"My theory is that if you look confident you can pull off anything - even if you have no clue what you're doing." - Jessica Alba

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Required National Day reading:

Consuming The Nation: National Day Parades in Singapore / Laurence Wai-teng Leong New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 3, 2 (December, 2001): 5-16

"The nation is therefore a commodity to be consumed... The National Day parade is packaged and marketed for the largest possible number of Singaporeans. Although the costs of the parade run up to a hefty sum, the expected returns are obviously not economic, but socio-psychological. Given the accounting mentality of state élites, who expect monetary or tangible returns for every public expenditure and who take great pains to avoid any budgetary deficit, the commodification of National Day is calculated with intangible gains in mind...

The National Day celebration is a highly ritualized and stylized event. It is produced with the same kind of detail, scale, skill and intended audience as the making of a Hollywood blockbuster movie... Like an epic movie, the National Day event emphasizes scale: the greater the participant rate, the grander is the event perceived to be. This focus on scale means that there are no stars in this event; everyone is an anonymous extra in a crowded scene. But everyone is also an unpaid extra...

For thirty years, National Day parades have been dominated by militaristic elements (an issue which I will elaborate below). Military music tends to be solemn, very much like the background of a funeral procession, and military marches are deadly serious in the emphasis on drill, regimentation, discipline and order. By contrast, modern consumption practices centre around the pursuit of pleasure... The consumption imperative obliges state élites to make concessions in order to win popular consent. In the modern age, hegemony is achieved not just through efficiency (by an élite skilled in the business of government administration), but also by appeasement (élites, however stoic they may be, must concede something to the hedonism of their subjects)...

The populist attempt to engage Singaporeans to participate in National Day celebrations includes the admission of popular cultural items. In 1986, a local rock group was allowed to perform during part of the spectacle. In 1989, students sang ‘La Bamba’, choreographed steps of Michael Jackson’s ‘moonwalking’ and also break-danced. However, given the pervasive anti-Western xenophobia of state elites, and the apparent contradiction of ‘Western’ pop and the commemoration of things ‘national’, such items were subsequently banished or relegated to the end-of-the-day bash when a tamed version of carnival provides relief from the regimentation of the parade.

Another populist strategy to engage the masses is the introduction of songs... Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, some Members of Parliament and government officials took to the stage in the finale, singing ‘We Are Singapore’. For state élites, who are typically unrelenting in their policy decisions, strait-laced in their exhortatory speeches and austere in their sartorial codes to relax publicly in a moment of fun was a rare sight, a spectacle in its own right...

National Day in Singapore is commemorated through a series of events: a parade, post-parade party, fairs at community centers, dinners at electorate constituencies, and some cultural performances. However, none of these public ceremonies in any sense constitutes a ‘carnival’. Carnivals like the Roman Saturnalia, the Feast of Fools, Mardi Gras, and Southeast Asian water festivals are marked by a spirit of licentiousness and rituals of inversion, which add a politically radical edge to their impact (Babcock 1978; Ladurie 1979; Bakhtin 1984).

Since community centers, resident committees and electorate constituencies are para-political organisations established by the dominant ruling party, fairs and dinners held at such locations are starchy events and formal occasions... Even the post-parade party is orchestrated, closely supervised and delimited: there is a conspicuous absence of camp parody of the Mardi Gras sort and, within an hour, the crowd is made to disperse (The Straits Times, 11 August 1994)...

The parade is overwhelmingly military in emphasis. Indeed, all National Day parades have been a military enterprise, planned annually by colonels and lieutenant-colonels, led by sergeant majors, marched, staged, performed and de-staged by soldiers. Even the glossy souvenir programme is produced by the Ministry of Defence.

The sequence of each National Day parade follows the logic of military protocol... In this schema, the highlights are always some military display, while civilians and students trail behind in the last half-hour of floats, show and dance... The military emphasis of the parade dramatizes the power dimension of the state, particularly with reference to violence.

Although a sense of oneness is promulgated in the celebration of Singapore’s National Day, the parade institutionalizes separation and hierarchy. The ritual dramatizes roles in clearly differentiated ways: there are officials, participants and spectators. Officials and authorities are not the participants in the marching contingents or the dancing troupes. They are the reviewers, and their position of dominance is marked off from subordinates by an elevated position or platform from which they can look down upon people and comfortably observe the event. And within this viewing stand, there are finer distinctions of status and power spatially given in the seating arrangements...

The rigid hierarchy of the event is further exemplified by the rank-order of the marching contingents: commando battalions, infantry regiments, police force, civil defence brigades, and uniformed school groups (national cadet corps, national police cadet corps). The uniformed school groups are miniature versions of the defence forces. Throughout the parade, the music played is militaristic: infantry brass bands, school military bands and police pipers. The civilian contingents tend to be represented mostly by civil servants and statutory board employees. Private organizations are led by males who are identified by their military designation as reservists...

The militaristic elements, the rank-ordered hierarchy, and the orderliness and regimentation of the event render the National Day parade similar to the May Day ceremony in Moscow’s Red Square before the Kremlin, Nazi Germany’s military processions, and official rituals in Beijing, Hanoi and Vientiane under communist rule (Scott 1990: 58)...

The resemblance of Singapore’s National Day parades to state rituals in fascist and communist regimes is in large part a consequence of the military dominance of the parade... Why does the defence force occupy center stage in National Day parades? The answer to this question depends very much on the intended audience of such spectacles. Devashayam (1990: 50) argues that National Day represents a symbolic dialogue with Malaysia. In a sense, National Day in Singapore does not connote independence or liberation from colonial rule. The 9th of August 1965 was the day Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian Federation. Given this inauspicious expulsion, the display of military might in National Day parades calls Malaysia’s bluff...

Such military exhibitionism is also targeted to the local population, not only as visual entertainment of the Top Gun and Star Wars epic film variety, but also as reassurance of safety under the current political leadership. How far this reassurance is realistic or not is a moot point, but military exhibitionism usually indicates anxiety rather than security. It is precisely because Singaporeans are still not courteous that courtesy campaigns have been waged for more than twenty years to drum into people the need for behavioural change. So too, thirty years of annual displays of the defence forces serve to instill confidence where this is waning or lacking...

There is no feminine analogue to ‘national service’; if there were, the most likely candidates would be a contingent of pregnant women marching in university gowns and mortarboards. Graduate mothers who procreate in line with the eugenic policy that the more educated a woman is, the more children she should have, would be deemed to have executed their duties and responsibilities of ‘national service’...

Although the above responses demonstrate the emotive intensity of some audience members responding to the National Day parade, they are not to be taken as representing the unanimous consensus of a national collectivity. Just as pop fans who are moved by the melody or tune of a song need not comprehend the literal and symbolic meanings of its lyrics, so too national fans entranced at the specific moment by the mobilizing power of a ceremonial ritual need not at other times express loyalty or patriotism (Street 1986)... the media in Singapore are unlikely to give voice to dissenting individuals and alternative views. One has to read between the lines to tease out an unknown number of repressed consumers.

In the report on overseas Singaporeans celebrating National Day abroad, an incidental reference was made to a lucky draw at the end of all the rituals of flag and anthem observances (Tan 1994). Lucky draws can be said to be a typical ‘Singaporean’ way of enticing consumers to buy a product and luring individuals to participate in some official function. In the latter context, the lucky draw always takes place at the end of the event after all the ceremonial rituals have been performed; this is to make the participants stay till the end...

Among spectators, the motive for attending the parade may be less than patriotic. Each spectator gets a parade kit... Carried to the extreme, the kiasu habit confuses ends with means: one may join a queue without knowing what it is for, but nevertheless one assumes that since so many people are in the line, it must be for something highly desirable...

Because the ruling political party in Singapore is a dominant party, and claims to represent ‘Singapore’, there is a conflation between Singapore and the PAP. By association, the Singapore flag takes on the meaning of the PAP too. The differential distribution of flags based on support for PAP institutions reinforces this conflation. Thus, Singaporeans who resist the flag do so in order to dissociate themselves from others who are PAP supporters or sycophants (The Straits Times, 3 September 1994). Those who are able to differentiate between loyalty to the nation and loyalty to the PAP thus refuse to hang the flag...

Singapore’s National Day parade is so highly structured, so meticulously coordinated, so scripted to a protocol and so hierarchically arranged that it resembles communist state rituals more than street carnivals. Its structuredness underscores the values of order, discipline and compliance...

Short of this free articulation of multivocality, the category of repressed consumers suggests that nation-building in Singapore again bears resemblance to the Soviet model of socialist realism. Socialist realism was the state formula for aesthetics in the Soviet Union. Art should picture reality, not in terms of an accurate portrayal of society, but in terms of what that society should be. Art should picture life, not as it is, so much as life as it should become (Schudson 1986: 215). So fiction should dramatize politically correct heroes, art should inspire people to socially correct behaviour.

Nation-building in Singapore follows this logic of socialist realism by suppressing social realities and replacing them with social ideals as defined by state elites... history is erased through collective amnesia (nationalist images in Singapore seldom refer to the past for inspiration)."