ABSTRACT
On 7 November 2004, Singapore's elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew planted a tree in his Tanjong Pagar constituency as part of the city-state's annual Clean and Green Week. To the extent that the event could be staged, it was thoughtfully done: decked out in matching green and blue batik shirts with floral motifs, Lee and his fellow Members of Parliament were veritable avatars of Cleanliness and Greenliness. Like baby-kissing, though, there's only so much pizzazz the performance of popular politics can or should support. A spade is a spade, whoever's digging, and the act itself was nothing new. In 1963, Lee, then Prime Minister, 1 initiated a planting campaign that has since seen the addition of over half a million trees to the otherwise densely populated, highly urbanized Southeast Asian island. 2 While the vast majority have been planted by the armies of workers from Thailand, Burma and the Indian subcontinent whose low- cost labour has been integral to the rapid infrastructural development of Singapore since full independence in 1965, a search at the National Archives reveals several hundred images of Lee, spade in hand and surrounded by onlookers, ministrating to a series of likely-looking saplings. This is how political performance secures the certainties of the present against the caprices of the future – again, and again, and again.
