Huzir's Malay Middle Class- better to remain quiet.

My friend from Blogsphere, Mat Cendana wrote an interesting piece about hijacking the middle class, or should I term it, meddle class? He was expanding on the theme expounded by one Huzir Sulamian. Who looks like Mr Bean minus the Engineering degree from Oxford that is. ( yes Rowan Atkinson has an engineering degree from Oxford and was university mate to T. Blair).

I don’t know Huzir Sulaiman. I know of him. He is middle class in the sense his ‘father, mother, are lawyers’. His father if I am not mistaken, is the lawyer Sulamian Abdullah- yes that person who wears a sarung and turban and who walks his dog/s around in Bukit Damansara. In a previous life he was one Srinivesan Iyer, brother to Tan Sri Rama Iyer. He was a law lecturer lecturing me thinks, my blogger friend DSN. The mother I think is Mehrun Siraj, the one who lambasted Zulkifli Nordin, the last time.

Now, Huzir is a dramatist. He is in the company of his fellow actors who lay around in Bangsar just like the English poets did in Mrs Miggins café in Blackadder stories. How would I class Huzir?. The best term I could come out is a bohemian bourgeoisie- the person who gravitates to thoughts that suits him. Certainly he is middle class being sons of prominent lawyers. His thinking on this ketuanan Melayu issue?- bourgeois morality. It’s a morality and values of someone who luxuriates in his/her present station in life, because others have toiled and sacrificed thus allowing him to do so. Just like the French aristocrats occupying themselves silly with fancy dress costumes, while the citizens were eking out their miserable life. His morality is the morality of Azly Rahman, of Harith Iskandar, the cheap Orson Welles wannabe. Making stupid faces and gesticulations pretending to be funny and make people happy.

People like Huzir Sulaman still does not get it yes? We come back again and again to Lee Kuan Yew. – the pace of social revolution in Malaya is as fast or as slow as the Malays in Kampongs want it, not as the Chinese in towns want it. The towns can act as catalyst on the kampongs, but it is the kampongs that decide the pace.

Substitute, kampongs as the majority and not middle class, and convert Huzir’s middle class as bourgeois. So by putting the views of a son of a Felda DG and one Zahim Albakri( himself a fellow actor and a progeny of one Malay and Caucasian and certainly in the same kindred spirit as Huzir), he lumps them into the unheard voices of ketuanan Melayu. Piously wishing, it is their voices that should be heard rather than the voices of the man in the street or the voices of the man on the SriJaya Bus or now Metro Bus. In fact, he wishes their voices are the voices of the Ketuanan Melayu- compromising, very liberal, ensconced in their comfort zones, sipping Bacardi coke, or Dom Perignon,. I have the exact terms for them- the caviar socialists, the BMW bourgeois, the smoked salmon sentinels, the café latte crowd. Their thinking are good conversation pieces, usable to score with the opposite sex, but detached from reality. Zahim al bakri’s and the Felda DG’s son’s views are more relevant amidst the din of Hard Rock Café.