You get real pissed when the body does not work as it should. The usual recourse is to head to the local quack but the problem is he or she usually has problems, too, and it all becomes self-evident too late in the day.
You have problems. They have problems. That’s that happens when governments slash and burn on purely economic grounds supposedly good for us all. Hospitals start brimming to the rafters with untreated patients and the streets start piling up with those who cannot get a look in.
This is when you rush off to your local quack, right? And you want to feel better right away, right? Spare a thought. The medicine man has his/her problems.
You walk in there and say, ”Doc, I burnt the chihuaha.” This happened to a Dr Justin Coleman, who reported it in the Australian Medical Observer recently. His theory is that most of us are storytellers, presumably because we want attention pronto.
So we tell the doc we burnt a chihuaha when what we really mean is we burnt our blessed foot while cremating a dead pet. Resort to the best medical books will lead to zilch here, proving the fact that diagnosis is no walk in the rose garden; more like a walk in the thicket.
I remember way back then, when I was a fairly young fellow. I’d had trouble sleeping. Naturally, I went in to my local doctor and confided, “Look, I don’t know why but I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I keep lying awake all night when all I want to do is sleep. I can’t get up and read because that makes my dad come up and order me back to bed.”
‘Young man,’ says the doc in his gruffest best. “What you need is a good, young woman and I can’t help you.” I ended up with a prescription for malt to be taken with milk every night and have been trying to fill the rest of the prescription since.
17 April 2002
Prime Minister Tengku Abdul Rahman, a scion of the sultanate of Kedah, the northern Malaysian State and founding father – Bapak – had led the new nation until then. The Tengku’s appeal to Malaysians as a peace-loving nation acted as a balm to the rule of bureaucracy and a constitutional system that had passed seamlessly from British colonial rule. Executive government worked according to an indeterminate process of patronage and privilege until May 1969, just as it had done in the days of the British.
The bubble burst in the late hours of May 13 after results pointed to a decisive turn against the ruling Alliance. The Chinese and Tamil minority had swung to the newly emergent Gerakkan Rakyat Malaysia based in Penang and the Democratic Action Party based in Kuala Lumpur, the capital. The results showed clearly that a motley coalition of opposition parties was close to forming an alternative government.
Party activists were euphoric. Never had the populace imagined that politics might better its lot. Celebrations in Kuala Lumpur quickly fanned north to the major cities on the west coast and degenerated into partisan communal violence.
The details of how the victory celebrations deteriorated into the now infamous May 13 Riots and how the government mobilised Malaysia’s crack riot squads and the military remain sketchy to this day. Martial law was declared in a matter of hours as the Tengku, from his residence, watched fires rage in his once peace loving capital. The flames licked at his hold on power as chief executive. The Tengku was soon to be ousted in a party coup.
The crackdown was decisive as it was ruthless. A dusk to dawn curfew was in full force by the next day. Orders to the troops were to shoot to kill anyone violating the curfew. Countless reports circulated of how army sharpshooters fatally shot people peeping through shuttered windows.
The Alliance had ruled unchallenged on an average of 70 per cent of the national vote and the uprising was a massive slap in the face to the status quo. The response was a hardening of powers, an extension of constitutionally protected Malay privilege – from an agreed 10 years at Independence to 30 years – and the almost complete quashing of dissent.
The Alliance seized government back by fiat and it evolved into a National Front comprising several political parties that had been in strenuous opposition to Alliance policies, ironically with the GRM opposition as one of its components. Now, 34 years later, Dr Mahathir wields the same weaponry against resurgent dissent – this time from within the indigenous Malay population.
It is easy and indeed common among the international media to see these developments much too subjectively but that is another thread in the story that needs re-analysing in the wake of the Anwar Ibrahim affair. Dr Mahathir - and the Malaysian political condition - is too easily demonised but not too readily understood.
*The Colonial Office officially took control of the Straits Settlements in 1867.