spend the night recounting

An American's life on Sumatra

[thenightrecounting]

Near Terror

Twice since the beginning of the year I have found myself not so far from terror-touched places.

In January, I stepped off a motorcycle in Depok, just outside Jakarta, to find dozens of messages from friends asking how I was, where I was---demanding that I answer. Walking to a meeting in the quiet, rainy university campus, I replied. There had been bombs, my friends said. The meeting came, went, we lunched and drank sweet instant coffee. Then I went to the train. Riding to Jakarta's old city, I began to think. And to read the news stories on my phone. The English-language press was still asleep, except in Australia. It wasn't clear what had happened. A bomb had gone off, and there had been a gunfight. Near Sarinah, one of the city's first high-rises (President Obama remembered it as the only tall building of his childhood in Jakarta), there had been a gunfight.

I walked from the station to an old coffee shop where I had once met an old Jakarta hand from the State Department (those don't really exist anymore). It sells gritty, sweet kopi tubruk, the especially Indonesian drink where coffee beans are ground to a powder, then poured into a cup, mixed with hot water, and drunk. There is a layer of grit on the top and of sludge on the bottom. In between, there is harsh coffee. Cut with sweetened condensed milk, it is evocative. Evocative was what I needed.

From a seat by the window I set about making an announcement. I rarely post on Facebook, but this would be a time to do it. I was fine, I wrote, there had been an attack but I was fine and everyone I knew was fine and things were safe.

Where were the attacks, exactly? Sarinah, yes, but where was Sarinah in relation to me? I'd been across the street from there just two nights before, singing a round of karaoke with the band at Jaya Pub (it was a tour for a visiting South African---Jaya seemed like the place to go for someone who wanted to know something about older Jakarta but didn't have the constitution for Glodok). It turned out Sarinah was a mile from where I was. The Menteng district is not so large, after all. I should have known better than to camp out a mile from the attack. Starbucks in Karet would have been better.

But the attack had been on a Starbucks. I am always at Starbucks in Jakarta. In Indonesia. The coffee is actually awful---far far worse than at US Starbucks. But the wifi is stable. I wrote my graduate school applications at Starbucks.

Tubruk coffee and a Facebook post and everything was fine. I was fine. Right? My friends were fine. One was stuck in her building until the lockdown ended. But the jokes, the relieved gallows humor, that was already coming. Alhamdullilah it was nothing like last time; thank God the bomb exploded in the street; maybe the police are succeeding---the terrorists are not competent like in the past.

I had scheduled a meeting with an expat friend. Now it proceeded under different circumstances. A brush with something. It sticks with you.

I was in Europe in March. Paris. It only sticks with you, I think, if you have a connection to the place. If in some way you can say, have to say, would rather not say but must, I was about a mile from there. I was down the street the night before. I've been there. I spend time in places like that. At least last time was worse.

[thenightrecounting]

Dispatch: Toraja

I am in a crazy place right now. Toraja, in the northern part of the island of Sulawesi, which you may know if you are really into maps, but otherwise, even its old English name Celebes is probably not going to ring any bells because what could be possibly be in Celebes?

What is in Toraja-land is this: animists. This is a pre-Christian place. Not like the Carlo Levi Christ Stopped Southern Italians are so primitive their Catholicism is paganism sort of pre-Christianity. This is the real deal sci-fi raw material stuff--if the baby dies before their teeth are in, put the baby into a tree so that it will become part of nature.

I haven't seen this many skulls since I went to the killing fields outside Phnom Penh. But it is amazing how different a skull can seem when it is in a cave and well-stocked with offerings of cigarettes from relatives who keep the place up. There's nothing scary about this place--it's just, well, pre-Christian, and that is something you don't see much in this world.

Of course, everyone here is nominally Christian. Because there is no "animist" checkbox on the ID card form and because in this country Protestan is a catch-all for everything that doesn't make sense to us and isn't about the pope. That includes Jews. Of course they all go to church and have crosses up around the cave where they keep the ancestors. Because Jesus Christ and your deceased ancestors both love you.

But it gets much weirder. Yesterday I went to a funeral. Funerals are what Toraja tourism is based on, because funerals in Toraja are a big, big deal. The one I attended yesterday is running for days--receiving guests Tuesday through Thursday, resting on Friday, then the burial on Saturday. Twenty-eight water buffalo are scheduled to slaughtered in the course of this funeral, and those things aren't cheap. I was at the market yesterday and the plain ones, not extra large and no white spots, were $8,000. The white ones and the big ones were pushing eleven thousand. Some German (or was it a Frenchman? Or an Alsatian?) wrote about gift economies and splendid, destructive excess. This is that. Two hundred thousand US dollars just on buffalo (there are pigs, too, and the space, and the announcer and the casket and the tents and the hole in the cave wall and the statue of the deceased and the parades) is excessive and destructive and spectacular.

But wait, there's more. See, the guy who died, he died three years ago. So where has he been all this time? On his couch. Because this is how it is done. Getting that money together takes time, and it wouldn't be right to not give Grandpa a proper sendoff. Naturally, the solution is to preserve the body and keep it around. If not on the couch then perhaps at the kitchen table.

There is something rather comforting about this, keeping relatives around. In the van on the way up the spine of this caltrop-shaped island a fellow in the back asked whose funeral I would go to. I said, a friend told me about one. He asked, is this friend living, or dead? I said, living. Living friends are nicer. Both kinds are nice to spend time with, he said.

And so yesterday I watched a water buffalo bleed out in front of a crowd of hundreds, and considered the bearded, empty eyed (drunk?) white man bringing his eight-inch lens two inches from the gore, wishing that the buffalo would thrash just once more and soak this sick bastard who did not understand the ritual and did not show Western disgust for the taking of a life. But then he might have enjoyed it.

End dispatch.

[thenightrecounting]

Alienable Rights

You may remember that the Indonesia's penchant for shooting foreign drug dealers gets my blood boiling. I saw today in the Jakarta Globe something I've wondered about for a long time, which is the degree to which decision-making at the top is influenced by quirks in the high school education system. Foreign minister Retno Marsudi, here:

“Has the other angle — the perspective of the victims — been adequately represented? How many millions of Indonesian children have lost their future because of narcotics? How many parents cry every day for these victims? How much do those parents and the government have to spend in order to save Indonesia’s youth?” Retno said.

I once attended, and judged contestants' "creativity" in, a speech competition where every student gave the same speech. Each of the speeches contained this line: "Human rights? What about human rights of the victim?" 

This sort of contractarian approach to human rights is so different from what is taught in the United States that I was surprised to hear it, and it was hard to link it to any legal concept of human rights used in liberal democracies. Think of it this way: as taught to Indonesian high schoolers, people are endowed with alienable rights, and that the right to life is alienated by default when a person possesses drugs.

It is worth noting that in none of these speeches have I ever heard the victims given a chance to speak, even in the form of a quote. Nor have I heard evidence linking specific dealers to specific victims. It is not that harm needs to be shown; rather, the consensus is that drugs will lead to harm, and therefore, there need not be an accuser, a victim, for the right to life to be lost. 

This is what we are seeing in Retno's words: "What about the victims" has very little to do with actual victims. It has a lot to do with choosing state violence as an easy alternative to careful problem-solving. 

I guess now I have some evidence that the way people are taught to think in high school influences how they think when they are foreign minister.

[thenightrecounting]

What we are asking of Indonesia is what Indonesia asks of other countries when its citizens are on death row,’ Mr Abbott said on Sunday. 'If it's right for Indonesia to ask and expect some kind of clemency, it's surely right for us to ask and expect some kind of clemency.' - See more at: http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top-stories/2015/02/16/meeting-to-outline-bali-nine-duo-execution.html#sthash.PUP6xvER.dpuf

[thenightrecounting]

As a democratic, sovereign state with its own sovereignty, independent and impartial system of justice, no foreign country nor party can nor should interfere in the implementation of the laws of Indonesia in force within its jurisdiction, including in the application of laws to deal with the trafficking of drugs.

My two favorite countries are fighting. Jokowi, you really should have taken Dilma's call. 

(In portuguese: http://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2015/02/governo-da-indonesia-chama-de-volta-ao-pais-embaixador-no-brasil.html)

[thenightrecounting]

If Indonesia opposes the death penalty for their citizens in the Middle East for example then I am more than happy to support their pleas. “Likewise I would hope that the Indonesian government would show the same mercy to Australian citizens as they are demanding that other nations show their citizens.

Julie Bishop, foreign minister of Australia, on the Bali Nine. Two of the convicts are due to be executed soon. Their lawyers allege that judges sought bribes to reduce the sentence. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/16/julie-bishop-refuses-to-comment-on-claims-bali-nine-judges-asked-for-bribes

[thenightrecounting]

Total stock price gains from coup authorizations were three times larger in magnitude than price changes from the coups themselves.

In other words, lots of people got rich from insider trading on CIA decisions to go forward with planned coups. Stock prices were jumping before the coups, but the coups were top-secret. 

Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu, "Coups, Corporations, and Classified Information" Quarterly Journal of Economics 2011. http://www.nber.org/papers/w16952

[thenightrecounting]

Andrew Gelman put this slide up during a presentation at the Harvard psychology department. The point is that if a phenomenon has a true effect size of 2%, with an underpowered study (I think in this case, n = not many), we would need to observe a 17% effect to conclude that it is statistically significant. And, 24% of the area under the curve has the wrong sign. 

Lots of studies are underpowered; a p-value does not constitute incontrovertible proof--not when we take power seriously. 

[thenightrecounting]

What are we thinking about today?

Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory (the Superbowl; a standard play-call; one great read by a rookie)

Regional oligarchies. Mostly in Indonesia, but let's be real, we have those in Utah, Michigan, all over Brazil. It's a bit different in Indo, and that's what I'm thinking about. 

[thenightrecounting]

Killing, not softly

Indonesia killed six people last week. Tied them to a post and shot them, like they still do sometimes in Utah, and do every day in China. It was all over the papers there and got some attention in English media. I have been trying to figure out what to think of it, and I've come to a few conclusions. The gist of them is that the executions suggest that president Jokowi: 

1) does not understand the harm these killings do to his country's international reputation, and perhaps has not much of a clue about what that reputation might be. He also, unlike his predecessor (anyone remember the "One Million Friends, Zero Enemies" policy?), is not interested in protecting Indonesia's reputation. 

2) is doing this to serve a domestic audience that does not need to be served in this way--am I mistaken or did he win the election that won't happen again for five years? He is the president. Whether those people live or die, he possesses all the powers of the office, which are considerable, and can be used in as "strong" a way as he wishes. 

3) We can also conclude that being educated on drug resistance by Pemuda Pancasila does not lead to enlightened drug policy choices 

And it is worth remembering that 4) the morally repugnant choice to take people's lives in service of an unnecessary domestic agenda is entirely consistent with the history of Indonesian populist nationalism. 

Remember how little coverage there was of the contest to outdo one another on nationalism there was during the campaign--the chest-bumping--this is the first hint we've seen of what that will translate to in the new government's policy. 

It is ugly. 

[thenightrecounting]

KPK is Us

While in transit from one antipode to another, I missed one hell of a story in Indonesia. The head of the country's Corruption Eradication Commission, which goes by the initials KPK, was arrested. Arrested by the National Police. And wouldn'tcha just know that one week before, the president's nominee for national police chief was named a corruption suspect by the KPK. 

This wasn't the first time something like this happened--shortly before I moved to Indonesia in 2012, protesters protected the KPK building from an attempted raid by the police. This time, the issue appears to have something to do with the anti-corruption commissioner's car. A Camry--yeah, a Camry. You just know someone with a Camry must be on the take. 

A straight revenge job, we can pretty safely assume. And somehow I missed that the reason Tempo magazine had put "KPK is Us" on its front cover and many of my Indonesian friends have made that their WhatsApp and Facebook statuses, is that we are once again in the midst of an inter-branch crisis. Tom Pepinsky has a good take on what the symbolism means (and for Indonesian language learners, an interesting discussion of how to translate KPK adalah kita). 

Tempo magazine has an interview with the current acting police chief that effectively conveys how opaque Indonesian officials are in their public statements. It's also interesting for mentioning other occasions of tense transitions in the command of the national police. 

For now, the crisis appears to be on hiatus. These things unfold slowly. 

Oh yeah, Jokowi and Prabowo had a meeting at the state palace the other day. Ten dollars to whoever can explain what that was about. 

[thenightrecounting]

There Used to be Bombs Here

1.

Last summer I was in Jakarta interviewing men responsible for neighborhood security. There is a whole system in place here that puts volunteers from neighborhoods, mostly men, usually older and often retired, in charge of all kinds of government paperwork, community activities, and security. It was talking to these men that I first heard Indonesians talk about terrorism. 

"We have to make sure we know who is in our neighborhood," know who is staying in boarding houses, because they could be terrorists, one of these men pointed out to me. There had been those bombings, after all, right around here. His finger traced a small circle as he said that, seeming to linger just a little longer on 

It was a few days before I put that together. Twice the residential and shopping district at the edge of the neighborhood where I was had been bombed. First the JW Marriott in 2003, then the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton in 2009. They were just around the corner, though the tight-packed residences of residential Jakarta and the ever-being-polished gleam and frigid AC clouds of a Southeast Asian business district are foreign lands. 

Foreign, too, are the hate-filled ideologies that fueled those bombings. To an outsider, it may be hard to explain how a place with prayer halls on nearly every street corner, prayer rooms in malls, and loud calls to prayer each morning can feel so utterly unrelated to any vision of Islam one can see on television in America. It becomes hard to remember that the stuff of our bigots' nightmares is the stuff of daily life here. And yet. Everyone here lives with the real connection between that Saudi movement and daily practice of this distant place

I met a friend the other day in an ersatz Parisian bistro at the base of a glimmering apartment tower. My taxi pulled up a sharp ramp--the only entrance--and found at the top a heavy bar and guards pushing little curved mirrors on wheels. The mirrors, like rolling selfie sticks, are for looking at the bottom of the car. They are normal in nice hotels here. So, too, are the uniformed guards and heavy gates. What was not normal was this driveway, this single way in that reveals to one paying attention that the beautiful tower sits on a concrete pedestal. Nor was the tall metal cage with one stone wall that surrounded the car as the mirrors on wheels checked the undercarriage.

The stone sat between the car and the building. A blast, initially spherical, would be directed first by the stone back into itself, then, by the foot thick steel of the cage, be channeled up and down the driveway. And the blast would have to be there, because the concrete pedestal put trucks too far away and too far below the structure to bring down the building. 

I thought these things because the tower was across the road from one of those hotels. Because the security was not perfunctory, as it is at the malls here, where a beeping metal detector does not prompt another look. Because each of these features came into relief as I wondered at the steep slope and the stone wall of a steel cage. 

2.

It was hard not to wonder, standing in the rubble of a freshly bulldozed neighborhood, whether the people who were moved had any say, whether they received compensation, and whether the experience of having one's neighbors plucked from their houses, one's neighborhood knocked down, and one's community turned into a hotel for the incomprehensibly wealthier is the kind of thing that makes a person angry. 

[thenightrecounting]

He walked past the house whistling like a bird. That's how vegetables are sold. 

[thenightrecounting]

Sunday School

Everything else is rubrics. 

Here, perhaps, is the key to Pope Francis’s astounding arrival, for beyond all matters of style, doctrine and behavior, he is offering a sure glimpse of a fleeting truth about the faith: The man on his knees washing the feet of the tired poor is the Son of God.

Francis is pointing more to that figure than to himself, or even to the church, which is why institution-protecting conservatives are right to view him with alarm. For this pope, the church exists for one reason only — to carry the story of Jesus forward in history, and by doing that to make his presence real. Everything else is rubrics.

- James Carroll, "Jesus and the Modern Man," New York Times 7 Nov 2014

[thenightrecounting]

Simpler ballots

Last Tuesday was election day, and I spent it at the polls. Voting is hard, it turns out. And it's harder in America than abroad.

Do you remember your last trip to the polls? If you were in a place like Michigan or Massachusetts, your ballot was probably a long, thick sheet packed with small text. Probably you used a pen or marker to fill in a bubble. It might have taken a while to hunt down all the bubbles to mark, to read all the long ballot questions and decide what you thought. You would have brought that sheet to a ribs-high machine that sucked the ballot from your hands, then noiselessly slid the ballot back out. Rejected, for no clear reason. 

This is all so much worse if you can't see very well, or if your English isn't so good, or if you've never done it before, or if the poll workers are inexperienced or the line is long, or if you haven't been paying close attention to the races. And of course, in most states and at most jobs election day is a work day. 

All of these are lived realities for many Americans. A few things may exist at each polling station to accommodate them. The ballot might be printed in English and Spanish, as it was in Boston. There might be a machine to assist visually impaired voters. There might be a phone line to reach Vietnamese-speaking interpreters. But none of these things is a given. 

Worse still, none of them help with a very basic difficulty: the ballot is tricky. For anyone who does not work with texts for a living, the ballot is intimidating--long, written in small text (look at the size of the party identifications under the candidate names), and full of unfamiliar names. It is strange that among all the accommodations that are made, none of them address the fundamental problem of a near-illegible ballot. 

Compare your ballot experience to the ballot used in the July presidential elections in Indonesia. 

Pictures and color. If you cannot read well, you still have the picture to go by.

One woman I watched struggle with Boston's ballot wanted to know three things: "Where is Martha?", "Where is the Spanish?", and "What should I vote for?". The Spanish was on the ballot itself, but in tiny letters. A better ballot would not have helped with her last question, but it would have made it very clear where Martha (a candidate for governor) was. To mark the ballot shown above, a voter simply pokes a hole in the picture of their preferred candidate. It's simple, and makes no assumptions that people have the capacity to work with long, detailed texts. 

What bothers me, and should bother everyone who thinks that the act of going to vote should be straightforward, is that none of the accommodations apply to the ballot itself. It is entirely appropriate to have translators on the phone and machines for the visually impaired. But these do not resolve the more basic failure to accommodate via ballot design. Such accommodation becomes critical when we remember that most counties do not have the kinds of resources needed to provide the translation services and bi-lingual ballots that go at least part of the way to increasing accessibility. 

We should have simpler ballots. Most places do. 

[thenightrecounting]

They knew everything!

Just in time for Halloween, things got crazy. In Brazil. Where there’s an election on Sunday. 

This morning, leading newsweekly Veja put this on its cover.

  It says, “They knew everything.” They are incumbent presidential candidate Dilma Rousseff, the woman on the left, and Dilma’s old boss, former president Lula. He’s the one with the beard. In case you couldn’t tell, what they knew was, apparently, very bad. See, for the past few months, scandal has been brewing over who knew what and when about some investments that went bad at Petrobras, the state petroleum company. Veja, whose previous hits include the cover text “suitcases full of money” did a whole lot of digging here and found a person who would say for the record that “they knew everything.”

And once you’ve done that, there’s nothing left to do but push your magazine out a day early so that it hits the newsstands 48 hours before the polls open.

Something about that seems odd. Oh, right. Fact-checking. May not have happened. As best we can tell right now, the evidence behind this cover is one guy already in trouble for his role in the scandal says that some other people knew some stuff.

It’s almost as if Veja has an agenda. 

I wasn’t sure how to interpret all this fishy magazine business, but luckily, Dilma went on TV to explain it to me. It turns out that this was “electoral terrorism” carried out by Veja magazine and “its dark partners.” One might even say it’s “barbarity” born from a “malevolent intent” to “interfere in the elections.” All this malevolence has got me worried—luckily Dilma reassures me that “just like the other times,” Veja “will fail in its criminal attempts.” Yeah, fail in crime. Yeah, “justice will condemn it for its crime.” Yeah.

Wait a minute—Dilma is the chief law enforcement officer in Brazil. If the justice system is going to condemn this crime, why, that would mean that Dilma would be bringing the case. This all sounds very democratic, and by democratic, I mean full of bad intentions on all sides and menacing on the part of the person in charge.

Isn’t it delightful that she ends her final TV ad of the election with, “I will reply in court”? It sure is.

Post script:

Dilma spent this afternoon asking the country’s electoral court to suppress the magazine. Yeah, they really asked the court to order that the magazine be taken down and that all Facebook links to it be deleted.

The court said no.

Last week, the court ruled that election ads could contain proposals and critiques of others’ proposals, but not “magazine clippings” and attacks on peoples’ character. You know what the campaigns did? They just ignored it. 

[thenightrecounting]

Backsliding

When a democracy is young—this is hard for Americans to understand—there are people in the public sphere who do not believe in democracy. And there are people with political power who, one suspects, are unhappy about democracy. Come election time, when one of these people runs, it can sound like partisan slander to bring up the anti-democrat’s personal history, to remind people who may not remember that the candidate tortured, cracked down, and married the dictator’s daughter. These are all ways of saying, “Do not trust that this person wants a democracy.”

This week in Indonesia, that informed suspicion was roundly confirmed. After losing the presidential election and refusing to concede, exhausting his appeals to the constitutional court and being denied succor by the electoral commission, Prabowo Subianto fired the shot that proved the point many had long been making.

At 2 AM on the 25th of September, Prabowo’s Gerindra party passed a bill to end the direct election of governors and mayors in Indonesia. No doubt they were upset that the man who won the presidential election, Joko Widodo, had risen to the highest ranks of Indonesian politics by being what a democrat should be—a popular, effective leader and winner of elections. Never again, they were saying, should someone come to power as this man did, through responsive governance and anti-corruption drives as mayor in Solo and as governor in Jakarta.

This is a sad day for Indonesia, whether the law stands up to court scrutiny or not.

None of this would have happened if the current president were not a coward. For weeks, as this bill moved through committee, President Yudhoyono reiterated his support for the direct elections that had so dramatically shaped Indonesian politics since his victory in Indonesia’s first direct presidential election in 2004. His party held well over 100 seats in the parliament, and controlled the balance of the vote. But at 2 AM on the 25th, they were nowhere to be found. The president’s party had walked out. Perhaps they thought that by taking neither side they could emerge from this fight unscathed.

But their walkout will be a permanent stain on the party, and confirm Yudhoyono’s legacy as a man unskilled in democratic politics and incapable of making a decision. Though he may not understand so, his party’s walkout was a decision, a decision to stand down when democracy demanded that he stand up. In a word, this was cowardice.