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2002-07-09 - 12:50 a.m. Rumour has it that in 2001, a group of students filmed a documentary on an opposition leader, tracing his biography, his involvement in the political arena, and his views on its current state (and if one has permission to make a cynical pun here, once can say that the current State is a perpetual State). The video was 17 minutes in length, and was scheduled to be screened as part of a festival. Needless to say, in a country where opposition politicians are rigorously denied any kind of air time in the television, radio and newspapers, the video was never screened. The Political Videos Act was invoked, which expressedly prohibits the screening of any kinds of 'political' videos, on the pretext that they serve to proselytize only one party's dangerously biased viewpoints, without providing any avenues for another party's rebuttal. I do not wish to speculate on what happened to the ones who made the video; whether they received warnings and threats, and whether they were harassed and subsequently muzzled. It is perhaps tragic that 17 minutes of information unmitigated by the media can be viewed as a challenge to the innumerable hours of infamy that the press has devoted to opposition politicians. 17 minutes of footage showing a person with his grandson on his knee, reading letters at his desk, walking through a sunlight-variegated park, affording a chuckle or two (and the timbre of the voice that produces that chuckle), a pair of long-sighted but honest eyes...I wonder at the subversive ferocity of these humble images (admittedly images that I have dreamed of myself), and what threat they pose to those caricatures all of us know now by rote: the man shouting taunts through a loudspeaker, that other man seeking asylum in another country for fear of being sued, another one defacing his dignity by peddling his books without a license in front of an MRT station. But let us now allow this tragedy to give way to comedy. Chee, my astute friend, asks if someone who did a documentary on the nation's illustrious founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, would then be considered as having made a 'political video'. Tang, who is at our table, swiftly refutes him. 'If it's about Lee Kuan Yew, then it's not political. They'll say it's historical.' We laugh, and at that point I wished I had a video camera with me. I would have urged us to continue laughing for the duration of 17 minutes, and the recording of that laughter, ridiculous and bitter, would enter into our game of opposites: one man's history meant another man's oblivion, and an angelic chuckle finds its counterpoint in devilish hilarity. As Kundera observed in his novel 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', angels laugh when everything is in order, but when the world has plunged into chaos and absurdity, there is only diabolic laughter.
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