COMMENT | Alternate worlds are a staple of science-fiction novels and comics. It allows writers to take tired characters and narratives and birth them anew.

I am in the midst of China Mieville’s Hugo-winning ‘The City & The City’ - a noir fantasy murder mystery is the closest I can get to describing this unique piece; he wrote it for his terminally-ill mother because she loved crime stories.

Its basic premise has two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, existing in the same space (a breach in the space-thingamajig), and the residents of both facing severe punishment if they acknowledge the existence of the other city and its residents.

Mieville’s novel is a work of imaginative fiction.

My country is morphing into an alternate world. The signs of this detachment from reality as the rest of the world perceives it are growing.

Like Malaysia dropping in the latest global index of corruption. They got it wrong. It’s obvious they did not take into account the hundreds of civil servants in government ministries and departments who have spent part of a morning in recent months standing in a hall and swearing on their lifted hands they cannot be bought.

Solution: we create our own index of incorruptibility. Then the world will get the “real” picture.

Like the Australian police saying they are confiscating a few hundred thousand dollars of dirty laundry, and our police saying it’s clean, he sold a house to pay for the children’s education.

File suit to prove the provenance of the funds? The legal fees would be prohibitive. They can keep the money.

Why do people want to migrate to Australia? Education so costly, legal fees so high, and the authorities can simply say your hard-earned money is dirty and take it.

Also, how now the children’s education? Sell another house? More where that came from?

The “true news” says the officer in question was naïve about Australian laws.

How stupid of me. I thought the transfer of the amount via 50-over transactions under the A$10,000 limit that required notification of the Australian authorities showed an understanding of Australian law.

What yacht?

The clearest example of Malaysia splitting from the rest of the world is the interminable saga of 1MDB.

I don’t know why everyone was asking the attorney-general to do this and the government to do that when Jho Low’s floating fantasy was shackled in Bali.

Let’s not forget the basic point: for there to be a crime, there must be a victim.

And in Malaysia, there is no victim.

1MDB has not sounded an alarm about having been robbed.

The “true news” is there is no crime here. The authorities investigated - an open-and-shut case. Everything hunky-dory.

A business venture that went sour, we are told. It happens in business.

It could have succeeded, but you people lah, with all the fake news about corruption, frightened business people away.

Our fault lah? Not the man who headed this failed business venture?

So when can the people have a don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry, probably both, look at the accounts of the our-fault failure?

It speaks poorly of the profession of accountants when the government cannot find a single firm that is good with numbers and books.

You mean must wait for an RCI on 1MDB when… 

Jho Low who?

Meanwhile, in the alternate world, half-a-dozen legal jurisdictions have punished individuals and banks for being dhobis, money and assets have been seized.

But however they are resolved, the final legal conundrum is, crimes may be prosecuted and fines imposed, loot seized on other parts of the world, but in our world, there was no crime.

Jho Low who? He has nothing to do with 1MDB. His yacht has nothing to do with 1MDB.

The government obviously has faith in the maturity of Malaysians to deal with this new phase of our mental evolution - final freedom to see things as they are without the biased, prejudiced dictates of foreigners.

I am not sure a pleb like me is ready for this, probably too old to change my point of view.

I will just distract myself with the spat between the cultured minister and the MCA. Dissension within the ranks of BN makes a change from reading about the factions within the fractured opposition.

Entertaining political theatre. The minister, swaggering, strutting, unrepentant about his manners, his ‘bola’ obviously in view. MCA sulking and warning of the enemy underneath their blankets.

Laugh while we can folks. “True news” is coming. That’s when the government decides what is real, and we become like Patrick McGoohan in ‘The Prisoner’, trapped in a candy-fake land, all attempts to escape its bounds foiled by a giant, bouncing balloon that flops and blobs across the landscape…  

THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.