On Having Your Cake, and Eating It Too
On The State of the Union
For as long as I can remember, I have been an Americophile (yes, apparently it’s a real word!) No surprises there, I suppose – having been born in the United States (both my parents were studying in Louisiana at the time), I have always had sentimental attachment to the USA, even if my own personal memories of my time there as a child was limited to a handful of photographs of my being a toddler.
Growing up in the Reagan era of the 1980s, it was very difficult not to look at America with a sense of admiration. Coca Cola and McDonald’s and Superman were icons that loomed large in our childhood, and the idea of the American Dream was not yet besmirched by the grime of cynicism and disappointment that has been the American legacy of the post-9/11 era.
I grew up reading Spiderman, watching Batman and Superman on the silver screen, and I remember spending my mornings doing my homework while CNN was playing on the morning television broadcast, watching the entire might of the mighty American military being brought down like a sledgehammer onto Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after the latter’s invasion of Kuwait. America was the almighty behemoth of the world, and once the Berlin Wall had fallen, the USA bestrode the globe as an unchallenged colossus – the one and only superpower of the late 20th century.
Going to college, I fell into student politics, and political biographies became my preferred vein of reading material ever since. I came to know FDR and Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy through McCullough and Schlesinger and many other scholars of American politics. And when Barack Obama ran for the presidency, my abiding interest for American politics kicked up another notch: I started watching Meet The Press on the weekends, trawled through RealClearPolitics and the New York Times and other news portals to read the tea leaves of the unfolding campaign. Obama becoming President will probably be the high watermark of American esteem and prestige in my lifetime, and I soaked every moment of his time in office. His speeches at Selma and Berlin and Egypt. His announcement of the capture of Osama bin Laden. Those speeches at the White House Correspondents’ Dinners.
And, of course, the State of the Union – that spectacle of American power and pageantry. Ostensibly a report card to be laid open for the American people, but really an annual statement of intent – a manifesto of a president in office and in power.
Biden might not have that same soaring oratory that marked Obama’s time as President. But for this State of the Union address, you will find me eager as always, watching and learning, basking in the theatre of American politics – still, so far, the hub and core of global power in my lifetime.
Three Things I am Thinking about Today #5
- The Government is tabling a bill to raise Malaysia’s statutory debt ceiling from 60% to 65%, in order to fund stimulus measures to help Malaysians get through the pandemic. I think this is timely, and much needed. What is not clear, however, is whether this is a temporary or permanent raising of the debt ceiling (the title of the Bill suggests that this is temporary, but this is not made fully clear), and whether there is a clear plan for Malaysia to bring its debt levels back down to below 60% once the pandemic is truly over. We must not allow emergency measures to become a slippery slope that drives our nation’s finances into further indebtedness, especially after all the losses that we are incurring over the 1MDB looting.
- While the debate in Malaysia’s parliament over raising the debt limit looks to be perfunctory, the United States seems to be spiraling into yet another bout of partisan bickering over its own debt ceiling. Madness? Yes. But this is the blowback that the US political class has purchased for itself when it walked blindly into the morass of the War on Terror, and the disastrous consummation of its flirtation with nativist no-nothingism with the Tea Party that had eventually led to Trump’s presidency. There is always a price to pay when you play with extremism in the pursuit of narrow parochial interests.
- Here’s an interesting and totally expected thing that usually happens when you conflate a succession race with a plan to recover from a pandemic: the politics will almost always get in the way. What is Singapore thinking? Like mentioned in the article, this is not something that would have happened during Lee Kwan Yew’s time. Another chink in the armour, then, for the PAP government under Lee Hsien Loong?