Would you trample on your parents' portraits?

A protester stepping on a picture of Pahang Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Adnan Yaakob

DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang trampling on the pictures of the three assemblymen in 2009

DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng stepping over the pictures of the three assemblymen

THE primitively ugly jungle dance where a bunch of badly raised youngsters trampled on and showed their backsides to portraits of the prime minister, his wife and the Election Commission chief on Merdeka Day eve at Dataran Merdeka might be considered a form of free speech, a democratic act similar to pro-testers' torching flags and effigies.

Portrait trampling and stomping, and effigy and flag burning are the etiquette of defiance, especially against the United States' flag and the effigy of any sitting American president.

Americans may squirm at this fury but the natives' right to morph into a "rage monster" -- to borrow Tony Stark/Ironman's dry quip describing David Banner's Hulk -- is still an indispensable right.

The Americans should know: they pioneered the cantankerously radical forms of free speech -- flag burning is constitutional, Occupy Wall Street fashionable, and long before these were the norm, legions of past Americans staged popular demonstrations, from the town crying/pamphleteering of Thomas Paine to the furious chants against the Vietnam War and Iraqi invasions.

Americans have accepted being targets of hot-blooded derision as the side-effect of their quarrelsome foreign policy. They too have no right to mind the reaction because that is the costly price Government leaders (and their families, friends and associates) pay to rule in a democracy.

Nevertheless, the police think differently: a student from a private Cheras college has been hauled up for the portrait trampling on Penal Code charges of causing public nuisance and intentionally causing insult to provoke peace.

Government critics, especially the opposition party kind, will of course chide the police for going into overdrive but extend their rants to char the PM, their customary target of contempt for anything and everything that goes wrong for them whether real or imaginary.

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Would you trample on your parents' portraits?