of street snacks in the hawker centers, is something to write home about. If you hit the right three stalls in a row, you might decide these places are a wonder of the modern world. And all of it quite safe to eat, thanks to the thorough, not to say nitpickingly Singaporean auspices of the local hygiene inspectors, and who could fault that? (Credit, please, where credit is due.)

  But still. And after all. It’s boring here. And somehow it’s the same ennui that lies in wait in any theme park, put particularly in those that are somehow in too agressively spiffy a state of repair. Everything painted so recently that it positively creaks with niceness, and even the odd rare police car sliding past starts to look like something out of a Chuck E. Cheese franchise… And you come to suspect that the reason you see so few actual police is that people here all have, to quote William Burroughs, “the policeman inside.”

  And what will it be like when these folks, as they so manifestly intend to do, bring themselves online as the Intelligent Island, a single giant data-node whose computational architecture is more than a match for their Swiss-watch infrastructure? While there’s no doubt that this is the current national project, one can’t help but wonder how they plan to handle all that stuff without actually getting any on them? How will a society founded on parental (well, paternal, mainly) guidance cope with the wilds of X-rated cyberspace? Or would they simply find ways not to have to? What if, while information elsewhere might be said to want to be free, the average Singaporean might be said to want, mainly, not to rock the boat? And to do very nicely, thank you, by not doing so?

  Are the faceless functionaries who keep Shonen Knife and Cosmo anti-feminism out of straying local hands going to allow access to the geography-smashing highways and byways of whatever the Internet is becoming? More important, will denial of such access, in the coming century, be considered even a remotely viable possibility by even the dumbest of policemen?

  Hard to say. And therein, perhaps, lies Singapore’s real importance. The overt goal of the national IT2000 initiative is a simple one: to sustain indefinitely, for a population of 2.8 million, annual increases in productivity of three to four percent.

  IT, of course, is “information technology,” and we can all be suitably impressed with Singapore’s evident willingness to view such technology with the utmost seriousness. In terms of applied tech, they seem to have an awfully practical handle on what this stuff can do. The National Computer Board has designed an immigration system capable of checking foreign passports in 30 seconds, resident passports in fifteen. Singapore’s streets are planted with sensor loops to register real-time traffic; the traffic lights are computer controlled, and the system adjusts itself constantly to optimize the situation, creating “green waves” whenever possible. A different sort of green wave will appear if a building’s fire sensor calls for help; emergency vehicles are automatically green-lighted through to the source of the alarm. The physical operation of the city’s port, constant and quite unthinkably complex, is managed by another system. A “smart-card” system is planned to manage billings for cars entering the Restricted Zone. (The Restricted Zone is that part of central Singapore which costs you something to enter with a private vehicle. Though I suspect that if, say, Portland were to try this, the signs would announce the “Clean Air Zone,” or something similar.)

  They’re good at this stuff. Really good. But now they propose to become something else as well; a coherent city of information, its architecture planned from the ground up. And they expect that whole highways of data will flow into and through their city. Yet they also seem to expect that this won’t affect them. And that baffles us, and perhaps it baffles the Singaporeans that it does.

  Myself, I’m inclined to think that if they prove to be right, what will really be proven will be something very sad; and not about Singapore, but about our species. They will have proven it possible to flourish through the active repression of free expression. They will have proven that information does not necessarily want to be free.

  But perhaps I’m overly pessimistic here. I often am; it goes with the territory. (Though what could be more frightening, out here at the deep end of the 20th century, than a genuinely optimistic science fiction writer?) Perhaps Singapore’s destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable…weirdness.

  Dear God. What a fate.

  Fully enough to send one lunging up from one’s armchair in the atrium lounge of the Meridien Singapore, calling for a taxi to the fractal-free corridors of the Airtropolis.

  But I wasn’t finished, quite. There’d be another night to brood about the Dutchman.

  I haven’t told you about the Dutchman yet. It looks like they’re going to hang him.

  Man Gets Death For Importing 1 Kg of Cannabis

  A MALAYAN man was yesterday sentenced to death by the High Court for importing not less than 1 kg of cannabis into Singapore more than two years ago.

  Mat Repin Mamat, 39, was found guilty of the offense committed at the Woodlands checkpoint on October 9, 1991, after a five-day trial.

  The hearing had two interpreters.

  One interpreted English to Malay while the other interpreted Malay to Kelantanese to Mat Repin, who is from Kelantan.

  The prosecution’s case was that when Mat Repin arrived at the checkpoint and was asked whether he had any cigarettes to declare, his reply was no.

  As he appeared nervous, the senior customs officer decided to check the scooter.

  Questioned further if he was carrying any “barang” (thing), Mat Repin replied that he had a kilogram of “ganja” (cannabis) under the petrol tank.

  In his defense, he said that he did not know that the cannabis was hidden there.

  The Straits Times 4/24/93

  The day they sentenced Mat Repin, the Dutchman was also up on trial. Johannes Van Damme, an engineer, had been discovered in custody of a false-bottomed suitcase containing way mucho barang: 4.32 kilograms of heroin, checked through from Bangkok to Athens.

  The prosecution made its case that Van Damme was a mule; that he’d agreed to transport the suitcase to Athens for a payment of US$20,000. Sniffed out by Changi smackhounds, the suitcase was pulled from the belt, and Van Damme from the transit lounge, where he may well have been watching Beaver’s dad explain the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts on a wall-mounted Sony.

  The defense told a different story, though it generally made about as much sense as Mat Repin’s. Van Damme had gone to Bangkok to buy a wedding ring for his daughter, and had met a Nigerian who’d asked him, please, to take a suitcase through to Athens. “One would conclude,” the lawyer for the defense had said, “that either he was a nave person or one who can easily be made use of.” Or, hell, both. I took this to be something akin to a plea for mercy.

  Johannes Van Damme, in the newspaper picture, looks as thick as two bricks.

  I can’t tell you whether he’s guilty or not, and I wouldn’t want to have to, but I can definitely tell you that I have my doubts about whether Singapore should hang him, by the neck, until dead - even if he actually was involved in a scheme to shift several kilos of heroin from some backroom in Bangkok to the junkies of the Plaka. It hasn’t, after all, a whole hell of a lot to do with Singapore. But remember “Zero Tolerance?” These guys have it.

  And, very next day, they announced Johannes Van Damme’s death sentence. He still has at least one line of appeal, and he is still, the paper notes, “the first Caucasian” to find his ass in this particular sling.

  “My ass,” I said to the mirror, “is out of here.” Put on a white s
hirt laundered so perfectly the cuffs could slit your wrists. Brushed my teeth, ran a last-minute check on the luggage, forgot to take the minibar’s tinned Australian Singapore Sling home for my wife.

  Made it to the lobby and checked out in record time. I’d booked a cab for 4 AM, even though that gave me two hours at Changi. The driver was asleep, but he woke up fast, insanely voluble, the only person in Singapore who didn’t speak much English.

  He ran every red light between there and Changi, giggling. “Too early policeman….”

  They were there at Changi, though, toting those big-ticket Austrian machine pistols that look like khaki plastic waterguns. And I must’ve been starting to lose it, because I saw a crumpled piece of paper on the spotless floor and started snapping pictures of it. They really didn’t like that. They gave me a stern look when they came over to pick it up and carry it away.

  So I avoided eye contact, straightened my tie, and assumed the position that would eventually get me on the Cathay Pacific’s flight to Hong Kong.

  In Hong Kong I’d seen huge matte black butterflies flapping around the customs hall, nobody paying them the least attention. I’d caught a glimpse of the Walled City of Kowloon, too. Maybe I could catch another, before the future comes to tear it down.

  Traditionally the home of pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists, and dealers in heroin, the Walled City still stands at the foot of a runway, awaiting demolition. Some kind of profound embarassment to modern China, its clearance has long been made a condition of the looming change of hands.

  Hive of dream. Those mismatched, uncalculated windows. How they seemed to absorb all the frantic activity of Kai Tak airport, sucking in energy like a black hole.

  I was ready for something like that… .

  I loosened my tie, clearing Singapore airspace.

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