This Island Race

Yes, I've been reading a lot of Churchill these days. A quintessential leader for dark times, his caustic wit and declamatory style burn through the fog like a beacon on a hill. It was he who appropriated the phrase 'this island race' for the British, he who said, "Do your worst, and we shall do our best."

I am a man of two parts, geographically and literarily; born on one island and living on another, I find the poetry of the first almost sufficient for all things and the poetry of the second infuriatingly sparse in resonant metaphor. Which island is it that goes with 'race'? It might seem a trivial issue. But listen to this, taken from Shakespeare's Richard II, II(1):

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands, –
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Who could read this, born upon the 'sceptred isle', and not wish that it were true in every detail? Then again, my second island too has poets. One of them wrote these lines:

Peoples settled here,
Brought to this island
The bounty of these seas,
Built towers topless as Ilium's.

They make, they serve,
They buy, they sell.

Despite unequal ways,
Together they mutate,
Explore the edges of harmony,
Search for a centre;
Have changed their gods,
Kept some memory of their race
In prayer, laughter, the way
Their women dress and greet.
They hold the bright, the beautiful,
Good ancestral dreams
Within new visions,
So shining, urgent,
Full of what is now.

It is hard to choose between one island race and another, at times. One has a surfeit of history, a long and tangled tale told in dark rooms; the other has an earnest of history to come, but the shadow of doom upon it, that it might fade before that earnest comes to pass. It is hard; it is hard. Sometimes, though, it is worse.

Not Knowing Jack

I don't often make political commentary in this blog. Once in a while, however, I find myself sufficiently perturbed to comment on political matters.

Recently, the lawfully-elected parliament of the urbanised Machiavellian city-state of Singapore has decided that its ministers should be granted a salary increase of about S$1m over and above their existing salary of about S$1.2m. (At the time of this writing, US$1 is about S$1.50.) The arguments for the pay increase range from dubious to clever, to competent and valid. It is not my place to discuss whether or not these ministers should have their pay increased - that issue has been adequately covered elsewhere in the blogosphere and I shan't be providing links: you can easily find them in the world of Tomorrow, for example.

But there was one particular argument which stood out for what I felt was its inherent... hubris, perhaps? This argument came from the otherwise relatively competent, relatively erudite and relatively informative mouth of Member of Parliament K Shanmugam. You can find his speech here in its entirety.

If you look at that linked document and scroll down to paragraphs 33 and 34 (don't worry, they're numbered very nicely in the document), you will find this:

[33] After the 17th Century, the British reformed their system and by early 20th Century, a top Minister like Churchill was earning £5,000. I am told that that would be about £350,000 in today’s terms. That is roughly what our MR4 was. But British Ministerial salaries have however not kept pace with inflation. It is probably not politically feasible in the UK. But that does not make it right. As an aside, if you read Roy Jenkins’ biography of Churchill, you will see that Churchill also made money by writing. For example, he received an advance of £8,000 for a book (about £550,000 now) in early 20th Century just before he took office. He wrote several books, and was a good, sought after writer.

[34] Likewise in the US. In 1960, President Kennedy was getting US$150,000. If Presidential salaries had kept pace with inflation, the salary would be higher than the US$450,000 that the US President now gets.

What's wrong with those two paragraphs? I guess I instinctively shy away from comparing the gentlemen who run Singapore with Sir Winston Churchill and President John F Kennedy. The problems tackled by Churchill (for example, the threat of Hitler and the isolation of Britain) and Kennedy (the Cold War and the Cuban incident) seem somehow larger than the economic concerns of a small nation-state, no matter how important it has made itself to the global community.

I am sure that Singapore has always punched above its weight, ever since Foreign Minister Sinnathamby Rajaratnam declared that intent to the United Nations in the early years of Singapore's existence as an independent state. I am sure that for many people it is a nice place to live. But I am not at all sure that Singapore's former Prime Ministers Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong, and Singapore's current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, are comparable in terms of ability or potential with Churchill or Kennedy.

Don't get me wrong. There are lots of sources which will tell you about the negative sides of these leaders. It is always fashionable to demythologize in hindsight, and it is always a good thing for history that this is done. It is difficult to say what Lee (or Lee) would have done as the leader of Britain under siege by Hitler's Luftwaffe, or as the leader of the US when Soviet missiles began to appear on Cuba. It is easy to say unflattering things about any of the politicians in this post; they are all human beings with various virtues, flaws and other qualities. We can make any number of powerful but irrelevant ad hominem attacks on the historical reputations of these men, and a few might be legal as well as true.

But some points of direct comparison can be made, based on Shanmugam's speech as cited above. He doesn't tell us much, but he tells us that Churchill was a good writer. Churchill had a 60-year political career. These two points - political longevity and literary prowess - are the only points Shanmugam raises. Correction: he raises the latter and very tangentially implies the former, but the former point holds, nevertheless.

In Singapore, PM-emeritus Lee Kuan Yew still continues to draw a Churchillian salary, continues to have an extended political career, and has written a few books. The first volume of his political autobiography is called The Singapore Story.

Well, here is a reasonably fair account of Churchill's writings. The article seems to say that his historical writings are of obvious value although tainted with some equally obvious flaws. He wrote histories which were ennobled by his gift of rhetoric and demeaned by his subjectivity, but they were such good books that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature on their strength. Churchill's honours (and his legacy) can be evaluated against Lee's by any reader here, and you can form your own judgement about whether one deserves the pay of the other.

Somehow though, when I evaluate paragraph 34, Lloyd Bentsen's one quote-that-will-live-forever comes to mind. For all JFK's flaws, a fair portion of the subsequent fate of the world was in his hands. And history would probably have to say to any one of Singapore's ministers, "I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Minister, you're no Jack Kennedy."

Leadership & Princess Diana

Like most people of my generation, I heard of her long before I heard of him. Unlike most of my generation, I was curious enough to find out more about the mysterious Dr Marston.

I was rather amused by the realisation that Dr William Marston was the true name of 'Charles Moulton', the creator of Princess Diana of Themyscira – the Wonder Woman of DC Comics fame. As I delved further into his past, I learned that Marston was the originator of the DISC profile as well as the inventor of the systolic blood pressure test for truth-telling. He had not only invented Wonder Woman, but he had invented her magic lasso of truth as well!

In fact, the 'modern' DISC profiling system was invented by Marston in 1924, and he had published two books on it in 1928 and 1932. DISC stands for Dominance, Influence, Submission, Compliance – and the significance of these four traits becomes truly apparent and highly entertaining when you put them together with his theory about Wonder Woman. For Marston said this about the male fans of his comic-book creation: "Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves!" And this wasn't the only thing that the inventor of DISC said about bondage, young people, discipline and submission. I shall leave you to examine my sources and follow the tale wherever it leads you.

My conclusion after reading all this was that seemingly innocuous personality profiling exercises can have extremely sinister possibilities when one is well-read enough or curious enough to discover the implicit philosophy embedded in them. It is part of the terrible reifying myth of personality testing. In this day and age, when people are too lazy to discover themselves and only too willing to let online tests or simple pencil-and-paper exercises perform the task of self-revelation, personality testing has reached something like cult status.

Sadly, I have to admit that I have been DISC-tested too.

My profile claims that I am an influencer/advancer/inspirer, with high 'D' and 'I', below-average 'S' and extremely low 'C'. The profile includes this quotation from Baroness Thatcher, a leader of the Reagan era: "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. I'm extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end. I don't mind how much my ministers talk, as long as they do what I say." I think that one of those sentences is true of me, and I'm not sure of the rest.

I have an alternative profile, according to the kind colleague who introduced me to this test. This profile stresses the fact that I have a slightly higher 'I' score than 'D' score. This second profile claims that I am a leader/decider/strengthener, and it invokes the late Sir Winston Churchill. I cannot say much more about this great statesman than what he says himself.

I must end by saying that no matter how flattering it is, I do not place myself anywhere near the same area of comparison as these titanic compatriots of mine. But it is something to think about; that if Marston was correct, I could harness the steely obduracy of Mrs Thatcher or the iron will and mercurial rhetoric of Sir Winston. Well, we live in hope. And if these things be gifted to me in any way, I shall be too grateful for words.