People who would once have cried 'foul' and demanded special treatment for one of their own are now so repulsed by the picture of disorder and incivility in their own country that they see no need to spare the rod for an 18-year-old half a world away. Not even Mr Fay's father, George, a first-generation immigrant from Romania who became the chief executive of a dollars 55m company, could sway them. When Americans heard Mr Fay was going to be caned, 40 per cent of them said: 'Sure, flog him. Flog 'em all.'
The baffled guardians of such basic American values as human and individual rights wondered why there was not an explosion of outrage over Singapore's use of the rattan, a wet bamboo stick that draws blood and leaves permanent scars on the buttocks. How could so many Americans condone such cruel and unusual punishment, outlawed by the US Constitution, in a tiny, distant republic with so few freedoms?
But America's reaction is not a rational assessment of whether the punishment fits the crime; nor is it a comment on Singapore's authoritarian democracy. Americans would never tolerate its detentions without trial or its political, press and academic control.
The fact is that Americans no longer care so deeply about the root causes of crimes or the social deprivation of the people who commit them. They are at war against crime and disorder on all fronts, at home and abroad, and in such times slogans take the place of reason. Despite the cruel and unusual aspects of the death penalty, an increasing number of Americans favour it. Americans want to lock up criminals for good after their third violent crime, and are even starting to favour police searches without warrants.
When the liberal New York Times exhorted citizens to stand up against torture and foul, authoritarian regimes such as the one set up in Singapore by Lee Kuan Yew, the headline over the next day's letters column was: 'Many punks could gain from six of the best'. When one of the paper's columnists, William Safire, called for top executives of major US companies trading with Singapore to press for a pardon for Mr Fay, whose appeal for clemency is to be heard on Wednesday, did they rush to call for mercy? Did they heck. They know a thing or two about business contracts.
Several things are going on behind the slogans - but none of them helps Mr Fay. The first is that Americans have come to believe that their legal system has increasingly deprived society of the right to protect itself. They envy Singaporeans their clean and safe streets - from the absence of blotches of discarded chewing gum to the lack of violent crime.
With 2.7 million citizens, Singapore had 58 murders and 80 rapes last year, compared with 1,058 murders and 1,781 rapes in Los Angeles' population of 8 million. In America, fewer than one in 10 serious crimes results in imprisonment. In Singapore in 1992, 1,422 were sentenced to the cane, in addition to prison, for murder, rape and vandalism. Last year the figure was 3,244.
Americans balk at the cane, but there is plenty of hypocrisy in the country's professed human values. The US still has the death penalty and executes people who commit crimes as juveniles - there have been five such executions since 1977. Last year, without much outcry, a Mexican was executed in Texas, even though Mexico abolished capital punishment in 1929.
Much as American parents worship at the door of Dr Spock, and eschew corporal punishment of any kind, almost half the States still sanction what is known as 'paddling' - a beating with a ping-pong bat or some object less ferocious than the rod. The practice is on the wane, not because of a particular revulsion against corporal punishment, but mainly because of the rise in child abuse and sexual harassment suits.
In craving order and civility out of the chaos and vandalism in their society, those Americans seeking a quick fix for the degradation of the family unit have been looking at Singapore's authoritarian regime as though it might offer a solution. Some have even suggested that Lee Kuan Yew might be able to advise on how to overcome America's problem of illegitimate births - up from 5 per cent in the Sixties to 28 per cent according to a report published last week. In the same breath they ignore how governments from Saudi Arabia to the Sudan and from Singapore to China rationalise torture (from the rattan or whatever) and prevent dissent.
Mr Fay's case provides an opportunity to protest anew about the inhuman treatment of citizens in these countries and bring sanctions against those in violation. But Americans have not responded. As the columnist Abe Rosenthal pointed out in the New York Times, America's human rights policy amounts to 'flog Asians only', and will be treated with the contempt it deserves.
It is not as though the information about these abuses is hard to come by. Asia Watch, an organisation on Fifth Avenue in New York, documents them. In a recent publication called Anthems of Defeat, the group listed the appalling conditions in China's jails, for example, where torture and inhuman conditions are rife.
Mr Fay's allegations against the Singapore authorities might be desperate excuses, but the possibility of his confession being coerced raises questions about Singapore's jails that go beyond caning. Francis Seow, a former solicitor-general of Singapore who is now a prominent dissident, says coerced confessions are common. Mr Fay's account includes the severe police beating of a 15-year-old, taken into custody with him, who lost the hearing in one ear. In his statement last October, Mr Fay says that, unless he confessed, he was going to be interrogated in what is known as the 'air-con room', a chamber which is so cold even the interrogators cannot stand it for long and have to leave while the prisoner remains inside.
Until American companies trading with nations like Singapore put new conditions on their commerce, cries of inhumanity over Mr Fay, or any other American mistreated abroad, will be as though in the wilderness. Instead, the voices heard will be those hate mailers and hate callers who infest American talk radio and television. They are already loud enough to form America's current image of uncaring souls.
(Photographs omitted)
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