Tan Wah Piow 27 May 2015
Lawrence Wong, the Singapore Minister for Culture, Community and Youth reminds me of a second-hand car salesman when I read about his recent remarks as to why the government is considering legislation to protect the name and images of Lee Kuan Yew. Ostensibly this proposed initiative is to prevent the “commercial exploitation” of Lee Kuan Yew’s name and images. Various media quoted Lawrence Wong as citing an example, the Singapore bakery which marketed a new line of Lee bu kai ni 李不开你 buns to coincide with the Lee Kuan Yew’s mourning period. The李 (Lee) as in Lee Kuan Yew, rhymes with 离 meaning leave. Hence Lee Bu Kai Ni means Can’t bear to Leave you. Touching stuff indeed. But somehow it did not go down well with the public. When citing the “bun” incident, it is unclear whether Lawrence Wong’s objection was because the buns from the BreadTalk bakery were not tasty enough, and “feel stale 90% of the time”, according to a complaint lodged by a Jumi Tan in the Straits Times facebook 24.3.2015. Or was it simply just too expensive at $2 a piece, as complained by another netizen Joseph Hiew to the Straits Times. Is this now the new politics of the post-Lky era – bun watching? Is it the Government’s duty to shoot down anything unbefitting to the memory of Lky because the dead man could no longer wield his libel law club to whack his critics? Or is