Saturday, June 16, 2012

Genocide, Gaga, and an accidental target for my irritation

If I wanted to read crap I'd have bought MAD, not a newspaper.
The news, it has been said, is a most effective depressant. If you have no idea what I'm getting at, get your friendly neighborhood drug dealer to sell you a stash of LSD, and have it three times a day, after meals. Reading the news will have the opposite effect of that, whether or not you take it before or after meals.


That being said, news doesn't really have a depressing effect on me. Sure, Roger Federer might have gotten knocked out of yet another tournament. Or the football team I vaguely support simply because they decorate my sneakers didn't win a trophy this year. Or that Utada Hikaru won't be having a concert in Malaysia. The last one wasn't in the news, but it's also less likely than you taking three servings of LSD to test my suggestion in para one.

What news does do to me on a regular basis is irritate me. It does it rather well too, really. Just yesterday there was this letter in a free paper by the VP of the Muslim Lawyers Association of Malaysia regarding the state of the... stateless (pun unintended) Rohingyan people of Myanmar.

In general he does make some valid points, like the fact (?) that 'Rohingyas are dying in the thousands'- this could be an exaggeration for all I know, but never mind- and that Malaysia should think twice about supporting Myanmar's status in ASEAN (The regional equivalent of the EU, but more like a drug-runners cartel) and not pretend that a member of the glorious fraternity is purging an entire culture/tribe.

Everything's fine, up to this point. Because the Rohingyas are in such a spot and no one is doing much to help them, he calls upon the 'Muslim Ummah' to save them, naturally because they are Muslims too. Even this is fine, never mind if he's attempting to emotionally, culturally, theologically blackmail Muslims everywhere into pitying the Rohingyas.

Even that is fine. What bothers me is this one line: "the Malaysian Government must offer every human resource at its command to organize and defend the Rohingya people as they may wish to be organized and defended, as must be..." Well well. Twenty-three years living here, and finally it has come home that somewhere out there there is someone self-righteous twit who wants to turn me into a piece of his machine. Sure, I know very well that there's always the threat of war and conscription, but this is the first time the feeling's come this close to home.

Removing my selfish paranoia from the equation, why the need to bring religion into the mix? Was the writer so peeved with human society for failing to make noise for the Rohingyas that he had to summon up a Venn portion to do the job instead? Oh well.

...on a lighter note, and almost entirely irrelevant, some Thai parliamentarian filed a police report for Lady Gaga's twitter post (I refuse to use the bastardized and misspelled adjective 'twit' as a verb) saying that she wanted "to get lost in a lady market and buy a fake Rolex".

This reminded me of the time when Martha Stewart commented that Malaysian rivers look like teh tarik (milk tea, it does look like the part), and a lot of people (politicians, mostly) got rather upset at her for telling the truth- that regular Malaysians have been joking about for ages, even.

It just goes to show- idiots everywhere, eh?

2 comments:

  1. I hear ya. I try to avoid the sensationalism that is the mass media...they are corporate sponcered tabloids nowadays :(

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    1. Stinks that they pretend that they aren't, though. At least UK's 'Sun' has it's page three babes- if you're gonna be a tabloid, admit it proudly, I say:)

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