Life gearing down to a dawdle

If a film was to be made on life under a lockdown, there should be a lot of slow-motion sequences as daily routines gear down to a dawdle (except for food deliverers zipping down car-less roads).

Life may be largely in suspension, but this being Malaysia, we can still expect an almost daily spectacle of some 'Very Idiotic Person' or 'Yang Bodoh' in intimate proximity with fawning minions. It’s glaringly obvious our gene pool is long overdue for draining and cleansing, becoming a health hazard but management is blithely hopeless.

Biasa lah (as usual), after weeks of confinement it is excusable if one’s sense of outrage at idiocies or injustices is sluggish, replaced by resigned acceptance.

Even Tourism, Arts and Culture Minister Nancy Shukri waffling nonsense about the arts industry barely warmed my vitriol. This from someone who has invested over five decades in the arts.

That five decades of immersion in the arts is also the defence for my lack of volcanic passion – in that time I had many occasions dealing with mentally challenged public servants for whom order and logic are alien concepts. Biasa lah (cue music, Jethro Tull's "Thick as a brick").

Where do I begin? The fact that she condescended to note that the arts are a “complementing” element? Wow, what a compliment.

The arts industry will be the fastest to recover post-Covid? Leaving aside the lack of any substantiation for that assertion, what about the toll on those now while under lockdown – film crew, dancers, musicians dependent on gigs and productions for income, and productions and shows suspended?

Nancy (photo) said they had been engaged and “it is easy for them to plan things and we are always responsive towards them”.

I am not sure what easy to make plans mean unless she is implying that the lockdown gives us many unemployed hours to plan. As for her ministry being responsive, my mind threw up an image of a touch-me-not plant.

Online singing contest

As for her laudatory example of the success of an online singing competition – hey aunty, fault me for being elitist, but get your terms right – singing is entertainment unless you are singing a full-throated aria; the arts is theatre and film, paintings and photography, music and dance.

Musicians, just be patient, poor and plan. Once the tourist industry picks up again, you will have hotel gigs. That is the bright prospect proffered by the “arts-tificial” minister.

It’s obvious where this minister is coming from. Sell tourists in hotels the fantasy that everyday young pretty girls, in colourful costumes, in kampungs all over the land, spontaneously burst into song and dance, waving and weaving gracefully (but non-sensually because we are a Muslim nation) with lit candles or umbrellas, while young men are klinking and plonking and thudding on the gamelan. Invite a couple of the tourists on stage to pick up the sway of joget.

It is futile trotting out platitudes about the arts being an expressive part of the soul of a nation and a mark of a mature civilisation. Mammon rules, money talks, and the government will always only pay lip-service to the arts.

The government will cite the millions that have been invested in the arts industry, and the arts community will talk of interference and wastage, devious patronage and pervasive corruption. The Chinese have earthy idioms for this kind of unproductive relationship - a chicken talking with a duck or one talking about the North, while the other talks about the South.

One-day meeting

The edge has been taken away from much of our lives in the lockdown, but there will probably be a spurt of high emotions when parliament meets for a day, no questions asked.

The members of Parliament will gather to establish the legitimacy of the government as required by the constitution, thank you very much, now the government must focus on fighting the deadly virus, please don’t distract it with politics (definition - any issue raised by the opposition).

I am looking forward to watching the prime minister address the House with a straight face, claiming a slim majority, with toadying allies whose support is provisional, representing a coochie-rat party, made more coochie because some members of his party are sitting in the opposition bench. What a menagerie. Only in Malaysia can we get such entertaining political drama.

But I don’t expect people to get worked up about the government’s avoidance of parliamentary oversight for too long. It will swiftly become just another story in the dozens that people trawl from the global net to distract from the tedium of the day.

For a real visceral accounting, we will have to wait a couple of years till the next elections.

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THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist. - Mkini