reduced and recycled

I’ve not posted anything for a while, and when one maintains a blog, a lack of updates is a bad thing. I’ll be honest: my periodic absences is part-lack of time, part-the need for distance, and part-exhaustion. When you’re too close to something, or too emotionally invested in a cause, you begin to lose sight of your objectivity. I’ll admit: the furore of the General Elections, and the elation over the Pakatan Rakyat win has been both exhausting, and disturbing: exhausting because everyone loves to paint bloggers in Malaysia into a corner, and disturbing because zealotry tends to dampen the imagination.

I’m not necessarily “back” since I didn’t go anywhere, but I’ve been disturbed recently over some sentiments that have been making its rounds in the blogosphere, and in my own thinking when I find myself not careful enough to pull back.

This is something to keep in mind, I feel: there is the ideal of justice, fair play and good governance - and then there’s politics. The way I understand politics in a democracy is simple: it’s the balance of competing interests in a country with diverse opinions, wants and needs. I was telling my friend Hanz recently: I hope people don’t treat the Opposition victories as signals of instant change. I’m reminded by what Lee Kuan Yew said in parliament prior to Singapore’s expulsion.

To paraphrase, he was saying something about how UMNO leaders were giving the rural folk the impression that if everything in Malaysia was in Bahasa Malaysia, that suddenly the padi farmer and his sons will be prosperous, that the Malays will suddenly rise out of the very real poverty they were suffering at the time. This was simply not true, and it smacks of shallow thinking.

There have been signs of this sort of attitude amongst Malaysians who voted in the Opposition. As I’ve said in my previous post, people power drunk on its sudden awareness of its ability to effect change have led to threats like “we voted you in, we can vote you out”. I’ve said before that this was troubling, and I’ve not changed my opinion on that matter.

It’s just that this recent phenomenon - or sentiment - has made me think that the opposition-inclined portion of the populace have placed a supererogatory burden on the opposition, that the opposition are now standard bearers of these people’s wishes. When you place the fact that these ‘wishes’ are driven by ideals together with the obvious fact that these new standard bearers are politicians, there naturally has to be some cognitive dissonance - at least, I think so.

Take Lim Guan Eng’s move to attempt some normalization of the relationship between the Federal government and the State government in Penang. This is, to me, a classic move not drive by magnanimity but driven by pragmatics. Let’s be logical: if the Opposition won in Penang on the basis of good governance, justice and anti-corruption, not just on a state level but on a national level, then who is the Devil here?

UMNO and its component parties.

Why should Lim Guan Eng seek to normalize relationships with the Devil? Because it is necessary, in my opinion. It’s a wonder why Penangites and other PR-adherents are not calling Lim Guan Eng out for opening up avenues for cooperation with a government that has been painted as corrupt, unfair and unjust.

But there it is: there’s a natural disjunct between politics and simple idealism, it seems to me.

A few days after the GE12, I blogged about possible defections. From my calculations back then I speculated 20 seats in the bag and 9 to drawn out from somewhere - for a simple 50/50 parliament (a hung parliament, that is). Now I’m reading news that there could be more than 30 people willing to cross the line and join Pakatan Rakyat. In my previous post on defection, my speculation was predicated upon the goal of wresting power from Barisan Nasional - and it appears that this may happen in the next few weeks.

Objectively, this couldn’t be better news. I’ve heard many arguments from both sides of the divide about the moral repugnance of crossovers and jokes about “kataks” and such. I know quite a lot of you will have your own ideas and opinions about what this means (and there are also many who are calling for parties to respect the choices of people, and such). This is how I will look at it.

Before the elections, I argued that I will be voting for the Opposition because I believe they will serve my interests. Interests, which are, amongst others, the abolition of the ISA, the abolition of repressive laws curtailing the freedom of the press and such. For these interests to be satisfied, it is necessary that the Opposition be in power (i.e. be the government), or else, these laws will not be repealed. An Opposition that is not in power only represents a stumbling block to any new legislation, that’s all. There is no power for real change.

Hence, the pragmatic, cold-blooded side of me agrees to party-hopping. I don’t see any inconsistencies if the question is not a moral one. But if it’s a moral issue, then we should all be consistent - let’s not work with the federal government at all. Let’s act consistently with our moral underpinnings.