‘Holy smoke, what have I done?’ I found myself wondering for a mad moment last week. Because it seemed that no sooner had I finished my Jan 11 column with a recollection of the Voltaire prayer “Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous” than Malaysia’s laughable current prime minister uttered his now infamously clownish ‘kangkung’ remark.

Wow. We theosceptics are shocked at the very thought that we might be caught praying to some alleged ‘Almighty Authority’, let alone having him/her/it/them answer our prayer in the affirmative.

But there was no denying that our enemies, or at least a principal representative of them in the person of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, had been rendered ridiculous by his patronising explanation of the rise in food prices and virtually everything else under the rule of his regime in terms of the seasonal fluctuation of the price of kankung, or water spinach.

“There are times when the price of vegetables, sawi (mustard green) and kangkung goes up and there are times it comes down,” he was quoted as declaring.

“I read in the newspaper that some prices have come down. Kangkung prices once went up and now it is down. When the prices come down, why are there no praises for the government? When it goes up, the government gets the blame.”

Much as I’d love to be able to take credit for persuading the - or at least a - divinity to get Najib to thus make a proper fool of himself, in all honesty I must decline the honour.

On several grounds, the first of which, is that of total identity confusion. Because when I uttered or at least typed the invocation “Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous” last week, I have in all honesty had to admit that I gave not a moment’s thought to which or whose supreme being I was addressing myself to.

Did my “Oh Lord” get me through to just the Christian equivalent of ‘Tuhan’. Or to the ‘Lord’ or ‘God’ in anybody’s language, like Jesus, Deus, Dios, or even Allah?

And in the case of the latter, given that ‘religious’ and most judicial authorities on the payroll of the Malaysian ruling regime claim Malay-Muslim copyright on the word ‘Allah’, at least in the peninsular, would I be somehow in breach of this and thus fail to get my message through if I sent it from some God-forsaken location like Sydney, Australia?

This question evokes my second reason for declining to take credit for seemingly prayer-inspired divine intervention for the purpose of rendering my - and indeed our - collective enemies in Malaysia’s BN regime ridiculous.

‘Kangkung’ speech nothing special

And that’s the fact that BN has been making itself so ridiculous for decades that it needs no help from me, let alone any God/Allah figure on whom I could possibly call to wreak more excruciating shame or embarrassment on it.

In fact, to me Najib’s ‘kangkung’ speech was nothing special in the ridiculous department compared with the abovementioned ‘religious’ and racial confusion BN has so long systematically sown to deflect Malaysians’ attention from the crimes it has committed against them and their beloved country.

Or to put this another way, so many millions of Malaysians have apparently tolerated being treated like vegetables by the regime for so long that I and many others had almost given up hope that they’d ever have the good sense to see anything as ridiculous.

After endless decades of robbery, fraud, repression and lies by the BN regime under the misleadership of the likes of Dr Mahathir Mohamad ( right ), Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and now Najib Abdul Razak, what is it with the ‘kangkung’ speech that’s got so many of the formerly ‘silent’ and pathetically compliant majority in such an unholy uproar?

Najib and the gang seem as puzzled as I am that a populace so long prepared to be the butt of perennial BN jokes like the concealment of rampant regime crime behind screens of corruptly compliant media and ‘Muslim’ organisations, are suddenly so fired-up over kangkung.

And it’s delicious to see how righteously indignant these jokes and jokers are at becoming the laughing-stock they’ve so long deserved to be.

“No need to make a fuss over kangkung,” the ever-ridiculous Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin prissily tweeted.

“The premier was using it as an example to show that not everything had gone up in price. Those that went up were caused by the weather, among other factors. Be a bit more rational,” Khairy ( left ) added.

And the great kangkung-erator himself, Najib was inspired to explain that he was “using kangkung as an example of how market forces determine the prices of food commodities,” and thus make the point that “certain quarters” should not make the vegetable a “subject of ridicule” on social media.

“I like to eat kangkung, you all like to eat kangkung,” he ventured to lamely continue.

“As such, I gave an example which everybody eats. If I use quail as an example, only certain people eat it.

“The example should not be ridiculed by anybody because I gave the example on the principle of supply and demand which decide the prices of some of the food commodities which are not subject to price controls,” he further ‘explained’.

In an attempt - of course, in vain as his kangkung example turned out to be - to treat his audience like simple kampung folk and employ trivial rises in the prices of ‘uncontrolled’ foodstuffs to try and conceal the point, which is that the regime is royally ripping-off the rakyat, as usual, by hiking the prices of everything from crony-monopolised foodstuffs to tolls on crony-controlled highways.

Therefore, I have to say that, much as I would like to personally take the credit for asking some God or Allah or other to make Najib and his entire BN regime ridiculous, they’ve done it all for themselves.

And even more ridiculously, the way Najib still talks so pompously about “going down to the ground” with deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin to monitor the prices of goods, reveals that despite being nothing but kangkung to increasing numbers of Malaysians, he still sees himself as some kind of heavenly being.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.