What Happened the Day a Poet Was Appointed Postmaster

With violet pencils
he wrote upon the back side
of returned love letters and lost light years
readdressing them
to eternity Their cancelled postage stamps
wheeled away on round postmarks
and flew off like flying saucers
marked Moscow Los Angeles and New York
The moon turned to tenements
for lack of lovers And a cancelled George Washington
flew over America
~Lawrence Ferlinghetti


Bedtime Stories...

A series of events troubled me greatly recently. Some I wrote about but most I didn’t have the time. It it made me a bit sad. I love living here and I enjoy it a great deal and I think the country is full of wonderful people. I was just shocked to see the willingness of its citizens to abandon their government.

Many Indonesians – particularly those of my age – would tell me that I got it all wrong. They think their government abandons them. Most Indonesians won’t recognize Government if it were to stare right back in their faces. In fact, most Indonesians have no recollection of what Government is.

Government remains an incoherent abstract, non contextual entity for most Indonesian even after more than sixty years of Independence. Even after successive failures of numerous experiments, Government functions like a fabled black hole in a primitively structured society where Indonesians dump all hopes and pray something good will come out.

What struck me is that Indonesian people are often upset when this expectation failed to materialize, and also blame Government for these failures..

Ed Denson, an ex-Berkley radical said in 1967 of the hippies that if they “ were more realistic, they’d stand a better chance surviving. ” He could’ve been talking about Indonesia, circa 2009.
Allow me to give you the basics of Democracy and how it works.

You vote, they work. You vote them to work.

You do not vote for the smartest people – smart people are busy only with themselves and see no added value in collective interests, presumably because they’re smarter and know better. . Public service is not the high IQ club. The burden of governing nowadays come with legal liabilities and you pay peanuts. You pay peanuts, you get monkey.

I realize that I didn’t make Democracy sound terribly exciting, but rest assured, many great men have arrived to the same conclusion before. You just have to make it work. For you.
Or else, it wouldn’t work at all.

The defining characteristics of any leader is that they have at least one follower.
Twitter users know this well..

Goenawan Mohammad wrote about Yudhistira - I can’t find an English translation - but It made me think of the curious leadership of Pandawa’s eldest. Mahabrata is the oldest novel in history and the story was mostly about a leader with a gambling habit – and how the Kingdom he lead fared against Fate.

Yudhistira sat on a dice game and literally bet his nation, surrendering himself and his people to verdict of random probability.

Then he lost.

What does that say of mankind that our oldest civic society lesson, was taught in the form of good people wondering around in the woods doing a twelve steps program, before emerging victoriously in an epic and glorious bloodbath - all to redeem the gambling habit of a pale and quiet bastard from unhinged gods and goddesses ?

Plights of righteous men in messianic roles are commonly unpleasant and legendary in their fairy tale taste but they rarely base momentous decisions on a dice roll. Neo, at least trusted the Oracle and took with him lots of guns. Throwing a dice seemed awfully fatalistic.

There must’ve been many good qualities to Yudhistira and I leave it to Pak Goenawan Mohammad to spell out those wonderful things but it’s obvious that from the lesson of Mahabhrata, leadership qualities are not defined by the lack of vice in character.

Politicians are monkeys and leaders have bad habits.
They make reckless decision all the time..


The business of governing is complicated and citizens delegate to their lowest common denominator, that’s why it’s a wonderful thing to have if you ever get it to work.

Democracy is really, a rather crappy. Except that the true alternative to this horrible idea is to elect a King. Or a Chancellor.

I personally think Duke Treespotter sounds regal.

Indonesian citizens need to realize what they could reasonably expect from their leaders. I once, for example, suggested that introducing Mandatory Mosquito Bats for all citizens as their Constitutional Right. GJ further added how I could use that to help balance my fiscal policy, too.
Even the most seemingly balanced minded leaders have crazy ideas sometimes.

Citizens need to be aware of this.

In mitigating the potential damage from this ludicrously acceptable leadership, it’s worth learning a lesson or two from the Asterix comics.

In ancient Rome, the Republic was represented by the top elites of the breeding few. The lived in different days so there’s no point to ponder on the antics of their questionable habits but the model of leadership survived for thousands of years..

Rome grew to be a prosperous civilization. The parties in the thriving Capital were set to the standards of decadence suitable for demigods, Rome was the most happening thing since Babylon.

With everyone rich and happy, it was practical for the Senators to delegate governing to generals and harbormasters – they themselves were preoccupied perfecting bubble bath products, choosing wine and throwing sex parties. Some Senators – particularly the accountants – expressed concerns of how to afford those parties and that Rome might require a new economic approach but most of Senators were too drunk to care.

The only sensible policy left to keep the republic civil was that nobody was allowed to carry weapons or bring soldiers within the city limit. Both rules were broken when Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army to reprimand those Senators, and later stabbed 22 times on the senate floor by his fellow supposedly unarmed citizens. It marked the end of the Republic. Octavius stopped bothering with Senates altogether and started calling himself emperor.

From the Roman, we know exactly how not to do a Republic. No soldiering or sharp instruments.

A few thousand years later, in another republic, when America entered a defining moment in its modern role of post war guardianship, right after the inauguration of President Nixon, HST wrote worriedly that the President, “moved into a vacuum that neither he nor his creatures understand. They are setting up, right now, in the calm eye of a hurricane… and if they think the winds have died, they are in for a bad shock.”

I wrote today to Mr. Andi Mallarangeng, the spokesperson for President Yudhoyono, wondering if anyone is advising the President properly. Frankly, i'm very worried.

Though there was no serious soldiering or sharp instruments involved, President Richard Nixon took America on a roller coaster ride leading to his impeachment. I’m still not sure what happened but there were spies, robbers, senators, bankers, jews, secret agencies and a whole lot of obscure tapes of conversations.

The whole thing tested the limits of the American leadership, all the way to the top of the pile – the president himself was fired and very nearly arrested. All The President’s Men is based on the book of the same name. Oliver Stone’s Nixon is good if you’re not claustrophobic.

I’m not sure what the lesson is from President Nixon, except that citizen got to say to the President, with all due respect,

“No, sir. You can’t do everything you like.”

Also you should be careful with conversation records.

The bottom line being, Democracy is not insurance against bad things. Democracy is mostly about the system we have in place to accommodate exactly what to do when bad things happen.

Run by monkeys and all, the business of governing gets to do with a lot of bad things.
Shit happens. That’s physics.

To the footnotes of the Mahabhrata epic, Yudhistira lead his brothers for their climb of redemption to the top of the world where one by one, they succumbed to lonely and distant death, forever frozen, their destinies eternally fulfilled.

Most leaders of infant democracies consider themselves lucky if they were not deposed and exiled at the end of their terms. The burden of leadership is often unforgiving and just as brutal and sad. But always worse is the rage of the people – or those hating you enough to bring weapons within the city limits.

I was in Thailand a while ago and witnessed some of the Thai style democracy, large crowd holding picket lines and blocking traffic in the city. It was mostly peaceful compared to those I’ve seen in Jakarta but the sights of tanks on the streets scared me a little. I don’t think anyone like to see tanks on the street. What usually happens when people with guns stands against people without guns?

Democracy demands some dignity, that people trust themselves they can speak their mind without killing each other. I’m not sure Indonesians appreciate what they have.
What’s surprising is they have forgotten it so quickly.

I think acceptable values to a respectable modern day man are generally defined by the air conditioning system. It is time Indonesians learn doing their politics indoors. Important decisions are taken only in the cold rooms. Roadside democracy is impractical with the traffic jam.

John Lennon said he wanted the revolution from his bed. Andy Warhol said in the future, everyone will be on television for 15 minutes. Indonesia has an excitable media scene and some 30 million internet users. On late night MTV shows, rockstars twits fans and insomniacs from their PJs and mockprop bedroom. I thought that was cute. I don’t know.

The important message here is that democracy requires your participation.

Democracy is not a five yearly ritual. If Indonesians believe that ticking multiple choice ballots one morning every five years will make your life better then this will be the end of today’s civic lesson. Go watch the funeral of the King of Pop. It’s on Youtube.

Most Indonesians are quick to jump on the faults of their leaders and yet, when asked, what exactly they think they should do, they stuttered.

Samantha, Irish and blond, calling from San Francisco, asking of more evidence of why I think this relapse of judgment is okay with post millennium Indonesians.

I admit, I might sound a little melodramatic.

I can’t help some colorful in romanticizing on what hopes I have of this Nation but a lot of Indonesians did go through a great deal of trouble to have what they have now and more. How they’re about to lose it and roll back on everything without realizing it happening is maddening.

I think the answer is really because a great many Indonesians are fairly richer than their companions today compared to they were ten years ago. The arrival of a tidal middle class with the full humdrums of a stubborn silence and the country tumbled under the avalanche of their mediocrity.

It’s amazing that Mr. Creed was not dispatched immediately.

The middle class are notoriously promiscuous and in the hyper urban Jakarta manners, almost hormonal. Most people care more of food and traffic jams. The lack of leadership qualities in the this particular caste is vulgar. Metrosexual suburbunites, semi literated and over saturated by ideas sold in small boxes – they trust no one and believe only things in their Blackberries. Steve Jobs used acid and Apple was named after the Beatles. Is it more relevant now?

It is really hard to get their attention.

As the euphoric election high wears off, the economy struck and the nation going slowly back to normalcy, more and more people are learning that their social and political progress do not track comparably to their economic progress. A lot of people are hitting fatigued by politics and tabloid television, everybody else who care enough for anything are planning their holidays.

Roughly a year ago, also nearing the last week of Ramadan, I was doing exactly the same thing – catching up with the news mostly while researching a few things, My subject then was the free fall in global market and holiday season in Indonesia. I was particularly interested to see how modern Indonesian leaderships react, returning from holiday only to the rest of the world gone bananas.

You can go back in the archive to see what I dabbled about those days but there is almost a pattern to it. The eerie similarities is a little spooky. Freak occurrence, I’m not sure how it could be that in many ways, they are the same things as they are about these days. Unless it’s really the same things.You can’t help but think if there’s a picture of Dorian Gray in the attic growing old.

I think it’s because the peak of the holiday season is usually the quietest week of the year and everyone wants only to hear good news. If you ever done anything bad, this would be the time to let everyone know about it.

Indonesians and Moslems are generous with favors and particularly most forgiving around this time of year. This is the time to get away with many, many things and hope you never get caught because nobody heard about it.

Samantha reminded me that I’m anal with numbers, my peculiar fixation on small details irritating and my predisposition to confrontation offensive. As much as I must accept those as the flaws of my character I have to point out that citizens may choose to care or not about it later but to demand that they care without giving them accurate and timely information is pretentious and really, rathat academics.

Alphonse Bertillon, a French police officer created anthropometry, an identification system based on physical measurements. He wrote the manual for first scientific system to identify criminals and granfathered CSI and modern day forensics. He said you only observe things that are already in your head.

The journalistic profession does not develop immunity to this basic flaw of man. HST said that if told the truth of what he knew 600 people from Rio to Seattle will be rotting in jail. Absolute truth and rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I have never believed in the notion of independent reporting. The people who believe in independent reporting live in complete denial to pantomime indifference to the obvious and self gratifying fact - that their report matters.

Independent reporting in modern day television is a state of denial, we – the moden audience - tolerate it to a degree that it keeps the system going and keeps us from going completely nuts.

I watch DVDs and watch only very little television..

You can trust the media only to tell you about roughly as much things as what you can say in a dinner conversation before you make the other guests cringe.. In America, President Clinton was made to say the word SEX on tv setting the millennium standard for acceptable in polite company.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t really care because I don’t get invited to polite dinner parties anyway.
Only I find it alarming that the press establishment have a consistently blonde disregard for facts or coherent storylines.

Indonesian press establishment – despite their noble aspirations – maintains similar disturbing signs of denial, in their unformed reluctance to adhere to standards applied in other lands. Political interests with direct control of media interests get to title headlines and look at the teleprompter. Business reporting and economic advice came with no financial disclosures and publishing inconclusive information is a common and acceptable practice. As much as I hate defamation laws, the only way to admit and demand retractions and corrections from the media barons is by taking them to court.

Still in their pubescent days, television doesn’t seem to know what they can do and cannot do, Which is strange since televisions existed before presidents. Orwell warned citizens the dangers of television before television exists. You should have known..Nixon was convinced that television conspired against him. I think the argument was that television discriminates against the better looking half of the population.

The only reason they got mentioned here is because they play a peculiar role. Between the people and their government, and the court and the banks and the beautiful people and everyone else in the country, press establishment is responsible for a cohesive bond of thoughts, ideas, conversations, questions. Chomsky explained that modern day people and even the conspiratorially controlled media corporations do this to keep “dissent and disinformation within bounds and at the margin.” Their job is to convince Indonesians to do their Democracy indoors.

That Award guy, Joseph Pullitzer said something about republic – "Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery."

Appealing to the scholarly priests and prayers to ancient gods are probably the only options left for most Indonesians but in the grand scheme of things, I don’t really buy membership cards for the afterlife and I don’t have library cards. I think government should govern and priests should pray and the two should do their best not to annoy each other..

Organized religion introduced a new ruling class of by providing legitimacy to accommodate obsolete ideals and substantiate the hopefuls. It’s a common pact for society to agree to not move forward, ever from etched ideas that will only turn stale and frozen and irrelevant. While it may sound absurd to some, Flintstones have a certain retro quality to eat. Some nostalgic appeal when things were, well, Stone-age-ish. Whatever.

Religious organizations however, often mutate into cancerous concerns with similarly promiscuous morals as their nationalist politician cousins in the social power structure. If religion is benign and probably nurious, religious lobby and special interests groups are parasites to effective governing. At best, they could serve as distraction but the last two elections have practically rendered Indonesian moslems a minor power in the political map.

At some point Indonesian Moslems and the Knights Templar of all holy causes must wake up to the fact that their influence in modern day Indonesia is being rendered irrelevant, not because the citizens no longer believe in God or the Zionists or more sinister scheming of the godless infidels, but it’s because the politicking of religion have turned the Prophet’s proud example for commercial endorsements on cellular phones and supermarket snacks.

A threat emerging from the bowels of unchecked greed of politicians and provided for by cooperative economic interests, secretly controlling the fate of a nation by twittering from the boardrooms of media barons, under the blessing and protection of Priests of Cosmic Intervention. Ian Flemming sounds a lot more believable in the book.

One day I will succeed in my World Domination Plan and make everyone watch only films I like.
In one James Bond film the villain kept an actual ice fortress. But until then, sub-zero lairs, crusades on evil villains and tinkering with radical ideas are relegated to the provincial burden of anonymous bloggers and 007.

One might say I’m delusional. In True Blood, the reverend’s blonde wife gave the warrior crusader a handjob in a bathtub. The blonde faithful was the priest of the Church Children of the Sun and they send suicide bombers to kill vampires.

Back to troublesome leaders and things people shouldn’t say in dinner parties.

Both American Presidents started off by doing some stupid little things. Admittedly, in the case of Nixon, an exhilarating train of stupid little things leading to a lot of big stupid things. Before Deep Throat became a porn figure, he was bringing down presidents in trench coat. President Clinton was barely guilty of flirting. Never too popular with the porn cult now an acceptable excuse to tell a dirty joke in the funnier circles. If the Nixon tapes is a conversation starter apparently nobody wants to see Clinton videos.

Both presidents were prosecuted and accused of not telling citizens what they did.


Citizens knew, when they cast their vote, they weren’t looking for the smartest.
Most likely they voted for the best looking ones.

But again paraphrasing Dr. Thompson on this critical flaw of Nixon, there must be something wrong with a government that is pathologically unable to reveal the truth to their citizens.

For a bonus booklet and a short detour, Andy Warhol, Hunter S. Thompson and John Lennon all had accidents with gunshots. One was shot by a raging feminist. One radical shot himself. One was killed by a mad man. One draws the cover for the Rolling Stones, two made the cover when they died.

This month, John Lennon – with the Beatles – are once again on the cover of the Rolling Stones, mostly courtesy of the Steve Jobs – Apple buzz. Steve Jobs was a psychedelic figure and a product of San Franscisco of this era.

Freak occurrence, no?

Back to whatever it was we were talking about.
Wishful citizens and stupid governments, I think.

I don’t know what citizens can do. In other countries you can call your MPs or write to the papers but they also have a functioning postal system.

HST was disappointed to find the Haight Ashbury becoming capital of the hippies in 1967, questioning if the beatnik lions have become lepers. The hippies were losing their political conscience and social cause, they were only there to get stoned.

I think the hippies were there to get stoned anyway, whether something important - like a social revolution or anything equally history changing event - happened while you’re stoned or not is a matter of Fate though I could see the point he was trying to make.

Kerouac ’s chronicled road adventure was the equivalent of Marlowe’s trip up the river to earn a face to face audience with the horror of men. The horror was real, whether one required drugs to deal with the pain depending a lot of his personal choices.

Experimental ideas were thrown around the place. Brave New World speculates on a world sterile of radical ideas. Farenheit 451 took to extinguishing records of ideas and in The Man in the High Castle, Phillip K. Dick speculates on the scenario that Nazi Germany won both the war and the propaganda. Like most good books, all of them have been banned by different governments in different parts of the world.

Jack Kerouac, while editing Naked Lunch, was said to have asked Williams S. Burroughs, "Bill, what is all this stuff about young naked boys being hanged in limestone caves?" Burroughs retorted back, "No idea. I know I'm some kind of interplanetary agent but I don't think my signals are decoding properly."

If James Swift took to giants and small people and Marlowe met Colonel Kurtz, the Beatniks saw aliens.

In 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was an epilogue to an era. Jim Morrison died in Paris. Sting and The Police sent an SOS message in a bottle, a cry for help forever trapped and left unread and released it as the white man’s reggae.

I believe the fear was real.

The fear and loathing came from a void, a sense of abandon and dismemberment of trust as social cohesion. Desperation leads a lot a lot of people to extremes. Language is prohibitive to reason sometimes.

There was a sense of helplessness to it.

You probably heard a lot more but you choose to remember a great deal less. Excess decadent of men and absurdity of demands was brutal and often tragic to the point of being pathetically funny.

After his aborted escape from Las Vegas, returned to find Dr. Gonzo, the Samoan attorney, introduced the only notable presence of women in the book, a barely legal painter with an unhealthy obsession with Barbra Streissand. The girl had been most probably drugged and raped under the influence of various drugs, alcohol and revolutionary ideas.

Duke realized that they really must have lost it completely and in panic, he flee.

“We’d abuse every rule that Vegas lived by. Burning the locals, abusing the tourist, terrifying the help. The only chance now, I felt now was the possibility that we’d gone to such excess that nobody in the position to bring down the hammer down on us could possibly believe it. “

Fear and loathing was a lot about Hunter looking at the edge of his generation. That point at the crest of a high and beautiful wave, at which point and only with the right kind of eyes, you could see the high water mark. That place where the wave finally breaks, and rolled back.

Samantha thought I was being awfully fatalistic, V, pointing to the man behind the mask said idea is bullet proof. That’s only in celluloid. In real life, V died but he blew himself up to be remembered forever. He died to live in bedtime stories.

This is a well known quality, martyrdom requires a stage friendly presentation. Authorities insists in proving that ideas could be killed. Poor people are prone to messianic ideas and for that, there was a very public execution to put an end to any arguments. Decisively. Che Guevara’s dead body was paraded so citizens can poke at the bullet holes.

The deafening silence of Indonesian leaderships to speak out at this defining moment in history will forever escape me. Maybe because fasting also requires them to speak less.

Samantha asked if this overly elongated blogpost was really provoked by the man with leather jacket and cheap tie. That by somehow observing the fashion sense of different revolutionary ideas, I glanced at that high water mark of the Indonesian dream and felt confident enough to write an obituary to Indonesian “Reformasi” era.

I don’t know. Stupidity have a knack of getting it’s way. I hope I’m wrong.

I really have no idea and merely contributing to the footnotes of history. That booklet I was reading earlier, in explaining Why the History of the English Law Has Not Been Finished in his inaugural lecture, J. H. Baker, Q.C. LL.D., F.B.A., Downing Professor of the Laws of England says that he was “concerned about the more basic truth that history cannot be written in any reliable way until the best evidence has been harvested.” (I didn’t make it up, that’s his real name and titles)

With Google and the Internet, history will be rewritten in search engine formulas at the behest of dropout geeks on a mission to catalogue all ideas on the planet to make all of them searchable by context, however ridiculous that sounds.

Consider this my contribution.