The constantly changing order of the day
By MARINA MAHATHIR
MUSINGS
THEY weren’t kidding when they said when it rains it pours. Except that there was nothing pouring out of our taps but grief.
In the past two weeks there have been at least twice (or was it more? I lose count) when millions of people have had no water because the supply had been polluted or cut. In fact, one incident came so fast on the heels of another that people barely had time to shower in between. There must be a lot of smelly people in the Klang Valley these days through no fault of their own.
But this is the time to find fault. As it is, we already have to endure a CMCO whose rules change so often that keeping up with them needs the skills of one of those performers who can change outfits faster than you can sing happy birthday.
Tracking CMCO rules requires a particular gift for mental dexterity. It makes you wonder whether they keep hard copies of decisions they made in the past, or did they dump them in the trash as soon as they’re done with them. That must be the reason why each time they lock us down, they invent something new.
For the few people paying attention, there’s also the political change games, also known as the Hunger (for Power) Games, one of which we all blame for the current pandemic state we’re in. The Director General of Health recently admitted that 448 people returned from Sabah and then tested positive.
Amid them, let us not forget, were some politicians who blithely walked around in a poor imitation of Donald Trump. Our DG then “noted” that “after implementing border control, the number of returnees from Sabah have (sic) dropped significantly”. The glaring omission of course is the date of implementation of that control.
What’s more, does dropping the number of returnees mean they were left to stew in the Sabah Covid pot?
Then, if any of us care at all anymore, there was supposed to be a change at the top almost a month ago. Except that there wasn’t. And now there’s supposed to be one again. Except there isn’t because the person who should be the headmaster to the unruly pupils in Parliament has decided to relinquish his duties to the head prefect. The headmaster who once knew the rules has now decided the head prefect knows better.
The only constant is change. Nobody has qualified that by saying they meant change for the better.
Since everyone is forming their own party these days, maybe the rakyat should establish their own.
We can’t call it Parti Rakyat because I think that’s taken but may I suggest the name I thought of during that interregnum in February when we didn’t know who our leader was? It’s called Party of Really Fed-Up Malaysians or PARFUM.
It will be a party open to anyone. There is only one criterion for admission; you must not stink. By that, I mean not from the bodily odours that emanate from people who are showering less often than usual but those who give off that smell from keeping skeletons in their cupboards.
To join, applicants must ensure that they pass the sniff test. They’ll be graded by how hard we have to pinch our noses when they come by (and stand not less than one metre away of course). Those that make our noses wrinkle up even behind our masks will be shown the door immediately. The wearing of perfume to hide one’s malodorous character will not be allowed.
On our scale, the more expensive the fragrance, the more likely it covers a tainted body.
Some might argue that smell tests aren’t necessarily transparent or democratic. This insults the intelligence of the average person, the one who’s had to put up with so much manure all this year.
Our noses are so attuned now to the different types of olfactory stimulation, we could find jobs at the fragrance factories in France.
We might be uncertain still of what smells good, but we sure know what offends our sense of what reeks, let alone our sense of decency.
Our membership would comprise people who emanate cleanliness, who use soap on their bodies and in their mouths, whose minds look to everybody’s future, not just their own. They’d have to not be too jaded nor have abandoned hope.
Losing hope is like leaving a cat wounded in a road accident to die slowly. Eventually nobody can bear the stench and leaves.
So, what do you reckon? Shall we go for it? This doesn’t have to be registered by any government agency because you know, agency is not what they have. We should leave aside bureaucracy because sometimes they make our noses crease suspiciously as well.
Nor should we have any President, Deputy Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Ketua Wanita, Ketua Pemuda, Ketua Puteri and all the various ketua all the way down the line.
We should discard these crabs forever scrambling so hard to get out of the bucket that they stay out in the sun too long. We should eat them quickly to avoid getting sick.
Meanwhile it would be nice if someone cared enough to express even a smidgen of sympathy for those who have had no water for days.
Someone who might treat it as an emergency issue, or even an issue of security. People who’ve had to endure no water to flush toilets are likely to riot after a while. They’re likely to find water cannons a relief rather than daunting.
And is anyone even interested in finding out why our rivers keep getting polluted? Or are those polluters also able to leap over fences to escape?
There’s really a bad pong here.
