A Game of Hearts and Minds

It was the storm before the calm.

The rains drenched Kuala Lumpur just as they - the predecessor and successor - nearly met again for the second time in three weeks.

That meeting between Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Mahathir Mohamad was supposed to be next week but the successor went to visit the ailing predecessor at the National Heart Institute today.

Does it matter?

Yes it does to those who peruse tea-leaves to figure out what will happen in next week's annual UMNO talk-fest and the implications of what was expected to happen before Mahathir suffered a mild heart attack early today.

Except that one of the pundits is locked up at the moment for matters of the heart and unable to give us a piece of his mind.

Away from that story that still percolates through circles that think they matter, the UMNO talk-fest looks less likely to blow up and instead end up in a love-fest of sorts with get-well messages for Mahathir and professions of loyalty to Abdullah.

Nothing in it for the rest of us out of the tangled spaghetti that is the UMNO network.

And so continues the game of hearts and minds between the predecessor and the successor for the soul of the party, race, religion and the nation.

Except, its the economy, Mat! that they should be most concerned about.

Not the economy of the UMNOputras still dependent on government contracts to fund their opulent lifestyle while the rest are kept at society's margins - falling into the cracks of the economy like the leakages that keep the rich richer.

We are talking about the economy of the rest of us - the bigger group marginalised into the field of little in a land of plenty.

Purchasing power is down no thanks to fuel and water rates going up.

We pay so much for the piddle that they call broadband.

We get paid so little for the labour that they call work.

Instead, the annual UMNO talk-fest will focus on the economy, education, culture and what else that ails the Malay society - something they have been gabbing about for so long that it no longer matters to the sons of the soil.

They just want a slice of the pie already cut up among the elite and not be the pawns in the eternal game of hearts and minds between warlords and wizards from all sides of the aisle.

And lets not forget the rest of us Malaysians too, whether online or offline.

The UMNO talk-fest will ignore all that.

And we will all be that much poorer, literally and figuratively.