The Whipping Boy

By JAMES WALSH

Should anyone much care whether an American boy living overseas gets six vicious thwacks on his backside? So much has been argued, rejoined and rehashed about the case of Michael Fay, an 18-year-old convicted of vandalism and sentenced to a caning in Singapore, that an otherwise sorry little episode has shaded into a certified International Incident, complete with intercessions by the U.S. head of state. An affair that sometimes sounds -- on editorial pages -- equivalent to the abduction of Helen of Troy has outraged American libertarians even as it has animated a general debate about morality East and West and the proper functioning of U.S. law and order. The Trojan War this is not: the wooden horse is in America's citadel.

Which, to all appearances, is what Singapore wanted. The question of whether anyone should care about Michael Fay is idle: though Singapore officials profess shock at the attention his case has drawn, they know Americans care deeply about the many sides of this issue. Does a teenager convicted of spraying cars with easily removable paint deserve half a dozen powerful strokes on the buttocks with a sopping-wet bamboo staff? At what point does swift, sure punishment become torture? By what moral authority can America, with its high rates of lawlessness and license, preach to a safe society about human rights? Isn't the shipshape and affluent little city-state molded by Lee Kuan Yew a model of civic virtues?

Not quite the game of Twenty Questions, but close enough. The caning sentence has fascinated many Americans who had never heard of Singapore and perhaps could not tell Southeast Asia from Sweden on a map. It has concentrated minds wondrously on an already lively domestic debate over what constitutes a due balance between individual and majority rights. Too bad Michael Fay has become a fulcrum for this discussion. Not only does he seem destined to be pummeled and immobilized by an instrument of ordeal, but the use of Singapore as a standard for judging any other society, let alone the cacophonous U.S., is fairly worthless.

To begin with, Singapore is an offshore republic that tightly limits immigration. Imagine crime-ridden Los Angeles, to which Singapore is sometimes contrasted, with hardly any inflow of the hard-luck, often desperate fortune seekers who flock to big cities. Imagine in the same way Jakarta or Shanghai. Beyond that, Singapore began its life as a British colony designed to serve as a shipping, administrative and financial center. Today it is a highly skilled society without the urban sprawl and rural poverty that afflict larger nations. An analogue might be Manhattan incorporated as a republic between the Battery and 96th Street, with its own flag, armed forces and immigration controls.

Even without its government's disciplinary measures, Singapore more than plausibly would be much the same as it is now. An academic commonplace today is that the major factor determining social peace and prosperity is culture -- a sense of common identity, tradition and values. The house that Lee built is 76% ethnic Chinese, a people with one of the most self-disciplined cultures in the world. Prizing family, learning and hard work, overseas Chinese have prospered wherever they have settled. Heavily Chinese Hong Kong is, granted, a somewhat messier place than Singapore. But without social engineering or the flogging of vandals, Hong Kong is still very safe and quite rich. Its crime rate: 1,522 reported offenses for every 100,000 people in 1992. Singapore's was 1,507.

And America's? Don't ask. Unlike Singapore, though, the U.S. today is a nation in search of a common culture, trying to be a universal society that assimilates the traditions of people from all over the world. Efforts to safeguard minority as well as individual rights have produced, as Lee charges, a gridlock in the justice system. America is not the pandemonium portrayed in the shock-addicted mass media. But its troubles stem more from the decay of family life than from any government failures. Few societies can afford to look on complacently. As travel eases and cultures intermix, the American experience is becoming the world's.

Singaporeans have every right to be proud of their achievements. Does that justify Michael Fay's sentence? A letter writer to the New York Times advised that "six of the best," as he suffered at an English public (that is, private) school, might cure all that ails American youth. Comparing Fay's sentence to a headmaster's paddling is fatuous -- but then, as John Updike once noted, old boys of Eton and Harrow can often "mistake a sports car for a woman or a birch rod for a mother's kiss." The pain from flaying with wet rattan, as it is done in Singapore, can knock a prisoner out cold.

The circumstances of this affair -- evidently no Singaporean has ever been punished under the Vandalism Act for defacing private property -- suggest that Singapore has used Fay as an unwilling point man in a growing quarrel between East and West about human rights. Several large Asian countries, China among them, argue that the U.S. has no business criticizing their own, equally legitimate values. But Japan stresses majority rights too. So does Hong Kong. Neither is watering its economic miracle with the blood from a bamboo cane.