Squeezing Blood Out Of Fossilised Stone

It was painful to hear MM Lee Kuan Yew struggling to mouth his vocally challenged reponses at an open dialogue session held to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Hewlett-Packard Singapore. Anyone attempting to make sense of the guttural noises eminating from his tortured throat can see that the man is not in his best of health, and his abbreviated attention span showed through in the short replies. Except for the DBS guy who was obviously trying his luck (or showing off his ignorance) if he thought Lee had the answers for USA's economic problems, the rest of the guests were merciful enough to keep the questions simple.

In volume one of his memoirs (The Singapore Story, page 203), Lee narrated the May 1995 riot account of a protesting 17 year old Chinese student shot by a policeman's revolver. Instead of taking him straight to the hospital, the other students put him on a lorry and paraded him around the town for three hours. By the time he was brought to the hospital, he was dead from the wound in his lung. Lee wrote, "But what was one life if another martyr could stoke up the fire of revolution?"

Whatever the mileage they may want to squeeze out of him, surely we don't need the spectre of an octogenarian making the election circuit in an open lorry? Even if they could put him in a Steve Hawkins type rig, complete with DECtalk DTC01 voice synthesizer and predictive text entry system, he'd still utter garbage like, "Singapore's small bases means it would be a "pipe dream" for the country to develop its own companies and expect them to compete with successful ones in other parts of the world". Hello, ever heard of Creative? Does Soundblaster ring a bell in your hearing aid? The Company that Apple had to shell out US$100 million to in settlement of a patent suit? Mr Sim, kindly accept our apologies for his ignorance and impudence.