Month: July 2023

SEX AND THE CITY

You know that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct. – Novelist Somerset Maugham 

Malaysian social commentator Sheraad Kuttan accurately described the gulf between the two countries yesterday.

“Singaporeans are funny,” he began in a tweet. “Concerned that their politicians are screwing each other. Over this side of the Causeway, we are more concerned that they are screwing us.”

Mr Kuttan’s actual language was a lot more explicit but I’m sure you’ve got the drift. 

In two separate, but distinct, extramarital affairs that might have otherwise elicited an approving oui from the French, the city state was recently “rocked by rare political scandals” – the breathless prose is courtesy of Bloomberg.

On Monday, the Speaker of the city’s Parliament Tan Chuan-jin, 54, and fellow lawmaker Cheng Li Hui, 47, resigned from the party and the legislature after Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong revealed that  they were engaged in an “inappropriate relationship.” Mr Tan is married, while Ms Cheng is single.

Mr Tan, once tipped as a potential premier, is no stranger to controversy. Earlier in the month, he was forced to apologise to opposition parliamentarian Jamus Lim for  “unparliamentary” language. 

In a speech in the House, Professor Lim had been arguing for more help for the island’s poor when the Speaker muttered “####ing populist” under his breath. Unfortunately, it was picked up by his microphone, a reality that the island’s netizens wasted no time in sharing over social media. Mr Tan apologised after the matter was brought to his attention, explaining that they  “were my private thoughts and muttered to myself and not meant for   anyone.” He added that Professor Lim had accepted his apology.

As if that wasn’t enough, two opposition  Members of Parliament  were also forced to quit after a video emerged showing the couple holding hands. 

Lest anyone conclude that the moral high ground was only reserved for the ruling People’s Action Party, the head of the opposition Workers’ Party, Pritam Singh called a press conference on Wednesday to announce that opposition MP’s Leon Perera, 53, and Nicole Seah, 36, were resigning after their “inappropriate behaviour” had come to light. Both MPs are married to other people.

The puritanical streak in modern-day Singapore might have astounded  Malaysia’s first premier Tunku Abdul Rahman. Asked once if he was ever worried when Indonesia “confronted” Malaysia over the latter’s creation, the Tunku replied cheerfully; “Not at all. All through the period (1963-65), my people were drinking, womanising and having fun. They weren’t worried so why should I?” 

But that was a long time ago. 

Singapore disapproved of such tolerance because they knew that even a little Leeway would be stretched irresponsibly. It was why its tax system was near-foolproof because they knew a simple truth, that if a taxpayer thinks he can  cheat safely, he will. Having begun on that premise, it was logical to then close off all loopholes. 

Despite the press conferences and the public hand-wringing, infidelity was relatively rare in Singapore for one reason: most of the island’s husbands were very, very fond of their homes. 

The French were astonished by the Singaporean prejudice. They were Catholics and  despaired of the Commandment but took comfort in the knowledge that no Frenchman had dreamed that one up. 

They knew that the novelist Henry Miller was right when he wrote; “Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.” 

ENDS

HOW TERRIBLY STRANGE TO BE SEVENTY 

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. – Poet Ogden Nash 

You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, but you grow old when you stop laughing. –  Playwright George Bernard Shaw

Dr Mahathir Mohamad turned 98 earlier this week.  

Now that he’s the oldest he’s ever been, the waiters in kopi tiam restaurants finally feel emboldened to follow George Burns’ instructions: “Even if he wants a three-minute egg, ask for the money up-front.” 

I only mention this because I read today that TENA, supported by the government, has just released the Malaysia Ageing Report, which cheerfully concludes that “active ageing” is the answer to life’s problems. On a more sinister note, TENA is the world’s leader in incontinence care. Now incontinence itself is, well, never mind, think diapers. 

I’m not trying to be the Grinch at Christmas or anything, but all this rhapsodising about “active” aging or getting older “gracefully” is a load of codswallop. There is nothing graceful about dribbling, liver spots, loose skin, or senility. The winners in the great game of existence are almost always predicated on a throw of the genetic dice. 

You can improve your quality of life by exercise, diet, and moderation but you cannot increase your lifespan significantly beyond what your genes have already predetermined.  

As Frank Sinatra sang, “that’s life.” 

That’s luck as well.  Germany’s most famous fitness instructor Jo Lindner who reportedly had more muscles in his ears than Arnold, died recently of a brain aneurysm. He was 30. 

Now we begin to understand what they mean when they say, “if your time isn’t up, not even your doctors can kill you.” 

I’m beginning to suspect that a great many quotes, sayings, and proverbs about getting old have been deliberately crafted to make us feel better about ageing, to shield us from Its Greatest Truth: it sucks!

Take the one about age bringing with it, maturity, contentment, and a Zen-like wisdom.   

You think? 

I mean, seriously?

Just consider Donald Trump, now closing in on 80. The following are actual statements uttered by the 45thPresident of the United States.

“Sorry, losers and haters, my IQ is one of the highest and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.”

“You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media writes as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.”

And finally… 

“It’s freezing and snowing in New York – we need global warming!”

Then there’s Boris Johnson, who’s closing in on 60, but isn’t averse to lying through his teeth. Pinocchio  might want to take lessons.

Do any of these sound like a repository of maturity and benign  wisdom accumulated over the years?  

What’s the moral of the story? 

There isn’t any except, maybe, we should neither warble about its joys nor bellyache about its downside. It just is because no one has discovered a way of getting around it

Here’s the bottom line,  according to George Burns: by the time you’re 80, you’ve learnt everything. 

The trick is to remember it. 

ENDS

HONESTY IS SUCH A LONELY WORD

The lack of money is the root of all evil – Playwright George Bernard Shaw

I couldn’t believe my eyes. 

I was going through a list of infamous sayings – I like looking up weird stuff – when this onejust popped up.

“There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am.” It was the citation that piqued my interest. 

It read: American cretin and 45th US President, Donald J Trump. 

A cretin, if you didn’t already know, is a seriously stupid person and is generally used as a term of abuse. If that’s how he’s being remembered these days, there’s hope for us all. 

But the Donald was that rare breed of politician, the completely obnoxious one, the serial liar who hits all our “dislike” buttons with such a shiver of annoyance that we question, yet again, the mental state of his many admirers. And, make no mistake, their numbers are legion. 

Maybe it’s just part of the human condition, a need to believe in, and hope for, a better tomorrow.  

Because we are no better. After all, we righteously imprison our petty criminals and simultaneously elect the biggest thieves to high office.

Alas, we continue to do so: a recent anti-corruption survey showed that a great many corruption cases involved politicians. 

In fact, the link is a time honoured one. It was the writer and essayist H L Mencken who observed early in the 20th century that the honest politician was “an impossibility.” 

In the English language, the “honest politician” is usually referred to as an oxymoron, or a figure of speech whereby two words reside in apparent contradiction to one another. 

An example would be a “civil war.” Even President Zelensky would be the first to concede that wars are never mannerly, courteous, or polite. Indeed, they are usually nasty, brutish, and exceedingly violent. 

A more placid example of said oxymoron would be “jumbo shrimp” for patently obvious reasons. 

The indefatigable Mencken went further, however, and even attempted to define the breed. To his mind, the truly “honest politician” was one, who once he was bought, “would stay bought.”

The ample architect of artifice, that Mastodon of Malaysian Malfeasance known as Jho Low aka Felonious, had, like Mencken, also believed in getting the best protection money could buy.

To this end, he’d disbursed his not inconsiderable fortune towards insulating himself from any, and all, consequences.

But it is always the unintended consequence that will get you. In Felonious’ case, it was the portentously ancient Chinese curse that returned to haunt him: May you come to the attention of the authorities. 

And he did, no thanks to the reporter Tom Wright whose global campaign to find Felonious had even sounded alarm bells in China: It wasn’t quite seemly to publicly disdain corruption while protecting one of the world’s biggest thieves now, was it?

Then the politicians he’d thought were “bought” had ended up in jail. 

But he remained confident that there was nothing money could not buy so he resolved not to worry. 

Like George Best, he’d spent a lot on booze, birds and fast cars while squandering the rest.

And there was a lot more where that came from. Possession was nine-tenths of the law, and he possessed a lot.

We just had no idea. 

ENDS

OLDER BUT NO WISER

I can’t tell you his age but when he was born, the wonder drugs were leeches – Comedian Milton Berle (paraphrased)

What’s a bigot?

It’s a person who has an obstinate, or unreasonable belief, or prejudice against people on the basis of their membership in a particular group.

By that definition, the grand, old man of Malaysian politics, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, is an unrepentant bigot. 

Except he isn’t grand anymore. He’s just old. At 97, the man remains as great as he never was but he tries to stay relevant: his last birthday cake resembled a Canadian wildfire. 

He’s a selective bigot, however. He dislikes Jews on principle but claims  “good  friends” among them including, of all people,  Henry Kissinger – the one who once ordered no part of Indo-China to remain un-bombed.  

Granted there’s no accounting for taste but the man’s deep seated convictions    about nationalism, Singapore or Malaysia’s non-Malays, remain, at best, jaundiced. 

In the late 70s, for example, he learned that Premier Hussein Onn was planning to move against Harun Idris, chief minister of Selangor and populist politician, for corruption. Dr M, then deputy premier, led a troika of party faithful to plead Harun’s case. 

Their appeal was that Harun was “a nationalist” which to Dr M probably  meant he was a staunch “Malay-first” patriot.

Hussein dismissed them replying “So am I.” Suffice to say that corruption wasn’t a problem during his tenure. 

To Dr M, Singapore was always abhorrent. If Lee Kuan Yew had his way in the 1960s, he has intimated darkly, it would have been a “Malaysian Malaysia,” multiracialism, meritocracy and, quite possibly, Armageddon-as-he-knew-it.  

Never mind that Goh Keng Swee, later Singapore’s finance minister, had  conceded that affirmative action on a grand scale for the Malays had to be implemented to make Malaysia work. 

Never mind that  the experiment that was  Singapore worked so spectacularly, or that Lee Kuan Yew became a global metaphor for an against-all-odds nation builder. Finally,  never mind that Malaysia’s founding fathers always considered affirmative action to have a finite shelf life. 

Not for Dr M. His insistence that affirmative action for the Malays be continued forever, coupled to his longevity in power all but enshrined the policy in stone, never to be questioned on pain of treason. 

And yet, it’s legitimately unleashed a Pandora’s Box of waste, pilferage and corruption. Ironically, it’s  accepted as part of the “price” of development. 

Despite all that, Singapore continues to haunt the old man, primarily  as an object lesson to Malaysia’s Malays, the one about being careful about what you wish for. 

But the island’s hard currency allows its Malay citizens to travel or to stay in Malaysian hotels that many locals can only imagine. And let’s not forget the enduring  ambition of many locals to work in the republic. 

In a reaction directly linked to Anwar Ibrahim’s rise to power, the man remains haunted by  multi-racialism. Last Wednesday, he told reporters that there were attempts to change, or rename,  Tanah Melayu  (Land of the Malays) to a multiracial country presumably,  the much-dreaded “Malaysian Malaysia.”  

Moreover, these people – from “foreign countries,” no less – refused to accept that the Malays were “the founders, locals and builders” of this country. 

The same Dr M once told a group of non-Malays, me included, that Malaysia was a multi-ethnic and multicultural society so everybody had to “tread gently.” But he was premier then and the rules, presumably, were different. Now that everything had changed, he was just being pragmatic and what was wrong with that? 

It reminds me of what he used to say about Anwar. What was it again? 

Ah yes, I remember. 

Something about a leopard not being able to change its spots, wasn’t it? 

ENDS