"All your base are belong to us!" or 'military intelligence - an oxymoron'

I'm harboring a bad case of grouch due to too many reasons to list today, so this is going to be an Angry Slinky entry.

(note: there is a disclaimer at the bottom of this entry. I am not liable for those who choose to ignore the said disclaimer and jump to conclusions)

I entered Day One of Life Without The Boy yesterday, as he has finally been sucked into all that is pointless, also known as 'reservist'. For those who do know understand what it is, it is basically a ruse by the government to drag poor long-suffering men from their honest jobs and their valiant attempts to keep the economy afloat and throw them into army fatigues to conduct useless exercises in mosquito infested areas, all so we can trumpet proudly that we have one of the strongest fighting forces in Southeast Asia. Mind you, this is AFTER they've been compulsorily thrown into the army for two and a half years while their women go on to university and meet exciting new older men. And your obligation to do reservist does not end until we don't need to use inverted commas to describe our government as a "democracy", or until you die. Whichever is sooner. (probably the latter)

In the meantime, these men, who probably have not seen the inside of a 10km jog in a decade, are practically keeling over from heart attacks at their first pushup, and wearing their little legs down to nubs on ridiculous 30km runs, because sitting on their arses for twelve-hour days simply do not equip them with the necessary levels of physical fitness in order to "serve our country". (Although I am proud to say that The Boy has acquitted himself extremely well, going for a bloody jog after his daylong field exercise. I'm sure he's lost his bloody mind, since if it were me who was forced to be stuck in some godforsaken patch of jungle doing stupid things for the whole day, at the end of it I'd be crashed out in my bathrobe after a hot bath eating Ben & Jerry's from the tub to console myself)

What kind of pointless exercises do they need to do, you ask?

This is an example.

While I was half-heartedly drafting a Memorandum of Appearance yesterday, I receive an MMS message from The Boy. After a great deal of cursing and signing the sanctity of my email away (fucking service provider requiring a fucking email so that they can fucking send you ten gabazillion promotional emails every month) I manage to activate my stupid IDEAS account and see what he sent me.

It was, after some careful scrutiny, a picture of what appears to be an elderly helicopter sitting on a filed. The picture is obviously taken from some higher perspective, like a hilltop overlooking the aforesaid filed. With its lonely little helicopter.

I was quite horrified. I have visions of The Boy going up in the air and falling from 5,000 feet to land on some poor unfortunate, leaving nothing but a violent pink smear on the sidewalk.

"Are you supposed to go up in that thing?" I asked him via SMS.

"Nope, I'm supposed to kill it," the macho response came back.

I'm sure my hard-working colleagues were deeply mystified by the peals of laughter coming from my room. They probably though I was slacking. This could explain the unexpected influx of work which landed on my desk.

You have to understand, from all appearances, this was an empty helicopter. No pilot, no crew, nobody whom I could see in that photo which looked even vaguely like a threat to national security. As it turned out later, the damn thing didn't even have a rotor blade.

Another thing I don't like about this whole stupid exercise.

People in the military simply do not think like you or me. They exist in some strange sort of vacuum where common sense and rational thought cease to exist. Witness, for example, the conversation The Boy had with a military superior, who embodies the flawless precision of military brainwashing.

The Boy: "I need to defer my reservist. I have a High Court case coming up, and I need to be there."
The Victim of Brainwashing: (practically foaming at the mouth) "What? You want to DEFER your reservist?"

The Boy did not mention this, but I am sure that the Victim's eyes were bugging out of his tiny head at this point. I'm also sure that flecks of spittle were sprayed liberally in the direction of The Boy, a sign of the mad fervor and conviction of the truly possessed.

The Victim: (continues): "You know, Singaporeans nowadays are all alike. Damn soft, all of you. You need to GIVE BACK TO YOUR COUNTRY! After all that your country has done for you! You need to SERVE AND DEFEND!"

At this point he may have started singing the Majullah Singapura while saluting. He may also have flashed his bottom, painted red and white on one asscheek and the Merlion on the other.

What exactly has our country done for us? Let's see. We have a government who tells us who to marry (undergrads breeding with undergrads only please, in case we only produce drooling idiots) and how many children we're entitled to have. Sometimes you’re supposed to have more than two, in which case they reward you for extra children by allowing you to pay a little less of YOUR hard-earned cash to the government through tax. But they don't give you more paid time off work to ensure that your children aren't thrown off HDB flats by crazed overworked abused maids, they don't ensure that you work less hours to spend with your rugrats so they don't grow up to be hooligans who get into staring compeittions then beat each other into bloody pulp, they don't ensure that housing is cheaper so you can move out of your puny little HDB flat can't accommodate all the sprogs and you without someone sleeping in the oven (sorry hor, Ah Beng, it's your turn tonight).

Clearly, this is ensure that we breed a whole army of intelligent children who, should we ever be under attack from another state, will not build weaponry on the wrong side of the island thus enabling our country to be utterly overrun (yes, oh great British empire, I'm looking at YOU).

Then again, sometimes you're supposed to stop at two, otherwise they take away EVEN MORE of your hard-earned money in the form of taxes, and I'm sure that if they could escape the publicity, they'd follow China's one-child policy with equal zeal, except that instead of having your children killed at birth, they’d terminate the excess children once it is shown that the firstborn child successfully completes university. Again, this is probably to prevent overpopulation, protecting us from having to sleep standing up in case one person falling down causes a chain reaction which causes a quarter of the population would fall into the Johore Straits and drown.

What else have they done for me? Well, let's see. They determined that women are obviously inferior to men because they are only baby-making machines and therefore it is guaranteed that the minute they become pregnant they will leave the workforce, therefore obviously it is more important that men carry on the important jobs so they slap on quotas for women in medicine and law, never mind that the only reason why the women in question probably leave is because they're trying to fulfill the one-child, two-child, three-child policy but don't want to leave their children at home to be cared for by a stranger since the measly maternity leave afforded by most employers means that the babies are still practically attached to the placenta and you have to go back to work but there are no childcare facilities but the government doesn’t care about that. Oh, and god forbid you actually bring and BREASTFEED your child in public because some Straits Times reporter will come along and snap pictures of you and start a national debate on whether it's right for you to breastfeed your child in public. Well, obviously not, because you'd be blocking the soft-porn Paris Hilton Guess? ads where just about the only thing not showing are her nipples and her woo-hoo. Ensuring that not too many women enter into professional careers and dropping out halfway is solely for our protection, of course, because we all know what monkeys professional women are.

Other things my country has done for me? The leaders of my country has decided that things like bubblegum, Cosmopolitan (the magazine) and slingshots are illegal as they are obviously harmful to my mental and physical health. But cigarettes are legal. My government takes care of me, yes they do.

My country ensures that I am polite, speak Chinese, never smoke, and learn to keep my environment clean, through the use of propagandistic, offensi- I mean, subtle, tasteful campaigns which too often feature scary oversized animals which are no longer indigenous to Singapore because the government has long ago destroyed their natural habitats in favor of building ore HDB flats and reclaiming land to build concrete beaches and office buildings thus rendering them extinct. And no, these campaigns are not the laughing tock of Southeast Asia. (they're the laughing stock of the WORLD, thank you very much. My country aims high)

My country also decides that I am entirely too stupid to notice that I belong to a different GRC every year, but they do make sure that I never have to exercise my right to vote, thus protecting me from the disastrous consequences of the idiocy of my voting. God bless them. They also decide that in order to ensure that I will never want to leave the paradise that my country, they will label the people who run away screaming for greener pastures and a better life as "quitters" and the people who doggedly, tiredly drone on in their unsatisfying jobs leading lives of quiet desperation trying to pay off the enormous debts which have accumulated because the cost of living with a roof over your head, driving to work and feeding your family of ten shackles you in debt for the rest of your life, these people are generously rewarded the label of "stayers". Well, sign me up, I want to be a stayer too!

So yes, obviously I am a complete fool and my country has done me proud and I want to give back to my country, so please take The Boy and make him do useless exercises for on and a half months while I bide my time until I can produce the perfect number of children as the government campaigns dictate is correct for the moment.

All events, persons and places which are stated here in Slinky's page are solely the creation of the Slinky Cat for the purposes of entertainment and are the product of fiction, and any resemblance to events, persons or places anywhere in the world are entirely coincidental. Oh, and if I suddenly disappear from my house and my work, please tell members of the Sisterhood who will probably find me in imprisonment on one of the Southern Islands. Not Sentosa though because they want to a build a casino there and it's bad form having political prisoners on a resort island.

So there.

The Slinky Cat says that sure there's free speech here but only because there's a gun at the small of her back where you can't see it.