It is getting to be about that time. A soft-green pre-evening nightshade is beginning to color over Singapore. We both realize the end of this conversational marathon is at hand.
LKY starts to get up. “I am not a back-slapping type,” he says, shaking his head, as I move toward him for a final question or two. “On the other hand, when I make friends, they are usually to be life-long friendships.”
This is somehow moving—both awkward and elegant, simultaneously.
Sorry Amnesty and other critics. This guy is historic and important, and I don’t know how long either one of us is going to live before “we go to Marx”, as the old commie atheists joke about the hereafter, which they believe does not exist. But one has to take stands in life, and I am convinced Lee stands for something historically important. It may be something we miss when we put on our Western human-rights sunglasses.
He is more like some important nuanced nexus point where Plato (in his search for Utopia on earth) meets Machiavelli (who wants to teach Plato some real-life lessons about getting his programs implemented and his enemies neutralized … and say to the great master: darn it Plato, don’t be so naïve!).
Lee then confides in me, as recounted in the very first story of this book, that he expects an American journalist to achieve objectivity and credibility by lacing this account with non-flattering elements as well.
Neither a hatch-job journo nor a suck-up be, I always say.
I tell him I have three last questions, forgot to ask.
He nods his head, standing, saying go ahead.
God? Is there one in your life?
No, no, he replies, shaking his head: “I am an agnostic. I accept Darwinism.” The great god of evolution, of course.
Then he smiles: “The religious right does not accept it. But nobody has come back from the hereafter to tell us which is right!”
That’s a pretty good one, I think.
Then he lifts a tired but determined eyebrow. What are the other questions?
Why do you care so much about governance? I mean, you look at government as an art as well as a science, and you take it so very seriously.
“Yes. You are dealing with people’s lives.”
Yes, one is.
Final question. I mumble something to the effect that after you’ve “gone to Marx”, will Singapore finally loosen up, as many have conjectured?
He pauses.
“It is for the present and future generation of leaders to modify and adjust the system as society and technology changes.”
I smile. I’ve now spent more aggregative time with LKY than any Western journalist I know. In this rarified setting I think I can recognize a ‘yes’. That was a ‘yes’.
I lunge forward a little bit. I say the hell with it and I give this man whom everyone sizes up as a winter frost a semi-flamboyant hug.
To my surprise, he hugs somewhat back. It wasn’t a backslap, mind you. And it sure as hell wasn’t caning. It was, in fact, kind of touching.
I say: “All this talk about your growing older, I am growing older unfortunately.”
“Everybody does.”
There is a serious silence of some long seconds.