The "Singaporization" of the United States

Our common agreement as Americans is the Constitution. If we place anything before it, even a perception of our safety, we merely become one more tribe.
Have you ever spent time in Singapore?
On the surface it's a nice place.. and kind of a man's paradise. For Asia, it's quite modern, in fact, it's not kind of first world.. it is first world.. I have a bunch of friends who used to joke it was the Irvine of the East... referring to the town in Orange County which is corporately organized and is quite modern, almost pastoral, but not the kind of place you see people walking around, people are flying into buildings in fancy cars with parking lots underneath. The Irvine joke suggested a place where neither random life nor creativity seems to occur.. there is order, roads are clean and almost pastoral, in that kind of over-landscaped way (Mexicans in floppy hats working away), people are in cars, and everyone seems to have a place to be. The common description is 'Santized'. If you spend enough time in Singapore, you will find some grit, some character, and some history, it can be a bit of a mans club, but they are hell bent to destroy the old gritty street vibe all the same.. the heart of the country is basically a huge shopping mall, and to quote someone I once hung out with, you have one freedom there, freedom to shop!
You see, Singapore is the worlds most successful dictatorship.. it runs like a clock because of the will of one man, Minister Mentor Harry Lee Kuan Yew, who got some education abroad, and came back a bit embarrassed at the corruption and vices of the predominantly Chinese Singapore, Yew's family included. He took charge, and not heavy handily by world standards, but certainly by western standards, and he went about creating a nation that was so stable and orderly that oil companies would want to refine their oil there, and corporations would want to keep their Asian headquarters there. He traded off the tiny land area and population of his nation to make military service universal, and to endlessly imply that their neighbors Indonesia and Malaysia are unstable and dangerous places, which many if not most young Singaporeans believe, especially after training in their late teens, if at all able, to kill invaders from those two nations.  Picture a jungley Israel, without discourse.
So Singapore went about codifying this orderly very un-Chinese vision, outlawing so many things, from drugs to gum chewing, that a mental disability arose, called 'No U Turn Syndrome'. Singaporeans, after one or two generations were so removed from agency in their own lives by the burden of rules, that they have to be told when it is permissible to turn around or left, otherwise they wont, driving endlessly, and increasing the traffic load on this small but increasingly prosperous country. They do have a good filmmaker who mocks these tendencies, but they are real, and deeply ingrained. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_U-turn_syndrome
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLAz_mia2HQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Neo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Follow_Law
What I am describing is a nation where the needs of the group, as interpreted by the leadership, are placed above the needs of the individual for freedom. Since decision making is considered by some to be the epitome of intelligence, the best use of the gift of our frontal lobes, those with the most freedom tend to stay the smartest one might simply argue. How deep does this run in Singapore.. well, put aside the endless surveillance and cameras found everywhere (you rarely ever see a policeman in Singapore until something goes wrong.. because they are either plain clothed or watching you from a camera), and consider this: you are guilty until proven innocent in Singapore, at least in corruption cases, and I am not sure how many other types. How do I know this? Because I was told this by none other than a spokeswoman for the National Supreme Court during the first ever open house of it's chambers. She then, in a kind of deluded brainwashed spokespersonley way that you see a lot in Asia, actually asked me where I was from after I laughed, and told me that of course my nation must have the same assumption, everyone who is rational must make the same assumptions as Singapore to so strongly trust government authority, and I, not knowing whether to laugh or cry at this point, calmly but firmly stated that my nation had in fact just the opposite assumption, based on our rejection of the dictatorship of the British Royalty.. she was stumped and the next few moments were indeed awkward for all in the crowd, like watching a crab back pedal... What I am getting at here is that Singapore has become a world model for the will of the top and the many over the one, and it is so unquestioned as to be entrenched, and now the country is suffering the fate it fears most, economic hardship, because of it's lack of innovative thinking and spontaneity, and is looking in part to a huge casino complex to jump start things.
So what is the point of this description from the other side of the earth? Well, most people who get wound up about the government tend to talk about the Nazi's a lot, raba raba raba the Nazi's! You've seen it, the pissy white guy born in the 50's....(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik) obsessed with the Nazi's and the Soviet Union. He is the guy Obama got in trouble for ad libbing about during that dinner in Pennsylvania that was recorded during his first campaign (he was somewhat sympathetic in his description, it should be said), and the mainstream considers this type of guy a joke because his buddies "didn't die face down in the muck so that.. " etc. etc.. Walter Sobchak types are seen to be dwelling in an angry alarmist nostalgia with no departure point from the present. Christians love to talk about how China denies religious freedom.  But these scenarios and the associated gripings have countries going off the rails and into serious foul territory within a few years of administrations taking power.. no one discusses what happens when you slowly sub-urbanize and the culture and social ties of a nation, kind of pit one against another economically through social fracturization, while slowly eroding civil liberties for the 'common good', without ever launching a pogrum, purge, holocaust, or cultural revolution..without ever truly going afoul of the mass of the population. What you end up with is Singapore.. Freedom to Shop, a banal nation of people who weave down a narrower and narrower set of options in life until they become in essence comfortable serfs of what we feared in fascism or communism, life becomes isolated, fear divides groups, but it never goes haywire, never goes off the rails.. it's like slow death to a boa constrictor, never dramatic enough for the mass of people to notice it, and it doesn't necessarily come from evil intent.. just the thousand cuts of well intentioned managers and lawmakers. In Singapore, the Malays hang with Malays, the Chinese with Chinese, people are treated with dignity, and you can go about daily life, unless you rock the boat.. it's subtle... it's like the movie Fatherland.. the dirty heavy lifting has been done.. a bit like Japan, no one wants to question a good thing as long as the good thing keeps rolling.. don't look under the hood.
What makes me think America is moving in this direction?
I just spent a bit of time in Tucson... Tucson is a pretty easy going place... not complaining too much about it.. it actually softens the blow of a lot of the self inflicted wounds of American living, but there was a controversy there while I was visiting that caught my eye... Tuscon is loaded with Red Light Cameras.. a subtle thing.. who could possibly be against saving lives, and supposedly, there are less traffic fatalities in Tucson now than there were before.. seems like a big win, right... well, it's also a big revenue generator, and it just makes Tucson, otherwise a nice place, feel 1984 creepy.. and what happens if I misjudge 'squeezing the lemon' on a late night trip back from the Loft movie theater on Tucson's breezy wide straight boulevards, maybe not thinking.. maybe I don't want to hit the brakes int he monsoon rains, no one gets hurt.. but maybe I get some automatic ticket for 300 bucks... Homo ex Machina.. Man Out of the Machine.. My judgement means nothing anymore, nor the judgement of even an officer, a judge, or my peers.. I crossed an arbitrary line, and now society can act through this instrument to take my money to teach me lessons. The arbitrary line was always there, perhaps credibly, but now it's a 'system' administered, I hate to say it, by a corporation, a defense contractor as a matter of fact in some instances, and although I might be fear mongering by using those descriptive terms to flesh this out, what I am really saying is that they don't have Societies best interests in mind, only their own, and their corporate interests are very narrow.
Here is a list of the actions that keep collectively and unconsciously moving us in that Singapore Direction:

• Red Light Cameras
• Address and ID presentation to check into Hotels
• Zip Code input to buy gas, but not with bank card
• ID check with credit card use
• Endless Security at Airports 
• Shoe Removal at Airports, for 10 years so far, based on one attempted attack.
• TSA now pushing people to Pay for Rre Screen, a rapid pass program, so you don't have to remove their shoes. so now they remove your dignity, and instead of working away from that with technology, make you pay to get it back. I had a TSA employee tell me when I made a comment about the absurdity or removing flip flops that I should pay for Pre Screen, like he was marketing it, so now TSA sees it's self as a business, with no free market alternatives.
• Voter ID and disenfranchisement games played by Republicans
• One set of mail attacks leads to endless mail scanning, and security infrastructure spending
• NSA Leaks disclosing endless loop-holing to monitor US Citizens Electronically
• Abuses of the Patriot Act
• Implications that filming police in Action or filming government buildings and installations is Illegal
• Automatic Licence plate scanning by vehicle and cameras in places like New York City
• Municipally Run Camera Surveillance Systems 
• Endless stop and frisk in NYC
• Florida Matrix System
• Checkpoints 50 miles away from US border with Mexico
• Drones
• Domestic use of drones
• Criminalization of Cash by Government, with moves to oblige banks to lower cash limits to 1000 USD from the previously acceptable 10k restrictions for reporting and withdrawals.
• The US Obsession with Terrorism as a Military and not Law Enforcement dilemma
• The Denial of Due Process to Guantanamo Detainees
• Extraordinary Rendition
• Formal or Informal Prohibitions against Smiling for Government ID photos
• The Obligation for foreign passengers to go through US immigration checks even if they are only transiting through the airport to another foreign country.
• The Endless fees imposed on people trying to obtain visa's of all sorts through the US Department of Immigration
• The endless holding of people in Immigration Holding Facilities
• Privatization of State Prisons and Prison Services
• The endless vague color coded Terrorist Threat Condition that has thankfully been retired
• Ag Gag Laws, restricting first amendment rights to protect industrial food practices
• The endless intervention of the Insurance Industry to legislate away potentially dangerous behavior
• civil forfeiture
• The Flood Insurance corporate fix

Each one of these acts or policies is completely justifiable within the logic of prevention of the administration that utilizes it. Collectively they spell a large step towards slowly encumbering and degrading the American way of life and it's Constitutional guarantees and intents. In other words, does this all add up to a death by a thousand cuts?

The High to Our Proclaimed Low: Subcultures in America, As Good As It Get's...

For all the talk of how mass culture is destroying America, and why not, let's go so far as to say the world, since the appetites of the Post War culture and lifestyle we unleashed on this world seems to have been a huge factor in our current massive environmental dilemmas, although it didn't seem so bad when you were listening to Buck Rogers on the radio, car's had fins to go with the show, and Jet Planes really did go that much faster.. there is one glimmering but apparently unrecognized high side to the all consuming consumer Home From Nowhere lost in the burbs culture that we all kind of bitch about or ignore as the elephant in the room: It has created what might be the most fascinating set of subcultures in the world.. truly.. for all the talk of Bowling Alone, as a whole, we join a hell of a lot of odd stuff..
http://www.vaillawnchairteam.com/carnes/index.html
Just start with the Sci Fi and Fantasy worlds.. think of all those geeky little clubs you know guys belong to in places like Madison, Wisconsin and Cleveland, Ohio.. you know the guy, educated but casual, goatie and a shaved head and black rimmed glasses, thinks his job is easy, likes craft beer, steady girlfriend.. he goes to Trek Conventions (see the documentary Trekkies if you haven't).. sure he makes fun of it, but he goes.. all sorts of weird games he plays, intellectual pursuits he engages in to keep his mind lucid as he struggles to keep life going... how he wears a kilt in summer and goes on these medieval weekend retreats.. you make fun of it, but oh the fantasy of it all.. he might belong to a club that surrounds his sexual fetish to go to on Saturday night(One of the Cable Networks has a whole show dedicated to exploring this.. Real Sex.. there are women who make a living popping balloons with their clothes on in this country..) and there's the red state pursuits.. Civil War reenactment, 4x4 clubs, start with white tail deer, the rat's of the hunting world, and work up to groups that focus on wild ibex's in Kurdistan.. they have groups for it.. I am just guessing that there is some American group that if you google it they focus on wild Ibex's in Kurdistan... we are rife with odd pursuits, and stumbling upon them is such a thrill because we feel we have set the bar so low because we have come to see the norm in our country, through advertising and criticism, as one of a McMansion in the burbs, when in fact I bet only 30% of us live that way, but growing up there even, are these weird subcultures... endless amounts of them... Thanks to the 5 day work week (although we voluntarily work a lot more, so much more that I believe that despite all the claims of decadence, american' work the longest hours of anyone one earth, which might be due to the corporate slavery that goes hand in hand with the Suburban criticism, but could also be people who have these unique subculture/recreational obs and just love what they do, get obsessed with making the coolest new gun like on some discovery channel show, or work long hours to get people ready for the Nathans Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest (where else but in, you said it, America..2012, Chesnut´s 6th Victory.. GO USA!) 
Fact's may not support all this completely,  I almost don't want to look, it may be a happy fiction I tell myself to deal with the banality I encounter,  but with leisure, which reads as full bellies, safety and free time, comes intellectual exploration, and that leads us to what we have today, the Garden Club on speed, 5000 permutations into an endless experiment in new shades of ways to kill time.. and it's hard not to find it cool for all the Edward Scissorhands hate we see for what spawned it..

Cliche as Conversation in New America

I have observed, so as to stick with ' Grumpy Sociology' theme of this 'blog', that American's don't seem to speak to one another anymore with anything approaching original thought. They instead seem to have whole conversations that are almost exclusively regurgitations of Conventional Wisdom and Cliche's, the kind of stuff an active brain hears once, processes, but doesn't feel the need to ever say again. It might just be a drunk white guy thing to do, but it's also a drunk white girl thing to do, and a sober white guy thing to do, and a sober white girl thing to do, and a sober red neck thing to do, and a drunk red neck thing to do, and on and on...
Sometime in the 1970's I feel as if movies became pervasive enough that there was no hiding from the stereotypes it would observe, examine, and display, and the news media did the same thing. After a while, instead of endeavoring to be unique, the vast majority of people seemed to just give up, join one or another stereotype, and just parrot it's mantras all day long.. it went from being somehow complex prior to our overexposure, to just being this hollow parroting.. This might be a nostalgic view, that somehow there was more substance behind the cliche's a harder life for the NYC stock World War Two character or cop or stock pickup driving southern boy back in the day, when the world was less depicted, and a little less glossy and smooth; that it somehow had more texture, but was still driven by group dynamics, we just follow these hollow roles more than ever because the individual texture is gone, we don't know how to get it back, so now we are just mouthfuls of affirmation of that hollow role we picked out... almost daily in the contiguous 48 I feel like that is exactly what I see... 12 Angry Men fades to Dog Day Afternoon, which fades to Heat 2, which fades in turn to a crack on Friends or How I Met Your Mother about a headier past, by some nostalgic writer, and conversation devolves into some endless blather of group opinion affirmation as we wait for our wing dings to heat up in the national sports bar from hell.. and any deviation from this is an abdication, and leads to some endlessly rehashed sharing of more cliched and regurgitated opinions with nary a new fact or idea submitted or entertained.. and the status quo lives on, and we get to keep doing what we think we should be unabated, until the next round of wings arrives...

Narcissism as a Virtue in New America

Narcissism isn't a new thing, the name comes from I think a greek fable of all things, but we seem to be reaching new highs in narcissism in America, and it seems like narcissism is becoming a virtue instead of the self defense mechanism it is clinically defined as; Instead of a reaction to some harshness or unboundaried insanity, it is being passed down as a way of being alive and satisfied, one facebook photo post at a time.. The boomers made a hysteronic art of Narcissism while simultaneously railing against it in their parents, Gen X fought against it, crying that it hurt to be open but open was the requirement, but it appears that Gen Y will take the cake for unquestioned self reverence and adoration, life at the meeting place of Marketing and Self Worth... This is not to say there aren't effective or smart, so much is being made of how they are joiners and not acrimonious, but they take that as a kind of placation of others to buy time to turn their reverence back on themselves, to sink into a private little world of gawking and constant self evaluation and comparrison and facade.. somehow it feels so good... It's similar to how porn has overtaken sensuality in so many circles.. the new edgy is trash, which elevates it... and this isn't an arguement against an industry or freedom of expression, but a fear that the cheaper elements of that expression have gotten an upper hand and are seen as the height of intimacy and sensuousness to the unititiated.. kind of Dolly Parton as the paragon of self expression, when in the quiet smoulder of a quieter less brash imagination there might be so much more nuance and pleasure, but since it can't be seen without it's market value to the new self lovers, it has no value at all... sad really..