BARCELONA BOMBING

BAGHDAD BOMBING

BENGHAZI BOMBING

BALI BOMBING

BOSTON BOMBING

and now...

BUKIT BINTANG BOMBING ...

Here is the bane of an open society and one that is moving down the ladder of a failing state, FAILING STATE, in which the road to lawlessness is already paved.

No - I am not a pessimist and a ‘worst-case-scenario’ analyst. Futuristics may be the lens I am using now to look at trends, the movement of the ‘futures-wheels of society’, karma of postmodernity, the impact of the evolution of complex systems, the view of Chaos Theory, the transcultural flow of ideas be they violent or peaceful as they travel instantaneously across time and space, and most importantly as Malaysians, what we reap from what we sowed and what we are experiencing as a karma of a global city.

“We are living in interesting times...”, chairperson Mao Zedong once said, citing a famous Chinese saying - indeed the time is now with almost 30 million people living in a highly complex society that is still trying to mediate the contradictions of a capitalist system and a government that, not only tries to manage chaos out of order, meet the needs of the microbial-multitude of demands made by groups, but also this - a government that is becoming so corrupt and corrupting and crowned itself as the Untouchable and prone to its own implosion and controlled internal demolition yet able to sustain itself by building rationale and structures of a defence system of a survival mode that imprisons its governors inter-generationally.

And we now have a classic problem of a hypermodern society, an open society threatened by its enemies, as Karl Popper would, say. The enemies are home-grown, borne out a strange brew of an Oktoberfest of the excesses and the sane-ness of religious and cultural philosophies.

BUKIT BINTANG - the Times Square of Cyber-Hyper-Malaya. Her Trafalgar Square. Her Hatyai Square. Her Jalan Wong Ah Fook Square in ‘Sin City Johor Baru’ (from a poem I once wrote that got the Johor government excited).

That glitzy, red-lightsy,

excitement inducing street of a global city,

and a clone of a clone of a Times Square of New York City -

that Bintang Walk of a semiotics of a city

of all kinds of future possibility

culture of red lights gone crazy,

people worshipping neon gods unrepentantly,

Of gangs from many nations and principalities  

Of many businesses done openly and by secret societies

By people rejected by their societies - from Yemen to Yugoslavia and the Filipino district of Makati

By those from North America to Nigeria to the Bangladeshi and the Pakistanis

scene of urban decay and homelessness of a consequence of a system of international slavery

and of  human trafficking framed as ‘progress’ needed for Malaysia to be defined as a ‘high-income society’

Aha - these rhyme and I am happy.

BOMBS in BUKIT BINTANG. Bombs over Baghdad.

If it is gang-triad related, in Bukit Bintang we have got to do what Lee Kuan Yew did in the 1960s to round up all the triads and send them to jail mercilessly.

If it is al-Qaeda and Islamic State-related, we have got a bigger problem that will have no end to the story of Malaysia - of a 1,001-Nights of a Rubaiyat of Wall-Street type of forthcoming city violence, urban terrorism, and religious-flavoured chaos of a magnitude a ‘foreign intervention’ would be necessary when it comes to maintaining regional/South-East Asian security in this Age of Neo-Pax-Americana of and ‘Asia-as-Pivot’ ideology.

I don’t know... do you?

This is my morning-after complaint. I hope you respected readers share my concern of a beautiful country going crazy.

I leave you with these verse of my beloved city...

‘Sin City, Jay Bee’

Azly Rahman

Where have all those memories gone

Of the city that never sleeps

Sin-filled you are

... Offering life’s panorama

A Pandora’s box of a lushness of emotions

Jay Bee

You may be called a city of filth

Of gang wars and transvestites galore

Of rock kapak geniuses conceived immaculately

From the womb of Papa Rock

Ahhh New Johor... New York you may want to be

Thou shall never attain that notoriety

Sweet city sin city

Celebrating the velocity of money

It is there I knew love’s inner beauty

As we walked up and down the Lido Beach

whose middle name is ‘filthy’

Ohh Jay Bee... you are a soul that is one with me

Jay Bee

Sin city

where politics stink

where corruption gets a nice daily wink

where the power elites are the underground kings

where the poor are hoodwinked

where the children of the working class roam the streets in motorcycles with bling bling

where the smell of ganja filled the air like a pissed-on fermented drink

Ahh Jay Bee

City of Sins

Your hunchback of Tanjung Puteri is dead and gone

Committed seppuku at the sight of what has become

Of you sin city Jay Bee

Si Bongkok died of a death he long-willed for

As the sight of the crooked bridge broke his heart that exploded with a roar

Ahhh... thanks to the Johor Corridor

And the Disney of Nusajaya Johoreans adore

Sin city

Jay Bee

Your economy, like a Segget River, stinks till eternity

Love is gone

Of the one my heart held on

As I walked countless miles

Along the Lido beach

Time has not been kind

To this city that never sleeps

To this sin city

That weeps

The yesteryears of the loss of pride that run deep

Love is gone

The deal is sealed

Sin city you are now sold

To the forked tongued nationalists grown old like ageing Disneys

Sin city

Jay Bee

You were once mine

You will no longer be

DR AZLY RAHMAN, born in Singapore and grew up in Johor Baru, holds a Columbia University (New York City) doctorate in International Education Development and Masters degrees in four areas: Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He has taught more than 40 courses in six different departments and has written more than 350 analyses on Malaysia. His teaching experience in Malaysia and the United States spans over a wide range of subjects, from elementary to graduate education. He has edited and authored six books; Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, Present, Future (2009), Thesis on Cyberjaya: Hegemony and Utopianism in a Southeast Asian State (2012), The Allah Controversy and Other Essays on Malaysian Hypermodernity (2013), Dark Spring: Ideological Roots of Malaysia’s GE13 (2013),

a first Malay publication Kalimah Allah Milik Siapa?: Renungan dan Nukilan Tentang Malaysia di Era Pancaroba (2014), and Controlled Chaos: Essays on Mahathirism, Multimedia Super Corridor and Malaysia's 'New Politics' (forthcoming 2014). He currently resides in the United States where he teaches courses in Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Political Science, and American Studies. Twitter , blog .