Obedience school

"Ladies and gentlemen," the captain said over the intercom, "welcome aboard Singapore Airlines."

"Our flight to Bangkok will take 2 hours and 10 minutes," he continued, "and in view of concern over SARS, there will be temperature checks on all arriving passengers at Bangkok airport."

"We therefore suggest that you take your aspirins now."

No, of course not, I don’t think any airline captain said that. But he could have. It would have made eminent sense.

The Thai authorities were said to be summarily deporting anyone found with a temperature, without bothering to find out if it was due to SARS. What a way to waste what you’ve paid for the airticket – to be sent back on the very next flight.

We don’t (yet) have a quick and reliable diagnostic test for SARS. Clinicians can only reach such a diagnosis through a history of contact with a known SARS patient together with the typical symptoms of the disease. The problem lies in that it takes 10 to 14 days for the symptoms to appear, and no patient can tell you whether out of the thousands of people we come across each day, who among them has SARS.

In the absence of good diagnostic tools, fever became the convenient stigma.

Yet, there are plenty of reasons for fevers. Dengue is endemic in this region. Influenza never quite goes away. You suck the wrong cock and you get a staph throat, and with it comes fever for a few days while your body fights off the bugs. If you’re feverish, SARS is among the least likely possibilities.

So if I have a fever on the plane, the smart thing to do, to avoid being bundled back onto an immediate return journey, would be to suppress that fever with a few aspirins before landing. 

And indeed it was a campaign. Newspapers had full-page features about how to take one’s temperature and what readings to expect. Employers starting taking the temperature of their staff. Some were taking the temperature of their customers. Even today, there's a sign outside the door of the CPF (Central Provident Fund) offices that tell any visitors to the building to first queue up to have their temperatures taken before they are allowed to enter.

This article is not about SARS. This article is about Singapore and the foolishness that so characterizes this place.

 
* * * * *

I first thought about writing this when someone came up to me and asked why I wasn’t doing the government’s bidding and sticking a thermometer in all my customers’ mouths.

I said to him, "look, my customers are adults, they know what a fever feels like. SARS fevers are typically high fevers of 38 degrees of more, which is something that will not escape your notice. If someone has such a high fever, he’ll feel pretty sick and he won’t be in the mood to come out and play. If he’s determined to come, he’ll just lower his temperature first with panadol or aspirin, and thermometers notwithstanding, we won’t be able to detect it. So why bother to stab everyone with a thermometer?"

"You mean, " my amazed questioner asked, "panadol can lower the temperature?" I was amazed that he was amazed.

And this article was born.

There is too much obedience in Singapore. People dutifully do what the authorities tell them. They don’t stop to question what they’ve been told. Worse, they don’t even have enough general knowledge (e.g. like how paracetamol and aspirin can reset feverish temperature) to begin to question what they’ve been told.

So we have a whole country poking each other with thermometers, we have stickers blooming all over the place telling people what their daily temperature reading is - information which, as I’ll explain below, makes me feel more troubled than reassured.

A bus pulls up at a bus stop. There’s a sticker on its windscreen to tell you that the bus driver’s temperature was taken that morning and it was 36.3 degrees.

Did anyone think? Are commuters worried about catching SARS from the driver or from the hundreds of other commuters they are jampacked with? Why bother singling out the driver, who sits isolated in his cab?

What purpose does that serve? What false security does that engender? Did anybody question the point of such a requirement?

I walk into a restaurant. All the waitresses have stickers on their shirts declaring their temperatures as taken at the start of the day. I look closely at one.

"Hi, I’m fine!" it says, cheerily. And handwritten below those preprinted words were the numerals, "33.4". Great, she has a temperature of 33.4 degrees. That’s below the famous 37 degrees, is it not?

Can that be real? Did anyone think? You have to be dead, and your corpse cooling rapidly, to be 33.4 degrees. That silly sticker only shows that (a) they merely go through the motion of taking temperatures without doing it correctly, and (b) they don’t know what the readings mean.

Walking corpses, that’s what we are. We’re all brain dead. We’re energetic, we’re certainly obedient, but we’re ignorant and incapable of thinking an independent thought.

And if we wish to be glib, we can say "SARS – Singaporeans Are Really Stupid."

* * * * *

And more.

A month or so ago, there was a seminar for upper secondary and tertiary students. I didn’t really pay attention to the news item. If I recall correctly, it was something about thinking out of the box and speaking up.

But the headline in the Straits Times highlighted that fact that when the reporters approached the student participants for their views about the seminar, they hushed up, pointing to a paragraph in the handout given by the organisers. The paragraph said that if the media were to approach them, they should be referred to the organisers for comment.

The news article shouted out this contradiction between what the seminar was meant to promote -- speaking up -- and the gag rule.

But I thought the more interesting thing was how the students dutifully abided by the paragraph. No penalties had been specified for breaking the rule, yet there is so much deference to authority that no penalties were needed.

The fact that the organisers might have wanted to control what was reported in the press isn’t remarkable at all. It’s a fact of life that newsmakers want to able to put their own spin to anything that concerns them. So don’t expect school principals, politicians, archbishops or corporate captains to bless freedom of speech without a heavy dose of self-serving hypocrisy.

What is remarkable is how we let them get their spin because we’re all too ready to gag ourselves when they merely suggest so. We defer too much to rank.

© Yawning Bread 

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