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Night (=) Owls

Journal entry, 2002

• Click here for real-life Indonesian schooling (with pictures).

This place I live in is two districts away from my former campus - it means half an hour speeding on a motorbike or one to two hours of useless circling of the whole region before eventually arriving by public bus. But in the grocery I met a couple of students who rented rooms nearby; I forgot that any time there have always been people so energetic - that actually out of the lack of some I got my own dorm back then too close to campus which by the way I rarely saw the insides of even from such an ideal distance that had yielded good students in my time.

'Good students' are my sister's kind. Like she did in her time, they go to the campus everyday, attend every class, get 'A' in all subjects every semester. The conservative Indonesian pedagogic system never excludes higher institutional ed from such an archaic notion of merit.

The students I met were one skinhead and one nondescript, buying Marlboro cigarettes - what they smoke and (quite contrast with the stuff God have given them) the apparel suggested that their parents are well-off. The one whose hair was cropped almost exactly like a helmet also carried the latest Siemens mobile phone operating on a Pro-XL SIM card - nobody financially deprived can afford either the hardware nor software of this sort. The cellphone thing must be mentioned. I carried my archaic phone, too, and BJ's - because I waited for a call and I didn't know to which number. The skinhead said, "Wow. Two phones, Ma'am?" and before I could check myself I already have replied "Well, I should have carried four if against one of that," - the Siemens. They laughed.

The grocer told them I went to the same university, and we talked about it for a while. The skinhead belonged to the campus' Hikers Club - and to my utter dismay he went hiking last week with people who already had been rustic relics there in the Students' Arena, the center of activities in campus, in my time. "They're still alive?" I uselessly expressed a surprise. "A lot of seniors are still there," said the skinhead. "There's even one from the class of '87." That means my senior. I was '89. People from my class have been professors for the last seven or eight years.

The young men told me that the campus' administrators plan an eradication of the loiterers like those old hikers. I said good, why didn't they in eighty-nine and he said he and his friends are protesting against the plan. "Wait a sec," I eyed him suspiciously, "You love hanging out with those bums? Who already had wives and kids in '89 and yet lived and slept in campus and extracting your cigarettes and booze?" He said, "But they're good in Search & Rescue. How else can we get some experienced help?" (the club got a major disastrous hiking lately, several were dead). Yeah, well, that might be reasonable, but the whole picture is still basically wrong. I don't like people who live in campuses - people whose age is 30 to 40 and derive livelihood from these young kids of 18 and 20.

The Rector and the ones responsible for keeping an eye on students' activities had changed the campus radically after I left. In my time it was still what it had been since 1950 - an open, welcoming campus, blending in with the environment. It gave life to small-time vendors and such. But since the 1990's the campus has been tightly barricaded. Fences are everywhere. It became visually inaccessible, and mentally it is a closed-circuit. Now, said the skinhead, they even plan a curfew.

A curfew. You know, like in war zones.

I got home from the grocery with some sugar and a conflict.

Curfew will exterminate the old bugs, but it won't make me, whose concern of the alma mater is only superficial and tiny, happy - I can imagine how upset people like my friends CJ, M, JB, etcetera are - those who consider the campus as always a part of their lives and all students there forever their younger siblings.

The Arena has been known as a dangerous area for the good students to roam around. The old adults, most were no longer students in my time (either graduated or dropped-out), controlled every activity that made money. Some of them were really rich for our standard, from such things as public seminars, rock and jazz concerts, techy exhibitions. Corruption of this kind was rampant and no one could nor would do anything about it. The skinhead gave me his observation that it still is like that today.

Plucky greenhorns, nervy freshpersons, year after year join the campus mobsters for many reasons - wealthy kids for adventurous evil, greedy or poor ones for a little slice of the cake. In my first year I, too, did. I'm not sure which was my intention - but without lying I can still say I didn't pinch a penny out of the famous Campus Fair, the yearly goldmine for the corrupt. While I was a treasurer for the Art Section. This means a lot of money to build a stage, rent sound system, hire bands - I was taught dirty accounting by a bunch of mature corruptors. Just an example of habitual markups: the item 'transportation' comprised of countless fake bills purportedly presented by a number of vehincle-renting companies for as many as ten trucks - while in fact it was only one pickup car owned and driven by a fellow committee-member, whose gas was paid by his own dad. Nothing I could do but to release mysterious sums never accounted for; but in a complete disillusionment I refused to take any for myself. Yeah, stupid, but my decision to join and promptly leave the establishment that early was right. I knew the worst of the campus way earlier than my peers.

But that was exactly why I think of the deprivation of such a lesson-lavishing thing as something bad, too, although 90% of people never could learn from counter-examples. The whole Indonesian university system is divorced from life, like a labor camp, like a fortress, like a nursing home - in the sense that life there isn't Life, period. Of course nothing else could make esprit de corps. But since those young people have to Live after 25, out of the hitherto pampering establishment, learning real life in there is good for their mental health later. The Arena was one hell of a professor in this subject. That way, cleaning it up is a loss.

The adoption of an owl to symbolize educatedness is fitting in my former campus and others like the Institute of Arts - nighthawks loiter the places and make homes there. Curfew will kill these owlish relics. At nights then if no event is held the campus will be entirely deserted just like any public place. We used to be proud of our campus' openness to the world beyond scientific learning. It has been no more like that. To arrive at the worst, kicking out the Arena mob is cutting the campus' soul to the roots.

On the other hand, certainly such a life is sickening. A corrupted sloth it has become. While every student that I know only thinks of studying as a pastime - we all enter campuses for, actually, freedom (especially freedom from uniformized lives we endure from kindergarten to High School) - students' activities should have been free from financial evil. And after graduation they simply must leave the place; it is abnormal to keep on sucking life from it.

Yet let the young people themselves decide it. Though already got a headache out of this none-of-my-business problem, after all I can get home and make some tea in peace. I sympathize with the parents whose purses are drained by sending their kids to universities to begin with; and they have no idea what their kids are doing there at any given moment. I always take the side of the older generations lately. The young men called me "Ma'am" already, for God's sake.

Tommy Boy

Email to Ryan Kane, 2002

Footnotes:

Tommy Suharto: Youngest son of former President Suharto, on trial for murder of a Supreme Court judge and other charges, June 2002. On the lam from November 4, 2000 to November 29, 2001 after he was sentenced several years in jail for embezzlement.

NY Knicks: Baseball club.

LA Lakers: Basketball club.

Michael Schumacher: Formula 1 Grand Prix racer.

Serena Williams: Grand Slam tennis player.

Eminem: American (white) rapper.

Suharto was in power from 1967 to 1998. He'd been President for three years when I was born.

Gus Dur: Nickname of President Abdurrahman Wahid.

• See Indonesian Presidents from 1945 to 2009.

So Tommy Suharto still got an audience because FIFA gave a few days off for the World Cup finalists before the (to me) anti-climax of this contest. As far as I'm concerned the final could feature New York Knicks v. Los Angeles Lakers or Michael Schumacher v. Serena Williams - some call it football, but Germany v. Brazil is to me some ninety minutes of peptic ulcer.

I'd watch Tommy then.

He's just entertained the court yesterday. When he was on the lam dodging jailment for the embezzlement, being the #1 Wanted Person all year long, he stayed at his own house, he said - paying cops to forget it was his. And he did pay the protesters in the streets because President Wahid (2001) didn't want to help him to get the appeal granted by the Supreme Court. The reportedly bewildered judge yesterday kept expressing his amazement at all these likely acts of the golden boy of Suharto's (where was he all the last thirty years by the way?). "That's a lot of money," he said when Tommy told him about the protesters' pay. "Yeah, but it's worth it," replied the defendant, laughing; "the President was impeached."

Stahl accused me once of being President Wahid's 'fan', and of course I said he should have his mind checked by a jumbo jet. But maybe I shouldn't have been Tommy. In an interpersonal exchange I should have admitted that yes, Gus Dur was my favorite man, though it wouldn't make any difference to me if we elected Eminem or him - both would have been equally noisy and ineffective Presidents. But Gus Dur was just unsuitable for the job - without it he has been an authentic individual; and the color of his hair didn't come from a bottle.

Others would be nothing whatever if not for their jobs. This loud Bush Junior is the finest specimen of the kind. He's never been a man - he's just, exactly like any Mr. Smith for that matter, President. The White House has a personality - little Bush had never got any. That's the DNA, you might say; Ronald Reagan was authentic in a sense, his skinny Veep wasn't, just like the younger aspirant. FDR and JFK, Charles deGaulle and Chou En-lai, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, Sukarno and Gamal Abdel Nasser - they would have been themselves, with or without the job; you can't measure them just by the humanly post-power syndrome.

I don't believe in martyrdom and Gus Dur certainly wasn't anywhere near a saint - he's too human, at the same time he's nowhere around the lesser mammals' absurd familiarity with evil and amazing self-sustaining stupidity. I just don't know how he had, at least until his last day of not being President yet, taken it. If I were him I would have been ordering missiles. His own people - the forty million of the Islamic Scholars' Organisation members - had never understood what he said, any time at all; other Muslims outside this compound even less so; minorities, despite the thank-God-there's-him, have always been clueless, too.

So he was a bad President - I agree. But there have been one thousand eyesore in the Parliament. If numbers do count, and in the so-called democracy it surely does, we have been having a thousandfold badness, which is now, alas, in control of the national chronic despair. Whitewashingly not one of them is good, not one of them is smart, not one of them is wise - all of them is us. How disgusting.

Gus Dur had said that the protesters were Reform Mercenaries. He had said that Tommy was nowhere but under some wings of the people who were and maybe still are in Suharto's payroll. Nobody listened; he had been branded as the National Liar and Chief Flapjaw.

Tommy might have been a small-time crook or exactly the opposite if he were not born into that family, or if it were not given the lucrative prospect to become vampirical and were set to live ordinary suburban lives. All of Tommy's crimes were only so for his ''job' as the President's son. Those were to be improbable if his father were an Independence War veteran selling electronics for a living and going fishing on Sundays and never meddling in any business of running the country over.

Comedy to me ceases to be funny when it teams itself up with absurdity - Tommy's that sort, and to make it worse his play is too costly. Not just the money his family's been Swiss-banking all of my life ; but also the police manhunt, the maintenance of him when in arrest, these trial sessions, everything. My rent is due next month and I wouldn't be able to pay it, so this Tommy thing is to me a personal insult. I hope they give him plenty of cholesterol there in jail.

Oh, Corea

Journal entry, 2002

Footnotes:

Golkar: Group of Functionaries, the ruling political party in Indonesia which backed-up the reign of President Suharto (1971-1998)

Kim Dae-Jung: President of South Korea

Rage Against the Machine: American rock band

In my 24th year of football-watching, this is the most personally disgusting World Cup, this 2002 Korea-Japan. Nobody is there now that it has reached the semi-finals. Yesterday both of 'my teams' were sent off packing by a group of Brazilian soap-opera actors and eleven Germans who ran like a team of rheumatism - very, truly, really unfair defeats to teams like those, to me the angry spectator over here several thousands of kilometers away from the scene. The poor young English team was forced to play against Rivaldo's consistent playacting and the oppressive Asian summer and failed to fend off none of the two. The USA played like real footballers for the first time in their entire lives - but they got to play against luck - which has been a thing made of flesh and blood and blind eyes: they had scored, but the ball was put out of the net by the German by hand. Most referees in this tournament deserves lynching. And no Italy. No Portugal. No Netherlanders to begin with. No Cameroon. No Mexico. No Sweden, no Denmark, no one! Today Spain was sent home by the Koreans.

The stubborn Indonesian pagans wouldn't yield to reality that their worshipped Brazilians are now just a faint echo of a shadow - the worst team I've ever seen of this one footballing nation I've never liked. Their coach Solari's instruction to commit as many playacts and fouls as they please to get through to the final even failed to enlighten these adamant stupidity - I shouldn't get surprised, but I'm no god.

So it looks like I will have to bet for Korea next. No choice at all. I will cheer anybody up if it is a game against Germany, even if the opposing team consists of Rage Against the Machine and George W. Bush's Texas Rangers. But this isn't the World Cup I have waited for impatiently four years long.

Yet the real test of my patience is the Indonesian media. Tautologist comments are nothing; we knew our mouths couldn't let anything smart out, being just tools for the adequately empty minds - so the obviously lacking exercise football commentators were not just foreseen a long time beforehand, but actually expected so. But the loud admiration of the Korean spectators in every Korean game makes me sick.

One million Koreans in uniform red t-shirts and clutching their national flag were seen all over the country when it won a place among the Top 8. Now it goes to semi-final and four million of the same creatures are everywhere there. When they face the limpy German robots later maybe the whole nation would be in the streets. And the amazement of Indonesian spectators of spectators gets really nauseating.

First of all, the Koreans didn't get through anything to win a place in this event because they were the last flock of hosts under the old FIFA rule that hosts are automatically considered through to the finals. First of all, the Koreans' triumph against Italy and Spain was controversial and they might not kosherly get there at all. First of all this World Cup is held in their own novel stadiums. First of all Kim Dae-Jung's son has been on trial for corruption or whatever that is there in Seoul. First of all we have had Suharto's party, the Group of Functionaries, for thirty years until a World Cup ago.

Especially the last item, so even though the un-funky Koreans actually play good football, we of all people shouldn't get so stupid as to hail their supporters.

For thirty years the Group of Functionaries routinely, more often than it was endorsed by sanity, had had this Koreanist thing jamming the national TV. Yellow t-shirts of a million people in a stadium for everything. If those British commentators had to relay their observances to an audience they would have said what is said now about the Korean instant football fans. The crowds of Suharto's were happy faces, cheerful noises, nationalist overall look - 'unity' and all.

The sight of the massive Korean crowds made me really nuts that it was hallowed so. They remind me too much of the long long years of swallowed nausea; they remind me too much of the Golkar.

And if the President's kid were on trial somewhere else at the time of the Golkarized era, I'm very very sure the whole nation would have been steered to look any other way and as far as possible from the court. Kim Dae-Jung was an idealist fighter once - he's lucky now. For me nothing either in this or the tournament is enough cause for celebration. We still can't play football, you see - we can't even comment on the game not ridiculously. I need more than just luck and careless referees for the Koreans to cheer them heartfeltly - this is sport and I won't instantly fall for anyone just because we're both Asians. Those suspects of hooliganism who came directly from Manchester to Japan were on a planned spontaneous errand. Golkar could raise millions of us in a single day just a few careless refereeings ago. There's nothing spontaneous in such a flocking in many parts of the lives of Asians.

Salad Day of The Village

Journal entry , 2002

Footnotes:

The 'high Javanese' (krama inggil) is reverential and used to address people in public, older persons, kings and princes, and such; similar to the German 'Sie' to say 'you' to strangers or to show respect while the more intimate or one of the peers simply gets 'du'. The latter is similar to the 'low Javanese' (ngoko). If you're one of us, a speech composed in both at once would sound funny.

Rujak is some fruit, scraped and dressed with chilli and palm sugar sauce. Lotis is the same kind of thing, only the fruit comes in slices and the sauce is served separately. Vendors come everyday around the neighborhood selling these.

RELATED PAGES:

• History of Indonesia
• Pictures of Indonesia
• Pictures of Java
• Javanese kingdoms
• Javanese view about power

Late Sunday afternoon here. I'm listening to the campaign of the candidates that vie for being the village Chief. There are eighteen of them, so the speeches couldn't get longer than five minutes each - there is, in line, a restless bunch of candidates to compete for other posts such as the Chief's deputies, the village secretary, treasurer, irrigation manager, project overseer, and so on, who will also take to the podium.

While Suharto was surely to be President every aftermath of an election, villages weren't that stupid. Brawls and bribery were firmly embedded within the image of a villagewide election of its own officials, but still this was more democratic than the inexistent contest to be Indonesia's Chief of the executive branch of governance.

Among the people who want to lead my village to some sort of betterment today was a 25 year-old man who already has four kids (he announced this on the dais), a 67 year-old man who said he isn't educated at all but then again he had seen Mecca with his own eyes; and a grocer who sang for us a capella with his supporters, which were two wives and several sons and nephews. There are two women among the would-be Chiefs, too; one very nervous and the other sounds like talking in the NATO meeting in the eve of the D-Day of attack on Afghanistan. She's a Junior High teacher, imparting knowledge of Physics.

Most candidates invoke their ancestral history, to prove the deep root they have in the village and to add legitimacy to their right to ask us to vote for them in the first place. Most of them are the wealthiest - this was exclusively so under the New Order, now it is already infiltrated by the gusto of the moneyless. All of them are Muslims, reflecting the village's almost wholly adherence. Only one candidate delivers his speech in Indonesian. The whole process itself is conducted in Javanese, in a way that would have gotten my Grandma's feudalist ear an ache - the sommersaulting 'High Javanese' and 'Low Javanese' together, in every utterance. One of the candidates is an alumnae of my college; he's exactly my age and was (as he loudly announced) cum laude upon his exit from the Philosophy Dept. He also let us know that his beloved wife is an M.D. from the same university and was accidentally proclaimed cum laude upon graduation. Things like this won't ring any bell in such a competition within the real life politics, but he obviously relies on the snobbish side of the Javanese soul.

What is interesting to me is the fact that all of the candidates for whichever post talk about themselves as their assigned icon in the paper the committe would give us upon election day. Like the general election's method, we have to punch one of the icons of our choice using a scary big nail. Villages have their icons chosen from among the horticultural lexicon; mango, orange, durian, cucumber, guava, etcetera. So the candidates today are energetically praising the fruits and highlighting each one's excellence that others surely can't compete - "Remember! Choose Cucumber! For ages we have known that cucumbers are good for skin care, healing and freshening our meals - can you imagine durian doing the same? No, ladies and gentlemen, it is Cucumber Forever." And, "I don't have to remind you how good Papaya is. From its roots to the buds of its flowers, the great fruit is useful to us. Why choosing Banana? Its trunk is nothing but some weak tissue loaded with water. It dies after giving fruit. In this struggle to recover from economic crisis, we must build our village with strong materials - Choose Papaya and I promise you no disappointment."

Wow, I think. While my neighbor Mrs. W eats the fruit-salad every single day of her life, today the components stand for themselves. But though I don't have the right to vote (officially I'm somewhere else's citizen), if I were to be given one I'm not sure I'd let my village governed by anything that populate a garden.

Ashes Too, Ashes

Journal entry , 2002

Footnotes:

Ronaldo: best footballer on earth according to FIFA, a Brazilian.

John Woo: Chinese-American director, often praised for his way in creating action movies.

Limp Bizkit: American band.

• Where Aceh is
• History of Acehnese freedom fighters

I met Dr. D today. After a wholehearted criticism of the Boom Boom Crepe his daughter seemed to get dangerously addicted to, and a long erudition on his own indecent attachment to Ronaldo , he told me he'd just got back from his fetish Amsterdam and heard that the Dutch thought of suspending several hundred grands of grants because of his motherland Aceh that has been kept burning.

To be frank if all the Acehnese freedom fighters look like Dr. D Hollywood might have offered them some meaningful assistance via John Woo. But their cause has been so far a wishful thinking; I'd never said so, but I do believe that the fact that Aceh is almost 100% Muslim makes it unappetizing to the caucasian churchgoers and atheists and the assorted usual democratic crackpots. So they all scrambled to East Timor (almost 100% Catholic) and at least Australia has always been gnawing West Papua (almost 100% Christian) away from us, but not Aceh. Aceh has been, sadly, alone in its struggle to stay alive; respectable Arabian nations have been restraint by their own diplomatic good manners - no way they were going to risk the solidarity with the Indonesian government. Only dimly aware of what Aceh means at all, it is clear that most laypersons here would resent the idea of letting it go.

Since the newest outbreak of blood-gushing in 1998, Dr. D said, more than 500 public schools had been burnt to ashes there all around Aceh. He did sound distressed saying it, though he also paraded his teeth adding that I might love that fact.

Oh, yeah, I hate schools. But I also hate kids. Kids are too noisy, too loud, too dirty and have absolutely no sense of animal-loving and they also never have any money that I can borrow in emergency. Schools have been keeping these nightmares of my cats inside their classrooms from seven a.m. to one p.m. everyday; schools have been doing me a favor then and so they're a lesser evil.

It is nauseating if anyone thinks that destroying schools is a legitimate warring deed. I can't remember anybody else doing it but Nero - and even then he only burnt Rome, and didn't single schools out if there was such a thing at the time.

Dr. D said it has been the Army that burnt most Acehnese schools, though the ones unanimously voted for as the culprit here are the Free Aceh Movement personnels. I don't think just because D is Acehnese then he knows about it from head to toe. So he might have gotten the correct leak but he could also have been wrong. Prejudice is democratic; a Harvard diploma doesn't protect you from it.

But I don't care who burned what in Aceh or anywhere else. I'm a very simple person. If it isn't kitchen trash, or sexually explicit love-letters of your deceased mother from the days of the dinosaurs, or pictures of your ugly ex-husband where his gigantic broken nose dominate the landscape, you ought not, I believe, burn it, whatever it is. Let alone schools, which are quite useful even to me. I wouldn't even allow you to burn Limp Bizkit concerts because of the inevitable pollution of stale drugs.

I don't like the snapshot of Aceh today - if it were up to me I'd give them the referendum and see what it is going to be; the same for the West Papuans; and I would let the Malukunese divide their lands according to their own sense. Anything to stop those mindful killings. As a Javanese I am smeared with the collective sin of discriminating and exploiting and whatever else-ing other islands' peoples. As an Indonesian I don't see why I have to get adamant in refusing them the right of self-determination for an Islamic or Christian or Catholic or any such a republic of their own, after decades of blood-spilling gunshots that had yielded nothing for this nation-state but corpses and hatred. That's the same as my reason to want to kick the Israelis' butts for their anti-Palestinian independence. Ariel Sharon's ludicrous project of erecting a wall to separate the Hebrews from the Muslims is, actually, however archaic and somewhat rather stupid, sensible in a way - it localized violence, though I wouldn't agree to it if the Palestinians are not let to be independent first. Nothing is worse than a stallmate, a suspension, a feeling like a floe in the ocean of uncertainty - and nothing elicits violence easier than this.

I just remember a Grecian folktale about Aeschylus (525-456 BC). They said he died when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a stone, dropped a tortoise upon it in order to break the shell for lunch. That was the best reason to call Aeschylus the 'Father of the Greek Tragedy', better than his writings.

Too many skulls have been broken in Aceh, and for whose lunch? None; they just broke them not 'in order to' anything else, just broke them for breaking them and here lied a dot. Aceh's natural resources were the initial reason; we couldn't let it go for the oil and such within the land. But as time marched on the deaths seemed distinctly less and less reasonable.

The Father of the Indonesian Tragedy is some say the Army. To me it is Stupidity, and the matriarch is Violence, for of this the Army has never had a monopoly.

Waterworld Miscalled

Journal entry , 2002

The flood drowned Jakarta at the beginning of the year (reached the height of 2 meters in some places, including where five-stars hotels sat, in February 2002).

Isn't there anyone who still remembers the time Jakarta got underwater? But me? I picked up a call for E this evening and the caller X actually said "What flood? Oh, right, that flood. No, I don't think they're doing anything about it now. But now there is no flood."

Is everybody living in Jakarta his clone?

There's the city's anniversary now, so if there is any sign of a flood quite a chunk of the population must have noticed. They've been hurrying to boring amusement parks, the same old stores offering 50% discount, the marina, the open-air music shows - come to think of it again, I guess none of them would have suspected they're flooded. They're too busy flooding.

The rest of them are busy preparing to elect a Governor for that capital city of indifference.

The brown, dirty river, older than anything in Jakarta today, keeps some of the trash left by the flood almost half a year ago. "We've started to have drought," I told X. He said, "Well, good, there's no flood."

To Look Daggers
@ the Dais

Journal entry , 2002

Amien Rais: Chairman of People's Assembly, officially to be held until 2004; Chairman of the National Mandate Party

Abdurrahman Wahid: President, 1999-2001, from the National Awakening Party

Hamzah Haz: Vice President, 2001-2004, Chairman of the United Development Party

• Indonesian Presidents
• Indonesian politics today

I tried to get up and pretend to live this morning only to behold Mr. U (my neighbor) remarking on how pale I was, "You're almost Chinese!" (tailed by the usual "Ha ha ha ha ha!").

To further my disconsolation, he also asked me about the "Amien Rais For President" thing - of which I knew nothing whatsoever, being in a heavyweight illiteracy about anything contemporaneous - no papers, no TV, just fevers.

I've never believed Mr. U since he convincingly reported that my cat Tabby had left her kittens at his place and it turned out to be a couple of puppies. Even if this never happened I would still doubt the accuracy of his worry there, that a deliberate scenario to impeach President Megawati is underway now, that she would be replaced by the VP Hamzah Haz until the election in which Rais would be elected President. I know how hard it is for us to learn, but still I refuse to accept the alleged fact that we are wholly unteachable. Only hapless idiots would repeat the Wahidization again after such a short span of time-out. Not so soon.

Yet Mr. U, like so many others, get nostalgic out of circumstances - "Suharto's time was better."

I hate to say this but it is, definitely. But it is not infinitely.

It was simple, the logic of Suharto's regime - political stability (including the quelling of streetbound crimes) must come first before anything, before the dollars. Now let alone foreign investors, locals have been considering their capital refugees. There is no protection and no service here when it comes to security. This nation of anthropos (the Grecian word whose original meaning is "The One Who Looks Up") has gotten used to having a strong boss who runs everything for us from the top of the political pyramid. Deprived of any, we lose track because there have been too many tracks.

Yet I'm not worried that the belief in democracy is dubbed archaic nowadays; I still hold on to it. The risk of being democratic is having Bush Junior in the White House, but in the age of mediocrity what can you expect? Bush is incompetent in foreign affairs and impotent in domestic business, he's too short and too skinny and too sickly-looking, he can't even pronounce tongue-twisting words characteristic of diplomatic lexicon right, he looks downright pitiful in an Army garb -- but that's the face more than half of Americans seem to want to shove forward representing themselves - so be it. While here we pile hopes upon hopes upon hopes.....and the opposite.

Greed is greed in any system; nepotism will be nepotism, collusion will be collusion, no change is to reform idiocy into some other thing, xenophobia stays the same and self-delusion is eternal. Whether it is democracy or tyranny, socialism or liberalism, theocracy or plutocracy, scumbags will be scumbags and fools will be fools. And the voices of the conscience will be encouraged to wither in a democratic ivory tower, will be incinerated in a fascist concentration camp, will be shot dead in a communist jungle, will be inquisited in a theocratic chamber, will be bought to be locked inside a plutocratic bank vault -

But the democratic corruption and collusion and nepotism will still be lighter to bear, since the curtain of justifications is the thinnest of all.

Kin(g)ship is Eternal

Email. Reply to Thomas Erskine, 2002

• Javanese monarchies
• My scary ancestor

Amen. I mean, right, none of the so-called great kingdoms of our past was Indonesia. Obvious that the maps of their territories wouldn't assist Tony Blair to accurately bomb us (they used which map on Afghanistan?). These kingdoms, from the 300's (Kutai, East Kalimantan) to 1757 (New Mataram, Central Java) were themselves. The 1945 Republic of Indonesia wasn't the continuation of their (any or all) existence.

Most of the names I have mentioned were the reference for modern Indonesians when we try to trek back the 'ancestry'. But if I am to name the most often pin-pointed then they would be the kingdoms of Sriwijaya (Buddhist, Southern Sumatera, heyday 856 under King Balaputera Dewa), Hindu Mataram (Central Java, around 732), Singasari (Hindu, East Java, King Kertanegara), Majapahit (Hindu and Buddhist, East Java, King Hayam Wuruk, 1350), and Islamic Mataram (Central Java, Sultan Agung, 1613).

What became Indonesia was the range of colonies claimed by the Dutch's East Indian Company (VOC). Not the former Sriwijaya's, not Mataram's, not any old kingdom's or all of them added up. The name 'Indonesia' itself is a hybrid made out of 'nothing'; there is no village, town, district, province, island, kingdom named like that. (See Anderson for backup details).

Everybody was mistaken for Indian those days, remember? From the land of the Sioux to the Pacific Islanders, each time some caucasian boots reached the newly seen land the mind above the boots usually registered the line "I have found India!". Can somebody explain this monomania without involving nutmegs?

Of life-span, the kingdoms varied. There were some that remained for ages, there were brief interludes between two greater powers' birth. This republic is only 57 years. The Rolling Stones are still around. So it's no great age, the gap between it and mine is only a few mistakes.

'Indonesian' monarchy was an imported item from the real India, so were religions (Hindu, Buddha, Islam). Our relationship with India could be dated back to the first century A.D., or even earlier. That republican rulers then acted like kings, that was destiny's joke.

About my kinsfolk - there was Meganthropus Paleojavanicus, estimately lived and breathed two to one million years ago, who probably was the first Javanese ever known. ( Fossils found by Von Koenigswald in Sangiran, 1936 and 1941.)

Call me archaic, still I will not accept this idea of the BMW to launch its '7 Series' there in Borobudur - right in Borobudur, Borobudur the largest Buddhist monument on planet earth, Borobudur that was built around the year 800 by countless laborers and sweat and blood.

And I should have used the past-tense. What BMW wanted was what BMW got.

Ultra-rich people who already not just own but collect these stupid cars sat there eating and drinking and looking old, ugly and bored - God, I can't repress my disdain and above all else disgust. Oh, morons.

One billion IDR is not enough to get you the car.

This is sacrilege. How could anybody sane thinks that it is no problem while millions of people here cannot even imagine what kind of money 1,000,000,000 IDR is!