Word: faye
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Just the contemplation of punishment for Kelso was sufficient for his supporters to insist that he had suffered enough. One reason for the surprising lack of sympathy in the U.S. for the American student Michael Fay after he was sentenced to be caned in Singapore is the increasing recognition that Americans have too much compassion and too little accountability. Our usual way would be to understand the root causes for Fay's vandalism spree -- his attention-deficit disorder and the breakup of his parents' marriage -- and send him on his way. From top to bottom, American society is soaked with...
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...
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...
...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...
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...