It was like war.

Two days under the radar. One day in insertion, and the next whipped past like a bad backlash. I smelled. Sweat, heat and desperation. The jungle was pungent with the alien and the green. Two days under rain and more rain. I smelled the rain, and the ozone of lightning-activated air.

Thinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking.

And it almost had that kind of drama. He wished me well, and I smiled. Our cars were parked outside. We waited, fidgetting with our pens. I considered the ways they could fuck us over. The first day was an open question. The second was a closed case.


I got an sms alert yesterday from Maxis/Star at about 8.30 am, . Datin Endon had passed away at about 7.55 am. I was startled, and my thoughts were with PM Badawi for a brief moment before focusing on the battles I had that day.

I came back and loaded up PPS and saw, as I expected, many tributes. Condolences. I entertained a thought that made me feel slightly callous. I wondered why so many wrote heartfelt entries. I asked myself if they knew Datin Endon personally, if they shared their life with her. Who was the sympathy for? PM Badawi?

I come up with a blank. But then I start thinking in general terms. There was Princess Diana. There was the Pope John Paul II. There was Canny Ong. And now, there is Datin Endon. And I thought about all the heartfelt entries. And the word “mourning” popped up. “Mourning”?

No, public mourning. Do a google search. I found an entry, a definition for public mourning at MedicineNet.com over here. A better read will be this one. Someone buy it for me? Ha! The booklet’s Conspicuous Compassion.

West says there is often a grisly competition to see who can display their grief most vividly. He notes that the traditional minute’s silence is now becoming ‘two minutes, even three and occasionally 10′. ‘They are getting longer and we are having more of them, because we want to be seen to care.’ He notes that where there was one minute’s silence across much of America in 1912 for those who died on the Titanic, EU countries observed three minutes’ silence for the victims of 9/11 in 2001, while friends of the murdered British schoolgirl Milly Dowler gathered for a five-minute silence in her memory in 2002. ‘Does this mean the 9/11 disaster was three times as bad as the Titanic disaster’, he asks, ‘or that the horrible death of an innocent girl was five times as tragic?’.

For West, such public displays of grief do not show that we have become more altruistic, but more selfish. The deaths of celebrities and strangers ’serve as an opportunity to (in)articulate our own unhappiness, and, by doing so in public, to form new social ties to replace those that have disappeared’. At a time when ‘binding institutions such as the Church, marriage, the family and the nation have withered’, says West, we seek new outlets for public connection.

An interesting excerpt I think. Note, the above is just a general observation with nothing pertaining to Datin Endon herself, or PM Badawi. Brendan O’Neill’s conclusion in his article also bears mention:

In many ways, the rise of the politics of emotion is a response to the demise of the old politics. The exhaustion of traditional movements of both left and right, and the loss of authority experienced by established political institutions, has given rise to a lot of soul-searching among leaders about how they can ‘connect’ with a new constituency - and often, they seem able to do this only in response to terrible tragedies or senseless deaths. As West asks: ‘[W]hat kind of society requires the horrific deaths of children to bond together?’

It probably doesn’t apply here, mostly because I don’t think most Malaysians are even aware of leftist or rightist political views or even subscribe to them. But I suppose the point of his conclusion is most important: while we do not have the kind of liberal politics practiced in western countries, it wouldn’t be off to say that the public in general here is rather weary of the efficacy of the political process. A generalization of course and worse, anecdotal. What are we really connecting with? All of us remember the Canny Ong incident, and it’s just the sort of incident West talks about. Our horror at how she died. Our loathing.

What’s really happening?