But still. And after all. It's boring here. And somehow it's the same
ennui that lies in wait in any theme park, put particularly in those that
are somehow in too agressively spiffy a state of repair. Everything
painted so recently that it positively creaks with niceness, and even the
odd rare police car sliding past starts to look like something out of a
Chuck E. Cheese franchise... And you come to suspect that the reason you
see so few actual police is that people here all have, to quote William
Burroughs, "the policeman inside."

And what will it be like when these folks, as they so manifestly intend to
do, bring themselves online as the Intelligent Island, a single giant
data-node whose computational architecture is more than a match for their
Swiss-watch infrastructure? While there's no doubt that this is the
current national project, one can't help but wonder how they plan to
handle all that stuff without actually getting any on them? How will a
society founded on parental (well, paternal, mainly) guidance cope with
the wilds of X-rated cyberspace? Or would they simply find ways not to
have to? What if, while information elsewhere might be said to want to be
free, the average Singaporean might be said to want, mainly, not to rock
the boat? And to do very nicely, thank you, by not doing so?

Are the faceless functionaries who keep Shonen Knife and Cosmo
anti-feminism out of straying local hands going to allow access to the
geography-smashing highways and byways of whatever the Internet is
becoming? More important, will denial of such access, in the coming
century, be considered even a remotely viable possibility by even the
dumbest of policemen?

Singapore is curiously, indeed gratifyingly devoid of certain aspects of
creativity. I say gratifyingly because I soon found myself taking a rather
desperate satisfaction in any evidence that such a very tightly-run ship
would lack innovative elan.

So, while I had to admit that the trains did indeed run on time, I was
forced to take on some embarrassingly easy targets. Contemporary municipal
sculpture is always fairly easy to make fun of, and this is abundantly
true in Singapore. There was a pronounced tendency toward very large
objects that resembled the sort of thing Mad magazine once drew to make us
giggle at abstract art: ponderous lumps of bronze with equally ponderous
holes through them. Though perhaps, like certain other apparently
pointless features of the cityscape, these really served some arcane but
highly specific geomantic function. Perhaps they were actually conduits
for feng shui, and were only superficially intended
to resemble Henry Moore as reconfigured by a team of Holiday Inn furniture
designers.

But a more telling lack of creativity may have been evident in one of the
city's two primal passions: shopping. Allowing for the usual variations in
price range, the city's countless malls all sell essentially the same
goods, with extraordinarily little attempt to vary their presentation.
While this is generally true of malls elsewhere, and in fact is one of the
reasons people everywhere flock to malls, a genuinely competitive retail
culture will assure that the shopper periodically encounters either
something new or something familiar in an unexpected context.

Singapore's other primal passion is eating, and it really is fairly
difficult to find any food in Singapore about which to complain. About the
closest you could come would be the observation that it's all very
traditional fare of one kind or another, but that hardly seems fair. If
there's one thing you can live without in Singapore, it's a Wolfgang Puck
pizza. The food in Singapore, particularly the endless variety of street
snacks in the hawker centers, is something to write home about. If you hit
the right three stalls in a row, you might decide these places are a
wonder of the modern world. And all of it quite safe to eat, thanks to the
thorough, not to say nitpickingly Singaporean auspices of the local
hygiene inspectors, and who could fault that? (Credit, please, where
credit is due.)