Conviction of Rafizi makes cow sense

I am losing it – my mind.

It can’t seem to focus on the weighty implications of the conviction of PKR vice-president Rafizi Ramli and former bank clerk Johari Mohamad for whistling a tune of shady deeds without it shooting off at odd trivial tangents.

Like it throwing up, in apropos, as a first response, a common childhood insult from over half a century ago – “You got cow sense,” and its synonym, “dungu.”

The folks and stall-keepers I chatted with during lunch in a coffee-shop in Old Town PJ the past couple of days, may not have used this particular term, but that was the unanimous response – Where got meaning? The people exposing dubious deals ‘kena’, but those who bought luxury kandangs (cattle-pens) in Bangsar are still free-range grazers and not penned.

(NB: My unscientific poll only took in the opinions of a couple of dozen Chinese and Indians. Since whichever-God knows when, Malays are extinct in Chinese coffee-shops, except for isolated pockets in the country. Not even for a cup of kopi 'o' and slices of toast with butter and kaya. They haven’t missed much with the latter. Now it’s slices of white soft-board with a thin smear of margarine and kaya.)

They didn’t care that Rafizi didn’t submit the information to the authorities for investigation before whistling it to the public. The cynical lot laughed at the suggestion of official bloodhounds following the trail; their verbal abbreviation: NFA (no further action).

Is it NFA on NFC? Nobody could remember. Understandable, because there have been so many bigger “fake news” since – 1MDB for the longest time, in recent months, Felda, Felda, Felda. How to keep track?

Umno Wanita chief Shahrizat Abdul Jalil (photo), plaintively claimed the mantle of victim, noting that she had suffered public opprobrium before she had a chance to answer the charges.

My failing memory prompts: what’s the answer? Where are the millions, the cows?

Then my crazy mind jumps from Shahrizat to a couple of lines of Shakespeare’s “Othello” that I didn’t even know I remembered – "That we can call these delicate creatures ours/And not their appetites."

That led me to ruminate on the cow’s four stomachs. One of them breaks down the tough fibres of the feed. The other three are basically storage bins.

So a cow always eats more than it needs. Actually, it doesn’t eat immediately. It stuffs itself full; later, at leisure, it regurgitates a small part of it, and slowly chews the cud, breaking down the tough greens into small pieces, before sending them down for a final acid bath.

Don’t know why I thought of this unless it’s a random thought of dozens of luxury watches, handbags and cars, jewellery by the glittery fistfuls, and stacks of money worth millions, ready-at-hand for daily household expenses, unearthed in houses.

Ah, the lifestyle of the rich and the infamous.

Rafizi’s entanglement in the legal system is far from over. He’s in a not-so-select group of politicians and NGOs who have been and will be at the courts so many times, they should get reserved parking within the complex compound.

Party or candidate

Does it matter if a politician can’t stand in an election? Do people vote for parties and policies and promises, or for telegenic candidates or scions of political “nobility”?

My memory jogs to the elections of 1986 and Pak Samad telling me to cover two MCA-DAP and one Gerakan-DAP contest in the Klang Valley, constituencies that had stubbornly refused to see the light and were DAP safe seats.

He said the leash and muzzle were off. Just write what I saw, heard, and conclude with an assessment of who was likely to win, don’t worry that the king might be angry with a messenger of bad tidings.

Rafizi’s plight prompted my memory of the Cheras fight and its answer to the question of whether party or person was more important to the voters in a literal sense, sort of.

The DAP candidate couldn’t campaign because he was a guest of the authorities for inciting Cheras residents to be disrespectful to the first monument to the rich heritage Samy Vellu left this country: toll-booths.

How can? Now go to work, come back at night must pay toll ah?

Did it count that the DAP candidate was not to be seen on the campaign trail? Nope. Were the Cheras residents cowed? Nope. (Trivia: after the elections, the defeated MCA candidate also spent some time looking at the sky through bars, something to do with missing co-op funds.)

My other two assignments were Kepong and the Brickfields/Old Klang Road hub. They were some of the last neighbourhoods in the capital city in the late 80s which illustrated the guiding political principle of governance at that time – you vote for the opposition, you will be governed by neglect.

So they lived with potholes that grow bigger, swatches of pustulent squatter settlements dependent on standpipes and illegal tapping of water, electrical equipment that will test the decades-longevity of British workmanship till it sparks a fire, flooding and heaps of garbage.

I spent a day with the Gerakan candidate for Kepong and his wife, a young couple in their early 30s. Nice, simple folks. The first half of the morning, with a couple of helpers, they went around the area plastering posters and hanging banners where already there was a profusion of both. The DAP rocket barely numbered a couple dozen in sight.

At the Semenyih market, I saw what years of divisive racial politics and politics had done to the Chinese. When he went round shaking hands, there were a few who turned their backs and ignored his proffered hand.

He didn’t deserve such rudeness. A sacrificial lamb told to go into a wolf’s lair, a necessary blooding for all political novices. Nice fella. He lost.

The MCA candidate for Brickfields was suited, suave, literate, analytical, personable. He gave me tea and a good interview.

The DAP candidate’s movements were a mystery even to party HQ for a while, and the schedule that I finally got didn’t say anything about him not showing up where it’s stated.

I finally caught up with him speaking at a rally. After a couple of minutes of listening to this man, who was only conversant in Chinese dialect, and his chauvinistic, racist views, I knew I didn’t want an interview.

DAP didn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel for this man. They had to wade into a swamp to find a creature barely evolved from a mud-skipper. (Trivia: he lasted one term.)

Final in apropos thought, two quotes, Samuel Johnson’s, “Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people (referring to sceptics) no more milk,” and American poet Richard Wilbur’s, “We milk the cow of the world and as we do/We whisper in her ear, ‘You are not true.’” 

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THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist.  -Mkini