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A Mother's Pain

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Everybody knows Lady Macbeth will never win the Miss Congeniality award. Not after the way she prodded her husband into steely resolve to do the dastardly deed:
"I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out."

Amos's mom is not Lady Macbeth. She's not even the evil Empress Dowager that Francis Seow claimed was actually running the show here. Mom would not report her own flesh and blood to the police, in a horrible place like ours where waving a copy of a report is already condemnation. J B Jeyaratnam did just that, at an election rally, and was taken to the cleaners.

Mom (“I did not file a police report to have my son arrested”) thought that a public apology lodged at a police station would sate the hellhounds' unquenchable thirst for blood, or at the least make the grassroots leader shy off from legalised castration. However, where we are, as the Bard penned, there's daggers in men's smiles (Act 2, Scene 3, Page 8).

It was was clever juxtaposition of words that fanned the flames to effect. A mother's declaration that her charge is beyond her control could be a cause of celebration in other circumstances. Like the breakaway states that chose to be unshackled from Mother Russia. Or a young nation longing to be free from the tyranny of colonialists. Let's not go overboard here. We are talking about a kid; mom was probably just driven up the wall in frustration, let's not escalate it into a family breakup.

Nathan Heller of The New Yorker (total circulation: 1,044,524 total audience: 4,476,000) reminded the world that Singapore today has a well-guarded culture of political deference. The writer from the state press that is ranked a hundred and fifty-third out of a hundred and eighty countries, just below Russia, by Reporter Without Borders, may soon discover the horror of Lady Macbeth when she finally realised, "Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, Oh, Oh!"


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