A Note To The Americans...

Listening to: (see below)


Anyway, before I start...

If you ever do any of the following:

1. Drive at night down the streetlit roads of a city, any city be it Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Chicago, New York, or even Penang...

or

2. Relax at night on your sofa, with a glass of Jack+Coke/Jager+Sprite/Gin+Tonic/50-50 Apple Juice+Sprite (if you don't drink).


...then a good album to listen to would be Interpol's 'Turn On The Bright Lights', or 'Antics'.



Back to the topic. If any of you Americans are reading this, I'd like to congratulate you all on the recent win of the Democrats in the recent election. You folks sure taught those Republicans and the Bush-Dick duo a lesson. You know... those guys who have held power for too long and had gotten drunk with it.

I was in the States from 2000 until last year and was in the midst of the '04 Presidential elections where sadly... Kerry lost (you folks should've stuck with Dean). I could still remember the dejection of my American pals... who along with me acting as a "foreign observer", had gathered in a friend's dormitory room that day to watch the results... along with bags of doritos and beer/soda. The concentration of disappointment of 11 odd people cramped in a dirty 15X10ft room was overwhelming.

By the way, as fucked up your electoral system is, at least you have a good chance of removing arrogant, lousy politicians who abuse their power. I would like to borrow it for a little while. You see, we have a little problem in Malaysia.... no wait, make it a big problem. For example, we have a councillor in my hometown who built a big massive mansion without registering it... on land cheaply obtained somehow through devious means. Instead of punishing him and demanding he resigns all his political positions, the Toyol has decided to go easy on him. Now that the media circus has moved on to the Mongolian explosion (which has nothing to do with a sudden interest in Genghis Khan), it appears he's gonna get away with it.

We also had another politician who blatantly interfered with Customs after they withheld the shipment of some merchandise imported by his own company. And he had also complained publicly that the Customs had at one time, refused to reserve the best luxury cars for him to buy... at a very cheap price. All this complaining about not getting the nice things in life which he wants, while forgetting that he was elected firstplace to serve the people.

These two are just the tip of the iceberg... there are many people like these in government; from the seats in Parliament to the city councils. And perhaps the universities too.

While in the States, I've seen Governors, aldermans, city council representatives, senators, (but not Presidents, sadly) step down immediately after their shenanigans were exposed. But not so in Malaysia, where they make all sorts of lame excuses and hope the furor will pass before the next election, where the electorate would have hopefully forgotten about it and start voting with their checkbooks in mind.

So we need to clean house. Any chance we could borrow your system for awhile? Please?