Dr. Mahathir Mohamad recently said that a non-Malay can someday sit in the very chair where he now cosily parks his own personage.

Experts in the Malaysian Constitution say there's nothing revelatory about this observation. The world continues to turn and the Klang River remains as damp as ever in the wake of his statement. But there have been sparks and reactions separated along the usual lines.

The English-language press played up this seemingly liberal stance as yet further proof that we've come a long way, baby, and that those Oppositionist crybabies won't be able to withstand, let alone match, this sweeping surge of egalitarian goodwill. "Put THAT in your ketayap and smoke it, Nik Aziz" pretty much sums up the editorial line.

The Malay press explained it rather differently. The always unfunny "Senyum Kambing" cartoon panel in Utusan Malaysia says it all: one guy passes on what the PM just said and his companion sagely replies, " Fahamlah maksud yang tersirat ." (Read between the lines).

What does this mean? As a faithfully masochistic follower of the cartoon, let me translate: It's a message to the Malays that if they don't buck up, their less halal counterparts will someday take over. This is meant to be a very bad thing. So the statement is presented as an implicit threat and a form of emotional blackmail rather than a hopeful sign that We Shall Overcome.

The Senyum Kambing way of thinking is pretty evident in the words of personalities such as Muhammad Muhammad Taib, who warned that the Malays must keep up with the times before anything horrible happens (the worst-case scenario is kept vague). Someone should tell him that "keeping up with the times" would necessarily include the basic comprehension that you don't need to pay for foreign houses in cash. But that's a different story.

It's always interesting to see how a particular statement can be spun to serve two different but complementary purposes. Interesting, but standard operating procedure in a country such as ours, with a divide-and-rule legacy that's too tempting to give up.