Yesterday it was my birthday

I hung one more year on the line

I should be depressed, my life's a mess

But I'm havin' a good time...

(Paul Simon, from the song Have a good time )

Another " Bulan Kemerdekaan " has come and gone. In fact the celebratory mood that was meant to last month-long until Sept 17 has long fizzled in the stupor of mega-sales and the contrived rejoicing of Aug 31.

Maybe September is no longer the month for any happy commemorations, especially if you are Muslim. Off to a lethargic start in mid-August, the tourism minister lamented this year's much subdued display of patriotism as he counted far fewer flags on our windscreens.

We could do with a lot of celebrations, really. After all we have clawed back from the brink on the strength of our own formula, and the man whose dismissal sparked ungrateful Malaysians to challenge the authority and nearly brought the nation to its knees is increasingly isolated and forgotten in Sungai Buloh.

The movement that he initiated is now only a minor irritant, a rag-tag band of irresponsible anti-national types. Let us get back into line, stand united, be grateful for what they have given us and let the good times roll again.

How we wished it is all true. For all that self-deluding slogans and reassurances that the worst is behind us, we have that uneasy feeling that we are living on borrowed time and borrowed money, maybe even borrowed labour. We are continuing to pay for our recklessness because we have not really learnt the lessons of our recent past.

During this high point of our national calendar, we are given to narcissistic preening and overblowing our mediocre achievements, mainly because we like to compare ourselves with our poorer neighbours and those wretched people whose lives are ravaged by famine and wars in some far-flung continent. But spare some moments for some critical introspection, and we can't help feeling that the Bahtera Merdeka , Kassim Masdor's beautiful metaphor of the young independent nation on the threshold of a voyage of self-destiny and actualisation of dreams, is lurching from one squall to another and running into occasional heavy storms.

Bigger worries

The ordinary Malaysians with the toil of their honest labour for a share of that elusive dream have bigger worries on their minds than placating the tourism minister's anxiety. The spiralling cost of living for the simple wage-earners, the crammed uncomfortable housing they have to put up with, and those children, as they grow up, can they provide for their education?

The feeling that eight hours of honest labour a day cannot provide decent material comforts and a fulfilled, dignified life for one's family is alarming enough, but underneath that we sense a society in slow but sure decay. Even if concepts like democracy, transparency, accountability, judicial independence things that make a society civilised remain abstract for ordinary Malaysians too hard-pressed to make ends meet to reflect on them, the fall-out from the decay of what these concepts stood for could hardly escape anybody's notice.

Just days before ' Bulan Kemerdekaan ' was to officially begin, the headlines of a Malay broadsheet screamed about the alarming practice of corruption among young officers who are mainly Malay Malaysians, especially those dealing with enforcement.

Sometime earlier the de facto law minister pointed out that the presence of more than a million illegal immigrants was because of the corruption of those who should be guarding our borders. And when the problems caused by the presence of such high members of foreign workers became too much, we implement poorly thought-out measures that are at once inhumane and inept, severely disrupting some sectors of our economy long used to relying on their cheap labour. In the process, we sparked the anger of our neighbours who protested over the death of babies and children in the appalling conditions of holding camps for deported illegal foreign workers.

Law unto themselves

Yet another sign of decay of civilised living, the men who are supposed to maintain law and order have become a law unto themselves. There was a police constable accused of raping foreign women in a police lock-up, never mind that the judge acquitted him on the grounds that the sexual acts were "consensual".

And the enquiry is on about a group of policemen in Sabah whom a Filipina minor awaiting deportation accused of rape.

And again and again we read of Indian youths dying mysteriously in police custody.

We would like to think that these are scandals every police force in the world have to put with on account of a few rotten apples, but all this in the space of a few months is very disturbing.

A measure of how civilised we are as a society is how well we take care of the seriously sick among us, the infirm, the handicapped and those with no means of earning their living. In the wake of the controversy surrounding a TV personality who raised nearly RM400,000 within a week for some kind of surgery in Australia, we read of those with serious chronic diseases suffering in silence, their media appeal for donations ignored and forgotten.

Too bad, Malaysians are only caring if you are glamorous and happened to be visited by VIPs.

We now realise that there must be many, many more who will slip through our skimpy social safety net.

Yet again, we are forced to question our lop-sided policies that place emphasis on hugely expensive mega projects that were meant to buy us prestige and international respectability, at the cost of the welfare of the less fortunate sections of society.

Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland

But I think its all overdone

Exaggerating this, exaggerating that

They don't have no fun...

(have a good time)

Stop whinging your poor losers. That's the way things are all over the world. Ever heard of globalisation? The lot of the common man today is to pay for every conceivable service. It can't be helped that even health and education are now commodities for businessmen to exploit for profit. The Americans have been paying them. It's that thing called neo-liberalism, you silly sod, that even social democrats of Europe today avidly embrace, ashamed of their old vision of cradle-to-grave welfare for all.

Qualitatively different

But let us not be fooled by this tired excuse. While it's true that all over the world the common man is feeling squeezed and corporations increasingly control people's lives, what we are going through today is qualitatively different.

The slow erosion of common decency and civilised norms, and the increasing marginalisation and exclusion of the less fortunate from mainstream national life are indications of the extent of the decay of our social and democratic institutions.

The petty corruption of young enforcement officers and the men guarding our borders that the media and the law minister screamed about are only to be expected when that evil pervades the higher levels of administration. The only difference is that these young officers do not have the privilege of the Official Secrets Act's protection.

What's the big deal about cops having sex with detainees or beating Indian youths in custody as claimed by relatives and lawyers when their highest officer beat a handcuffed and blindfolded PM-in-waiting four years ago? It will be forever etched in our collective memory the shameful way that they have allowed themselves to be used in a political conspiracy, and the violence they inflicted on unarmed citizens exercising their fundamental rights. The Federal Court judgment on the arrest of the ISA 6 bears testimony to this shame.

And woe to those who dare challenge the men of power. Our once respected, independent judiciary no longer have the people's confidence that it can deliver justice, and all hopes that it was about to redeem itself when the present chief justice was appointed have all but vanished.

Well, we could go on, but it would be tiresome, for we have heard it so many times before. But the sad fact is we remain indifferent as long as we are not directly affected.

Opportunities slip by

We would rather be lulled by delusions of excellence and achievement. " Pakar IT, pakar ekonomi, jaguh sukan dan juga jutawan... " as Keranamu Malaysia , the reigning patriotic song of the day goes.

It's not that we have not achieved anything, but I think we have let too many opportunities slip by because of our love of the transient and the illusory, easy wealth and power without responsibility.

Where did we go wrong?

It's not that we didn't have a great vision. Reading the Vision's "Nine challenges facing all Malaysians" in Malaysia: The way forward by our prime minister, the great bulk of those nine points actually concern national integration and the building of society with a healthy, resilient democracy, and strong in moral principles. It talked about establishing a mature, liberal and tolerant society, a caring culture and ensuring an economically just society for all the races.

Actually, it's only the last point that emphasised economic prosperity, about being competitive, dynamic etc, etc.

But we entrusted that vision to a band of 'mediocrats' who, once ensconced in power, refuse to let go. Mediocre men and women with weak moral fibres, who easily succumb to the temptations of unearned wealth and the trappings of power and privilege, given to adulation and overblown sense of achievement. Who cares about liberal and caring society, resilient and mature democracy and all that jazz?

In the end that fantastic Vision became a populist vehicle and a tool to overstretch the legitimacy of the mediocrats at the helm, making us overlook the administration's weaknesses, recklessness and improprieties in the belief that they will take us to unimagined heights if we could all just be a bit patient and ignore those little scruples.

Draconian laws

But the crisis that swept the region exposed the illusions, deceit and plunder. It is in the aftermath of the crisis and the defining events of 1998 that we drift even further from those noble aims of the Vision as the shaken mediocrats attempt to recover their legitimacy. Coming around with a bloodied nose, they are determined to cling on with awesome ferocity, subverting and degrading our democratic institutions even further, coming down hard on vocal critics with draconian laws that our former colonisers invented and used on our independent fighters.

For the less vocal critics, the cynics and our largely indifferent populace, this struggle to reassert their legitimacy takes the bizzare form of appropriating the symbols and institutions of nationhood unto themselves, equating themselves as the nation itself. Patriotism and love of the nation have been given a new twist as to mean adulation and blind subservience to the administration's leadership. To debate important issues, offer constructive criticisms and expose the scandals of holders of high office to safeguard the public good are seen as ungrateful and anti-national, those repressive laws invoked all too frequently if one steps a little too far.

It is "either you're with us or you're against us". Malaysians are expected to be passive, obedient, ever grateful subjects of the hegemonic overlords who have appropriated the nation, its wealth and its symbols, as encapsulated in the words of the song Keranamu Malaysia . Who is to blame for our lack of dynamism, blunted competitiveness, mediocrity of our public universities, the rot of our institutions, the decline of our public life and the harshness of everyday life for the simple folk?

In times like this, I yearn for the gentle melody and beautiful words of Bahtera Merdeka , where we are the nation and everyone has a stake in its destiny.

Bahtera Merdeka Kassim Masdor

Bunda senyum riang

Menerima bahtera merdeka

Putra-putri sayang

Sedang berjuang.

Fajar telah tiba

Nan menyising membawa harapan

Tanah semenanjung

Permata nilam.

Jiwa dan raga

Buktikanlah pada nusa bangsa

Supaya negara maju jaya

Aman merdeka.

Duhai ibu pertiwi

Putra-putri datang sujud bakti

Ingin menunaikan

Sumpah dan janji.