Between Mahathir's narratophilia and Najib's phallophilia

One likes to tell dirty stories and trash. The other likes gargantuan sizes of things. It’s Mahathir’s Narratophilia vs. Najib’s Phallophilia.

It’s none of our concern if DR Mahathir’s attacks on Najib are tactical or real. They are all masters and practitioners of subterfuge and deception. Those who oppose UMNO and BN have but one clarion call. Let’s bury UMNO and BN.

I suspect the UMNO camp is really worried about the attacks on their man that they have to do a spin on the whole works. That’s UMNOthink. When something is not working for them, they will manufacture a preferred storyline. Hence the story line they come out with is that the good Doctor is doing his usual reverse psychology.

They can whack each other to kingdom come. Every UMNO leader knows that Dr Mahathir blames Rosmah Mansor for the position UMNO finds itself today. Rosmah is the heel to Najib’s Achilles. Mahathir is the poison arrow.

Dr Mahathir never ceases to bully Malays into believing they are inadequate and therefore the solution is to entrust their future in the hands of good people like him. Social evils, intoned Mahathir, arise from the activities of evil people and if only known devils like him and the band of marauders and plunderers are in control,  Malaysia is safe.

What is wrong with this kind of thinking? The answer is- it only requires unthinking and self-praise. Unthinking on the part of the people and self-praises- lots of them on the part of the master class. Make the people look up in awe and maybe even deify them.

Mahathir likes to self-praise himself although he has a round-about way of doing it. He is after all, a person with a weak school certificate. So maybe because of his weak school certificate, he has this Napoleonic persona to over-achieve many aspects of life. The medical doctor uses self-deprecation to disarm and defeat opponents. He seems to enjoy talking trash. Maybe Dr Mahathir has political narratophilia – telling dirty stories and trash appeals to him. Maybe it has worked in one-to-one encounters. But this time, it can’t work when you are confronting whole people.

Najib of course survives on daily doses of self-praise and extravagant self-promotion. His larger than life pictures adorn so many billboards all over the country. Maybe Najib is suffering from political phallophilia. Everything must be of gargantuan sizes.

So you see his gargantuan images on top of buses, on the sides of trains and also at the entrances of public toilets. But please don’t piss on his picture. You will be arrested and manacled.

So Dr Mahathir harangues the public with simplistic takes. If UMNO is vanquished, Malays will be finished. So, Malays need to continue to place their future in the hand of good people like UMNO people. Associating UMNO with all the goodness is easy to do. It needs only an appeal to the emotions. And that is what Mahathir and the menagerie of UMNO political animals do. But to reason out that other people other than UMNO can do better, requires overcoming prejudices and subordinating the emotions. That would require analysis and thought process- something UMNO people and cyber troopers sorely lacked.

This only-emotions is required thus explains, why UMNO/BN policies with their track record of corruption, cronyisms, economic pillage and plunder, abuse of power and even murder, is regarded as superior than the track record offered by Pakatan Rakyat. The argument in support of UMNO despite all the various flaws admitted by Mahathir is easy and requires only emotional engagement. The argument in support of rational policies of Pakatan require disengaging the emotional attachment which is a little difficult to do but not impossible.

So what’s bothering Mahathir? What Mahathir fears is that the process of disengagement has spread so widely so as to threaten UMNO’s stranglehold on the people.

Let us therefore help Dr Mahathir make sense of what is happening on the ground so that he can come to terms and make peace with himself.

First, Malaysians have acquired a new tradition of embracing democratic values and the sense of importance and self-worth. These are natural outcomes of economic and social advancements with our own borders and also arise as a result of an almost complete removal of artificial physical barriers between nations. Advances in the internet have demolished almost all barriers set up by autocratic government and allowed people to learn and make comparisons. Governments set and established using autocratic means find themselves under increasing assaults from civil rights groups and people. That is happening to UMNO and BN who have thrived on unchallenged autocracy. Malaysians have acquired new values and traditions- that of liberty and liberal values.

The second force checking UMNO’s hegemony and autocracy is simply its own success. UMNO is a victim of its own success. Once UMNO and BN acquired a false sense of invincibility, they become victims to the baneful influence of corruption and power abuses. UMNO and BN have become a corrupt government. The government endorses, incubates, nurture and encourage rampant and rapacious corruption buoyed by its believe in its own invincibility.

The desire to stop a corrupt government has become both a unifying and motivating force to check UMNO and BN.