One out of two mornings as I get dressed for work, the radio blares Ferras’ single, Hollywood’s not America.

I actually had to google that, because the track sounded so country I figured based on local tastes, it had to be done by an American Idol hopeful.

Do you know what his Wiki entry says about him?

At the age of five, his father took him to the airport promising a trip to Disneyland, but instead spiriting him away to Amman, Jordan. He stayed in his father’s native country for three months, and there began writing songs, taking solace in the Casio keyboard that his father gave him.

Is that not the singularly most deadpan, depressingly quirky Wiki write-up on anyone you’ve seen?

But I digress.

Point is, the song goes on about how the bright lights of Hollywood isn’t ‘real’ America. And it occurred to me that most countries attempt to pretty themselves up during popular portrayal such as TV or in the movies.

Most countries tend to sell a glamourised image of itself–in this instance, America. Case in point, the women in Korea do not look like those in the box set dramas your mother buys, I assure you.

But Singapore, strangely, continues to beat itself into a flaky pulp in order to ‘engage’ its people, continually playing up the crass in the media.

TV programmes such as Phua Chu Kang or Police and Thief immediately come to mind–local primetime sitcoms so insistent on centering themselves around the ‘everyman’ protagonist (who’s ironically fairly atypical in Singapore society) that they deliberately introduce subplots and plot devices directed at making the characters as ‘low-class’ as possible.

I’m not saying these people don’t exist, but the contractor with the curly hair, yellow boots and the mole is such a caricature of this ‘everyman’ that he’s unrecognisable as such.

We’ve even stopped our newscasters saying ‘es-pla-nahd’, switching that to ‘es-pla-naid’ so as to encourage more people to visit the Esplanade. What was stopping them before? That they weren’t sure of the pronunciation?

Welcome to Singapore. A country which thrives on its constant commercialisation, and strives to be the regional hub of…everything. A country so modern, so ‘advanced’ in its technology and economy, yet so afraid its people will reject it as the fancy relative which struck gold one day and stopped being accessible.