General election: Here they go again, folks

 

It’s let us choose a new prime minister… time again.

Since the last general election four-and-a-half years ago, we’ve had three prime ministers, none of whom won favour with the large segments of society.

The declining years for the length of their tenure clearly indicate a fractured instability of the besieged position.

The first, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, with his ways known only to him, was around for one year and 291 days. Muhyiddin Yassin hopped into the hot seat, and then hoppers left him with the dubious distinction of the shortest serving prime minister – one year and 169 days.

A painful lesson in timing for him – Muhyiddin barely warmed the seat before a virus started decimating populations and economies. The unsympathetic evoked alien concepts of karma and schadenfreude.

Phew, he was rescued from ignominy by Ismail Sabri Yaakob who registered one year and 51 days at the helm. Ismail Sabri’s usual hang-dog, glum look suits the scuttled what-might-have-been scenario – 119 days to beat Muhyiddin, if only he could have held out for the general election in March, after Chinese New Year, after the rains and high water.

I should qualify my opening line about us choosing a new prime minister.

The people don’t choose a new prime minister, or retain an old one, when they cast their votes. The prime minister has been decided by a party’s elite before the election, after any internal squabbling for supremacy has been squashed.

So if people have no say in the government they want or get lumbered with, why bother to vote? Well, not voting means you accept whatever is handed out by whomever for the next four to five years, wallowing in your grumbling complaints, feeling superior in your sulking. Alienated in your country. Becoming a grouch. Pathetic.

One vote in millions may not amount to anything, one vote in a constituency may not amount to anything but it is a voice, pip-squeak though it may be, your voice for more of the same old crap, same old faces, or for change.

Okay, some same old faces in those advocating change too but there are the imponderable young who will be casting their first “X” about the future they would like to have.

Streak of rebellion

I cannot predict how many of the newly empowered young will vote or for which party they will vote. I can only trust that in every generation of the young there is a streak of rebellion, a vein of don’t-talk-down-to-us, don’t cramp our style defiance.

A spirit of hanging out, letting loose like those kids dancing to live music in Kedah recently, which led to religious guardians harrumphing about questionable behaviour leading to immorality, the usual religious stuff.

Or the passionate commitment that moved university students in 1974 to brave the tear gas, truncheons and kanda sticks of the FRU and police for about a week before succumbing to an invasion of superior forces.

The prediction attributed to King Louis XV of France before he lost his head to the revolution – “Apres moi, le deluge” – seems oddly appropriate.

Firstly, and obviously, it’s a reference to the looming dark clouds of the monsoon and the potential flooding. BN is chanting a comforting mantra, the monsoon will arrive in the middle of November, so any day before that will be fine and dry, and the opposition is led by wimps and ninnies for fearing to get wet.

Here are two possible scenarios deriving from the weather on the day of the polling day, or days before. If there is flooding, where will the displaced people be placed? In schools that have been set up as polling stations? That’s just one of the myriad problems that will surface if sodden clouds dump their wet load on us.

BN will be swamped with a tsunami of vituperation. I would advise not launching a flotilla of rescue boats bearing BN candidates handing out bags of goodies with their faces, names and party logos on them. That would be rubbing it in.

For all that, BN will survive relatively unscathed. They have long experience of not listening to or ignoring what anyone else outside their coterie and cohort had to say.

If it is fine on the day of the election, I will have to ignore news portals for at least a couple of days to avoid puerile, juvenile jabs from BN taunting the opposition about being scaredy-cats.

Selective paranoia

King Louis’ warning about what would come after his removal was, of course, also triggered by Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi’s viral message of the dire aftermath should BN lose the election.

His naming the leaders of the BN coalition had his detractors swiftly hearing the rattling of skeletal bones as the door to the BN cupboard is opened. Ah, an insight into a rogue’s gallery.

They got it wrong, Zahid says. The message was of vindictive persecution - selective prosecution should the opposition come to power.

I see where Zahid is coming from about selective prosecution. When former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak was convicted, Zahid said the judgment would have Commonwealth jurists aghast and bemused.

A few weeks ago, Zahid was acquitted of a few of the many charges he faced. He was happy that a court of law had acquitted him when the court of public opinion had “convicted” him long ago.

Hang on, what happened to selective prosecution on that occasion? How come the system didn’t get him nailed?

I hate to piddle on the happy parade but a court freeing a defendant of charges just invites an appeal from the prosecution, so this ain’t over.

By the way, it’s the jurors in the court of public opinion who will be voting. You know lah Malaysians, mustn’t lose face, so how many of them will admit they were wrong about you?

Now Zahid is feeling threatened again by selective prosecution.

Whoa, it is beginning to sound like selective paranoia.

I am not qualified to be a shrink but I read a lot of psychology/psychiatry texts as background for my Master’s thesis on poetry and suicide.

The smartest thing I learned about paranoia was not from those texts, but from Joseph Heller’s satirical novel “Catch 22” – “just because you are paranoid does not mean you have no enemies”. - Mkini

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THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.