Yet Another Candidate For Your Attention
“Please,” she says, “Don’t let the elections ruin Tolstoy for you. Please.”
I’ve been virtually attending a seminar on New York time, and the coming week’s reading is War and Peace, by Tolstoy. Unfortunately, it’s election week. The overlap seems to have just occurred to the professor, and the thought that politics could ruin even this is unbearable to her. As we all wave at the screen, our rectangles evaporating one by one, she repeats her plea. “Please!”
Even from all the way across the world, election anxiety is palpable. Never before has an election weighed as heavily on literally everyone’s mind, and this, if nothing else, seems to prove that despite all of America’s gaffes, it remains the cultural capital of the world, reluctantly relevant to the rest of us no matter how badly we’d like to disavow ourselves from it. Even friends who haven’t visited America, who don’t intend to, confess that they’ll feel better once it’s all over. As celebrities urge citizens to exercise their right to vote, as people display their I Voted! stickers, it becomes clear that underpinning this and other pleas is the sense that there may be another option, the option to opt-out and wash your hands off it all.
This vaguely Thoreauian system is alien to me. Voting is compulsory in Singapore, so like it or not, you make a choice, and later on, this choice is held as evidence that you were somewhat culpable for the city that you live in. Although your vote is secret, your national identification number is checked against a master list at each polling station, so if you skip out on a year, you forfeit all future chances at voting. To be allowed back into the Register of Electors, you have to write into the government to explain why you didn’t vote in the previous election, but if it’s not a good reason, you’ll be fined some money. Miss a year, and you can never run for office. It’s a civic responsibility, this nation-building business, and we’re a young country with a long memory.
Because of this, some people who don’t want to be forced to participate spoil their votes. They leave the voting slip blank, or vote for everyone who wants to give governance a shot. Some of them draw flowers or penises where they should put a neat cross. Over 45 thousand people spoilt their votes in the most recent election, which was held on the 10th of July this year. That’s 1.8% of our 95.8% voter turnout. I was happy to vote; I take it seriously. But if we had been assigned Tolstoy the week Singapore’s future hung in the balance, I would not have finished War and Peace.
Though if you look at the numbers, there’s a Singaporean election every five years, and an American one every four. Two chances each decade for things to be turned over on its head. Although the voting/not-voting American conundrum isn't applicable to me, whenever election season comes around, I feel queasy. I study for it, pouring over manifestos and reading online commentators break down party promises. I’m forced to evaluate where my compromises lie. From the moment an election is called till voting day, we have a short period of legal campaigning, usually nine days. That’s nine days to learn everything about the eleven contesting parties, to interrogate their histories and scrutinize their sincerity. It’s often a pressure cooker of information, opinion, and fact, that leaves no space for life to be regularly lived. And then, just like that, it’s over. Life returns to normalcy, it usually hasn’t altered much. Although there had been a potential for radical change, the existence of potential is partially what intoxicates the nation, inflames the young. After that, this energy cannot be destroyed, but it has nowhere to go. It simmers, confused, directionless.
Perhaps this is why the professor appealed to us so desperately. It seems impossible for any country’s elections not to absorb its citizens completely, especially not if they are artists, or people who believe politics to be deeply personal. But while life is measured in the now, the term, the decade, it is also measured in the art which precedes and extends beyond us. The power of literature to be transformative lies waiting in the text, it is patient, but it will not do the work for us. The reader has to come to it seeking. How fervent the professor’s voice, when she professed that Tolstoy had changed her life! What a pity, if in a moment of temporary blindness, we carelessly traded one transformative opportunity for another. Life is messy, it overlaps, and our great duty too is learning to manage it all.
