| HOME Doggy Style Archive On the Road Holidays Doggy Style Blog Novel |
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Part
XI |
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The last revolution in the United States was almost 225 years ago and I missed it. From what I recall hearing in school, and the reviews I read of The Patriot, it was a pretty good one as revolutions go. |
I’ve been here four and a half out of my six months and
I’m trying to figure out what to do next. I’m not going to lay
my neurotic lack-of-decision-making process out here for all to see.
Trust me, it’s not pretty. Let’s just say that day to day,
minute to minute, it cycles through: stay here for another month
or two, go to Chiang Mai, Thailand for a while, head back to the
U.S. where I have a prospective petsitting gig in Portland for three
weeks and nothing else lined up, or, well, something else.
As usual, I’m not wracking my brain, I’m waiting for divine inspiration, though at the moment any inspiration would do nicely. I’ve tossed around the pros and cons: it feels pretty good here/ there’s not a lot of varied sensory input/there’s some semblance of community/ there’s no Balinese word for infrastructure, blah, blah, blah, boring, boring, boring. But this week a new factor cropped up: it’s looking more and more like the government could topple and—what can I say?—I’ve never been around that before.
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In the rest of the world they take these things much more seriously. They fill the streets in protest, they have general strikes that paralyze the country, and they block the roads with trucks just to see if traffic can really get any worse than usual. |
Face it, as Americans we’re too civilized, too genteel, and
most of all, too jaded. We get excited over the president getting a
blow job, hanging chads in Florida, and our favorite soap opera
being interrupted by an annoying announcement about some devastating
earthquake in India. But we don’t get too excited. Except maybe
over missing those three minutes of All My Children.
Sure, we’ll spout off at the dinner table and watch the family recoil in horror as the mashed potato bits fly out of our mouth. We’ll even write a letter to the editor and not bother to mail it. But take to the streets and demonstrate? Hah! The U.S. hasn’t seen a good demonstration since Nixon resigned. God, I wish we had him to kick around some more. It’s true there was
Seattle during the WTO conference, but that wasn’t a purely
American protest. Besides, no one had any idea what the cause
was—not those demonstrating nor those at home watching it because
they accidentally hit the wrong button on the remote. In an
interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, one activist who
was at a demonstration training camp—“Mom, instead of going to
computer camp this summer can I go to Camp
Its-a-Pro-Test?”—couldn’t tell the reporter what she was
against, only that she was against “something”. So it was really
just a mass temper tantrum, and the best most of them could come up
with was, “Because. That’s why.” |
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In the U.S. the only way you can get this many students in the street at one time is to give them free tickets to the taping of MTV’s Spring Break. And tell them Jennifer Lopez will be having sex with Daisy Fuentes on stage. |
In
the rest of the world they take these things much more seriously. In
fact, it’s an important part of their life. They fill the streets
in protest, they have general strikes that paralyze the country, and
they block the roads with trucks just to see if traffic can really
get any worse than usual. Maybe it’s not as “civilized”, but
it’s passionate. In the U.S. our passion is reserved for the
Thursday night TV line-up, small nation-sized bags of chips, and
spouses during the first year of marriage.
Hey, I might get the chance to be around when a government is overthrown! All week tens of thousands of students have been taking to the streets of Jakarta protesting because President Abdurrahman Wahid was allegedly involved in two scandals, neither of which, unfortunately for him, involves sex. Each day they demonstrate in front of the House of Representatives, making their views known, trying to effect positive social change, and putting off starting that term paper on “The Long-term Effects of PlayStation on My Grade Point Average.”
For my parents’ sake, I
do need to mention that Jakarta, where all this action is taking
place, is 600 miles away and across the Bali Strait. While it’s
true Bali is a province of Indonesia, it’s had precious little
political demonstrating in the past. In fact, one popular guidebook
describes a student demonstration in Denpasar when Suharto was
ousted as “more like a street party.” |
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Not long ago, in Kuta, a guy actually asked me if I needed transport while I was climbing out of a car and hadn’t even closed the door yet. If they’re nothing, they’re an optimistic bunch. |
I
can’t guarantee we’re immune here, but it’s not likely to be a
problem. For one thing, Bali is predominantly Hindu and people are
much less hot-headed. For another, it survives on tourism, and face
it, political uprisings aren’t good for tourism. Well, not unless
you want to attract a bunch of people like me, and I don’t think
I’m what most tourist boards consider their prime target market.
But it definitely has an effect—tamu are few and far between right now. Much of this is natural since it is, after all, February, and that’s hardly prime traveling season. Plus it’s the rainy season, though so far it’s been a pretty light one. (Excuse me while I continue typing with my dfcfuwindm gdnigy...I mean, my fingers crossed.) Sitting on the steps at Tino’s, a market on Jalan Raya, I talk to the drivers who hang around asking every non-Balinese who walks by if they want “transport” while making steering motions with their hands, even the drivers who have motorbikes and not cars. They’re persistent. Some days they ask me if I want transport while I have my motorcycle helmet in one hand and the key in the other. Not long ago, in Kuta, a guy actually asked me if I needed transport while I was climbing out of a car and hadn’t even closed the door yet. If they’re nothing, they’re an optimistic bunch.
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So I check the newspaper every few days to keep an eye on the situation. And watch the news on TV wondering what the hell they’re saying. |
Several drivers have asked me why they don’t disclude Bali when
they issue these. I tried to explain that as far as our government
is concerned, Indonesia is Indonesia. I told one that I’d see if I
could get them to change it to say “Indonesia with the exception
of Bali.” Now every time I see him he asks me if I’ve heard back
yet. At first I told him Madeleine Albright’s handphone was always
busy. Then I told him Colin Powell took over and I didn’t have his
phone number. When he pressed me I said a friend was trying to get
it for me. I’m running out of excuses. I’m dangerously close to
having to tell him a gecko ate my e-mail.
I can understand how people get the wrong impression about what’s going on here. After all, there are problems in Timor, Aceh, and Jakarta to name just a few. The fact that Indonesia is made up of 13,670 islands and the trouble spots are at least 600 miles away from me isn’t made clear on the nightly news. Not that I expect Peter Jennings to use my location as a basis for describing Indonesian unrest, though it certainly would put my parents’ minds at ease if he would. It might also put a stop to the biweekly e-mails they send asking if it’s really a good idea for me to be here. And while I’m at it, will I remind them of my real name, which son I am, and whether the Christmas presents I sent them are really lost in the mail or, as in past years, am I just making it up. So I check the newspaper every few days to keep an eye on the situation. And watch the news on TV wondering what the hell they’re saying. I really hate to base a decision about what I’m going to do with my life on a government’s political unrest, but it could be worse. I could flip a soon-to-be-devalued coin.
©2001 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
The last revolution in the United States was almost 225 years ago
and I missed it. From what I recall hearing in school, and the
reviews I read of The Patriot, it was a pretty good one as
revolutions go. But unfortunately we don’t do these things every
day. Or even every century. It’s a shame too, since there’s a
lot to be said for shaking things up once in a while. Sure it’s a
big change having a president who has more money than experience and
more of Daddy’s staff than brains, but that’s just not the same
thing. Hell, that’s not revolution or evolution—it’s
more like a recurring nightmare.
In the U.S. the only way you can get this many students in the
street at one time is to give them free tickets to the taping of
MTV’s Spring Break. And tell them Jennifer Lopez will be having
sex with Daisy Fuentes on stage. With a donkey. Hey, you usually
have to go to Tijuana to see something that good.
But they’re not very optimistic at the moment. Business has been
slower than usual and they blame the U.S. government. After all,
they’re the ones who keep issuing those pesky travel warnings. You
know, the ones that say, “The Department of State urges American
citizens to defer nonessential travel to Indonesia.”|
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