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I HAVE had some unpleasant scraps with various branches of our bureaucracy lately.
Much of the unpleasantness revolved around computer glitches, setting off endless possibilities of human reactions from those purveying public services and those of us at the receiving end of such services.

Readers will be spared the details, but it should suffice to say machines now seem to have a near-exclusive stranglehold on the workings of our bureaucrats, not the other way round. There is, to be sure, plenty not to like about our bureaucracy and all its shortcomings and inefficiencies. Ours is clearly not a first-rate, "first-world" bureaucracy.

Perhaps that is tarring our vast bureaucracy with an unfairly broad brush. Bright spots do exist. Renewing our passports is now a cinch. Making a withdrawal from the Employees Provident Fund is now about as professional and business-like an experience as any encounter with a commercial bank officer.

I am moved to write this week's piece after reading in the electronic media that some Malaysians are forsaking their country, and a large part of their reason for doing so has to do with the quality of our public service.
As what I have written so far shows, I do have a beef with our bureaucracy -- as most other Malaysians do, I am sure -- but never has it crossed my mind to abandon the country simply on account of such a beef.

Perhaps it has to do with the partiality of each and every Malaysian. Some of us tend to see the glass as half-full, others as half-empty. I count myself in the former category. I do not take for granted that much of our public service, by and large, works. It may not be up to scratch sometimes and in certain categories, but at the end of the day, you do get what you are after.

Some sectors of the public service seem to be deteriorating by the day. Others are continuously seeking to improve. It is a thoroughly mixed bag.

Yet, one thing is for sure. The government is paying a price for the more egregiously non-performing parts of the bureaucracy. The more egregious these bureaucratic enclaves are, the more alarmist are the voices raised in disapproval.

So alarmist, in fact, that some have started painting the government as "evil" for tolerating our bureaucratic vices or, more accurately, for being the very genesis of those vices.

Some of the shrillest voices raised are politically partisan, so we know where they are coming from. The sad bit is when such voices find resonance among the public at large. It is never really healthy for the entire body politic if ordinary Malaysians, like George W. Bush did, start labelling fellow Malaysians with opposing political views and preferences as supporting or defending "evil".

Malaysians claiming to be fighting against "evil" see corruption and its corrosive effects on the body politic as the "root" of all the perceived evil.

Now, corruption, per se, is of course evil. It is also an evil that has permeated human civilisation since Adam ate the forbidden fruit in the Biblical account of Creation. Fighting it is an unending struggle. We may fault the government for not putting up a stout enough fight, but let's not lose perspective amid all the righteous indignation about corruption.

The perspective is that our international corruption perception index ranking has always been at the middling level, far from some of the truly shameful bottom-leaguers among those countries in our region that claim to be more democratic than us, while in the more august company of the most progressive nations in Asia.

The perspective, also, that corruption has not actually seriously impaired the economic progress of those same progressive Asian nations. Truth be told, in their headlong push for progress at seemingly any cost, these nations are doing something far more meaningful against corruption: a well-fed and well-off citizenry will increasingly have less stomach for tolerating corruption.

That oft-quoted exemplar of anti-corruption in our region, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, certainly holds a sophisticated perspective. He defends the massive corruption of the Suharto era in Indonesia by proclaiming Suharto as a force for good, on balance.

Both Lee and Suharto may be on the verge of vindication. The advent of democracy has made not a dent on Indonesia's bottom-scraping corruption index. If anything, it has only made the country's corruption more invisible and diffuse and, therefore, even more widespread, with even less noticeable beneficial trickle-down to the general population.

There will always be those among us taking the high and well-trodden path of public ethics and integrity, and winning widespread and easy acclaim. But they are just as likely to lead us on the path to perdition as to paradise. It is a path shrouded in shades of grey, so that what really ranks as evil, and who ranks as reactionaries, are truly muddled.