On June 2, the Publications and Quranic Texts Division of the Home Ministry raided my T-shirt stall at Central Market for the third time and seized 83 shirts they claim are ‘obscene and contain communist elements'. You can see the images they confiscated here .
That the ministry is clamping down on items they allege glorify (Chinese) communism at the very moment our beloved leader is grinning for photo calls with the flat caps in Beijing is flash- bulb irony so blinding, it requires uncommon talent to miss it. The ministry, of course, missed it by a mile.
Not many people know this but the lightweight, low-level officers of the Publications and Quranic Texts Division are entrusted with absolute power to make on-the-spot judgments about what is obscene, subversive, subliminally seditious, distasteful, unartistic, drug-drenched, communist, radical, Swedish.
Er..okay, maybe not Swedish, but apart from that they can pass instant judgment on just about everything else under the sun. Worse, having judged, they are empowered to confiscate anything that offends their fragile sensibilities.
They can say your cupboard is a badly-disguised coffin, your toothbrush is a sex aid or that your plastic KL Tower statuette so thoughtfully bought for you by Aunt Mimi is plainly a male sexual organ.
Having so proclaimed, they have the unchallengeable right to then cart everything away. In a blink of an eye, one is judged, juried and executed by the same single entity. Issues of abuse of power loom large.
You only have to click on the link above to realise that the ministry tends towards irrational excitability in their interpretations, betraying the government's impatience with the mildest satire and discomfort with the freedom of expression that is our guaranteed constitutional right.
What this means in practice is that the ministry has a bunch of people running around seizing things under the flimsiest pretext. They took half my stock - three times - but they could just as easily have taken it all. If you run a business selling things, they have an unquestionable right in law to do so and there is not much you can do about it.
When a government deliberately denies a citizen the right to make a living, it had better have weighty, considered reasons for doing so. Here, we allow low-level staffers to snatch away our rice bowls on a whim, without warning. Accountability, reason and judiciousness be damned.
By natural progression, since the images are now presumably ‘illegal', are we to see enforcement squads jumping out from behind lampposts to rip T-shirts bearing similar images off the backs of recalcitrant wearers?
Will we have ‘T-shirt evaluators' sitting alongside the H1N1 scanners at airports and entry points around the country? Will tourists be warned to leave their Viagra at home?
You may think that the images have no artistic of comedic merit. You may think them stupid and juvenile. But to say that they glorify communism, are obscene and illegal, is really stretching it.
And, surely, confiscation on those grounds is wholly unwarranted.
Are we, as Malaysians, so sanguine that we accept the government has a right to intrude in such a way into our lives, compromise our professional integrity and devastate our businesses on nothing more than one person's inadequate understanding of the word ‘obscene'?
