I’ve been reading ‘A confederacy of dunces’ in my spare time, and I’ve caught myself wondering if I was reading a farce, a true story of a farce or the biography of a farce in the person of Mr Ignatius Reilly. It’s been a great read, but a mind-bending one. Ignatius is funny, pathetic, a member of a pseudo-intelligentsia railing against a consumerist world out of touch with a ‘proper theology and geometry’. He’s like a shunt, a deep black hole in the fabric of reality – and in the reality Mr Toole concocts, he makes a certain kind of sense.
Ignatius rails against a certain kind of mores that offends his medievally-informed sense of place in the world. It’s a peculiar sort of delusion, and in one particular episode, Mr Toole corresponds Ignatius’s mean-spirited, faux socialism - inspired by his object of desire - with Ignatius’s ebullient turns of phrase, something which contrasts the patois the other characters in the book. The farce and satire rise up like a mix of shit and perfume, and it’s devilishly funny. Reading the book has become a sort of escape for me, mostly because I see lots of similarities between the absurdities in the book and real life.
Like when I hear about certain parties demanding money from stranded folks in KT to be ferried to safety. It’s like demanding cash from someone who’s lost everything and now probably owns whatever he’s wearing on his back: it’s either a sad, outrageous situation or an uproariously funny, absurd situation. In either case, one can only laugh in helpless despair.
I know: I’m still obsessed about what’s been going on in KT. It’s personal for me, not because I stay there, but because I’ve blogged about a situation in KT that happened about three years ago. I was in KT a few weeks before the general elections when the businesses closest to Sungei Johor were hit by a flood. The waters had overflowed Sungei Johor’s banks, and waters rose to about four to five feet. I was in a pet shop, and everything was wet. Pet rabbits and dogs were dead in their cages because the owners couldn’t reach them in time when the floods hit. These shop owners almost got themselves drowned trying to save these helpless few.
The neighbour of this pet shop was a sundry goods store. The floods had turned much of what they sold into slippery mush, or had soiled everything else. The owner of that sundry goods store was crying, sobbing and screaming at the top of her voice, demanding answers: why weren’t the banks of the river buttressed? Why wasn’t anything done about the drainage? I only understood why she was making such an impassioned display when I noticed an UMNO delegation walking from shop to shop. They were shaking hands, pressing the flesh and garnering support for the coming elections.
They came to that sundry goods store last: the screaming reached a fever pitch, briefly, and ended in disgruntled muttering when the delegation fled the scene and shuffled into our shop. The owners of the pet shop were old folks. The wife had a really stony look on her face and refused to shake hands. The husband was more accommodating, smiling and shaking hands. I don’t think he meant it. While the UMNO delegates milled around and made soothing noises, commiserating with their loss, the wife leaned over and asked me if they’ll do anything to help them.
I said no. Then she said, in Mandarin: ‘then why are they here?’ The leader of the gang smiled benignly at me and shook my outstretched hand. And I asked him, smiling, if they intended to do anything other than shake hands and smile. I know, it was insulting. I wanted to be insulting. So I said it was good to see them once every five years. The leader of the gang turned away, and his secretary, bedecked in shawl and with a clipped, falsely accented English told me they were looking into the problem.
As she turned away and as the group left, I called after them, asking them if they intended to do anything for the folks right now. I was waved away. I was incensed. I was angry and I couldn’t believe these shop owners were dismissed out of turn. The husband, old man that he was, said: ‘they are always like that. Nevermind lah’.
And that was the one those events that forced me into reading the news, and digging up as much as I could about the government. Three years later and nothing has changed. And that leader fella I shook hands with? I learned later that he was – and is – Abdul Ghani Othman.
Ah, well.
It’s personally encouraging to find myself online and not in a pub somewhere drinking the night away. A mixture of work and fatigue is getting to me, and it seems sometimes the only solution to both is a large, tall glass of ice-cold beer. Common sense tells me more sleep is the solution, but that doesn’t help with the mental exhaustion at the end of the day. John and Kay understand that, and I’m glad they’ve hung around. They’ve got their own problems, too, so we usually have enough excuses to get together for beer.
We’re like this close to becoming ‘alkies’. It’s all good.
Comments (2)
Nothing much has changed all these years, so what’s new? These folks get elected into power again and again, which really sucks.
Isn’t that depressing? Which makes the whole enterprise of what we do, conscious or otherwise, on the blogosphere somewhat questionable as far as its efficacy is concerned.
That said, it’s interesting to note how the cracks in the govt’s armour are widening. Don’t you feel the desperation and panic all the way from Cabinet?
In any case, I suppose we’ll know the result in the run up to elections: either a cornered UMNO reacts like Mahathir did in 1988 or they crumble and fail.
In the meantime, life goes on, I suppose.