Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Calling All Animal Lovers

    We have recently learned that our cat, who still lives in the US, has been causing his surrogate owner respiratory problems.  When we left, we entrusted him to two good friends who have done a fantastic job of looking after him, but now it appears that he needs a new parent or set of parents.  So we are sending out a call to all friends, relatives, and well-wishers living between Atlanta and Boston–anyone want to have a cat for five months?

    For those of you who don’t know, our cat’s name is Voltron, named after the flying space robot that dominated morning cartoons throughout the 1980s.  (guess who picked out the name-jm)  Just think, for five whole months you could be the proud owner of a cat with the greatest name of all time.  Besides his awesome name, he really is the best cat ever, and it’s not just us who say that.  His surrogate owners have been extremely happy to have him as part of the family, aside from the sneezing and bronchial attacks.  He is well-behaved, extremely cute, and friendly too.  He has successfully lived alone, but he has also successfully lived with up to two small dogs and one cat at the same time (that’s four animals total…he was fine with it).  He is an inside cat, as we fear he might not be smart enough not to play in the street.  He is also neutered and up-to-date on all of his vaccinations.  He still has his front claws, but he is very good about not using them on clothes or skin.  This is one of the things that makes us most proud of about him.  When playing, he likes to swat, not claw.  For his clawing pleasure, he has a small rug that we will provide.  Voltron is also very sociable around his owners, but a little shy around groups of strangers.  So, when you have a party or a bunch of guests, he’ll stay out of the way.  But, when you get home from work after a long day, he’ll immediately come on your lap and purr like crazy.

    Voltron comes with lots of love to give out to a new owner.  He also comes with all of his toys; accoutrements; a blank check for food, litter, and care until September 1, 2005; and the eternal gratefulness of his owners in Malaysia.  Many of you may not have met him before, so we have included several pictures.  We had to include three because we couldn’t narrow them down.

    I know that this is a bit of a silly post, but believe us, the subject is absolutely serious.  If you are interested or have a good friend who is, you can email us or just post a comment.  We hope to hear from some of you soon.

  • Of Crazy Cabbies and Positive Discrimination

    The other day we were coming home from the gym in a taxi, which we do every day.  We hopped in, and the driver seemed nice enough, a nice Indian chap.  He asked what we were doing in Malaysia, a couple things like that.  He seemed particularly interested in my (TP) study of Malaysian politics.  Pretty soon I mentioned that I was studying Mahathir’s policies during the Asian Financial Crisis.  Well, he immediately exploded in a twenty-minute rant about his utter hatred for Mahathir.  We ended up driving slowly down the side of the highway while he screamed about how "that a-hole ruined this country!" and "don’t you dare say anything nice about him!"  (He didn’t say "a-hole," of course, but this is a family blog.)

    At one point he picked up a newspaper on the side of his car (this is while driving slowly down the busy highway, answering his phone, and keeping an eye on us in the backseat so we got his point) and showed us that he had taken the time to scribble out Mahathir’s face from an article about him meeting with Nelson Mandela.  Every once in awhile he would turn around and say "I’m sorry lady, but that mutualfunder made the Malays stupid."

    What’s his complaint, really?  Just another democrat upset that he lives in a dictatorship?  Probably a bit more complicated than that.  Malaysia’s complex ethnic makeup is no joke, of course.  What makes this ethnic mix so important is the fact that politics is tightly tied to ethnicity and redistribution.  Under the New Economic Policy, from 1970 to 1990, the government enacted a number of stringent policies aimed at eliminating the identfication of race with economic status and eliminating poverty.  What this meant was restructuring society to give ethnic Malays a greater share of the economic pie.  Under the British and in the first years of independence, Malaysia had a fragile agreement that the Malays got to control politics while the Chinese got to run the economy.  This is of course a simplification, but not that far from the truth.  We’ll expand on this more later, but politics since 1969, when racial riots between Chinese and Malays led to a suspension of the fake parliament and introduction of even more heavy-handed anti-democratic measures, has been a struggle to balance the demands of Malays for greater economic participation with the need to protect economic growth, largely determined by the investments of non-Malays.

    So where does this Indian taxi driver fit in?  In many ways, Indians have gotten the worst of the deal.  The worst educated and poorest group in Malaysia is Indian women.  Many Indians, imported to work the rubber plantations in Malaya under British, remain in poor rural areas.  However, as they are not Malay or bumiputra (meaning "sons of the soil," a term for all so-called indigenous Malaysians), they experienced the same discrimination that Chinese experienced.  While the NEP has created a new Malay middle class and a number of new superrich Malay tycoons, Indians–in many ways occupying the same socio-economic niche as the Malays after independence–have received little attention.  Our driver, for example, was fired from his job in the 1970s as a doorman because Mahathir wanted all doormen in Malaysian hotels to be Malay (or so our driver claims). 

    The term in Malaysia for affirmative action, meaning the promotion of Malay interests through special government programs that hold bumiputra equity in companies and give favorable treatment to Malays in education, politics, business, etc., is positive discrimination.  Talk about a loaded term.