cookie-cutter comments

My father shouts “Kill! Kill lah!” with as much passion as he can muster, and I know he must be watching badminton or some such. Not a strange sentiment given how passionate he is about games. I remember a course in Anthropology I did back in the day during which we examined how games were like life, wars and such: conflict being the basis of our analysis. If a game is anything like war, my father presumably applies the same brutal passion to life, or so the pseudo-theory goes, which in this case can only be true.

Besides a robust disdain for politics in general, a disdain which ironically translates to maintaining an obsessive interest in the same, my father has a range of opinions about almost everything. Opinions, that is, that boil down to a simple fact: life is hard, ugly and people are the shites (sic); in his most florid declamations, he truly sounds as if he believes that “Hell is other people”.

Which I have been discovering. Not to sound uncommonly jaded for one so young (a questionable opinion of my own age, yes) but I’ve just about run the gammut of people who, in trying to make ends meet, are not afraid to cheat, lie, beg, steal, bitch, whine — not necessarily in that order — for what they want.

However, being in the “real world” populated by the people who believe that “life is hard, ugly and people are the shites” has left me, many times, to question the motivations behind people who are so willing to sell their integrity so cheaply.

This recent Thursday night out was a sort of example for me, a test case (?), an eye-opener. Not two feet away from where we (my friends and I) sat were a bunch of people in plainsclothes, who my friend identified as being “law-enforcers”. I won’t say the Police or Traffic police, but those details are sometimes unnecessary.

This same friend spent the first half of the night sneering at them, and the other half dancing on the seats and tables with them, the alcohol once again proving that social cohesion works best when you don’t know what you’re doing (or have no control over your basic motor skills; pick either).

What he said earlier in the night, however, made sense: these “law enforcement officers” were tossing back whiskeys and coke like there was no tomorrow, with no care in the world, while we plebes pick fights in the mud over scraps.

They probably didn’t bother who speculated about the money they were flinging about, which is probably worse. In training schools, apparently, these would-be officers are forced to accept bribes to make them jointly culpable with their senior officers… this, of course, is a rumour.

After a while, you get used to it: this is Malaysia, after all, the land of the helpless and the Internal Security Act.

But what happens if you know a decent fellow who begins walking the crooked path and worse, things you do, too?

This happened this evening as I finished dinner with him. He put his arm around my shoulders and promised me a ’share’ of the takings, after he cashes out his check, since I was instrumental in getting him the assignment for last night’s catastrophe. I protested, shocked and hurt, and he said he understood, that everybody wants to make money, got bills to pay, everyone needs a little something.

I said not me. I cannot and will not be bought. Not patting my own back, here: my colleagues and I have to do this on a regular basis, and we’re the good guys in a relatively ugly industry (I’m immensely proud to say), believe it or not. We can be shitty assholes, too. And, more importantly, we’re all realists and we know this sorta shit happens all the time.

What hurts is hearing this from someone you respect, someone who you might look up to. Firstly, you lose that respect you had, you lose it and you start getting resentful, angry, hurt..

And secondly, you begin to wonder if the other party respects you so little that he has no qualms about offering to buy off your dignity.

I hear my dad again, screaming “Kill lah! Kill!” and whooping with each stroke of the racket, and wonder again how life became “hard and ugly”, and populated by turds.

I suppose if you’re like me, you aren’t surprised anymore by how unbelievably amoral some corporations are or can become.

In a bitterly funny turn of events, Cisco gets slammed by its owned shareholders for apparently allowing the Chinese government the use of tools to restrict internet access to sites deemed not in their “national interests”, whatever that means.

Check out the following funnies:

“Cisco does not participate in any way in any censorship activities in the People’s Republic of China,” Alberstein says. “We have never custom-tailored our products for the China market, and the products that we sell in China are the same products we sell everywhere else.”

Which, of course, is the same as saying “we don’t do the censorship, nevermind if we make it easier for them to do it”. Double you just love neutered double-speak? Another one:

Export constraints passed in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre block U.S. companies from selling “any crime control or detection instruments or equipment” to China. Cisco says networking equipment is not covered by the prohibition. “We do sell our products to law enforcement agencies around the world, including China,” says Alberstein. “And we do that in full compliance with Department of Commerce export regulations.”

I find it sometimes amusing how following the letter of the law is used as permission to flout ethics, don’t you?

It wasn’t a big bank by any means; not a multi-storeyed affair with lots of bells and whistles, marbled walkways or lush furnishing, but it was impressive enough. More impressive still was the amount of water I found myself wading in, just minutes upon my arrival.

I didn’t know bank tellers were this cute, though. I found myself making excuses to stick around for just a bit longer, but water-logged shoes don’t make good footwear. That and the fact that I had to dream up something pretty quickly to get things in order.

Which meant climbing rickety ladders and peeping through small portholes to take badly aimed pictures. Once that was done, I found myself gesticulating at pipes and such, trying to make sense to the client all the while wondering what in the world I was saying, which, in this line of work, happens quite often.

From that particular bit of madness I stumbled home to find the family unit preparing to go out: it was mum’s birthday, and while I remembered it, I didn’t expect an elaborate celebration. Between enduring expensive wine and my brother’s incessant demand that I find other means of paying the bills, I recall staring blankly at billboards in the distance wondering when everyone would shut the hell up: thinking with food and family around is just not done, I realize now.

Half-awake, I play ball and make my way back to site. I feel a twinge of guilt when I learn that one of the contractors had not taken their dinners; a twinge and quickly gone, when I remembered just what sort of asshole this fella really was.

I slap my sizable belly and offer my commiseration, smiling.

And that was the highlight of the night, honestly.

The rest fades in a blurry haze: back home; bath; forgetable small talk and then, thankfully, sleep.

Bad days should be this good, considering how my client might be facing a multi-million dollar suit.

She should exist in my head without a name, though I know it. That kind of elevation should mean something, at least. I heard her the night before and last night, I wanted to hear her again. You could feel the hearts breaking when she sang her song — her song because she made it her own, completely.

A quick introduction later, I found myself, half-sloshed, informing her that I’d never heard anyone this good. You see, I think she thought it was flattery, but the truth of the matter is I was serious. She remains nameless here, but oh boy, her voice, her stance, her very being were throbbing with emotion when she sang.

That’s all my fuzzy brain can summon up now; it’s been two straight days of pubbing and boozing, sleep deprivation and a decided lack of care for anything but a soft bed and a hot woman in-between the sheets. We got roaring drunk on Johnny Walkers and great music, blew our ears out listening up close and personal and screaming along in homage to our rock gods.

Damn, it was unbelievable.

The question that’s on my mind is: “Who can you trust?”. I can imagine that some would be grateful with Mahathir’s recent comments on the AP issue, amongst others; that sparked off a debate and ‘war of words’ between the ex-PM himself and one of his own loyalists.

But who’s the bad guy, here? I’ve read some posts in forums and it seems as if people are happy that the AP issue is finally coming to light, but I suppose the question of importance to me is, how does that make Mahathir any less culpable? As he remarks, he was once the Minister of Trade and Industry before Rafidah, and should therefore have some inkling of the backroom deals going on in that ministry.

But to come right out and say he didn’t know things that were going on during his administration? I don’t quite know how to think about that. Firstly, I find it hard to believe that such rampant corruption went unnoticed under his very nose.

To think that is perhaps tantamount to accusing Mahathir of either a blindness in that regard, or outright accusing him of culpability in the goings-on at Rafidah’s ministry. That is to say, I’d be accusing Mahathir of incompetence or corruption, which no one should because neither accusation is based on fact.

Secondly, if I were to accept that Mahathir did in fact know what was going on in Rafidah’s ministry, then I would be accusing him of allowing the very corruption that he’s now trying to expose to carry on, and I would pile on another criticism, that of hypocrisy.

And now he’s threatening to release further information, citing secret communications, remembered meetings and such. The details, at this stage, seem to be less important because, to my mind, a few things will happen for sure:

• More sordid details will be revealed
• More people will become implicated, but things will stop before it tarnishes the top politicians…
• Rafidah will probably step down or if she remains, will now find that she has next to no influence anymore
• Badawi, if he’s not collaborating with Dr Mahathir in this chess game, will find some way to silence him

What bothers me is how people are taking definitive sides in this saga, either for the release of the APs or not. The plain fact of the matter is, what first started out as a complaint that APs were allowing Proton to lose market share has now turned into a witchhunt of sorts against those who seemed to have benefitted under Mahathir’s rule.

In the first place, shouldn’t both ’sides’ be equally tarred?

The Star has characterized the issue as a spat between a “mentor and protégé”, and even the contents of the article by Joceline Tan is full of the same kind of emotionally charged language. Perhaps that’s what this National Sandiwara really is at its heart: divided interests and divided loyalties. What got my goat, however, were these:

Shortly after landing at Subang airport on Sunday, he told a close friend that he had “saved Rafidah three times” in the past, the implication being that he expected more respect from the International Trade and Industry Minister.

But he was no longer interested in an apology.

And…

And if that is not enough, Tengku Mahaleel himself has some stories to tell which he is not telling yet.

So, basically, Mahathir probably knew what was going on, was keeping silent all this while, and when push came to shove, he played his trumps. Yes, one will conclude that it’s merely politics, and politics is dirty. However, the problem is one of consequences: what, if anything, will happen to Mahathir?

And yet there are those who are, get this, grateful that Mahathir’s now exposing all the bullshit that went on in MITI.

Update: as at 3.07pm, I have received an SMS alert from The Star citing Dr Mahathir who, apparently, says that the government is good, and that APs were given to the wrong people now and then, and added that those were minor things.

A deal behind the scenes finalized between shadowy parties? An agreement to seek a compromise? Or did Mahathir suddenly become aware of the hypocrisy of trying to expose the corruption underlying the issuance of APs?

I tend to receive emails from Jane (not her real name) at odd times. Take today, when I was relatively happy.

I don’t know what possesses her; is it a natural tendency to morbid thoughts? the natural conclusion of a twisted naivette? I’ve been hoping for somebody to tell me for the longest time. There seemed to be a ‘passing of batons’ between our mutual friends, and now it appears that I’ve been ensconced firmly in her driving seat (without option to bail, what’s more).

Having spent about 5 years wondering, I finally, in a fit of sheer frustration, demanded that she explain the reasons for her feeling the way she did/does/WILL. I expect a reply first thing tomorrow, with oddly placed line breaks (my favourite peeve) and admonishments. I will be taken to task for not caring, for being typically male (and therefore, insensitive: I love stereotypes), being a chauvanist who, in my wished-for short span of existence, will never understand the subtilities of the female mind, who–

Well, yessss…

All of this is just a preliminary, mind, I can see it already. My silence, which she finds disturbing, will spur her to ask me about my day, week or month, i.e. she finally decides a much saner way to introduce me to her world of incessant complaints (yet again). After a few exchanges, we will promptly conclude that life isn’t fair, that men suck and that the best men literally do suck.

All in the span of a day, after which my mysterious and often-flighty friend will disappear for a week or two…

And then it starts all over again!

p/s: Jane, you just need to get laid, and badly.

It’s a sign of the times to see vested policemen standing guard outside No. 10, Downing St. I was sprawled on the floor, staring dumbly at the screen as talking heads gave their varied opinions on Tony Blair’s after the live telecast of his press conference. Robin Oakley, speaking for CNN, looked pasty white and for a while I wondered what possessed a man to wear foundation. It was an idle thought, but his anaemic-looking face brought to mind the morbid image of a people on death-watch.

Waiting for the next bomb.

I can hardly remember Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’, and much of it was spent delving into the particular psyche of the insurgent, I seem to remember. But an image that has stuck to mind are the bright, almost shimmering descriptions of the Crystal Palace, an important landmark at the time in the UK, I’m led to believe, but which holds not a bit of real significance for me.

I didn’t know what that erstwhile insurgent was fighting for, I was caught up in the image of a cannibalistic Europe devouring itself in reaction to its sheer comportment to the mechanical. It echoed like Hawkmoon’s glorified and bloody response against a familiar, mechanical, inhuman ‘Granbretan’, no doubt a transparent play on “Great Britain”, in Moorcock’s stories.

Maybe it was that familiar reaction of the organism, of the organic, of the holistic against the stretched and skewed duality of that Modern age that captured my imagination at the time; my lecturers used to insist that the antecedents of that ‘war about nothing’, World War I, could be found prophesied by literary minds who had, before the fact, seen and predicted the madness that would grip a civilization uprooted from its own centre by its very hands.

Like a dog gnawing at its own leg to be free of the steel jaws of some hunter’s trap.

Just after 11 September 2001, that vicious horror, Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama both presented views that were oddly similar in their call for a another sort of convenient duality, a another schism of abstractions to explain away the coming (existing?) conflict.

To think we made some progress in the ’60s, stumbling away from convenient dualisms of the past only to fling ourselves headlong into yet another one, this time between the ‘West and Islam’ cast definitively in a ridiculous “either/or”.

At the time, part of our own private readings revolved around the implied dualism between Hegel and Nietzsche, attempting to evince a phenomenological perspective of the works of both thinkers. We were young, we were stupid, we were ambitious and ultimately, we gave up upon witnessing the horror of those two twisted hunks of metal dissolving in clouds of dust and tortured girders.

XM sank into a strange sort of reverie. He had, by that time, developed and adopted a keen sense of the place of a class of the elite, of the aristocrat; I don’t mean this in its lowest form or implication. That and his incisive cynicism – incisive, really, and oh, the walls of irony he could dart behind – became more and more pronounced.

Joyce wrestled with her own demons, alternating between the authentic and the worry-unto-death. She’s still caught up and lost in her own metamorphosing mazes.

I wrestled with the implications of that bombing cast against the subject of my thesis, by now submitted, and by now – to me – all the more stark. It disillusioned me further to that laudable, but ultimately naïve project of a philosophized hermeneutics.

You wouldn’t believe how hard-lined we became, then. As I said, we were young. In turns, we found justifications in the tyranny under which Athens persisted; we found justifications for action, for the will to act, in Mills; we argued long and loudly over characterising, rightly or wrongly, the anachronism we thought Islam to be – a pitiful artefact of the pre-Modern. We even agreed that staring into the abyss would now be justified, under just these sorts of conditions, when the very ideals propounded by democracy had seemed to become our own weaknesses.

We became warped in our adherence to that convenient “either/or”; it’s easy to get lost in the need for some kind of vengeance, though none of us had any personal and/or immediate attachment to those 3,000 plus who died. Fortunately, some conclusions stand in time, stand in large vacuum vats unaffected by changing circumstances. These conclusions tend to become anachronisms.

I was thinking of all this while watching that hour-long press conference. A call to fight not just the methods but the ideals of the terrorist. A call to fight the rhetorical slants that often equate the aspirations of the Muslim world with the methods of the radical few.

“It’s time we stop thinking, ‘oh, we disagree with their methods but maybe there’s a sliver of truth, a justification for their ideas‘” — Tony Blair

Remarks by an Al Jazeera reporter struck home; Tony Blair barely flinched, but you could see his mind working, and when he replied, you could see his exasperation. It was unsurprising that he focused on terrorism as being wrong, but could only prescribe democracy as the cure for the ills Muslims in the Middle East and beyond have been trying to push into the light.

Without doubt, such an ephemeral cure can only mean nothing to the Muslim, living in the immediacy of his or her plight.

Worst, on the most superficial level, would presenting ‘democracy’ as the solution serve to strengthen arguments of a ‘Clash of Civilization’, of subsuming the Muslim world under the blanket of democracy, an artefact of the ‘West’?

Where will bombs go off next, this time?

The normal disclaimers apply: i’m just linking the video clip, and the clip in no way expresses my utter disgust at the um thing, the thing they said. I didn’t upload the clip, I’m just linking it.

The things they were saying, I mean, bloody brits thinking we make cars in a jungle clearing! Bastards!

Clip is from the… was it the 10th July ‘05 broadcast of Top Gear? Not sure.

Said clip mentioned anew (news of this made an appearance about 2 weeks back) in this thread, Topgear video savvy humiliation here.

Direct link here.

On a serious note, they don’t really have a good opinion about Protons over there, and consequently take a rather dim, if not insulting, view of Malaysians.

Update: the above links don’t seem to be working anymore. Paultan.org has put up a page hosting the vid. Check it out here.

Hot off the presses, Bernama has an article spotted at Screenshots on the press conference given by Dr. Mahathir on the much talked-about non-renewal of Mahaleel’s contract with Proton Berhad.

Jeff Ooi detects some bitterness from the press release, which could be substantiated by the following:-

“Apparently there was no willingness to consider (Tengku) Mahaleel’s views so he refused to sign and the board decided not to renew his contract,” Dr Mahathir told a press conference here today.

and here:

Dr Mahathir also said Tengku Mahaleel’s ability to run Proton was cramped after he was removed from the chairmanship of major Proton subsidiaries.

But it seems Mahathir won’t let sleeping dogs lie. I received an SMS alert from The Star stating that Mahathir considers the AP list just revealed to be incomplete.. and he’s now demanding for the release of the 2004 list of AP recipients.

I suppose no one knows what’s going through his head, but I do think he might be acting recklessly, and trading on the goodwill he’s built up over his years in office. To what extent is he willing to pursue the matter?

I can only imagine Mahaleel’s leaving as a blow to Mahathir’s efforts to, perhaps, retain some control over his last remaining pet project. That’s perhaps not to say that Mahathir privately agrees with Mahaleel’s policies, maybe, but since this is speculation it should be disregarded.

Both seem to have a particularly acute aversion to any major foreign involvement, a mentality that would do the UMNO Youth proud with its undertones of affirmative action.

This dismantling of the old guard, this transitory phase between the Mahathir era and a post-Mahathir era makes for interesting drama at the very least. Taking apart power structures and making way for new ones shouldn’t be surprising and I suppose, happens in any regime. It’s what gets cast into the light that, more often than not, disappoints and reaffirms my abhorence for the incumbent.

Bloody bastards, all of them.

It’s like a diabolic embrace, this sinking into her arms. You play the conversations in your head like the future-past, knowing what she’d say. You could reach out to wipe away her shallow tears and she says this and that but the words that spill forth are names names her names.

And you could enjoy that embrace, knowing your words hover between the indifferent and the uncaring, because she looks away and her eyes are elsewhere. Like a wisp of air in her arms, drawn in her every intake of breath.

You could imagine yourself insinuating like wreaths of feeling across the nape of her neck and beyond, because she looks elsewhere.

Imagine the irony of her words, you know the words now by heart. “Passing clouds”, and at times, even her most desperate explanations must dissolve into that simple expression, “alone”.

And you could then lie in her embrace, savouring her self-pity and making it your own.

How the HELL do people come up with this?!

#111338 +(8918)- [X]

JonJonB: Purely in the interests of science, I have replaced the word “wand” with “wang” in the first Harry Potter Book

JonJonB: Let’s see the results…

JonJonB: “Why aren’t you supposed to do magic?” asked Harry.
JonJonB: “Oh, well — I was at Hogwarts meself but I — er — got expelled, ter tell yeh the truth. In me third year. They snapped me wang in half an’ everything

JonJonB: A magic wang… this was what Harry had been really looking forward to.

JonJonB: “Yes, yes. I thought I’d be seeing you soon. Harry Potter.” It wasn’t a question. “You have your mother’s eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wang. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wang for charm work.”
JonJonB: “Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wang. Eleven inches. ”

JonJonB: Harry took the wang. He felt a sudden warmth in his fingers. He raised the wang above his head, brought it swishing down through the dusty air and a stream of red and gold sparks shot from the end like a firework, throwing dancing spots of light on to the walls

JonJonB: “Oh, move over,” Hermione snarled. She grabbed Harry’s wang, tapped the lock, and whispered, ‘Alohomora!”

JonJonB: The troll couldn’t feel Harry hanging there, but even a troll will notice if you stick a long bit of wood up its nose, and Harry’s wang had still been in his hand when he’d jumped - it had gone straight up one of the troll’s nostrils.

JonJonB: He bent down and pulled his wang out of the troll’s nose. It was covered in what looked like lumpy gray glue.

JonJonB: He ran onto the field as you fell, waved his wang, and you sort of slowed down before you hit the ground. Then he whirled his wang at the dementors. Shot silver stuff at them.

JonJonB: Ok
JonJonB: I have found, definitive proof
JonJonB: that J.K Rowling is a dirty DIRTY woman, making a fool of us all
JonJonB: “Yes,” Harry said, gripping his wang very tightly, and moving into the middle of the deserted classroom. He tried to keep his mind on flying, but something else kept intruding…. Any second now, he might hear his mother again… but he shouldn’t think that, or he would hear her again, and he didn’t want to… or did he?

melusine: O_______O

JonJonB: Something silver-white, something enormous, erupted from the end of his wang

JonJonJonB: Then, with a sigh, he raised his wang and prodded the silvery substance with its tip.

JonJonJonB: ‘Get - off - me!’ Harry gasped. For a few seconds they struggled, Harry pulling at his uncles sausage-like fingers with his left hand, his right maintaining a firm grip on his raised wang.

*falls over laughing my ass off*

More here! Spotted at Mr Brown’s.

Saw this at the Autoworld forums.

Link to Bernama article here.

KUALA LUMPUR, July 25 (Bernama) — Tengku Tan Sri Mahaleel Tengku Ariff will no longer be group chief executive officer (CEO) of Proton Holdings Bhd effective Sept 30, 2005 as his contract with the national car manufacturer has not been renewed by the board of directors.

He has been with the company for more than nine years.

Proton said Datuk Kisai Rahmat, currently Director of Operations and Datuk Kamarulzaman Darus, currently Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Proton Tanjung Malim Sdn Bhd, have been appointed chief operating officers of Proton Holdings effective Tuesday to replace Tengku Mahaleel.

Talk about being unceremoniously booted out:

Tengku Mahaleel, 59 will be on leave with immediate effect till the end of his tenure on Sept 30 this year, the company said in a statement to Bursa Malaysia here.

If he’s Mahathir’s golden boy, what’s the status of Mahathir’s perceived authority in Proton now?

I discovered Michael Moorcock about 6 or 7 years ago when, in desperation for anything fresh in the fantasy genre, I picked up what was described as an ‘omnibus’ featuring an effete-looking skinny white dude with the title ‘Elric of Melnibone’ emblazoned in orange-gold lettering just above that decidedly anorexic face.

I was looking for something fresh and I stumbled upon something that was written in the ’60s. Yay, me.

I read and read and read, and couldn’t stop myself reading; the next week, I rushed back to the old MPH in Holiday Plaza and bought the rest of the ‘omnibuses’ on display: one about Hawkmoon (super!) and another about Corum (my fave) in that whole Eternal Champion cycle.

Since then, I pretty much moved away from reading fantasy and started down other paths, which was all well and good, but I never lost the itch for a rousing, good yarn with assorted beasties and technicolor magical effects (heh). So last Friday, my colleague and I took a (long-ish) detour while our bosses were away and found ourselves in this tiny little second-hand bookshop tucked away in a dilapidated, terraced row of shop-houses somewhere along the road from Senai to Johor Bahru town.

We called the shop “Shakespeare” as a convenient shorthand for “Shaik Peer Bombay Bookstore” (the owner suggested it!). The place was no bigger than 20′ x 40′, but we were immediately assailed by decades of accumulated dust thick on the books and shelves.

The books on display looked older than my grandfather, which in turn seemed to be confirmed by our hosts, an Indian Muslim man and his wife, who looked as old as dirt itself. But he had all the charm of my dearly departed grand-dad, and so we got along well, though I was more interested in ploughing through his books.

And boy did I find some gems! Buried deep in a pile of Barbara Cartland-ish pulp romances, I found Michael Moorcock’s Masters of the Pit! Which isn’t saying much since, at the time, I didn’t know just exactly what I had in hand. I had the vague notion that it was a hard-to-find book (if not out-of-print; it definitely looked old enough!), but being a Moorcock it had to be good, lah. I didn’t know or care, I was like a puppy with a freshly-mangled bone :p.

Later that night, I got down to reading ‘Masters of the Pit’, and found it wasn’t all that bad. It’s told in the first person, and written in short, even terse, paragraphs and sentences. Much of it is narrative with bits of dialogue interspersed here and there; it felt less like a book and more like a rehearsal of a plot outline. It definitely lacked the polish of some of the later Elric stories I’ve read, and plot lines quite literally disappeared or were artificially resolved prematurely in some places.

But damn, was it funny! There was one particular part in the book when the main protagonist, Michael Kane, has this sort of interior monologue about society and such:

“Fear,” she said

I nodded, wondering if that deep emotion was not the essential cause of most ills (wah, very like the stuff in the movie ‘Equilibrium’ – ed.). Were not all political systems, all arts, all human actions channelled towards creating that one valuable sense of security we all, in our own ways, sought – an absence of fear? It was fear that produced madness, fear that produced war. Fear, indeed, that often produced the things we feared most. Was this why the fearless man was lauded – because he did not represent a threat to others? Perhaps, though there were many kinds of fearless people, and a total fearlessness produced a whole man, a man who had no need to display his fearlessness. The true hero, in fact – the often unsung hero.

Ok, I must admit, not only did I laugh, I was reminded of that short cartoon in Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine”. I don’t know why.

Imagine a Michael Kane in a ’60s retro-futuristic costume on the set of a faux Mars, intoning the above with dead seriousness (cue cheesy violin set pieces)… you get the idea .

Time to start digging into the other books I found!

I was struck by Brendan Pereira’s article on Sunday about perceptions and reality, and can’t seem to get my head around what he meant by that article.

Globalization’s a word much bandied-about these days, representing, in turns, salvation or doom for countries. There have been detractors, and there have been others who ardently support it. A few years ago, friends of mine reflected how ‘Globalization’, like ‘terrorism’ today, has been co-opted to mean many things, and in that vacuity of precision, it has come to mean very little at all. Close to its heart, I figure, are probably things like the free communication of ideas, the mobility of labour and ideas of an open, ‘globalized’ market.

Take mobility of labour and capital for instances of globalization at our doorstep. Garment manufacturers in Batu Pahat and Johor Bahru now have widespread operations in China and Cambodia. Whilst handling one of their jobs, I caught the Finance Manager of this company commenting on the need to move. Cheaper markets, he said, and cheaper labour. We obviously can compete here any more.

That same manager entertained thoughts of returning to the UK for work. I think that’s even more worrying.

Skip several steps ahead, and the thing that’s been bothering me becomes this: wherefore nationalism if globalization demands and encourages this very sort of mobility? Is nationalism feasible in such a scenario? I believe Singapore’s been trying to deal with this for some years, where the debate still rages on how to maintain an effective labour force in the light of a ‘brain drain’ of talent plying their skills beyond Singapore’s shores.

And it doesn’t help that there is a underlying perception amongst non-Bumis that this country in which has become and is becoming less and less hospitable to live and work in.

I’ve been thinking about this because Mr Pereira mentions this:

“Here is the reality. Malaysians are not competing against each other. The day we adopt such a myopic view will be the day Malaysia will become a backwater for investments and economic development.

The day we adopt that myopic view is the day we will abdicate our position as among the top 15 destinations for foreign direct investments or be ranked among the top 18 exporting nations in the world.

Meritocracy is based on the concept of survival of the fittest. In the context of a globalised economy like Malaysia’s, this is a contest between Malaysia and the fast developing economies of its neighbours.

It is not a contest between Malays and non-Malays or a contest between those in rural communities or urban centres. This is the reality.”

He has a telling point; we should band together as one and leave petty ethnic divisions aside to, presumably, fight for a viable nation-state that can stand tall amongst others. That’s the context within which his article operates. But it’s pretty idealized, even more so after the pronouncements coming out of the UMNO General Assembly.

Here’s another reality check: there are some sectors of the population who do in fact feel that they are being side lined. It’s a plain and simple fact. More to the point, there are those who do believe that the sort of chauvinism that engenders this sort of side lining is necessary for the betterment of other sectors of the population.

So, what does one say to the non-Bumi student who, having been side lined, decides to study medicine overseas, and then refuses to return?

“Malaysians for Malaysia”? Some are already giving pointed opinions about the latter by voting with their feet.

I am confused: if Mahathir was aware that there was corruption of the sort of levels revealed by the reason AP debacle, does it make him anymore blameless now that he’s exposed them?

Questions of that aside, the burning issues still on the minds of many at the Autoworld Forums is how the APs awarded to the main recipients have been used. Paultan.org notes that there has been a discrepency of conditions required for the receipt of APs. Weststar purports to own several service centres and showrooms with which cars imported are sold. Among the cars purported to be sold are Honda and Chevrolet cars. A recent discussion on this in the Autoworld forums can be found here, and a pertinent question that Paul Tan has noted is this: aren’t Honda cars distributed and sold by Honda Malaysia Sdn Bhd? And aren’t Chevrolet cars distributed by Hicomobil?

When I first saw this in the Autoworld forums, I was incensed. I thought the money was only really being made by those who could secure Open APs, a recipient of which could import cars of any model or make, kinda like an ‘open license’. Franchise AP holders are supposed to have in place the necessary infrastructure for distribution within Malaysia; it makes me wonder just how many of those 100s of distribution centres claimed by Weststar are nothing more than shell companies.

***

You know, when faced with situations that are seemingly hopeless, laughter becomes the only possible response. I wonder just how many people are incredulous with the recent revelations running up to the UMNO General Assembly. I wonder, too, just how many non-Bumiputras listened or read with horror the pronouncements coming out from various parties. Seeing Hishammudin brandishing the kris splayed across the front page of one of the dailies gave me the shivers, and the subsequent announcement by Badawi that UMNO had never, to paraphrase, deprived non-Bumiputras of their rights gave me the chuckles for a brief moment.

Badawi’s conclusion becomes only superficially true because, yes, non-Bumis have rights just like everyone else does, prescribed by the Constitution. But what do “special rights” represent? Special rights seem to be rights normatively prescribed for one class of people in Malaysia. The positive and concealed fact affirmed by his pronouncement, however, remains that there are some people who deserve more than others.