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01. Really
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Footnotes: Schumacher, Michael: German, World Champ of the 2002 Formula 1 Grand Prix race. IDR:
Indonesian Rupiah. O. Henry's best short-story, has been translated into a score of languages outside English, is The Last Leaf.
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Got some fish for the cats today. Accidental treasure in the scrap they came wrapt by; I'm not sure what paper that was but the ads that make me write this could suggest it's Jakartanese. First ad:
Second ad:
Both ads were written in English, so I fantasize that the copy writers and proprietors of those shops were probably being careful not to tantalize the unhoped-for audience of the suburban fish-buying poor, who came to get amused thanks to their heroic effort to keep the life of sophisticated consumerism in this age of scarcity. The first ad is interesting - the salespersons there speak Indonesian, it said - so all these years 'we' have been flocking the establishment apparently and leaving a generally good impression there upon the cashiers of the store. They can't be mastering even the Indonesian Dictionary of Handling Sales Situations (if there is such a thing) at a short notice - so this 'have been' condition is likely to span along many years. The crisis started in 1997, quite reasonably at the pace of a well-kept old Volkswagen van, but it gained Michael Schumacher's speed since 1998 and the calendar of 1999-2001 was full of disagreeable events such as the launching of the American dollar up to beyond the stratosphere - six times its former value measured in IDR. I guess Indonesians were still flying to Paris even those days when babies died because of the disappearance of milk. The duty-free shop attendants might have begun learning Indonesian around that time. The second ad is a mystery. This is March; the paper looks very new (stiff and the color is still lighter white); it can't be coming from last year. But it offered some autumn leaves and the view it had upon this particular foreign season was of the birth of hope - even O. Henry's short-story didn't get this far in beaming up optimism. Then the most bizarre ingredient is of course the opening lines - that this autumn collection was launched to commemorate the Indonesian economic recovery. We have had a recovery? Am I or the copywriters are crazy? Oh thee the really duty-free.
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I Starved You Did Not Feed Me  2002 Footnotes: Emha
Ainun Nadjib:
Identity politics: Alain Delon: French actor, dubbed the best-looking and sexiest in the seventies or thereabouts. Robert Redford: American actor, ibid. Motor of the early Sundance festival and the flood of 'independent movies'. Price of shoes: in January 2002. |
Somehow entities like Jesus seem to be un-religious. Popes are, even or especially the Borgias; evangelists and missionaries and streetwise preachers and small-town churchgoers and peanut-farmers and Jimmy Carter (he was all three) emit nothing but religiosity. But Jesus was not. Maybe he had never excelled in carpentry but (and) that was a part of why he seems human, and humans are not invoking God every other second. Humans are too busy starving. The Bible is full of culinary info, that's the thing I still retain from my one and only visit to a Sunday school; the topic of the day was a mysterious edible substance rained at the Israelis in the desert in Moses' days (I've never known what it was). From my Christian primary school I got the invaluable religious knowledge such as that The People Whom God Had Chosen roasted lambs and cows at any slightest provocation. There was a long list of dishes kosher for the Hebrew omnivoraes, there was wine every few pages, a heavy diet of carbohydrate and protein seemed to keep the heaven-goers of the Biblical times busy along the wars and adulteries of for instance King David. In Junior High when I was around fourteen and to hear the same old tales retold time and time again in Religion Class I wondered if God intended the people He favored the most to attain such a monstrous deficiency of vitamins. I remember being told of gardens and I can recall several vineyards, but the Israelis looked like never knew vegetables. And they told us that Jesus from time to time was hungry. He was when Satan asked him to abracadabra stones into pizza or something, he was when fishing, he was when attending dinners. The most human and less godly Jesus even got mad at a fig tree that gave him no fruit when he needed some - it looks to me that he had forgotten his own (well, he is said to be God, isn't he?) verdict delivered to Adam a good many other wraths before - that the human race shall never reap what it doesn't sow or even if it does (I forget which). Now I am recalling an old essay I read in my college years, more than a decade ago - it was one of the finest of Emha Ainun Nadjib's stuff when he was still a mere great writer and not yet an average celebrity. Someone else might get bad things to happen if writing like him about Islam and Muslims that way - at the time I was stunned at the irreverent tone lavished on the essay (for which my puritan minority-inferiority was responsible). There was a man, he said, who was visited by the Prophet Muhammad one night and asked if he loved the Prophet or not. The next night Allah visited the same man and sent him shivering all the way by asking the same question. The short discussion about what love is love and how was to give it to such beings as God and the Deputies ended with Allah's speech that among others consisted of the lines "I was hungry and you did not feed me. I was sick and you did not come to see me." I guess it was glued on my brain eversince because Christianity is crammed with faces (thus interpersonal familiarity) but Islam is not; there's no icon showing the Prophet (and to visualize him is a universal sin) while Jesus came in every racial feature after the birth of identity politics - though Mom still clings on to the Alain Delonized Jesus of her youth, with occasional sway towards the Robert Redfordian. I remember the essay when picking up the bulk mail thrown over the door by the goal-oriented postman this morning. There's a brochure telling of the imperative destination of citizens of the town to be the Mall, since Adidas and Nike and Reebok are inaugurating the New Year Sale. A pair of Nike shoes is 80 bucks. That's three months of salary for my buddy M - who owns the pair nonetheless, probably by the help of a genie. Adidas sells its products cheaper, around US$ 40.00, and Reebok offers the lowest price of the three, 'only' about 28 dollars a pair. I wouldn't suggest reading such brochures as a sane activity unless you are so sick and got to stay in bed with nothing to eat today - like me. I'm never God, so I don't say what Nadjib said He said; I'm starving and sick and laughing at the price of the footwear of Nike's. Every four seconds one person dies of hunger on this planet, especially far away from the welfare nations of Europe and the United States of The Plenty. More than 800 million of people are starving worldwide. Among them over ten million of Africans are in a dire need of famine relief. Nobody had ever said anything like that about Indonesians, but we have sunken below the dignity of a self-sufficient food-generator into an importer. And there are, I believe, people who starve here somewhere. And there is me. Yet mine isn't a poverty that would incite the United Nations' pity. I don't have what it takes to buy some food today, but I'm writing about it with my own PC and perchance going to see the visual basics of the African hunger on TV. So my starvation is ridiculous even to me; it has the strong halo of a bad joke. Yet it is hunger, even though it 'only' means that I have not a penny anywhere with me and that the fridge in the house is eerily empty. I'm hungry because I'm sick and I'm sick because I'm hungry and I'm both so I can't get a job and I can't work because of both. This ludicrous circle makes the brochure from the Mall seem to mean more than what meets my eye. The Muslim guerrilla fighters of the separatist Abu Sayyaf faction, the Philippines, have been kidnapping foreign evangelists and clueless tourists and well-off locals for ransom - not just to get guns but also food and medicines. This unhealthy practice to keep the separatists healthy is still alive there in the jungles of the MacArthur's symbol of Northern eminence, though the Philippino Army kept the guerrillas on the edge. Fortune hunters have also been infiltrating the humid woods - one guerrilla commander's head is worth US$ 100,000 to be paid by the government. That's 1,250 pairs of Nike shoes. Hunger can do a lot of things. But to kidnap foreign persons or to collect the Philippines' monetary reward I guess you have to get first of all well-fed. Or else you won't fit into the shoes and must lay down weakly in bed reading Nike brochures.
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Ryan Kane & Thomas Erskine Footnote: Islam started to spread worldwide under the Caliphs after Prophet Muhammad passed away in the year 632 A.D. |
In a long, thin country like Japan or England things tend to behave orderly; there is no room for havoc-wreaking and tomfoolering and other such extravagant waste of history's pages. There was the pre-Hideyoshi phase of warlordliness, there was Oliver Cromwell, but conflicts will ebb in time and the people become more or less solidly united. Long, substantial countries like the USA, Russia, China and Brazil got more problems, and harder, too. Vast territories demand more time and energy to unify. They can't arrive at certainty like the thin countries, and the relative result of the painstaking labor was gotten over a noisier period of disunity. Short, thin and/or small countries usually don't bother anybody else as long as they are not European or members of the league of the dogmatic, so in general we can keep most of them aside when it comes to the global power politics. Indonesia is a long country, but it is surely not thin - it is somewhat medium-sized though once it had the inclination to get fat. So it still is with the flock that got to deal carefully with longer and larger countries - something that could be seen as a betterment already considering that it was colonized by a thin, short, size S country Holland for a long time. Size does matter (or it doesn't). But size is relative in the world power. So we had had something to do concerning the United Kingdom (example: after the World War II), Japan (invading us in 1942), the USA (our headache anytime), Russia (when it was leading the USSR, our Communism era of the sixties), China (ibid.), Brazil (football deities for most Indonesians since the seventies). Yet Indonesia is inhabited by a large number of Muslims. Saudi Arabia is substantial, but it didn't get the troubles commonly found intruding to uglify countries of its size, because of Islam. Economic interests wane and political alliance dies and military pacts shift, Islam stays on and keep on the way it has been for the last 1,370 years. It doesn't only keep Saudi relatively stable. It didn't unite the Arab countries, but it keeps them rolling on a meaningful one-way street unmatched by any other regional relation. And it has everything you need to achieve what Karl Marx never came to get - a global association. Upon an injury inflicted by some Otherness, all Muslims worldwide leave awhile the internal theological disputes and political quarrels and economic squabbles. A really great pain gotten would effectively bring them all as one single force. Without discounting persistent differences between the Muslim countries (Iran or Egypt might insist upon something that Iraq or Libya abhor heartfully, for instance) and the normally witnessed sectarianism, this still is an awesome prospect. The unifying power comes from within Islam itself, a thing no other religion seem to be able to rival - whoever, wherever, whenever you are, as long as you are Muslim, these come real and true: veneration of the Prophet, adhesion to the Qur'an, the use or at least knowledge of Arabic, five prayers a day, and pilgrimage to Mecca as the ideal completion of your faith. A Muslim will never feel like lost in any Muslim settlement worldwide. This is a civilization that thinks of itself as a methodically horticultured garden and constructs itself accordingly. So Islam is, and not just rhetorically so as the Christendom has long been confined as, a global power. I can't provide any explanation of my thought about this Afghanistan ramble if I can't nail nationalism or such as why do I care. I'm only one entry among a mere two million or so of Indonesian Protestants, if you trust the official classification of all citizens' religions. The whole sum of Indonesian citizens is approximately 210 million - so you know how minor this minority is. But then again I am Indonesian. I know more Muslims and I know more of Islam than both George Bushes ever do. And alongside my overall spiteful view upon wars, there is the disgust at seeing Indonesia - this fussy and messy theater of impossibilities that is nevertheless mine - being portrayed that way elsewhere northward. Hating is something, undermining is something else; Bush seems to be possessed of the second. Ignorance is something, stupidity is something else, Bush looks to be sporting the second. Arrogating justice as he has been busy with, the man who in better circumstances wouldn't get to be President to begin with really emits the entire disagreeable aroma we are forced to inhale here even from the distance of ten thousand miles. I don't hate Bush or anything that childish - neither does any of my suburban neighbors. It is Bush the American President that we probably love to kick the butts of. That the junior Bush neglects domestic affairs is one great sin to us. As an individual, even my cats would pass him by without glancing - our general evaluation of the junior Bush is of a political opportunist latecomer, unreliable official, Texan oil-magnating loser, dyslexic public speaker, incompetent domestic administrator. He is thus nobody in particular when he is President - we apply the evaluation of the presidency then. Indonesian politics, like others, have always been having some links with the USA's. There are American Presidents whom we took as the men behind the Oval Office door - Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, even Bill Clinton - and there are Presidents, period; men who only got some sort of a semblance of personality and an illusion of statesmanship because they are Presidents - John Tyler, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Harry Truman (who somewhat later self-improved), the Bushes duo. If the latter league member is rather 'a good man', we are a bit more generous to him, for instance Jimmy Carter. Otherwise we sum them up strictly by deeds as Presidents, and the Bushes have been giving us enough bodybags to consider them damned. This evaluation chart is, I guess, the kid of our homegrown Presidents all through the short fifty-seven years of independence. Sukarno was a personality. Suharto was. Abdurrahman Wahid was. Megawati's power emanates from the lingering light of her dad's (Sukarno) and is lent by Muslim parties' concession, Habibie has none of anything whatever. Hereby I want to kick the opinion that we measure Bush by our narrow episteme of 'strong men on the throne' - the euphemism of despots. We only have five Presidents so far, but only two were such. President Wahid was never President if you ask me. So where is the 'anti-Americanism' of Indonesian origin today? Nationalization of foreign assets and denouncement of foreign relations are decidedly out of date. The fears of such being officially endorsed or even urged by the Indonesian government - whichever it is - could be said as groundless. Megawati's strength is chiefly the urban masses, and these could shift into the Islamic parties easily except the minorities among them. The Indonesian Democratic Struggle Party - hers - doesn't have any semi-permanent ally except perhaps the Group of Functionaries - which would quickly grab a spot in the Muslim caucus if it looks like winning. You can't possibly establish anything with that kind of opportunism as your mate. Many believe that she has been courting the military, but if you don't believe in miracles then perhaps you would be seeing the Indonesian armed forces today - they do look like professional soldiers, consciously sliding away from politics. Amien Rais' used to be a loud non-Americanized (in the Desert Storm war he surely sounded anti-American) voice (though he is the one politician using more English in speeches than any other heart-breaking elements for Indonesian linguists), but I don't think that anyone now knows exactly his range of power - he played a part in forcing Megawati down, hoisting President Wahid up, and then in pressing him down, and afterwards in lifting Megawati up (yeah, this makes me dizzy, too), but his party only finished off the 1999 election with a meagre sum of votes and as the Chairman of the parliament he has been having no direct route to constituents. To me Rais seems to be fuzzing around the inner circle of elites and no further. He would run for President in two years' time - we shall see if he can get there at last and end the scheming atmosphere during his being outsider to the Presidential Palace these years. Perhaps W. Bush would get lucky because his being undermining Islam happens in a very domestically busy era; Muslim countries, Asia, Africa, Arab nations, have had no time to mind foreign affairs amidst the pressing internal problems. Yet I've never believed that ideology was dead with the USSR's demise. Things like nationalism and such are immortals to me because reality doesn't sustain the verdict of the newest grand narration - and in this I am not a minority.
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Yo Soy
Betty,
Footnote: Indonesians'
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It's been everybody's favorite soap opera, this Betty La Fea, that made my second reason to avoid even its ad. But who was I to have foreseen that Mrs. GF's TV would die (yup, clickcracklecrackle and all turned black) this 5 p.m.? This neighbor then sat comfortably on my bed, facing my TV, watching intently and sighing appropriately, and when the looooong trail of commercials broke in she took the opportunity to enlighten me about this series. Which might or might not explain why Betty got so many commercial breaks - according to Mrs. GF's tabloid, it has been habitually watched by thirty million of Indonesian women. The series itself, said she, is imported from Honduras (??) or Kolombia (???) or Venezuela or Ecuador or Paraguay (endless ???!). She got confused when I asked her whether it is Central or South America that she meant, so I didn't press her to come closer to the truth. Mrs. GF is 100% sure, though, Betty is not Mexican. Okay then. From that one nation we have gotten enough by now. The story is menacingly the same as every other soap opera ever got on air here; the ugly duckling turns magically into the princess of swans. Betty, Mrs. GF said, had her mouth full of stuff like Hannibal Lecter's, long curly black hair damply let loose, horrible bangs on her forehead, large correctional glasses, old-fashioned clothes which she wore one upon another at once, stuttering when speaking, stooping when walking, generally pathetic in any other occasion. She was a secretary of one of the managers in a company of apparel-generating business named Eco Moda. She fell in love with her boss. She was the laughing stock of the whole place. The boss married her for monetary reasons. Then she was kicked out of that world and came back as a powerful queen, accidentally this happens after a massive reform of her entire looks. Mrs. GF has, like everyone else, known how this story is to develop and how it will end. But this 5 p.m. the Betty I saw was (Mrs. GF's words) "still the in-between" (duckling and swan) - hair has improved, though she didn't do major upheaval and only bound it like mine (aaaaaarrrgh!); large glasses were replaced by small frameless ones but not yet contact lenses (Mrs. GF said she will end up wearing Bausch & Lomb's); what she wore was only slim jeans and grey cardigan for the entire hour of this show. I have to write this description down because Mrs. GF told me that the reason why I must at least watch one episode is because Betty looks like..... me (!!!). Well, she doesn't. I swear she doesn't. She is, according to my standard, beautiful already in this state of 'in-between'; if the picture at the end of the show is how she will be in the last episodes, then in the end she will look like anybody on a catwalk in Paris. Those bones that made her face are the same type as Linda Evangelista's. God bless anyone having those cheekbones. They usually make it in life. Anyway! I was told that the man named Armando was Betty's mock-husband (he did it for the money, and kept the nuptial a secret, plus he still was her boss at work). Now this is in itself interesting. Armando is, more or less, short; every other male character is taller in this episode and I suspect must be so everywhere else. He is stubby; his collar looks painfully choking his almost nonexistent neck, his hands are banana-like. And he wears glasses and Mrs. GF said he will forever do until the series end. Armando never gets any physical exercise, not even to be shown as wiping sweat in a luxurious gym or agitatedly walking in the park or something; if there is a mugger in the street you wouldn't instinctively turn to him for help. He's a completely sedentary worker, everlastingly confined in a cubicle. Some hero, that! I did a research once on soap-operas we got from the Mexicans, around the time of the splash of Esmeralda. Their heroes were, if not the same actor, then the same character - all physically masculine and it is completely understandable if some women there got sexual fantasies involving these men and thus badly-staged cat-fights and unconvincing evil-doing came to enter the scenes. Now Armando - can you paste the word 'sex' on an office equipment? (a safe-deposit box can elicit sexual fantasies, I know, but Armando is not even that -- he's entirely pennyless). I asked Mrs. GF if she thought this man attractive. She said no. "But," she added, "Betty was an ugly woman, you know; even if she will be very pretty, they can't give her a really good-looking man." I see. So a dream-male for an ugly woman is average and for an average woman supermen and for the sinfully beautiful gods. Maybe I'd watch the next episode to make sure if this was my genuine impression or was I only contaminated by Mrs. GF's personal ideas. If I was right, then this hero is a deviant; he's too realistic for a dream. Anyone's dream at all. My dream-man was of flesh and blood, but at least he got 20/20 vision, he's around 6 feet, he got muscles on his arms and he went to jail and he got tattoos and he crooned onstage and he claimed of knowing karate. Poor Betty.
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