Just Do Your Job

 

The big TV event coming out of the USA is the congressional hearings into the January 6 2021 attacks on the American Congress. The hearings have the elements of a good drama. There is the central event. There is the obvious villain in the shape of the former president who conspired with others to overturn the election. Then, there’s the question of the hero.

One of the most unlikely heroes appears to be the former Vice-President, Mr. Mike Pence, who refused to reject the electoral votes at the request of his former boss and was the target of the mob’s anger. People have testified that Mr. Pence was verbally abused by his former boss (who called him a wimp and other interesting names) and yet chose to do the “right thing” at the end of the day.

 

 Should he be a hero for merely doing his job? Copyright – CBS News

There’s no doubt that Mr. Pence played an important role on January 6, 2021 and being able to withstand the pressure from being close to the wrong end of a mob’s anger was commendable. Thanks to Mr. Pence’s courage, American institutions prevailed and the system of checks and balances survived.

However, there have been arguments against Mr. Pence’s status as a hero of the moment. The arguments rest of the fact that Mr. Pence was effectively his former boss’s poodle until that very day. He stayed silent when the theory of the stolen election, which the former attorney-general described as “BS.” This effectively implied that he had no issues with what has been called “The Big Lie” and this helped motivate the mob. It’s a case of why are we making him a hero for doing the right thing when he could have prevented it from reaching that stage. There is also the point that he was probably OK with doing his boss’s bidding until his lawyers told him that he would be implicated.

Mr. Pence’s behaviour does suggest that self-preservation had more to do with his actions than actual principle. Whilst he has told his former staff to cooperate with the Committee, he himself has not volunteered to speak up. He has only mentioned once that he thought his former boss was wrong. In normal speak, most of us would be pretty f** off if someone sent a mob after us and kept bragging about it. Instead of keeping silent, most of us would be vocal about it at every available opportunity. Mr. Pence, it seems, is more of calculative operator rather than the man of principle that he portrays himself to be. Its for this reason that many of Mr. Trump’s detractors used to say that whilst Mr. Trump was loud and awful – Mr. Pence was arguably worse because he’s quiet and sneaky.

Having said all of that, I am actually sympathetic to Mr. Pence, even if I don’t agree with him on most issues. Sure, he was probably just doing his job on the day when he refused to be brow beaten into rejecting an election, he had no right to reject.

The reason is simple – doing your job is sometimes the most difficult thing in the world. Think of the medical professionals around the world who have been working through the Covid Pandemic. They have spent their days dealing with death and disease. They watch people die despite their best efforts and they themselves end up risking death, away from the presence of loved ones. In places like the USA, health care professionals have faced additional risk like verbal abuse from conspiracy nut cases who believe that the virus is a hoax.

Yet, despite everything that the healthcare professionals faced – they were effectively “just doing their job.” The same is true for active-duty personnel. As horrible as a war may be, a solider is just doing his or her job. They’re just doing their job but when you consider what doing the job means, you got to accept that what they’re willing to face for few pennies is commendable.

Then, there’s the question of what exactly is the job. There is the official job description and the actual job. Mr. Trump probably selected Mr. Pence for Vice-President in the same way that Singapore’s president’s get selected – to execute whatever the selector expects them to do.

When Mr. Ong Teng Cheong, our first “elected” president left office in 1999, he held a press conference, which went down in Singapore’s history books as one of the most controversial. Mr. Ong’s sin in that conference was to complain about his former cabinet colleagues being uncooperative and one of the most famous moments that he mentioned was the fact that when he asked for a figure as to how much was in our reserves, he was told by civil servants that it would take an exceedingly long time to come up with a figure. The following day, the government dismissed Mr. Ong’s complaints as if they were a fiction.

The problem here was that Mr. Ong believed that he was supposed to follow the official job description, which was to look after the reserves. The entire point of making the presidency an elected office was so that it had the political legitimacy to question the government over the reserves.

However, the government’s dismissal of Mr. Ong’s claims suggested to most of us that the problem was that Mr. Ong didn’t understand the “real” or the “unspoken” job description – which was simply to smile and wave on national day. This was further compounded by the fact that the Mr. Ong had a very quiet life after leaving office and when he died, he had the funeral of a private citizen rather than a formal head of state.

So, in such a situation, the question is – which job do you do? Mr. Ong’s successors have all followed the “real” job description of being president. The two from minority communities (SR Nathan and Halimah Yacob) were effectively appointed (all challengers were disqualified) and were allowed to appear as if they were looking after the reserves and the only other president who had to fight an election, somehow vanished and only appeared once a year at National Day.

All of these presidents have been lionised. However, the chances are, if you were to ask a random Singaporean which president was the most significant, chances are they will say Mr. Ong. Let’s be clear, Mr. Ong was not a rabid antigovernmental figure. He was, however, keen to do the official job and appeared that he was willing to stand up to his former colleagues in the government.

Doing your job his very tough. Sure, Mr. Pence’s behaviour before and after January 6 would indicate that Mr. Pence is anything but a decent character. It’s likely that his motives to “do his job” were based on self-preservation rather than principle. However, let’s not run him down for “doing his job” for one day in four years. This was the most crucial of days and the fact that he did it and took leadership when it was needed most is something that we should be grateful for. There are times when “just doing your job” can be the hardest thing in the world and we should be grateful that Mr. Pence was willing to do his when it was needed most.