A Funny Recollection

Some time ago I had quite a funny joke posted in one of my blogs. It was borrowed from a Malaysian politician's blog and recently, I came across it. I said to myself, "Hell, it's a frustrating time for me-what with my car accident and consequently, a big dent in my finances and the loss of my passport!"

It was the first day of school and a new student named Chandrashekhar Subrahmanyam entered the fourth grade.

The teacher said, “Let’s begin by reviewing some American History. Who said, “Give me liberty , or give me death”?

She saw a sea of blank faces, except for Chandrashekhar, who had his hand up.

“Patrick Henry, 1775″ he said.

“Very good! Who said, 'Government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the Earth?'”

Again, no response except from Chandrashekhar. "Abraham Lincoln, 1863,″ said Chandrashekhar.

The teacher snapped at the class, “Class, you should be ashamed. Chandrashekhar, who is new to our country, knows more about its history than you do!”

She heard a loud whisper: “Fuck the Indians,”

“Who said that?” she demanded.

Chandrashekhar put his hand up. “General Custer, 1862.”

At that point, a student in the back said, “I’m gonna puke.”

The teacher glares around and asks, “All right! Now, who said that?”

Again, Chandrashekhar says, “George Bush to the Japanese Prime Minister, 1991.”

Now with almost a mob hysteria someone said, “You little shit. If you say anything else, I’ll kill you.”

Chandrashekhar frantically yells at the top of his voice, “Gary Condit to Chandra Levy, 2001.”

The teacher fainted. And as the class gathered around the teacher on the floor, someone said, “Oh shit, we’re fucked!”

And Chandrashekhar said quietly, “George Bush, Iraq , 2005.”

My apology to the great leader of the free world for mentioning him in this joke. I still respect him.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL!

I've been twice to the States-legally, I may add-and fallen in love with the friendly folks and the beautiful country there...On this birthday anniversary, I sincerely wish the great country, "Happy Birthday!" Way to go, baby!

Here's my poem, extracted from Stanzas from the Grands Chartreuse:

But where the road runs near the stream,
Oft through the trees they catch a glance
Of passing troops in the sun's beam-
Pennon, and plume, and flashing lance!
Forth to the world those soldiers fare.
To life, to cities, and to war!

While the dark forces of evil, desperado Osama bin laden and his jihadist attempt to destroy it, the rest of the world needs the U.S.A. We can only imagine how the world would have turned out to be if Great Britain had not granted it its independence and managed to crush its cause for freedom... A backward world filled with miserable slaves to despotism, fascism, communism, totalitarian and theocratic regimes...

Here is a favorite article borrowed from the BBC which I wish to share with my dear visitors here. It first came out on 2nd May, 2007. Many, many thanks for your loan, BBC. I wasn't taught how to attribute loans from the net so I do apologise if it's a form of plagiarism...

Washington diary: Land of ideas

By Matt Frei BBC News, Washington

How many ideas has the US allowed to flourish that would otherwise have withered on the vine?

I am happy to report to you that the Oxford Union, in its infinite wisdom, has allowed America to continue existing.

After a raucous debate in front of a packed house, the motion - "this House regrets the Founding of America" - was overwhelmingly squashed.

My colleague Jonah Goldberg, from the National Review, made a witty and punchy case for the birthright of America, lambasting the Union for a motion that "sounded like a bad joke".

Peter Rodman, a former US assistant secretary of defence, entered the fray with patrician aplomb and, for what it's worth, this was some of my contribution to joust for the country where I keep my toothbrush and pay my taxes:

It is very easy to find Americans who disagree with its current direction. But you'll be hard pressed to come across those who regret its very existence in a fit of collective self-annihilation. The confusion of one with the other strikes me as the fundamental flaw of this motion.

Let's say you didn't need to regret the founding of America, because it had never been founded. How different might our lives look? We would not be listening to George Bush's fluent Texan. We would never have had the benefit of Donald Rumsfeld one-liners or clogged our arteries on a Big Mac.

But what music would we be listening to on our iPods? Would it be German marching songs or Russian ballads? Would we even have an iPod?

Yes, the beloved iPod was designed by a British citizen, Jonathan Ive, a son of Chingford, Essex. But would his design have changed the world of music if it hadn't been for Apple, an American company, based in Cupertino, California?

Freedom to dream

So much for iPods... what about ideas? How different would the world be without the Bill of Rights? What about Thomas Jefferson?

It's hard to imagine life without TV series like the Sopranos

The Declaration of Independence was the quintessential treatise of self-determination. If America had never been founded it would have remained unwritten. And who can imagine life without the Dumb Waiter, another Jefferson innovation?

The list goes on and on (and I apologise for any omissions): Thomas Edison, who had 1,093 patents for inventions in his name; Henry Ford; the Wright brothers; Bill Gates; the Boeing corporation; Desperate Housewives; The Sopranos and, of course, SpongeBob SquarePants.

As a TV correspondent, I would be out of a job. The television was invented over decades by a German, a Brit and a Russian but their ideas all came together in the middle of Middle America.

The United States created an environment in which inventive minds had access to easy credit, a willing market and the freedom to dream and create without fear of prosecution or recrimination.

As the writer and poet John Ciardi put it: "The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself"!

Europe's offspring

If we regret the founding of the US we regret a thoroughly European creation. If George III hadn't been as mad as a hatter, if the Redcoats had been more in touch with the feelings of His Majesty's subjects in the colonies, the English colony of Jamestown might never have given way to Yorktown, where 174 years later the English crown was finally defeated in the War of Independence.

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America Bill Clinton

To be against the founding of America is not to be original but to continue a long line of misguided bigots who always resented the birth of the US. In the late 18th Century, the eminent Dutch scientist Cornelius De Pauw wrote that everything from America was "either degenerate or monstrous". He was considered the foremost expert on the New World of his time and, like many critics of America, he never went there once.

Then there's the Oscar Wilde quip, plagiarised by former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau: "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation". Anti-Americanism is as old as America and it continues to miss the point.

America did not come from nowhere. It was an offspring of Europe, the step-child of a corrupt, moribund post-feudal system. America encapsulated the principles of the Enlightenment - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - wrapped them in the pursuit of happiness, underpinned them with an inalienable right and turned an IDEA into a country.

It took the missteps of the French and the English revolutions and it made them work.

Yes, there were terrible mistakes - the gross hypocrisy of slavery, segregation and McCarthyism, to name a few. But America found and keeps finding the solutions to its mistakes. It is a giant, rolling social experiment in constant pursuit of self-correction. As Bill Clinton once said: "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."

In America the idea was ragged, rough and imperfect but it kept growing, it kept evolving and, if this isn't a vote of confidence, it kept attracting people, millions of them - Dutch pilgrims, Russian Jews, persecuted Egyptians, hungry Mexicans, uprooted Kurds, homeless Armenians, unloved and underpaid British film stars, now luxuriating in Hollywood. Ask them if they regret the founding of America!

Real promise

The US is a nation built not on ethnicity, not on religion, not even on history but on an idea.

Many Americans see Guantanamo detentions as a big mistake

Not only does this make America different, I would argue it also makes it ideally suited for the 21st Century. We live in a globalised world in which national boundaries are less and less relevant and the citizenship of ideas is more and more defining.

Al-Qaeda also strives for a world without borders, a trans-national entity based on ideas, which a majority of Muslims find as unpalatable as we do. So, ask yourself and be honest: where would you rather live - the Caliphate or California?

We Europeans created America and to regret this is to engage in a colossal act of self-denial verging on self-mutilation. We have a stake in its survival and its success and we ought to nurture it, not bring it to its knees or delight in its misfortunes. We can criticise its leaders without regretting its existence.

The reality of America may be vexing, frustrating, infuriating and puzzling but its promise is no less real and, given the right voice, should be no less inspiring.

Guantanamo Bay, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and yes, so many aspects of the war in Iraq, were big mistakes. But these are aspects of current foreign policy, not part of the nation's DNA. They are lamented as much inside the US as outside. And that too speaks for America!

To quote the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington: "America is not a lie; it is a disappointment." But what is worse than being disappointed? It is not even to know what you're missing.

The Eleventh Hour Game...

At the eleventh hour...

a) the ill-fated courageous American firefighters were either still climbing up the stairs or rescuing some of the thousands of trapped World Trade Centre innocent civilians whose buildings had been hit by two aeroplanes cowardly hijacked by al Quaeda terrorists;

b) the sixth Global Interfaith Conference to be held in Malaysia and chaired by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, following the September 11 attacks by Islamic terrorists were abruptly cancelled by the Malaysian government under Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi;

c) one of the most sensational murder trials in Malaysian history involving a shot Mongolian translator, Altantuya Shaariibuu and the use of extremely rare special explosives to blow her to pieces by elite special forces commandos, Chief Inspector Azilah Hadri and Corporal Sirul Azhar Umar and the alleged abatement by University of London graduate, Abdul Razak Baginda, allegedly her lover, a high profile socio-economic think tank organization founder and consultant and a prominent adviser to the Deputy Prime Minister, was abruptly postponed due to the astonishing reason that the prosecutor and the sitting judge were seen playing badminton earlier;

d) the Malaysian Prime Minister, a widower, Abdullah Badawi suddenly announced on a Wednesday he had found someone, an Eurasian convert, Jeanna Abdullah, whom he would be marrying on the coming Saturday;

e) the ex-premier, Mahathir Mohammad announced he was going away from Malaysia on the 18th June, 2007 and the whole of Malaysia trembles because the COSMIC JOKER somewhere above us loves to play jokes on Malaysia whenever this awesome mortal is not around;

f) the main Opposition party, the Democratic Action Party (DAP) called for an inquiry into allegations by a Malaysian prince, Raja Petra Kamaruddin in his hugely popular blog, Malaysia Today on the close collaboration between organized crime syndicates and the Malaysian Police, including the highest cop in the land, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP);

g) the IGP hastily called for an urgent meeting of officers resulting in them declaring their support for him in the face of allegations;

h) will anything extraordinary happen today as the sensational Altantuya murder case resumes once again on this day?

i) will anything else sensational happen in Malaysia?

International Ghosts in Comics (Part 1)

I've decided to share with all of you, my dear visitors from around the world, some of the ghosts in the comics that I have. Some of them are funny; others are terrifying. The ghosts will be displayed in the days and weeks to come.

As an afterthought, you might imagine what sort of chap-I mean ghost-you may like to be if you had a chance!

For a start, here's a funny Yankee ghost in the States who harbors bitterness against the British whom he fought against during the War of Independence....

The ghost is outraged that a former colonial visitor, in the form of a British ambassador is coming over to his home!

The rest of this humorous yankee ghost story will be shown here tomorrow.

JAPS VS. UNCLE SAM AT WORK

This hilarious cartoon by Oliphant came out in the business paper, The International Herald Tribune dated March 11, 1992.

The two little fellows at the bottom are also having a conversation:

Bowing Jap: Ah so-Perhaps you have baseball team for sale?
Yank: I can get you a great deal on the Washington Senators!