The Tao and the “mother of all things”

 

According to the Taoist world view, the birth of the “mother of all” things is a sure sign of the the two extreme Yin and Yang forces are at its peak. 

Kuo Yong Kooi 

In a short period of just over a month, Malaysia went through a festivity of ‘mother of all things political’. Just after the parliament was dissolved, the opposition declared that GE13 is the ‘mother of all elections’. In the period leading up to the May 5 election day, new records were set in the numbers of ceramah attendees night after night. On election day, we had the ‘mother of all voter turnouts’ with 84.4 percent, a new record.

Adding in BR1M 1 and BR1M 2, GE13 is undoubtedly the ‘mother of all amounts of money’ spent on buying votes compared to any other elections.

We also have the ‘mother of all number of independent candidates’ participating in the recent general election.
 
Anwar Ibrahim has publicly declared that the GE13 is the ‘mother of all fraudulent elections’.

We had the ‘mother of all post-election gatherings’ in Kelana Jaya stadium on May 8. We also saw a series of after-shocks in Batu Kawan, Penang; Ipoh, Perak; Kuantan and Johor Baru; with large turnouts but not as impressive as the one in the Kelana Jaya Stadium.

Depending on the outcome of the coming Umno general assembly, Najib Abdul Razak’s head might roll and that would be the ‘mother of all heads rolling’, adding to the recent head-rolling of Gerakan’s Koh Tsu Koon. MCA’s Chua Soi Lek’s head will purportedly roll at the end of this year as he stated. 

The opposition PAS might also do some blood letting in the coming PAS muktamar as the progressive ‘Erdogan’ faction suffered losses at the last GE13. We will have to see if Mat Sabu’s head is going to be rolling, too.

Uncle Kit Siang has seen cabinet line-ups since the sixties. He labelled the current new cabinet as the most (mother of all) unimpressive cabinet in Malaysia’s history. East Malaysians had just witnessed the ‘mother of all number of East Malaysians’ in the current cabinet line-up.

The winner of the ‘mother of all political illusionists’ is P Wathaymoorthy. Many did not take him seriously when he demanded a few seats from Pakatan in negotiations prior to the election. I was really touched when he did his 21-day fast. He even got Karpal Singh’s attention and sympathy.

I guess many Indians went along with his call to vote for BN and that contributed to the “technical” survival of MIC in the recent polls. That was really a class act. He worked hard and honestly to get sympathy from the Indian community to vote for BN as a free agent/NGO. 

Whereas BN openly and utterly disregarded the sanctity of a “free and fair” election campaign. Its secretary-general Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor said, “There is nothing wrong with flying in voters to vote”, and the caretaker PM Najib Razak was quoted to have said that there will be more BR1Ms to come if BN is re-elected during the campaign.

Of course Wathaymoorthy deserves the position as a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s department as far as the prime minister is concerned. I think he might have a future in Bollywood after this stint at the Prime Minister’s Department.

The progressive forces in Malaysia are now split. This election result has pushed the radicals out of the woodwork. We will have to see the turn out in the ‘one million people’ protest march in the next week or so. If the group manages to attract a big turnout like all other previous post GE13 ‘aftershock’ rallies, we will be witnessing the ‘mother of all stalemates’ in the history of Malaysia’s politics. 

This group will surely thumb their noses at the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Najib administration and ask for Anything But Umno (ABU).

According to the Taoist world view, the birth of the “mother of all” things is a sure sign of the the two extreme Yin and Yang forces are at its peak. We are living in an interesting time indeed in the context of Malaysia’s political history.