So what DID happen on May 16, 1969?

Technorati tags: Humor, May 16, 1969, Freudian Slip, Jimi Hendrix, Morgan Freeman, Ahmad Mahyuddin Abdul Manaf, The CowHead Collective

While Marina M. quite rightly doesn’t want to give these folks anymore airtime than they already have gotten, Walski would respectfully like to differ. Sometimes it’s important to see just how some human specimens like the Badan Bertindak Perpaduan Ummah carry themselves, in order to ascertain whether or not they are indeed the ‘First Class’ kind of people they proudly claim to be.

First Class feudalistic idiots probably… So much so, even high-level UMNO personalities like Nazri Aziz came out and condemned their grandstanding (via Malaysiakini). Walski doesn’t have a particularly high opinion of Nazri, but let’s give the guy credit when credit is due.

The tongue-slip you hear at time-marker 5:03 about the “historical event of May 16th” is what Walski would classify as a Freudian Slip – saying something else other than intended, but something that is embedded deeply in the subconscious.

May 16th 1969 – or any year – must have some deep significance, so much so that it contributed to the Freudian Slip.

So, exactly what DID happen on May 16th, 1969? 
(tracing the historically insignificant, and more, in the full post)

According to various news reports, including this one from The Malay Mail, Ahmad Mahyuddin Abdul Manaf, one of The CowHead Collective, and the one who slipped Freudian in the video, is 36 years of age. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out, therefore, that he was born well after May 16th, 1969 – more like in 1973, in fact.

Excluding the possibility of some genetic memory transfer phenomenon, why is that date so important then? Walski, for one, had to find out.

Scouring through the Internet revealed some interesting results. Apparently a number of historical events did occur on that day.

One of the events, which Walski personally found very interesting, was that it was on that day that the Russian space probe Venera 5 landed on Venus. This, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of Ketuanan Melayu, or why non-Malays should be classified as 2nd class citizens. Apart, of course, from the fact that Venus is the 2nd rock from the Sun (Earth being the 3rd – hence the title of the popular sitcom). But that’s too big of a mental stretch to have any relevance. Even for Walski.

May 16th, 1969 was also the day, half-way across the globe, that The Jimi Hendirx Experience performed at the Baltimore Civic Center, in Baltimore, Maryland. Ketuanan Rock is very different from Malay Supremacy – not to mention significantly more existentially rewarding – so that couldn’t have been it, either. Incidentally, is it just Walski, or if Jimi Hendrix had not died in 1970, he’d be a spitting image of Academy Award winning actor Morgan Freeman?

Original images from here and here, respectively

Or is Morgan Freeman really Jimi Hendrix? Now that possibility is very intriguing – but unfortunately, of no relevance whatsoever. Besides, Ahmad Mahyuddin looks nothing like either one of ‘em.

So, is there anything at all remotely relevant about May 16th? And no, Tracy Gold’s birthday being on the exact day in 1969 has no relevance. Unless Ahmad Mahyuddin was a fan of Growing Pains, which Walski doesn’t know whether he was or not. Nor does he really care.

If there is anything remotely relevant, it’s that May 16th, 1969 is the day that the National Operations Council (NOC) was appointed by the Yang Di Pertuan Agung to govern the nation for the next 20+ months until Parliament was reconvened on February 21, 1971 (via The Malaysian Bar website).

But is this the “dreaded” historical date of May 16th that Ahmad Mahyuddin blurted out? Can’t be, because it is indeed this very NOC that formulated the New Economic Policy, which many people now claim to be part of the Constitutionally-enshrined Special Malay Rights. Which is really debatable, because nowhere is the NEP explicitly mentioned in the Federal Constitution.

Apart from the formation of the NOC, what relevance does May 16th, 1969 have?

As disappointing as it may be, no relevance whatsoever, it would seem. And no relevance is also what Walski considers the action of the Badan Bertindak Perpaduan Ummah – aka The Cowhead Collective – to have. Yes, they did file a police report, which is within their rights. But no, what they did will in no way further the credence of what they’re fighting for.

Quite the opposite, in fact. What more with a brainiac spokesperson like Ahmad Mahyuddin, their credibility, too, will probably suffer the same fate as their relevance – lost someplace in the insignificant historical footnotes of our nation’s history,  just like May 16, 1969.