Exile on Main Street

The Opposition aren't really the Opposition. They're just called the Opposition. But in fact they are the Opposition in exile. The Civil Service are the Opposition in residence.

-Antony Jay-

How many times have you bumped into a "teh" instead of "the" in recent online news stories, compared to those you’d found on papers?  Or, a more confusing "there" when it was suppose to be "their", then probably, after a quick fling of the writer's mind, you got one like "trial" when it should have been "tribal"?

Those typos were not from small county or college papers, or websites now, but from top news agencies. Though some say that you cannot blame them for what is going on these days. Agencies are racing to get updates wired even just for a line, just enough to make your short birthday texts looked less embarrassing.

So how is it looked like on news sites in non-English speaking countries? Like Indonesia perhaps? Im not talking about full English report -- that’s not gonna happen here for the next two Olympic Games or World Cup safe to say -- but on how they ridiculously present some UN bodies in their official names like the "International Organization of Migram" or a relatively fancy recruitment term like "outsourcing"?

Some reporters here, mostly those away from the capital, are not schooled enough with English to write down their hobbies correctly in English. While the Jurassic editors are fruits of the Soeharto’s long-running nationalism brainwash at every social layer which, more or less, said "love thy language, don't try to sound like Charles Bronson in westerns". That explains why the five-star general himself never hosted his foreign guests without an interpreter next to him.

Forgive me for swinging too far.

So one day when I was waiting for my commuter van in a Jakarta dusty bus stop, a guy in early 50s with unlit cigarette between his lips pedaled his sewing cart near a stall at the stop and braked for a light. I chuckled, before the offended feeling started to seep in. This one is different.

This guy wanders around neighborhoods offering sewing service for a living, that’s what the text on the front of his 'wheel' says. It’s somewhat a “new” kind of service in urban areas compared to kitchenware or shoe fixers which have been around for over 40 years.

It’s a dollar or less to patch a hole on your pants, sew up ripped-off pits on your shirt, stretch out the waist line of your old jeans, or cut the pipes of your new jeans. They don't tailor shorts or make shirts. They are jobless who can't sew actually, but forced to do the job. Some are married and some, unfortunately, with kids. He, has two teenagers to feed while the older ones he said have been living on their own.

And for people who take home - sometimes a dollar after meal and cigarettes- when time is not on their side, or about five dollars when they thought the heaven is smiling that day, I think, the bold capital line on his cart was like a firework at a funeral.

It felt disturbing. It still does. Because who can afford school with that earn to have such simple yet pertinent line? Maybe he’s been watching some Hollywood on TV, but it takes wit to make those words speak for him.

With school tuition moves wherever the gasoline goes he won’t find any decent school for his kids, if anyone suspected that it was probably his kids, even if his wife had an exhausting housekeeping job which pays worse than he makes averagely.

The Sad Truth

Now, our guy was not entirely an ordinary poor. He is an educated man who lost his job for corruption.

Feel the stir in your stomach now? It was almost half and hour since I asked him for a chat in exchange of cold drinks and cigarettes, which he never asked actually. I had no way to prove his claim, maybe he is just one of the state spooks sent to spy its own citizens. I didn't care. The twist in my gut was too much to handle, it bubbled up to the chest, pumped tingles out all over my body, then sprayed to the air through the bumps on my skin, leaving disappointment and all the feelings you got when your union chief walked to the other side.

He claimed to be a staff with one of the offices under the Transport Department for 22 years before he got fired ten years ago. It was the seaport operator of Indonesia’s biggest and busiest container transit hub, Tanjung Priok. The port where, as the legend says, you can slip Harley Davidsons in under Chinese toys guise, or slip out ebony logs with garlic printed on the export notes. No kidding.

It took five minutes altogether, in which I lost all his words, and about the same time for me to get back to my notes, as the zap came back to tell me: “this kinda thing doesn't happen everyday”.

The next surprise I must tell you, was the second line painted below the first. It’s the popular abbreviation of Indonesia's anti-graft office parodied into "Kelompok Permak Keliling" on the bottom, or the Mobile Sewing Group' in rough English. Again, for most from his class who are living hand to mouth, how many would give a damn on anti-graft campaign? They are still taking one day at a time.

And how can he speak politics.

With a bit of that familiar bureaucratic air and choice of words of the latest popular politicians, I know he watches TV and no doubt reads the papers too. He played it well for me too when I asked his side of the story. But he kept me wondering how did it go.

He only said he was the only one who left after a probe that scared him. He didn’t say he was being “victimized” though, a cliche you can expect from most civil servants nailed for graft.
The "New" Side

He is on the opposition side now. A fierce one.

A street opposition crying out on every corrupt measure toward the poor. A man who might have been on the other side of the fence had he grown in the corrupt system, won a strategic post, before maybe being forced to take the fall for the whole office and eventually secure a soft landing of no longer than five years in jail, not to mention the coming Independence Day and religious term cuts, instead of serving his term in exile now without signs of pardon.

He snuffed out the monthly--social security-like--cash handouts to the poor, which were actually a sweetener to the fuel hike. It was over two years ago, you know, the president had to strike a balance on his budget somehow in the middle of the first global oil boom in nearly four decades, while keeping his approval rate high for his second round of presidency. The previous lady in office, the nation's first female leader, did that too, who are now mouthing the policy because it is crippling her party “socialist” image.

He saw what the poor actually got was half of what the program was boasting, or about three days of best earn he stitches off the streets.

He knew that some of the poor in his area always get the help while some others never, supposing underhand deal, could be familial or well-maintained inter-personal clique.
Sometime after the hand-outs stopped, way before a Harvard professor came all the way from Cambridge recently to lecture the president and his cabinet about the handouts, the sewer said his local chief got his private home restored. The half cut of the hand outs for his neighborhood, he accused, had turned into a new home.

The man even made me moved my weight from one side to the other, when the energy in his voice spilled out wide distracting the other moving peddlers and his friends around. Some turned their heads away with traces of mocking smile. In my mind I could easily picture him in a suit with a tie, rambling at the social affairs minister about the program, like some real oppositions in a recent bail out case that could take down Yudhoyono the way Richard Nixon fell off his chair. Its just that, the real MPs feigned harassed feelings of the public who lost their savings to conceal the vengeance for their loss in the last election by the cheating incumbent, while our guy looked pretty much like the actual, if not the true, voice of the harassed.

He and his class probably have all the right to be furious. Half of the hand-out means, for him, three days off the street with plenty to spend, while the other half is just what he, and all the poor households in the country will need to get the official papers for special-priced medical treatment for the poor, in case anyone in his family got sick.

But the rich driving latest Japanese cars here could easily win the papers, which were never meant for them, simply on ground that they could not cover a whole overwhelming surgery cost, and they had the total cost paid for by government. It’s nothing for those in the upper middle brackets to spend, to get the stamped papers from the lowest community office to the top regional agencies, which suppose to be free of charge.

Bribe, as our guy said in his own words “has reached to the fundamental” part of the society.

The impacts of pricey oil had also found its way to the slum neighborhood. Of course, they have been the cushion against any economic shock rippling down from corrupt decisions made at the top, to spare the upper class from the mutilating backfire of foul policies.

And the poor had been forced to pay with their lives. Programs to switch kerosene, the main cooking fuel for poor households here, to gas, had killed dozens of poor, which in turn has humiliated the president when a mother living hundreds of miles away from the capital decided to take her burnt four year-old to the state palace for some attention, and money.

Maybe they are now not so stupid after all. Or was it despair? Or probably one of the oppositions came over and had a talk with the family after the blast?

However, our guy said, the victims not worth the official campaign which claim every poor household will get one free gas stove and one free gas canister, although some were actually forced to pay.

Those matters were probably all too apparent by most of his peers but for him there were more.

He literally jeered at university students as ‘stupid morons’ for the way they observe his neighborhood. He asked me what kind of result their poverty survey would show, after copying the poor list from the local office were all they did instead of getting down to every house to see the picture for themselves. A list which, like he said at the beginning of his story, came from good relations.

All I can do was nodding. It’s only an hour since he start talking, but I felt stuffed then.
I told you this guy was different from the group he belongs to now, and he consistently is, to the last drop.

When Friedrich Nietzsche felt frustrated about the world he lived in, he created in his mind a superhuman that could do the clean up fast and lead the ordinaries to a better world, something that the majority of less educated political infants in the country believe. The difference is, here people expect God would send him, or her, over.

While this guy looked very much assured that the public has the equally significant part of responsibility to fix the nation he lives in, by keeping, not just  their eyes, but also their mouths open.

Nietzsche must have never really broke to get the picture, or never been in a society where massive intellectual gaps separate the classes and makes the east advanced painstakingly slower than the west, or simply had something more intangible to fix than this poor urban is expecting. What do you think?

Ronald Saut - csidorf.posterous.com