Demeaning epithets will devalue our polity

 

PAS election director Muhammad Sanusi Md Nor has a talent for getting under your skin.

His "apek seluar pendek" (Chinese man clad in shorts) is a particularly disparaging epithet.

Its phonetics ensures it drips off the tongue readily, its concision hides its odium, and its ambivalence between joke and insult leaves you momentarily confused.

You want to laugh until you realise it’s a slur that dehumanises the target, demeans the person who laughs and suggests that the narrator is an ogre.

When realising how vile it is, you’d start to regret laughing and begin to feel like the jokester belongs in a zoo.

Invective has its place in political contestation, especially when there is an election on the cards, but there is no place for epithets that singe, such as "apek seluar pendek".

According to Sanusi, if unchecked, DAP youth leader Howard Lee’s use of a Quranic verse to reinforce his arguments in the course of a campaign speech during the Pelangai polls would set off a trend of "apek seluar pendek" holding forth on the Koran.

This, in fact, was a classic case of racist-cum-religious baiting.

It took the good sense of DAP secretary-general Anthony Loke to ask if Sanusi could point to one instance of a DAP leader having delivered a Friday sermon (khutbah) in Penang in the now-15 years the party has ruled the state.

There has not been an instance, so there is no cause for Sanusi to raise the possibility of something like that happening in the future in the wake of Howard Lee’s caper.

It’s in the nature of hate-fomenting epithets to distort history and blur the context of situations where these slurs are employed.

Loke’s challenge to Sanusi to cite an instance of DAP usurpation of the role of khutbah delivery in the long years of the party’s domination of Penang politics is certain to go unanswered, would it then invite contrition from the fomenter?

Banish the thought that it would.

Muhammad Sanusi Md Nor and Anthony Loke

Race-cum-religious baiters are usually unrepentant and self-driven agents of division and discord.

It has taken the campaigning for a by-election to expose the emptiness of Sanusi’s race and religion-baiting rhetoric.

Sanusi has become a highly popular campaigner due to his ability to use accents on the streets to draw people to his rhetoric.

This is unlike Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim who used to be able to render highly flown philosophical speculation in the vernacular of the streets, in the days when he campaigned as the resident opposition leader.

Anwar these days seems to have lost that ability. Is it that things are different when the view is from the prime ministerial office, not from the standpoint of the putative opposition leader?

It is as if, just as nature abhors a vacuum, politics too detests it, such that Sanusi’s popularity as a tub-thumper has come to imitate Anwar’s crowd-pulling power but with a changed rhetorical currency of race and religion.

It is one of the strengths of democratic contestation that its exponents must come up with ideas to push back opponents.

Loke has come up with the simple expedient of asking Sanusi to cite facts to support his fear-stirring antics, one that uses base epithets to play on people’s fears.

In the end, the presentation of more persuasive arguments is the lifeblood of democratic contestation.

Would the outcome of the Pelangai by-election be a waystation on the road to a higher civility in campaign rhetoric?

One certainly hopes so because the polity should not take more of the "apek seluar pendek" stuff that is so demeaning. - Mkini

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TERENCE NETTO is a journalist with half a century’s experience.

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