on Election Circus

"They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they alledge, that care and vigilante, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves; but honesty hat no fence against superior cunning: and since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit; where fraud is permitted or connived at, or hath no Law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone and the knave gets the advantage."
~Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift

I haven’t got the chance to properly sit and write things down – I’m sure you’re all thankful of that. And yet, there are a number of things worth noting from the last few weeks.

Of course, this year, is mostly about election. The election in Iran is interesting. I have been to Iran twice and I think everyone is just as surprised as I am by the Persian vigor in politics. True that the candidates were screened by an absolute council of theocrats but they’re fighting as doggedly as any other politicians on earth. Very exciting.

The election in Indonesia is also exciting – though all the candidates suffer equally from severe mediocrity. The current libel trial of Prita highlights everything that is wrong with SBY administration. The Attorney General publicly condemned his own prosecutor - later ‘relocated’ to some other remote island. The Minister said it was a gross misinterpretation of the Law. The Parliament demanded a hearing into the matter. Investigation revealed that the parties were materially rewarded for their public positions. And yet the President let this thing dragged on for weeks in the middle of the most important election in the country.

It is probably true that SBY is the most moderate of the others but that was quite frankly, spineless. A man so committed to offend no one, the President often offends everybody else with stupendous indecisiveness. You’d wish that he would at least have some conviction in his own people.

I was in a taxi the other day stuck in the worse ever jam in Jakarta rush hour. My driver, a man in his early thirties with two kids explained he voted for PKS and was probably likely to vote SBY for lack of better alternatives. When I asked for specifics, he thought the President should’ve been louder and tougher to the Malaysian. Putting it succinctly in the most polite manner, the taxi driver explained that he was not demanding a war. He just wished for some dignity. Like most men, he wanted to be proud.

I saw a lot of polls and I genuinely fail to understand why the President is deciding in such ways but I suspect that it is probably a problem of character.

I digress.

Then there was the matter of Miss California and her biblical breasts. She’s been misbehaving again and Donald Trump has had enough of it. Does anyone else find America strange? Speaking of the Christian Right, the Pope upsets the Israelis again and Obama upsets the Israelis further. It seems like everyone upsets the Israelis these days. They need to take anger management class. Also, Britney Spears is going on Circus once again and likely to stop in Australia.

Meanwhile North Korea is playing with real nuke.

The world has gone mad.