Well, well, well – the latest election-time fiasco to hit our fair peninsula (and Borneo!) caught our eye over the weekend, shortly after Prime Minister Najib Razak presented ruling coalition Barisan Nasional’s manifesto following the dissolution of parliament on Saturday.
He later uploaded the contents of this to his personal web page, with eagle-eyed designers, netizens, and anyone who’s ever bought a Kuala Lumpur postcard noticing that something was missing.
Turns out that someone didn’t want the Petronas Twin Towers in frame, and took the liberty of airbrushing the iconic structures out of the image.
However, like a giddy Kardashian/Jenner, excited to upload a Photoshopped #fitspo picture to Instagram, whoever made this overlooked a tiny detail: The towers were still visible in the water’s reflection.
Local non-profit Lawyers for Liberty were quick to tweet their disapproval, accusing BN of airbrushing the towers out of frame because they were built during the tenure of former PM (and current adversary) Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. Calling the action “childish and petty,” we were also left wondering what kind of lawyers forsake the spelling of “because,” in favor of “coz.”
Pettiness in politics? Pettitics! Childishness? No! Why, never! I mean, what would possess a geriatric former statesman, and current PM candidate, to gatecrash a forum he wasn’t invited to, discussing whether he was too old to lead, just so he could tell his haters to “say it to his face”? Certainly not pettiness, not childishness. Ahem.
However, many were left wondering just how affected the sitting government was by the legacy of Mahathir, who not only built the Towers, but also the iconic Sepang F1 circuit. While some questioned whether the image BN shared was a reflection of a parallel universe, like in the movie The Upside Down.
History is full of revisionists, and any given event will have its share of alternative interpretations.
While the simplest explanation would have you assume that a designer forgot to take the towers out of the water, one social media user wondered if MAYBE what they meant was that they could succeed WITHOUT KLCC! GET IT, PEASANTS?!
While this makes about as much sense as New York taking away the Empire State Building to prove a point, we do commend their plea for everyone in Malaysia to get a grasp of “subtext” and to “be a bit smarter.”
How’s this for subtext: While you can Photoshop them all you like, they’re there, both physically and in the very picture where they were erased from. Deep.
Another user wondered if the mistake was intentional, done to get maximum attention from minimal effort, which is a semi-plausible theory, if you recall the fiasco that was the Visit Malaysia 2020 logo.
Yet another user wondered if the fact that everyone was so focused on representational accuracy in images meant that the rest of the content was faultless. Perhaps, but for what it’s worth, we’re the kind that only look at the pictures.
As well as having its fair share of revisionists, history also tends to repeat itself. Throughout history, incumbent leaders have often used photography to mold public perception.
Whether it was a wheelchair-bound Roosevelt censoring any photos that would highlight his disability, or a Russian despot conveniently adding himself into frame with a larger than life predecessor to curry favor with the public — to the armchair historian, it’s just another page out of the encyclopedia.
