After polling day on March 21, writers and commentators will have sufficient materials for a month at least, to dissect and analyse the hundreds of individual battles, and follow up on the post election scenario throughout the nation.

Lamenting or celebrating the fall of some prominent politicians will be the order of the day. The rise of new political stars will be noted. There will also be different appraisals of the new government and the new opposition.

As I write though, in the midst of the campaign period, I am denied the wisdom of hindsight. What I am not denied, is the expected deluge of mind-boggling imbecilic infantile propaganda flooding the media. Many campaign posters, banners and pamphlets are no better; completing the impression that Malaysian voters are intellectually impaired.

For the sake of getting to know BN strategy better, I broke my long habit of not watching television and not reading local papers. It turned out to be a mistake; I was soon bore and depressed beyond measure.

One particularly depressing TV ad makes pretence to exhort voters to go out to vote. It features healthy cheerful Malaysians of various shapes crossing their arms symbolically, while mouthing the slogan "Choose feel good; choose to vote", to the tune of inane Malay rap music in the background.

No equal opportunity

As usual, the one-sided attack against the opposition in the media goes on undiminished. I was praying like mad for equal time to be given for the opposition to reply. Let Hadi Awang and Lim Kit Siang loose on the idiot tube, and we may actually get some entertainment value, like watching a professional wrestling match in action.

I am being sarcastic of course. There is no point hoping for fairness in media coverage of the election campaign. If open fairness and equal opportunity were given to the opposition, not only during elections, but also between them, we just might witness the slashing of BN two-third majority in parliament, and eventually a change of government.

As expected, the new prime minister is given prime air-time and almost limitless print space to articulate his vision and judgement, as if speaking ex cathedra . The man is saleable as a political product in Malaysia. He projects the image of a kindly caring patriarch who tries to be fair. His deputy trails by a long shot in this department. The absence of the previous combative prime minister is not missed. Is this a kind of progress in Malaysian politics?

Allow me a moment of my cynical indulgence. Abdullah Badawi looks and speaks well. He is a nice guy despite being a politician. For one thing, he does not appear as vicious and vindictive as his predecessor. He may even be punished for his niceness by his own Umno colleagues somewhere down the line. (Really nice people in politics eventually quit out of disgust, or get kicked out by their so-called friends.)

Eventually, whether the new BN supremo is really nice or not is beside the point. Media campaign, like all marketing tricks, is about appearance, and has nothing to do with reality. Packaging is the name of the game. Unfortunately in Malaysia, false advertising in politics is the accepted norm, rather than a moral and legal affront.

Yes, modern politics is all about packaging and market presentation through the media. It is also about creating needs and fears, where none existed before. In an age approaching late-capitalism, politics, together with politicians and their wares, have become mere consumer products.

The American presidential election is no exception. Before the final results of this complicated process are known by November this year, Bush and Kerry would have raised and spent a few hundred million American dollars between them on election ads, each running for mere 60 seconds.

Why no outrage on this

In Malaysia, we do not aspire to ape the evil West always. We do things differently. Here, endless airtime and limitless sprint space are given to the incumbents at the expense of the tax-payers. Is this a form of corruption as well, one which will enrage our morally righteous prime minister?

The privilege of free advertising on television is not accorded to the opposition of course. In fact, even if the opposition politicians offer to pay for their campaign ads, they would likely be turned down for various reasons.

Getting bored with this political soliloquy by the BN machinery on television, I cannot help but wonder: why is it that Malaysians do not get scandalised by this form of injustice and inequality? Why are they not outraged by this sort of political monstrosity, like they have been outraged by rape and murder?

The taxi driver who took me home from the congested town centre had a mountain of gripes to unload from his stomach. He had nothing but venomous disaffections for the police, the oil companies, the land transport department, the taxi companies, the customers, and the world in general, as he ground and tortured his car engine through the unearthly traffic around Puduraya in Kuala Lumpur.

I thought that taxi-drivers are the most sensitive barometers of political sentiment on the ground. So I nudged the conversation tactfully to the direction of the current general election. His eloquence left him instantly. Finally, almost inaudibly, he confessed his whole family would be voting for the Barisan Nasional.

I did not ask for the reason why he should continue to support the very political forces that have created all the conditions for his enslavement and suffering.

The jungle battles

There was a time, many years ago, when it was my full-time job to deal with this sort of enslavement and suffering. With a handful of assistants, I used to travel into the remote rural areas of Sarawak, to deal with the problems of native customary land rights, that were under assault from the loggers and plantation companies.

These battles in the jungle, a universe away from the bright lights of the city, and certainly far away from the attention of a media devoted to urban consumers, were often fierce and sometimes bloody. Some of them dragged on for years.

One of these areas was the stretch of the Bintulu-Miri trunk road, covering some 18 Iban long houses. We were fortunate to have a good local political leader there. There was also a local grassroots NGO that had involved themselves in the training and agitation of the Iban community leaders.

The end result was the translation of discontent into a people's movement during a general election. Although the opposition candidate was Chinese albeit an Iban speaking Chinese he defeated the BN incumbent who was also the president of a Sarawak BN component party!

A congruence of factors made the empowerment of the humble villagers work. In other areas, where community organisation did not go hand in hand with a great deal of education of the people involved, the people who suffered and fought against government policies that threatened their livelihood, would continue to vote for the BN when election time comes around once every five years.

No alternatives

Time after time, people who bitch against the government will eventually vote for the ruling parties. Most of the time, they see no alternatives. What they fail to see, is that the failure to see alternatives and the inability to imagine possibilities are but the symptoms of an enslaved mind.

I make this observation without any intention at moral judgement. It seems to be a natural stage in the historical development of any society that the oppressed do not automatically want freedom from enslavement; in fact they begin by aspiring to be oppressors themselves. In capitalist societies, it is called "climbing the social ladder".

Therefore, the suffering demos will not see their political masters as the cause of their misfortune. Instead their torturers are seen as role-models or in some cases, as their saviours even. As for their hard lot in life, they can always blame it on bad luck.

The oppressors' instinctive response to this deep-seated need of the oppressed is to mystify the power, prestige, and glamour that come with the job of the slave-master. Coercion will work in the short term, but social conditioning through the promotion of slavish values works better in the long run.

In this general election, nothing else plays the role of stupefying the masses of faceless millions than the media. They give the voters a false sense of power once in every five years, by "allowing" them to vote for the government of their choice, when in fact, there is only one choice. Sadly, the majority of our voters will be compelled by their own fear and insecurity to choose that only choice, thereby offering their freedom as a sacrificial lamb to the godhead of "security'.

On the world historical stage, freedom and liberty have always been the primal motive force behind progressive politics in the promotion of our common human vocation: to be truly human. Is it not a sad commentary of our state of political affair that in the whole election, the thought of 'freedom' has been obscured entirely, like a tabooed obscenity, even by the opposition?

May we all bear the fruit and burden of our twisted choices!