E.T. go home!
- Bumper sticker in New York City
When I was a child in primary school back the early 1970s, there was an alien invasion in my school, Sekolah Temmengong Abdul Rahman, Johor Bahru. A spaceship landed. It was a UFO.
During recess, hundreds of kids ran around the soccer field screaming as if they were hearing the last 10 minutes of the broadcast of Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds’. There was total chaos.
I recall falling on my face as I jumped across the huge monsoon drain that separates the field from a building leading to the classrooms. I tried to run away from being attacked and taken into the spaceship, into a world of weightlessness in which teh tarik becomes teh terbang.
I almost fell into the drain and was helped by my best buddy, Fook Shiang, a bespectacled chap who would roam around with me even into the Chinese graveyard on the north side of the school. I was curious about what a Chinese ghost looked like, having been quite well-versed in how Malay ghosts are presented.
Years later I discovered that ghosts, supernatural beings, and aliens are actually big business in Corporate America. Halloween is a great celebration of spiritual awakening – wherein America danced it to the tune of Michael Jackson's ‘Thriller’.
In the case of the Johor sighting, kids were talking about seeing a spaceship landing in the middle of the field and about children being shot with laser guns that left them with red spots, just like those you get when bitten by red ants.
The invasion and the attack by the aliens on the kingdom of Johor did not stop in the school field. Two of my classmates saw battalions of little creatures (actually not seen by the naked eyes), the size of red ants, marching across the classroom as we were ready to resume class. Some claimed to have been shot in the legs and thighs.
In broad daylight we were attacked - in an age when TV was still black and white. That was almost 10 years after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, in a race with the Soviets. That was the beginning of technological fantasy - that we will one day colonise space when we have devastated the Earth enough.
The incident at my school, which I heard was reported by Utusan Melayu, happened almost 50 years before we sent our first space tourist/cosmonaut/space participant aboard the Russian rocket. A giant step for Malaysian but a small step in our understanding of spaces of knowledge and power. Here’s why.
Outer space, inner spaces
We go in and out of spaces and create these as well. We let the entire nation become mesmerised by our ability to launch a man into space. This could be good education for our kids, so that they may get hooked on rocket science.
But science ought to also teach us how to think rationally, promote free inquiry, cultivate academic freedom, address economic disparities, solve our educational problems, haul corrupt leaders to justice easily, how to recognise the rise of totalitarianism, solve the issue of our dispossessed and violent youth, and most of all decolonise our minds and let us live a life free from being colonised by the spaces of knowledge and power.
Science ought to be democratised to teach citizens to live in republic that is founded upon scientific socialism and transcultural ethics. But we are still colonised.
We let aliens colonise our living rooms; through TV programmess we allow Hollywood to dictate how we should invent our reality. We saw the 1961 Apollo blast-off and thought that only when we have sent a native to the moon would we be recognised as an advanced nation.
We are misled by the notion of technological advancement. We have not learned what science for social purposes means and we have not delved into the philosophy of science for the advancement of the Third World nation.
We saw Pakistan triumphant in testing its nuclear bomb near Kashmir on May 28, 1998 through the achievement of Nobel Laureate in Physics Abdus Salam, and we thought that an Islamic nation had progressed.
Little did we know how Pakistan has evolved as evident in the rule of General Pervez Musharraf. The nation's Nobel Prize-winning scientific achievement has its contradiction. There is so much disparity in the national-cognitive evolution of Pakistan.
We must get Malaysia to come down to earth and look at the reality of empty spaces and the spaces in knowledge and power that we have created over the last 50 years.
At present we are looking at Outer Space as escapism and a national fascination and alteration of consciousness - so that we may be made to forget the harshness of the daily lives of the people. We create newer grounds for play and fantasy.
Now for example, the Johor Kingdom is heading towards another fantasy world - the Disney Project. It will become Johor Darul Disney and Sekolah Temmengong Abdul Rahman will become the Malaysian office of the American project called Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
Critical thinking is all the more needed to equip the next generation to ‘come down’ from space and through science and technology, build a socially meaningful paradigm of economic development that benefits all races so that to evolve into a nation that prides on bridging the gap between the filthy rich and the abject poor.
Who benefits?
The world around us and inside of us continues to become more complex. We continue to be given bread and circuses. We continue to be mesmerised by inventions, institutions, and installations that are slowly killing our critical sensibility and eroding our ability to analyse realities that have been invented by those in power.
We have been turned into alienated beings amused to death with things we do not need. Our economy has been transformed beyond our control - and we think that this is the only way to ‘progress’.
We think ‘progress’ is linear, following what Walt Rostow suggests in his book ‘The Stages of Growth’. The 1960s brought us the hippy movement and the World Bank formula, a precursor of the Reaganomics ethos of the ‘magic of the marketplace’.
We were trapped into believing that modernisation means liberation. Now that we are in the post-modern era, we cannot turn back unless we revolt against the rule of instrumental totalitarianism. It has to be a revolution of the mind and a reconstruction of our consciousness.
With those many little ‘super corridors’ being installed in major states, what will ‘human development’ mean to us? Where is the concept of ‘development - of the people, by the people, and for the people’?
Let us come back to Earth and be grounded in the social reality of things.
Great site, very informative
Posted by: suti | May 15, 2008 at 02:21 AM
What do you think of this http://samsonblinded.org/blog/dont-buy-reformism.htm ?
Posted by: Nikol | October 24, 2007 at 09:33 PM