gold (2)

Still thinking about why i'm not quite sharing in the mass hyster ... oops i mean mass celebrations over Schooling's Olympic gold.
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i think i've just never been the kind of person who gets swept away very easily by mass emotion and 'tribalism'. Maybe that's the reason. i don't understand, or i don't share, this impulse to claim individual successes for nation / race / religion / etc, just because the successful individuals in question happen to belong to that particular community. For better or for worse, i've never quite been able to buy into that notion, except in cases where the community happens to have contributed a lot to the individual's success. And even then, my tendency is to think that the success should really only be claimed by the people who actually did the work. i guess this is why Schooling's win is not exactly whipping me into a patriotic fervour the way it's doing to so many other Singaporeans. As far as i'm concerned, this is his victory, not ours.
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(On a related note, and in all honesty, i find it hard even now to identify with the current hand-wringing over questions like What does it mean to be a Singaporean? What is the Singapore identity? Why this need to fix a label on our selves, to lose our individuality in a category like national identity -- like pinning a dead butterfly into a display case? i actually find it hard to understand.)
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The way i see it, Schooling won the gold mostly because of his own extraordinary effort, talent, and personality, the support of his parents, the talent of his coaches (including his coaches in Singapore), the entire American sports ecosystem, and the goodwill of the government here in allowing him to defer his National Service obligations. i honestly don't see that Singapore played very much of a role in his success -- after all, he left here for the US when he was 13, and it can be argued that it was precisely that very un-Singaporean decision that's allowed him to come so far.
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