Rationality and Messy Jungles, For Starters, Santa

(First published in Bali Advertiser, December 21, 2005)

That would be harsher punishment for parole violators, Stan … and, world peace. – Sandra Bullock as undercover FBI agent Gracie Hart answering a beauty pageant question in the movie Miss Congeniality

Dear Santa

It’s been a few years since my last letter. I did write a couple of times after I stopped believing in you – just in case, you know – and it is in that spirit I write again.

Beauty queens are always saying “world peace” is what the world needs most. What I want, though, Santa, is a rational world, because that would bring peace, as well as bureaucrats that aren’t automatons, companies that don’t poison potential customers, countries that don’t demand people die for a flag, adults who behave as adults, children who behave as children. And, if, you know, you exist, Santa, I’d like this rational world to include

• Messy jungles – “I really like your jungles. They’re so neat,” a friend of a friend said after flying over hectares and hectares of palm oil plantations on her way into Kuala Lumpur. Now I’ve belatedly learned that some genius wants to create the world’s largest palm oil plantation in the “Heart of Borneo.” The proposed project, to be funded by China, will cover 1.8 million hectares, or about half the area of The Netherlands, according to an August article on the World Wildlife Fund Web site (www.panda.org). I am not an environmental wacko, Santa; I just wish people would take more time to think before chopping down trees. This project sounds a particularly bad tree-killing idea.
• A mature American attitude on guns – Each year in the US around 30,000 people die in gun deaths – most are suicides or homicides. Only about 300 are from “legal intervention,” according to statistics for 2002 quoted on a Web site for the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence (www.ichv.org). Yet no progress is ever made against the guns-don’t-kill arguments of the National Rifle Association. The fact is guns are killing machines. They are the weapon of choice of armies, police, and gangsters precisely because they are more efficient at killing than bows and arrows, swords, and baseball bats. Americans don’t have to ban guns; they just need to recognize that in a civilized society guns are seldom more than dangerous toys.
• Tolerant religions and freedom from the wrath of God – People keep killing other people because of what somebody said God said a long time ago. I don’t expect people to give up their religion or faith – I just want them to learn the difference between what they know and what they believe. Maybe then religious disagreements will turn deadly less often. And, if we can’t reasonably expect a year free from earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and killer hurricanes, let’s at least be free of the dubious prophets who claim natural disasters as the judgments of their personal petulant God.
• Sober political debate – To avoid redundancy, Santa, see the above, and make note of a Christmas wish that folks would stop getting a jolt from the thought that the founding fathers of their country hung the lowest and swung the widest.
• Fair income distribution – I’m not particularly Marxist, but I can see no reason for the average CEO to make 400 times more than the average production worker in 2004, as the Economic Policy Institute reported, according to the Web site www.politicalaffairs.net (Marxist Thought Online). No one can be worth that much more than a production worker. A CEO making 400 times the average salary of 2,000 workers could increase their salaries by almost 20 percent and still make 25 times their base (without changing the payroll total). If his ego called for it, the CEO could raise the workers’ salaries 15 percent and still get 100 times their base. Can’t we have some kind of agreement that the ‘suits’ are worth only so much? Or can’t you give them a sense of shame, Santa?
• Clean oceans and rivers – I was watching a nature special on whales last night, and I just think it’d be nice if they and other water creatures could swim in oceans and rivers unclogged by plastic and un-poisoned by chemicals. It’d make me feel better about the water I drink – even if fish do go to the bathroom in it.

If you still have some magic left over after taking care of the above, you can also do a few things just for me. First, I’d like to misspend my lost youth again. Second, I never did get that mini-submarine I asked for when I was eight. Lastly, if nothing else, just keep my family and me safe, healthy, and out of News of the Weird in 2006 -- we’ll do the best we can about the rest.

Your old unfaithful friend,

Lee Roy LeRoi

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Up in Arms Down Under ... Again

(First published in Bali Advertiser, December 7, 2005)

And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. – Deuteronomy 19:21

Unless the Singapore government wavers – and it hardly ever does -- by the time this is in print, Australian Nguyen Tuong Van will have been dead five days, hanged for trying to smuggle heroin through Changi Airport on his way to Australia from Cambodia in 2002.

Australia, of course, has had the plight of drug-running or drug-using citizens highlighted in Indonesia this year by Michelle Leslie, Schapelle Corby, and the Bali Nine. Leslie was released in November after serving three months, escaping a potentially much longer sentence; Corby is serving 15 years in a Bali prison and is appealing her case to the highest Indonesian court; and the ‘Nine’ are on trial for heroin smuggling charges carrying the death penalty. Two other Australians have been sentenced to die for running drugs in Vietnam.

Nguyen, the young man Singapore will hang Dec. 2, would seem to have the biggest claim on any sympathy. He’s the “selfless drug mule”, who agreed to carry 400 grams of heroin from Cambodia to Australia in order to pay off his twin brother’s A$30,000 in drug-related legal fees. “He … is described by those who know him as a decent, cheerful and dutiful young man,” Richard Lloyd Parry wrote in a Nov. 25 article for The Times.

And Singapore really is doing an injustice if Nguyen is as artless a criminal as most articles paint him to be. But why did it take Australians so long to note his arrest, trial, and sentence? The hubbub now is “like visiting a dead person in hospital,” said Subhas Anandan, a prominent Singapore defense attorney, in a Nov. 25 article in The Australian. Singapore has a mandatory death penalty for anyone convicted of carrying more than 15 grams of heroin and has never granted clemency to anyone after all appeals have been exhausted.

While Australian Prime Minister John Howard has been restrained in his diplomacy for Nguyen’s life, the public and press have been calling for boycotts and sanctions. “The death penalty is abhorrent, it is repulsive,” writes Barbara Curzon-Siggers, in a weepy-eyed piece Nov. 30 in The Age. She suggests in her article that Singapore is violating an international consensus that the death sentence is immoral, or perhaps “barbaric,” as an earlier Australian PM called the execution of two drug smugglers in Malaysia 20 years ago.

But there is no such consensus, not in Asia, where the death penalty is on the books of most countries, and not in the United States, where 64 percent of the population supports capital punishment, according to an October Gallup poll. Indeed, Dec. 2, North Carolina is likely to hold the 1,000th execution since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

The possible execution of Stanley Tookie Williams Dec. 13 in California also has capital punishment back as a top US news topic. Williams is co-founder of the California-based Crips gang and was convicted of murdering four people in 1979. Since then, anti-gang work has earned him five nominations for a Nobel Peace Prize, and he’s written nine children’s books. He already had many Hollywood heavyweights advocating for him before the 2004 movie, “Redemption.” Now he is a full-blown celebrity cause, with Jesse Jackson, Bianca Jagger, and Snoop Dogg, among others, petitioning Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to commute his sentence to life.

Capital punishment is seldom debated without the hysteria surrounding cases like Williams’s and Nguyen’s. Clearer minds need to look at the question: Do governments have the right to execute lawbreakers? Both Singapore and the US say they do, and Singapore takes to heart the injunction “thine eye shall not pity.” Last-minute, weak-knee editorials aren’t an effective counter.

Yes, ideally, societies would do without capital punishment. Realistically, some people are “bad machines,” and governments and laws can be flawed. Either way, people are going to be killed. And no matter the thinking of the “right-minded,” nations such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the US have the sovereign right to their own judicial structures. Raising a fuss only when one of your own gets into trouble or only when the cause is glamorous isn’t going to change anything -- not when a month later, attention will have passed to the next arm-raising exercise.

Sadly, Nguyen will be old news by late December. Rather than indulging in periodic attacks of indignation, Australians would do better to make sure their traveling young men and women know and respect the laws of countries on an itinerary … or keep them at home. It would save more lives than boycott threats and arguments that “everyone knows the death penalty is wrong.”

They don’t.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Let's Pray We Can Close the Pillow Gap Before It's Too Late

(First published in Bali Advertiser, November 23, 2005)

Its designers say that if it works, the pillow could one day join rifles, flak jackets and helmets as part of the basic equipment soldiers carry into conflicts. – Associated Press article on sleep-inducing pillows Danish peacekeepers are testing in the Balkans

Pat Robertson, the American TV evangelist, knocked me from despair into depression last week when he told the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, it could no longer count on God’s help. Dover citizens rejected God, Robertson said, when they voted to replace a school board that had required an introduction of so-called “Intelligent Design” into science classrooms.

“If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin,” he said. Proponents of Intelligent Design, or ID, hold that some life forms are too complex to have evolved by natural selection, as Darwin proposed, and must have been created by design.

Now, I know Robertson proved himself religiously insane long ago – he blamed the 9-11 attacks on America’s pursuit of “health, wealth, material pleasures and sexuality”; he warned Orlando, Florida, it risked God’s wrath in the form of a hurricane for holding a Gay Pride Festival; he’s said Christians and Jews are the only people fit to hold public office.

But the man is 75 years old, and it’s depressing to think that someone so old has learned and matured so little. And he’s got one million daily viewers (his network says), and his show, the 700 Club, is translated into more than 70 languages. The weight of the stupidity is too much to bear, especially nights when I lie awake formulating arguments to counter all the world’s village idiots.

I was even preparing to give up my daily news fix, ready to be done with my habitual morning apoplexy, the natural result of a mathematically trained mind meeting the illogic and inconsistency of the normal news cycle. But my outlook suddenly brightened at the news that Danish soldiers are carrying pillows into battle in the Balkans. Actually, they are not carrying them into battle; they are using the pillows -- which rid the soldiers of unpleasant thoughts and ease stress through a mixture of nature sounds and acoustical music -- to rest from peacekeeping duties.

“You will not think about what is maybe happening with your wife at home, or your children. All thoughts will disappear, images will be created – forests, beaches, mountains. And then you will fall asleep,” said Maj. Helmer T. Hansen, the battalion surgeon serving the Danish soldiers.

This is a happy development. For once the pillows are proven – and the only complaint so far seems to be that the pillows may be too thick – armies and nations will begin competing with each other to have the best rested soldiers. Technicians and specialists will work in secret laboratories to design pillows for the deepest, quickest, most satisfying sleep – for it is logical that well-rested soldiers will perform better than the sleep-deprived, grizzled veterans of earlier wars.

National efforts that would previously have gone into making better missiles and bombs will pour into pillow technology. For is it not also logical that the best and latest killing weapons will be of no use if soldiers fall asleep beside the red buttons that fire them? “Who fell asleep while our soldiers were sleeping on the watch?” will be the new question parliaments and congresses demand war-losing ministers and presidents answer.

Inevitably, too, espionage and sabotage techniques will be developed to disguise and substitute sleep-depriving pillows for an opposing army’s sleep-inducing pillows. The trick pillows will make soldiers worry about whom their wives might be sleeping with, how late their children are out and where, if anyone’s put out the dog and taken in the cat. And, yes, when both armies have been first coddled to and then disturbed from their rest, pillow fights will break out.

As an American, what worries me is that Dover, PA, aside, US educators are still contending with this movement to introduce ID and Creation Science into classrooms. In Kansas, for example, the Board of Education recently approved ID as part of its high school “science” curriculum, and similar efforts are underway in several other states. The danger is obvious -- if American students are taught that life was designed according to purpose by an intelligent being or God, they will eventually come to the conclusion that if soldiers were meant to get a better night’s sleep, their ears would be fluffier … and America will fall behind in the pillow race … to the Danes!?

I was just about to start sleeping nights again.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Ride Till We Find Them; Kill Them All

(First published in Bali Advertiser, November 9, 2005)

But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them … as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. Deuteronomy 20:16-17

The news of the beheading of three school girls in Sulawesi sickens and terrifies in a way that hearing of thousands dead from earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami cannot. Natural disasters may inspire awe or the feeling that an angry God needs to be appeased; people may get angry at God for allowing or sending death by flood, fire, famine, and pestilence.

But unless one is personally swept up in a disaster, it doesn’t have the same numbing effect as hearing that men (or women) have taken to murder and mutilation to purify their corner of the earth – if that indeed is what is happening again in Sulawesi.

It is easy to point to religious conflict as the motivation behind the beheadings of Saturday, Oct. 29. Thousands, after all, were killed in clashes between Christians and Muslims in Sulawesi and Maluku provinces from 1999-2001, and in May, a market bombing in Tentena killed 22. One Indonesian observer (Lian Gogali on the political blog www.laksamana.net), though, says that blaming it all on religious rivalry simplifies a situation that owes as much to corruption and economic and political power struggles.

Rev. Andreas Yewangoe, Chairman of the Indonesian Communion of Churches (PGI), “dismissed speculation that religious motives were behind the murders” and called on Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to “capture the perpetrators … and unearth the real motive behind the crime,” according to an Oct. 31 article at www.adnki.com.

Din Syamsuddin, chairman of the Muslim organization Muhammadiyah, said the “incident … has nothing to do with ties between Muslims and Christians," according to the Jakarta Post.

On the other hand, it seems naïve to say, “No religion teaches us to kill our brothers and sisters,” as former Indonesian president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid did after the girls’ murder at the end of October. Religions that have at one time or another instructed people to kill their “brothers and sisters” sometimes seem in greater supply than those that don’t. The quote from the book of Deuteronomy is just one of several places in the Christian Bible where God supposedly commands death for enemies of his people. The Koran, too, has its bloodthirsty passages allowing for or commanding the killing of unbelievers, and some primitive belief systems are built around the taking of heads. Even if a religion doesn’t itself teach people to kill their brothers and sisters, there are usually religious leaders willing to make up for God’s oversight.

In Sulawesi, whatever the motive – whether religious or racial cleansing, or the creation of chaos for some political and economic end – six men thought their goals and beliefs justified the murder of three teen girls. And the men didn’t have the decency to off themselves a la the Bali bombers in the making of their “statement,” which means there are still at least six men in Sulawesi comfortable with a leisurely beheading come a Saturday afternoon.

The disturbing thing about that, the thing that chills in a way that wind, water, and unstable earth cannot, is not how different those six men must be from us, but how similar they and we are. We are all capable of such brutality. Or, at least, we are all only a few generations removed from ancestors that had to be just as brutal to live long enough to pass on their genetic seed.

The question to ask isn’t, “Can’t we all just get along?” The real mystery is that we are getting along as well as we are. Human history is one long account of peoples and nations trying to wipe out most everyone else. Western Europeans didn’t stop killing each other by millions until the middle of last century; political ideals were behind the extermination and starvation of countless persons in Russia and China; the US has stockpiled weapons with the explosive power to destroy the earth many times over; and it’s only been sixty years since our last world-wide killing spree. Since then, we haven’t been able to get really going again, but the six men in Sulawesi are proof that our old, familiar instincts are still there.

Those six men remind us of the thin line that separates us from our “primitive” forefathers of 10,000 years ago, or even of 1940 and 1914. None of us are far free from the kind of thinking that can justify the beheading of three school girls. And if anyone thinks that understanding and tolerance of cultural differences are effective weapons against mobs intent on murder for a cause, then I’d rather someone else watch my back when the barbarians come over the gate.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Money for Nothing, With Respect, Trust, and Humility

(First published in Bali Advertiser, October 26, 2005)

Before the death of my late client with his wife and two kids. my client {Late Mr. Nicola Wisma} as he likes to be addressed, who was a big oil dealing personal with our formal minister of finance and was a very charitable person noble in the federal republic of Nigeria. He deposited the sum of USD$8m [eight million United States Dollars] in a Bank in Nigeria. -- E-mail to my wife from Dr. Atkins Risha

It’s been a tough few weeks for my wife and me. Several members of our far spread family clans have died. We are sorrowful, of course, but also fortunate in that kind individuals have offered to help us recover some of the vast sums the deceased ones left secreted in the banks and safety deposit boxes of two or three African countries.

We have also been notified of winning a few lotteries we did not have the foresight to enter. Kind individuals have again assisted us by randomly linking entries to e-mail addresses. It restores our faith in humanity to know that so many “multinational companies as part of their social responsibility” are doing their part to enrich us.

We have had so much good fortune that we find ourselves embarrassed at the numerous sad letters from the brothers, sons, and wives of murdered government officials. We truly would like to assist the survivors of these government purges in recovering the funds fortuitously put aside by the victims. We do not want to be greedy, however, and feel sharing our luck is the next best thing to do. Thus, we have forwarded some of the offers to friends and family less fortunate.

We do realize that not all of these offers are legitimate. We have been careful in our evaluations to accept only those that promise honest cooperation and contractual agreements protecting us from any breach of the law and assured to be 100% risk free.

We do admit, as well, to being flattered that our “esteemed selves” are known in so many places to be of “high repute and trustworthiness.” Persons again unknown have been kind enough to include us as “imminent personages” on the contact lists of many business organizations and associations. It is worth almost as much as the millions we expect to receive to know we are well known and respected so broadly.

We do realize acceptance of some of the offers might be construed as taking advantage of widows and orphans and damage our heretofore sterling reputations, but we feel there ought to be some cash value to our virtue and are happy to besmirch it to reap the millions we have been offered. It is sad for us to think that the less virtuous may never have the same opportunity of cashing in. We are thankful that virtue truly does have its own rewards.

We hope that

Mr. Frederick Chucks (Exq)
Mr. Christopher W. Ziwabo
Mrs. Robecca Martins
Mr. Sam Makani
Prince Fred Seiso, B.Com, F.C.A., CPA
Mr. Emmanuel Gezi
Mr. Paul Jacob
Mr. Alex Twala
and Dr. Boniface Gani

will understand that we have already accepted so many proposals of “urgent business assistant” that we cannot possibly take on more opportunities at this time. We especially apologize to Prince Fred, but we have already entered into business relationships with two princesses, a prince, and the favorite wife of a deposed (and beheaded) king, and feel we would be reaching above ourselves to entertain any further negotiations with royalty.

In anticipation of our coming wealth, my wife and I have established a secret trust fund in the name of one of my uncles (for tax purposes). Unfortunately, he has just passed on, a victim of the recent New York boating accident (we fear it is his own weight gain that caused the mishap). This could possibly complicate the recovery of our soon-to-be virtuously obtained funds. So, dear reader, with kind and utmost affection, though we have never met and received your name only through the ON-LINE BUSINESS NETWORK OF ESTEEMED AND TRUSTWORTHY PERSONS, it is with humility and adoration that we would like to propose a business arrangement to recover the monies that will soon be flowing into the account. We look forward to hearing of your honest cooperation and guarantee that this is a 100% risk free business opportunity, to be carried out in the manner of all legitimate business, for which you will never have any regrets.

Sincerely and Deeply Respectful
Lee Roy LeRoi, DoA, ASAP, BYOB

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Son, You Ain't Been Raised Right

(First published in Bali Advertiser, October 12, 2005

There are other choices, Man Lambert. Our children have no expectation of being burned to cinder, blown to fragments. They are free of that fear. Which is the better love, Man Lambert? – the Argonian Vonk Soobuknoora to the human anthropologist and sociologist Lambert in John D. MacDonald’s science fiction short story, Common Denominator

Every time people blow themselves and others up for an idea or belief, I think of John D. MacDonald’s tale about a man worried that humans will destroy themselves before achieving their potential. In the story, Lambert, chief of a future Bureau of Racial Maturity, searches alien civilizations encountered by space explorers to find one that has solved the problems of war, crime, and insanity, hoping to discover the key to human survival.

The Argonauts, inhabitants of three planets orbiting Argus 10, after a violent early history, have achieved a placidity and contentment that may hold the answer. Eight thousand earth years ago, war, crime, and the insanity index dropped almost to nothing in their three-planet system. The drop, though, is somehow connected to one thousand following years in which the death rate of 18-to-24-year-olds is higher than normal long after the end of war and violent crime.

What Lambert finds on a visit to the Argus system is that Argonians -- in horror of the self-destructive tendencies of their species -- made suicide a painless, easy alternative to any Argonaut older than 18. They reasoned that this would weed out the unstable and parents would take greater care raising their children, knowing that from age 18 onwards anyone can easily kill themselves in a fit of pique or depression over some insignificant setback of post-adolescence.

“At eighteen the operation is performed. It is very quick and very simple. We saw destruction ahead. We had to force it through. In the beginning the deaths were frightening, there were so many of them. The stable ones survived, bred, reproduced. A lesser but still great percentage of the next generation went – and so on, until now it is almost static,” Vonk tells Lambert.

Lambert recoils from the thought of parents planting in their children the “seed of death,” but he then realizes that if his own children were to be given the Argonian surgical implants, “I would do a better job as a parent. I would try to give them enough emotional stability so that they would never have that urge to kill themselves.”

It’s only a story. Still, children and young men and women do have the power to damage themselves and others, even without surgically implanted ‘kill switches.’ And it’s probably true that those who end up doing damage have been failed on some level by parents, teachers, and religious leaders. Men, for instance, who strap bombs around their waist, walk into restaurants, and blow up themselves, clearly weren’t ‘raised right.’

The same could be said of American teen boys who get it in their heads that it would be ‘cool’ to go out in a blaze of glory, guns, bombs, and high school carnage, or workers who walk into their workplace upset at being passed over for promotion and kill everything that moves. They may not have the same ‘religious’ motivation as Bali’s suicide bombers, but there is no difference in the senselessness of the acts. And it is just as likely that someone failed somewhere in teaching them whatever it is that keeps most of us from mass murder.

I’m not wasting tears over ‘poor, misunderstood boys and girls’ who carry out suicide bombings. I’d be just as happy as anybody if they all blew themselves up in the middle of an empty field. But we who have the fortune not to be blown up with them have to figure out what it is that makes some people susceptible to the enticements of the death lovers. We can only truly defeat those seducers when we produce generation after generation that ignores fools when they see and hear them -- because then they will just laugh at anyone who says exploding themselves in the middle of a crowd is a noble, laudable act.

A good place to begin would be to start getting across to people the idea that few beliefs are worth dying and killing for. Dying and killing for a belief requires certainty, and human history documents the defeat of one certain ‘truth’ right after another. Gods regularly change names and abodes, the earth changes shape and place in the sky, taboos and socials norms are in constant flux. People fight and die for one idea in one century, and fight and die for its opposite in the next.

People don’t really need ‘kill switches.’ We all have the “seed of death” in us already. How we handle the power that implies is largely a result of what we have been taught in our formative years. We as individuals and communities at least need to make sure that our children -- the only important assets produced by the human race -- aren’t susceptible to the seducements of the many brands of gurus and clerics high on death.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Gotong-Royong, American Style

(First published in Bali Advertiser, September 28, 2005)

If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in Peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? – James 2:15-16

A friend in the US has spent the last few weekends volunteering with the Red Cross in Knoxville, Tennessee, helping out at shelters for refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana parishes where she lived as a young girl were some of the worst hit areas and that may have had something to do with her wanting to help. I could also say volunteering comes naturally to her -- she did train as a nurse, though she is now the archivist for a media company. But that would be assuming that all nurses are compassionate and caring; some are probably just efficient professionals (who get unfairly characterized as sadistic and cruel in the fiction of Kesey and King).

It would be nice to think compassion is an inherent trait some have and others don’t. That would let me off the hook. It was days after the Kuta bombing of 2002 before I had any thought other than about how it affected me personally. I assured friends and family by e-mail and phone that I was well, that there was no need to evacuate to some place ‘safe.’ I called up former colleagues to offer my services as a freelance reporter. I took a ride in a helicopter over Kuta with a news photographer taking aerial shots of the damage. Everything I did was based on being near an event receiving worldwide attention, some of which spilled over onto me.

My callousness shamed me when I realized that many people had dropped everything and headed to south Bali to see what they could do to help. I hadn’t even thought of the need, partly because I thought volunteers would be in the way of professional emergency workers; partly because my instinct was to think of the tragedy in journalistic terms: Who did it? How many died? What will happen with tourism? What will happen to the rupiah and Indonesia’s economy?

My reaction to the tsunami last December was much the same, only then I was e-mailing other people to see if they had survived. Again, while others where jumping to help, I never got around to asking the question, what can I do? And how quickly one gets to that question is what separates ‘adults’ from ‘children.’

So, it was with some pride that I learned my friend had been helping out in Knoxville. It’s comforting to have friends that are adults; it gives an assurance that somebody will always be around to think of the things that need to be done. She quickly got to the question of what she could do and ended up assisting hurricane refugees from New Orleans and Louisiana for three weekends at shelters in a Knoxville church and at the city’s Civic Coliseum.

She kept with it despite the apparent ineptness of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the “petty power struggles, (and) poor organizational management” of the Red Cross. “Most of the volunteers see through all the nonsense and try to make the best of the situation anyway,” she wrote. “That’s how things get done – isn’t it always?”

It would be easy to take the attitude that if the “professionals” can’t get it right, then what’s the use of amateur volunteers trying. In Indonesia, though, where medical emergency and other infrastructures are poor, people are used to the idea that some things just won’t get done unless everyone pitches in to the best of their ability. Gotong-royong, or community self-help, isn’t just part of the culture; it’s an everyday necessity that can kick into overdrive when disaster strikes. It’s both disconcerting and heartening to see a gotong-royong spirit in the US filling in for the infrastructure and community neglect Katrina has exposed.

“All of it makes me infinitely sad for all of the people that have lost everything and lost family, not only in Louisiana but also in Mississippi and Alabama, sad for the loss of physical place and the loss of a sense of that place, sad because our government is so screwed up, sad for the country and how we look to the rest of the world in that we can't even take care of our own, just sad about it all. It will be a long, long time before I'm not sad anymore,” my friend wrote.

Then she went out to help get soup, sandwiches, blankets, and clothes to the people who needed them. That’s what adults do.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Katrina & The Wave

(First published in Bali Advertiser, September 14, 2005)

… for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. – The Gospel of St. Matthew, 5:45

Some folks love to see the hand of God guiding death and destruction in natural disasters to wipe out “sinners” unlike themselves. Thus, Michael Marcavage of the Philadelphia-based Christian organization Repent America pointed out that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans two days before the start of Southern Decadence, an annual gay and lesbian festival. And in December -- after the tsunami hit Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India -- Hindu, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders blamed people who don’t pray enough, Western tourists who have sex on Asian beaches, humanity’s inherent evil and depravity, among other things.

Someone or something divine, it seems, always has to be behind each catastrophe that strikes. Or maybe some people feel superior blaming collective and personal karma instead of petty heavenly entities – as if karma is any better at explaining what is and what happens.

“Grant an idea or belief to be true; what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? … What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?” asked the American pragmatist philosopher William James (1842-1910). I can only answer that little of what we choose to believe or think makes a difference in how we respond when waters are rising and there is breath to struggle for and food to be found.

Since I started thinking about and writing this column, a plane has fallen out of the sky in Medan killing at least 148, a theater fire in Egypt has killed more than 30, crowd panic on a Baghdad bridge killed hundreds, and typhoons have killed dozens in China, Taiwan, and Japan. And tomorrow, next week, next year, people are going to die in car accidents, in more plane crashes, more natural disasters. Once we get past the mundane explanations for why a disaster or tragedy occurs and kills – a loose screw, a poorly maintained levee, lack of advance warning – to asking and answering a cosmological “Why?”, we quickly reach the limit of the utility of our knowing.

It doesn’t matter whether an earthquake, tsunami, volcano, or hurricane is God’s retribution on sinners or his warning to the spared. It doesn’t change what has to be done: The dead have to be buried, survivors have to be assisted, plans and preparation have to be made to make sure it isn’t as bad the next time. The question “Why?” doesn’t enter into it, no matter how you answer it.

In day-to-day life, too, “Why?” doesn’t change what one does unless instead of rising and going to work one is going to sit under the Bo Tree and wait for enlightenment. And that doesn’t work unless we are all Buddha. Someone is probably going to argue that we are all Buddha or all God or all little bits of the Great Whole playing a game with ourselves by having forgotten that we are all little bits of the Great Whole. But even that someone is going to wake up in the morning, have their morning cuppa, and do whatever it is they normally do -- even it is only to take the next shift under the Bo Tree. Even then, if that someone happens to be caught by tsunami or typhoon, he or she will still either be dead or just another survivor looking for help.

As skeptic and pragmatist, perhaps materialist, I don’t deny mystery; I simply don’t accept explanations that can’t be proved or that aren’t useful. I don’t know if God used Katrina to strike New Orleans as a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah; I don’t know if Katrina was a “soldier of Allah” striking against the Great Satan of America (as some Muslims bloggers have said, according to the Times of Oman Web site). I am pretty sure that stronger and higher levees would have kept most of the flood waters out the city; just as I’m pretty sure something vital was missed in the last maintenance checkup of the Mandala Airlines’ plane that went down.

Finding ultimate explanation in deities and karmic workings is fine as long as it doesn’t keep people from tightening screws and tying their shoelaces. But that is what I fear -- believers counting on God or Allah or fate to determine the outcome of an event and not paying attention to holes in the dike, worn brake pads, flammable materials in a corner, loose railings, overdue elevator safety inspections, dead batteries in the smoke alarm … Oh, Isis, protect me!

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

I Don't Want to Buy What You Are Selling

(First published in Bali Advertiser, August 31, 2005)

You’ve got to reach a state of mind in which you don’t want it or need it. – William S. Burroughs II, beat writer and heroin addict, in a 1965 interview with Conrad Knickerbocker for the Paris Review

Burroughs, writer and addict, once attributed his longevity to his “rebirth” every time he kicked a habit. Each “cure” was a rejuvenation of mind and body, he said, even though he always relapsed and was on methadone when he died at the age of 83 in 1997. Burroughs knew way more about addiction than I ever will, but I know enough to have experienced the addict’s rebirth.

I’ve recently stopped smoking, or nearly so. I’ll smoke the last cigarette of my last pack when I’ve finished this column. It’s been a 20-year habit. Other smokers will know how hard it is to quit. It’s easy to give up everything except the cigarette with morning coffee, the happy hour smokes after work, the drag that assists a good bowel movement. At first, I was going to smoke only to keep alert during long hours working in the oil field in my 20s. Then I was going to quit at 30, next at 40. What finally worked was having a son and not wanting him growing up with a father puffing cancer sticks and later wheezing on oxygen tanks.

During the process of quitting, the similarity of all addictions -- cigarettes, booze, drugs, love, gadgetry, religion – struck me again. “There are also all forms of spiritual addiction. Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways, that is, if we have sufficient knowledge of the processes involved,” Burroughs told Knickerbocker in 1965.

Any addiction, any habit overdone, is a way of turning off the world, tuning it out, so that pain can’t get in. The habit is just something that replaces thinking and feeling, even if it doesn’t actually cause numbness in itself. When the habit is gone, the ignored and evaded sensations come rushing back on newly awakened nerves. And it doesn’t really matter if it was a heroin addiction or an unhealthy, consuming obsession with exercise.

Addicts, in the best cases, harm only themselves. But there is almost always some form of “secondhand smoke” that threatens the non-addicted as well. Burroughs’s example was “policemen … addicted to power, to exercising a certain nasty kind of power over people who are helpless. The nasty sort of power: white junk I call it – rightness; they’re right, right, right – and if they lost that power, they would suffer excruciating withdrawal symptoms.”

(That last quote is more or less a gift to anyone who will enjoy seeing parallels between President Bush’s administration and Burroughs’s cops.)

The secondhand irritant I have in mind are people who call me on the phone, knock on my gate, or stop me in the street, to try and sell some product or philosophy that promises to solve all my problems. Some salespeople are just salespeople; others are true believers out to convert the heathen to a therapy, religion, or multi-level marketing program offering unending wealth and unlimited happiness. And it is the promise of unending happiness – at least in this world -- that I reject. Material goods cannot bring it; God, gods, or mantras cannot bestow it; other people -- no matter how loving or giving they might be -- cannot provide it. These things may be able to bring momentary happiness or enjoyment; they cannot guarantee it forever and always.

The first cigarette of the day can be enjoyable, but the 20th tastes of the bottom of the ashtray, especially if it’s been preceded by 20 years of 20-cigarette days. And that first “cigarette” can be almost anything – some chemical high, a religious experience, an initial flush of physical and mental attraction. The danger is in the emotional investment that the experience can always be repeated with the same result. The hunger for the initial high always increases, the payout always decreases. And it’s difficult to break away, because one loses what’s already been put in, like a gambler who can’t stop feeding quarters into a slot machine hoping for the jackpot that will recoup all losses. It’s difficult to admit that one has been a fool for so long, that the payout is never coming, that unending bliss and peace are only the smoke dreams of con artists, advertising executives, and faux gurus.

Let’s make a deal: I’ll quit smoking and no longer subject you to my secondhand smoke; you no longer subject me to the blowback from your own obsessions. Whatever you are selling – a better mousetrap, a new religion, a new political party, a new life – don’t call me on the phone, don’t knock on my gate, don’t stop me in the street. I don’t want it. I don’t need it.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Bali, Oklahoma, and the Sweet Scent of Cows

(First published in Bali Advertiser, August 17, 2005)

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain
And the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
- Rodgers and Hammerstein

A few columns ago I wrote about people screwing up their faces when I tell them I lived in Singapore for nine years. They react the same way when they learn I’m from Oklahoma. It’s like they are examining me for clinging remnants of manure. Is it behind his ears? On the flip-flops that have replaced boots in concession to tropical climate? It must be somewhere on his person or attire, they seem to think. They assume I choose to live overseas to escape my birthplace, that I grew up with the desire to get out fast and forever.

Well, no. I was born in Oklahoma, and I’m proud of it. It’s where my people are buried; where my mother’s father worked his first job making leather harnesses for mule-drawn plow teams; where my father’s father traveled the state as a hardware company sales rep during the 1930s; where great aunts and great uncles farmed, horse traded, and carpentered to give their children a chance at something other than muscle labor and survival by country boy wits.

But I’m not writing just to defend pride of home and family. Most people have a place to which they are connected, even if only tenuously. New Yorkers and San Franciscans love their old city neighborhoods. Chicagoans love the windy city and the Cubs. Even residents of Cincinnati and Detroit must love something about their hometowns. People tend to love what they know, what is familiar. A woman I knew in Singapore was ecstatic at the opening of a Taco Bell outlet there. It reminded her of her favorite lunch place when she was in high school in California. I couldn’t understand her being nostalgic for a cookie-cutter fast food joint, but then she didn’t understand my love of truck stop diners and chicken-fried steaks the size of a plate.

I do understand the dislike of Singapore as the quintessential modern nanny state, where the citizens, it is thought, are only concerned with getting a Visa Gold Card, a white Mercedes, and the latest, smallest hand phone. I am perplexed, though, by people who’ve chosen the Bali expatriate lifestyle reacting to Oklahoma and Middle America with smirks and snide remarks. It’s as if agrarian society can be valued only when it is Asian and exotic, as if traditional culture is important only when the musical scale is dissonant to Western ears. Why should the pageantry of a temple procession be any more valued than the pageantry of small town rodeo? Or participation in the young people’s association of the village banjar be anymore important than membership in the Future Farmer’s of America?

Except for no ocean, lower rainfall, and a surplus of guns, a lot of America’s Midwest is similar to Bali. Oklahomans and others in American ‘fly-over’ country still have parades down Main Street. Most everyone goes to church on holy days. Everyone knows if it’s rained enough for the wheat and if the price of cattle is up or down. People help out family and friends; they try to maintain culture and tradition against encroachment by the modern world; they have a fondness for cows.

When people talk about the “wonderful world” of Balinese tradition and ceremony, I wonder if they recognize that same kind of beauty in the faded traditions and ceremony of their own home place. Maybe they feel that the village sense of connectedness and place has been lost in their own cultures, that their own places moved past redemption many Wal-marts, Starbucks, and mega-malls ago. Maybe this sense of loss is what sparks a desire in some people to protect and preserve Bali. It’s a laudable desire, although I’m not sure if efforts to “preserve” a culture at any point of its development can be anything but misguided. Culture doesn’t so much fade as it just becomes something new based on whatever preceded.

Several years ago in Oklahoma I went to a small town rodeo and was shocked when it was announced that the Girls’ Palomino Club was to do a precision horse riding routine to a Michael Jackson song. It just didn’t seem right. Jacko, even in one of his less whacko incarnations, didn’t seem to fit the atmosphere of bull riders, bronco busters, and barrel racers. But as the small town girls went through their riding routine, I could sense their pride at having found a way to connect what they knew to the larger national culture. Maybe they also thought they were being a bit scandalous and daring. It was Oklahoma, so they probably were.

Sitting in the stands, I tried to hide my enjoyment of the incongruity of it all. On reflection since then, I’ve realized that girls who can make horses moonwalk to “Beat It” don’t need much help from me. Now, when I visit my wife’s village, I see in the young people the same restless country kids I knew in Oklahoma. I can almost pick out who will be seduced by bright lights and big city and who will stay on the farm. I’d like to tell them all to stay within sight of paddy fields and the scent range of cows, but it wouldn’t do anymore good than telling Oklahoma teens never to leave Strang or Bowlegs. Country folk, anyway, in Bali, Oklahoma, or anywhere else, are capable of finding their own way. They don’t need help so much as they need to be respected and valued -- on both isle and prairie.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

The Moral of the Donut and Coffee Cup

(First published in Bali Advertise, August 3, 2005)

Topologically, a donut is equivalent to a coffee cup. – A mathematician’s observation

Normal people never confuse a morning donut with a cup of java. Mathematicians are not normal. They are seldom seen in the light of day before they are 30. They do funny things with numbers and squiggly lines. They are boring at parties and have bad haircuts. People don’t understand them and think only that mathematicians must be good at long division and their checkbooks must always balance when they remember to do them.

Topologists, a particularly odd species of mathematician, don’t bother with shape or distance. Their interest lies in sets of objects and the relationships between the objects and the objects of other sets. The only thing a topologist cares about a donut and a coffee cup (when thinking mathematically, not when having breakfast) is that they are solid and have holes through them – the donut hole and the hole in the coffee cup’s handle. It doesn’t matter that they don’t look anything alike; topologically, they can be considered an equivalent collection of “points” making up the solid part around a hole.

The mathematical assumptions of topology make it possible to treat a donut and a cup as the same thing. A change in the “standard” assumptions can also alter familiar rules. Mathematical assumptions can make a difference whether 2+2=4 or 2+2=0, for instance. It is only a matter of choosing the best system for a specific situation. Two plus two equals four is true in the system most often used, the agreed system of banks, accountants, and traffic cops.

If, however, I needed a mathematical system restricted to describing a flywheel moving in quarter turns, then I would choose the less familiar. Two quarter turns and the wheel has gone half way around; another two quarter turns and the wheel is back at the starting point. Thus, 2+2=0 models the flywheel’s movement, and nothing more complex is needed. As strange as the equation looks, it isn’t an abstract mathematical game – just don’t use it when figuring your bank balance.

Many mathematical systems would be less comprehensible. We don’t experience life as nuclear particles, for which the mathematics of quantum physics applies. Assumptions – mathematical, philosophical, and cultural -- make the difference in what is seen as odd and what is considered normal. This truth is often overlooked. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when people confront something that doesn’t add up.

“He sees a coffee cup and a donut as the same thing? What are his assumptions?” isn’t the usual response. “Let me have some of what he’s smoking,” is more like it.

Differing assumptions are behind the culture shock all travelers and foreign residents have to deal with at one time or another. A bigger problem occurs when people who once shared a set of assumptions find that some members of the group have forsaken some of the assumptions or taken up others. It is an inevitable occurrence for a tribe or nation formed by the circumstances of a particular time and place. For a few generations, the original assumptions hold the grouping together. But as the descendants of the original group meet new challenges and face new dangers, the assumptions change. Some are dropped, others are added, and the subtractions and additions aren’t always accepted universally by the whole. Eventually, every intra-group conflict can be reduced to an argument over what the basic assumptions should be.

That’s America now, with people unable to agree on society’s fundamental axioms and every major news story, from the death of Terri Schiavo to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the nominations of Supreme Court judges, sending the American press and people into paroxysms of shrillness. Ostensibly, the debates are about a specific “crisis.” They are in reality another battle over the fundamental principles that are supposed to hold America together. And the problem isn’t restricted to America alone: within America, and between America and the countries of Western Europe, too, the assumptions have become so diffuse that they can support no coherent intellectual agreement. No one is getting the same answer for 2+2 anymore.

Some form of cultural topology could be the solution. A less rigid set of principles would allow some people to see an ideological donut and some a doctrinal coffee cup amid general acceptance that they are much the same thing. The only other eventual option is to start nuking any bastards – friends, enemies, countrymen, or foreigners -- who get any answer besides our four for our two plus two.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Mucking About in the Middle

(First published in Bali Advertiser, July 20, 2005)

So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. – Revelation 3:16

The middle of the road may be appropriate when dealing with ice cream flavors, but it's completely misplaced when dealing with questions of war and civil liberties. – E-mail from a Bali Advertiser reader

I’m in a muddle this week, mostly of my own making. My last column sparked two dissimilar responses. To the woman who harangued my wife for thirty minutes for my attack on President Bush and America: I think you misread the column. I was criticizing the easy assumption of the standard Bush caricature, not endorsing it. To the reader who emailed saying I had gone light on the president and ignored, among other things, the Bush administration’s violations of civil liberties in conducting the “war on terror”: You are partially correct. I tried to write about a serious subject with flippant humor, didn’t do it justice and ended up in “a quicksand of tripe.”

(The reader’s initial e-mail on the column appears in the Letters to Bali Advertiser section. Some of his comments I refer to come from a subsequent e-mail.)

My intent wasn’t to attack Bush or defend him. In a sense, the column wasn’t about Bush, but about how people come to form conclusions about him. Bush provokes an instinctive reaction from people that makes it easy for them to dismiss him with a shake of the head. Bush becomes the cartoon cowboy, and some people, even reporters writing news stories, interpret every new fact or development in a way that enhances the image.

It was and is the same with the Clintons. Supposedly serious pundits and commentators still trot out as fact the most outlandish allegations: Bill and Hillary killed Vincent Foster and Ron Brown; worked and are working as closet socialists (communists, Marxists, leftists) to destroy America and establish one world government; launched cruise missile strikes whenever the Monica Lewinsky affair got too hot for Bill; and conceived Chelsea only after Bill raped Hillary in the Bahamas. Bill and Hillary are controversial enough that it’s hard to see why people would also want to delve into the purely imaginative.

The reader who e-mailed, though, said he believes his visceral reaction to Bush is fed by facts, not by sensational reporting. Most sensational reporting, by the likes of “FOX and the lily-livered generality of the American press,” favors Bush, he says. He gets his facts from the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and the New York Review of Books. The problem, though, is that people just as intelligent as my correspondent believe the exact opposite: that the NYT, the IHT, the Post, and the NYRB are the sensationalist, biased press, that FOX gives the straight scoop, or if not FOX, then the more straight-laced, straightforwardly conservative Wall Street Journal.

The American press has been divided like this into the “leftist liberal media” and the “organs of the rightwing conspiracy,” with people reading only publications that reinforce opinions they already hold, denigrating the rest as unbalanced and unfair. The fact is, no paper, no reporter, no editor, no publisher, can completely achieve the goal of journalistic objectivity, assuming that they try. The views of the reporters, editors, and publisher always creep into the pages, no matter how honestly the paper or publication strives to keep them out. I happen to think that the NYT usually does a respectable job of keeping the opinions of its staff and writers confined to editorials and commentary. My e-mail correspondent and I have to accept, though, that many Americans, perhaps even a majority, would scoff at the notion that the NYT reports only objective fact.

I do have concerns about Bush, Iraq, and the violation of civil liberties; I just can’t be as confident as the letter writer that I have a complete picture of what’s happening at any given time. In following any news story, I often come across contradictory presentations of the same set of “facts.” The alternative to reconciling the contradictions into the best obtainable version of the truth is to accept only those “facts” that fit my preconceptions and to abuse the intelligence and question the motives of anyone not reaching the same conclusion. The alternative is what seems to happen every Sunday on the US news analysis shows. For me, I sometimes spend a long time trying to struggle through to a reconciliation of the contradictions.

I still haven’t completely made up my mind about the Iraq war, for example. Many people believe that the search for weapons of mass destruction and regime change were nothing more than cover for a US grab for oil. Yet, a friend in Iraq with the United Nations says Bush made the right decision to invade and remove Saddam. Saddam had been ignoring and skirting UN resolutions and ultimatums for more than a decade, and the US, United Kingdom, and “coalition of the willing,” had to put teeth into the UN rulings, WMD or not. And regardless of the mess that’s been made, Iraq is better off than it was under Saddam, he says. It all seems so much more complicated than that, and I’d like to disagree with him, but it’s hard to argue with someone who’s under the threat of mortar fire in Baghdad and not end up looking foolish.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Rollers, Shakers, and Snorters

(First published in Bali Advertiser, July 6, 2005)

I am, surprisingly, in favor of shutting down Gitmo. I firmly believe all prisoners held there should be taken out immediately and executed for their crimes against America and humanity. With no prisoners left in the cells we could respect the wishes of those who want Gitmo closed. Problem solved. -- David R. Burkett, in a June 21 e-mail to the editor at www.worldnetdaily.com, a conservative Web site that hates to be called conservative

Bush is an idiot. Iraq is about oil. The Republicans stole the elections. America is getting scarier. That outlines the political convictions of most expatriates in Bali, based on an eyeball test I’ve been conducting the last three years. I mention the U.S. President to someone I’ve met in a bar or at a party, and the higher the eyeballs roll, the higher the person scores on the Bush-is-an-idiot scale. Anytime more than 50 percent of the iris ascends behind the upper lids, I know we’ll get to the America-is-getting-scarier part of the conversation.

Rabid letter-writers such as Mr. Burkett aside, I can’t buy the “Bush is an idiot.. America is getting scarier” scenario. For one thing, Bush can’t be both idiot and evil manipulator of the media and public opinion. And if Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are the real powers behind the Oval Office, wouldn’t they have chosen someone with more polish as their front man? I don’t believe Bush is a savior out to make the world safe for freedom, democracy, and family values either. But any suggestion from me that he is more than his cowboy caricature - or even that he may not quite be an idiot – leaves me feeling like Arlo Guthrie sitting alone on the Group W bench. (“And they all moved away from me..” – Alice’s Restaurant)

I admit it is difficult to keep from eye-rolling, headshaking, nose-snorting disgust when reading yesterday’s talk show transcripts on www.rushlimbaugh.com, Ann Coulter’s latest excretions of bile, or the most recent pronouncements from Cheney and Rove. It isn’t any different, though, when I shift to the anti-Bush diatribes at www.counterpunch.com. It’s easy to blame President Bush and his for-us-or-against-us attitude for dividing America into traitors and patriots and all issues into dichotomies. However, I don’t see any logic in complaining about the simplification of the world into black and white and then turning around and painting Bush black.

Some Bali expatriates have decided simply to ignore the news. It must cut down on strain to the eyes, neck, and nose. “I don’t follow the news,” is a boast, not a sheepish confession. Maybe they want to tend their Bali garden and let the rest of the world take care of itself or rot. Somehow, though, despite making no effort to sift through the many voices and views heard on a typical news day, they are still certain that Bush is the doltish consort of demons.

They should know news at a distance seldom matches reality. On how many occasions have friends and family at home contacted them, worried that something - tsunami, earthquake, riot – had got them? Usually, they were nowhere near the event, or the “riot,” prettily telegenic on CNN, lasted as long as the cameras were rolling. It should be harder for them than it is to get hysterical about warnings of Bush leading an American descent into McCarthyism. It just may not be so. Or maybe the news has been magnified by the lens of a camera, a reporter’s imagination, and an editor’s insistence on something sensational. Editors are funny that way.

Once, when I was on assignment in Jakarta, I was asked for a story on demonstrations in front of the American embassy after the US started bombing Afghanistan. Editors in Hong Kong were upset to hear that students were resting in the shade and Indonesian soldiers were using water cannons only to relieve the “rioters” from the Jakarta heat. They wanted a story to match the images they had seen on TV. What I saw was more street party than riot, with only drinks and snack sellers making a killing.

So, rollers, shakers, and snorters, spare me the vein-popping displays. And if you just have to declare Bush an idiot, at least be armed with the latest quotes from www.dubyaspeak.com. I might not have had a chance to look at them that day.

(The eyeball test has great entertainment value when conducted as a game to see who can get the most roll out of a target. Players can devise a point system based on the height of the roll, or play until someone provokes a full, whites-only roll. Canadians, as the “other Americans,” usually give the best responses, perhaps proving something about familiarity breeding contempt. If a point system is used, bonuses can be given for headshakes and snorts.)

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Do You Know How Much I Spend in Your Country?

(First published in Bali Advertiser, June 22, 2005)

How can we, as a country, stand by and let a young lady, as an Australian, rot away in a foreign prison? We gave Indonesia how many hundreds of millions of dollars in tsunami relief? -- Actor Russell Crowe on an Australian radio talk show, as quoted in a May 28 International Herald Tribune article.

People who live or travel in foreign countries sometimes get the idea that no laws exist for them. They are outside the reach of their own governments. They aren’t integrated into the political, social, and legal communities around them. They may be away from company, boss, family, and friends. They may not understand the laws of the country in which they temporarily or permanently reside. They sense only freedom for the next weeks, months, years.

A few get the idea that even physical laws have been rescinded for them. Bare skin no longer loses when challenging asphalt; un-helmeted skulls no longer crush when hitting solid objects at 40 kilometers per hour. Additionally, many Australians, Americans, Europeans, and northern Asians - as ‘wealthy’ foreigners in a poorer country – come to feel their higher financial standing gives them an aristocratic status. The deference shown by officials, shop owners, and hotel staff becomes a right instead of a service. “Do you know how much money I spend in your country?” is the rhetorical question to excuse all bad behavior.

I don’t know if Schapelle Corby, the Australian woman sentenced to 20 years in a Bali prison for drug smuggling, is guilty or innocent. If she is guilty, I have no more sympathy for her than I would have for anyone - foreign or Indonesian - sentenced to serve time in Indonesia. If she has been wrongly convicted, I hope that she, her lawyers, and her family are able to prove her innocence during the appeals process.

Anyone who’s followed her case knows the excess and hysteria that it has sparked in the Australian media and public. Consider, though, the outcry if one million Indonesians were visiting Australia each year, driving illegally, consuming illegal drugs at all-night beach parties, and behaving badly and loudly in most public situations. Australians would rightly argue that it didn’t matter how much the Indonesians were contributing to the economy: Visitors have to obey Australian law or face the consequences, and even the potentially innocent would have to be tried and judged in the local courts.

This didn’t work out so well for Chika Honda, a young Japanese woman, and three male companions. They never even got the chance to ask the money question. When they arrived in Melbourne in 1992, Australian customs officers found 13 kilograms of heroin hidden in false panels in their suitcases. Their story that their original bags had been stolen in Kuala Lumpur and replaced by the “generosity” of a friend didn’t sway the Australian courts. Ms. Honda and the three men were deported in 2002 after more than 10 years in jail and are still trying to clear their names from Japan (June 2 article on www.theage.com.au).

Travel in a foreign country carries risks. It’s one of the reasons we do it. We want a break from daily routine. We want to see something different, try new things. For travelers from wealthy countries, the price paid for the experience includes the risks inherent in lower standards of medical care, dirtier water and unhygienic food, and less developed political and judicial systems. And there’s only so much the people back home can do for the willing traveler who has been unlucky or foolish.

Many of Ms. Corby’s supporters in Australia don’t seem to grasp that she isn’t in Australia, that Indonesian laws aren’t the same as Australian laws. Such ignorance is of no consequence for someone sending letters to the editor from Cambewarra, New South Wales. It can be costly for someone in Bali who thinks money, foreign citizenship, and light skin color makes them untouchable. Just as I would have no sympathy for a guilty Ms. Corby, I have none to spare for unlicensed drivers “harassed” by the police; for people who “buy” land despite laws against foreign ownership and lose on the deal; for people turned in for drug use by the person who sold them the drugs. They are breaking Indonesian law, and if caught, deserve to be punished or pay accordingly. It doesn’t matter how much they’ve spent or how many Indonesians depend on them for jobs.

The only important issue for Ms. Corby is her guilt or innocence. If she’s guilty, it’s no good to argue that the sentence is too harsh, Indonesian jails are too dirty, and marijuana should be legal anyway. She isn’t in Australia where those kinds of arguments might win her some leniency.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Singapore, Oh, Singapore, Lah

(First published in Bali Advertiser, June 8, 2005)

Anne and Michael prided themselves on being different; artists, you know, and liberal-minded people – maybe a little scatterbrained, but then (secretly, they felt) that came from genius. – Langston Hughes, Slave on the Block, 1938

People screw up their faces when I tell them I lived in Singapore nine years. They seem to dislike Singapore because it is efficient, safe, ordered. Singapore, the thinking goes, just doesn’t have the chaotic freedom that would allow a Bali resident’s genius to flourish. The ‘true’ Asian cities of Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, with their traffic, pollution, stitched-together transport systems, and urban slums, are a better fit for anyone with an anarchic turn of mind.

The typical Bali free spirit probably does feel out of place in the ‘nanny’ state. Singapore allows people to chew medicinal gums now – but you must have a prescription; it holds annoying (and amusing) social improvement campaigns; foreigners can’t bribe their way through a traffic stop if caught driving without a license; illegal activity of most sorts is dealt with harshly. And it’s expensive. Unless you are staying in a love hotel, you can’t get a half-decent room for under US$50 a night. Cigarettes are the equivalent of about 60,000 rupiah a pack. A mug of non-happy hour beer at most pubs will set you back the same.

I just returned from a five-day trip to Singapore. After I had finished my two days of business, I spent the rest of the time exploring the city on train, bus, and foot. In the evenings, I caught up with friends at pubs and restaurants. Going to Singapore for me is like dropping in on the world to see how it’s been doing during my absence in Bali. I can report to the curious that oil and other commodities are still being shipped around the world; traders and brokers are still buying and selling; companies are still plunking down millions of dollars to make the plastic for the plastic goods that define 21st Century life; airlines are still fighting over landing rights and offering cheaper and cheaper flights; and Singapore is still building, building, building to improve the living, working, and commuting comforts of its citizens.

Singapore can be a charming place if you go to explore and enjoy it, instead of for an in-and-out visa turnaround, limiting your extracurricular activity to shopping for CDs and books you can’t find in Bali. The city has a great movie festival for art film lovers every year in April and May. The German and French cultural associations hold annual mini-movie festivals as well. ‘Fringe’ plays are regularly put on at the Substation Art House on Armenia St. and at Jubilee Hall at Raffles Hotel, some featuring actors and playwrights with London and New York City experience. Almost every weekend in season you can go to Victoria Hall or to the gleaming new Esplanade and listen to the Singapore Philharmonic Orchestra for less than the price of a cold Singapore beer.

Cars and housing are expensive for those that live there, yes, but the public transport system is second to none, the airport is world class, and the air is remarkably clean for one of the major refinery and petrochemical centers of Asia. What isn’t to like, really? Flights to the playgrounds of Asia are cheap. You can take bumboats to the east coast of Malaysia or ferries to the working ports of the Riau Islands. You can walk safely in most districts any time of the day or night. And if you think that Singaporeans are all automatons, you haven’t spent much time talking to the cab drivers about old Harry Lee and his PAP policies (PAP - the Peoples’ Action Party or Pay-and-Pay, depending on a driver’s political views).

My last day on this trip I went searching for some old shrimp farms in one of the few slices of mangrove swamps remaining on the northern coast of the island. A friend and I had been separately to the spot in the late 90s and were curious to see if the little corner had been wiped out by the intervening years of development. We did not find the shrimp farms. The mangroves were there, and a by-the-hour fishing pond was still in operation, looking more like something across the Johor Strait than like a Singapore enterprise. The boardwalk and fishing platforms were crumbling. The generator running the aerator was covered in oil and hoses. The whole area was littered with discarded wood and scraps of corrugated tin.

The best part was getting caught out in the mangroves about a kilometer from the car by a sudden rain storm. We sheltered underneath a tree until we were soaked and finally slogged back to where we had parked after giving up on a respite from the rain. We and the 20 others at the fish pond were probably the only people who got caught by the rain in Singapore mangroves that day. We had strived, we had conquered, and we still got back to a café half an hour later for a warming cup of coffee and a beer. Exploration is seldom so easy and enjoyable. As a bonus, for a couple of hours we escaped the sight of the government minders – a secret pleasure that can’t be found in almost-anything-goes Bali.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

You Ain't from Around Here, Are You?

(First published in Bali Advertiser, May 25, 2005)

I was furious with God that I was not born in Bali! -- George Krause, 1930, as quoted by Michel Picard in Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture, English Edition, 1996

The besotted are everywhere. I’ve seen them in China and Taiwan. I’ve read their letters to the Straits Times after a three-day stay in Singapore. I’ve seen them desperately nodding their heads along with a gamelan beat to show that they get ‘it.’ They are the culturally love-struck and an irritant to old hands.

Fresh arrivals romanticize almost everything – a trip to the wet market, people working in the fields, the slaughter of a pig. Everyday occurrences are objects of wonder. They suddenly recall former lives in the country and culture of their current infatuation. They “go in” for everything, rushing out to every festival and street celebration. They learn a few words of the language and work them into conversations and e-mails. It is tolerable if they are on a two-week holiday and return home. If they stay, and the spell doesn’t wear off, a year later they are saying, “I’m more Balinese (Chinese, Japanese, Asian…) than Western.”

For the jaded, long-term resident, it is like watching young, delusional love after enduring a decades-long marriage of battles and compromises.

“You look like a tourist,” was how we sometimes taunted one another when I was growing up in Taiwan. Nevertheless, when I returned to Asia in 1993 after a 10-year absence, I had the newcomer’s high my first couple of months in Singapore. I sprinkled my talk with “lah.” I spoke “ing” words with a rising inflection. “Can? Cannot?” I would ask a friend when making arrangements to go shopping or see a movie. All the women were beautiful, the sauna heat of Singapore was warming, the food delicious. Hawker stalls served beer over ice, which seemed quaint. I reveled in roti prata for breakfast and had the newcomer’s silly grin on my face everywhere I went, even if it was only to the provision store for a newspaper and cigarettes.

Then I had the lover’s first slap. I was at a window of the immigration department trying to get an employment pass to work in Singapore. The woman at the counter had just told me my first application had been rejected. I would have to re-apply and appeal the decision, she said. She would not explain further. When I became the indignant, angry foreigner, her face went blank and she turned her attention to the man in line behind me. I could not make her look at me again. I wanted to bite my arms off and beat her over the head with them. Only a mixture of self mutilation and violent assault could have vented my frustration.

“You are not Singaporean. You will never be Singaporean. We tolerate ‘foreign talent,’ because the government says we must. We may even like some of you, but you will never be one of us,” is what she was telling me. Friends, colleagues, waitresses, and bartenders repeated it to me many times over nine years in Singapore, sometimes subtly, sometimes resoundingly.

The newcomer or tourist doesn’t know or has forgotten that’s it’s impossible for the non-native ever to get beyond a superficial understanding of another culture. No matter how long you live elsewhere, you cannot change the geography of your birth. You cannot be Balinese unless you were born in Bali of Balinese parents; Chinese unless you were born in China or one of its outposts; Asian without Asian forefathers. That’s just one of the rules. You cannot circumvent it by longevity, by study, by religious conversion, by marriage. You will never erase from your mind the distinction “us” and “them,” though you may forget it for long periods. It will always be brought back to you, and you will turn into the raving lunatic foreigner.

My younger brother, who is more intolerant than me, jokes that his normal conversation with a fresh arrival goes like this:

“How long you been here?”
“Longer than you.”
“How’s your Chinese?”
“Better than yours.”

That would be cordial for him. “You don’t have to talk to him,” he once kept whispering to our father while Dad was trying to talk to a friendly German at the other end of a sushi bar in Japan.

The fear of being drawn into a conversation with an unworthy newcomer is more than fear of being peppered by inane questions, I think. Partly it is discomfort at being reminded of the foolishness of all new arrivals. Even old hands were new once, too. And it is difficult to resist the temptation to enlighten the newcomer, even when the old hand knows his advice won’t be understood, that he risks sounding angry and bitter. It’s like trying to tell adolescents that their first love will last a few weeks, maybe a few months.

More than that, in every old hand, hidden deep is the suspicion that he is Wilfred Thesiger coming out of the Empty Quarter. Talking with too many newcomers threatens to expose it for what it is: the smoldering coal of his first romance of a foreign country threatening to flame -- only to be almost extinguished yet again with the next dousing by reality.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Biting the Apple

(First published in Bali Advertiser, May 11, 2005)

How much more tourism can the island take? How much more traffic? How many more craft shops? How many more Kutas? How many more jets? The answer is that it never stops, the roads are widened, the hotels multiply, the direct flights increase. Commercialism has crept into every aspect of Balinese life… It is now clear that the unbelievably complex social and religious fabric of the Balinese is at last breaking down under the tourist onslaught. (Bill Dalton, Bali Handbook, 1990, as quoted by Michel Picard in Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture, English Edition, 1996)

Bali was probably an easier sell as paradise when Balinese girls and women gathered topless in the markets to do the day’s business. Michel Picard in Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture thought so. “The breasts of Balinese women no doubt constituted a major attraction to the island during that time,” he wrote about the period between the two World Wars, when Bali achieved international fame for the beauty of the island and its women.

On my first trip to Bali in 1998, I was happy to find that some women, when not expecting to see tourists, still went topless in fields north of Ubud. And I was pleased and embarrassed the day I turned my bicycle off the road to Goa Gajah from Ubud and found myself in the middle of village bath time, with naked men and boys to the left and naked women and girls to the right. I plowed on looking down at my front tire. It was more than erotic titillation. I was able to report to friends in Singapore that the ‘real’ Bali still existed outside the tourist centers.

Don’t be shocked at equating topless and bathing women with the continuing existence of Balinese culture and all that pertains to it. It’s an old equation among writers that helped create the idea of Bali as earthly Eden. Hickman Powell, author of The Last Paradise, 1930, was disappointed on landing at Buleleng and finding just another grim colonial Asian city. As he traveled towards the ‘real’ magic of south Bali, Powell was still skeptical until he saw a solitary woman walking along the road, a pot on her head, with “the bronze bowls of maiden breasts project(ing) angular, living shadows… and all at once she was but a part of a vast spreading wonderland, embodied dreams of pastoral poets.”

Dalton, in 1990, thought old Bali still existed, too, despite the lead quote. “If you get away from the commercial strips of Sanur and Kuta, there are still literally hundreds of villages which haven’t changed since Covarrubias’s book was written in the 1930s,” he wrote a few pages later. This probably isn’t as true as it was 15 years ago. Paved roads, electricity, television and phone service now reach almost everywhere, integrating previously remote villages into the national and global world.

Nowadays, too, trash is piled up in ravines along the roads. Coastal rivers run dark, dirty and full of plastic. Denpasar’s sewage system and roads are overworked and inadequate. Tourist buses and market traffic sometimes so clog Ubud’s center that vehicles are backed up all the way to Monkey Forest. Yet Indonesian officials keep raising the targets for tourist arrivals and people keep arriving to hit them.

The tourist arrival target for all of Indonesia in 2005 is six million, according to a Jan. 3 Jakarta Post article. That would mean Bali tourist arrivals of 1.56 million judging by Bali’s percentage of Indonesia’s total for 1994-2003. It’s a small increase over the almost 1.5 million that arrived Bali in 2004, but it’s almost a 50 percent increase over 2003 arrivals. (Arrivals in 2003, slowed by the Kuta bombing of 2002, dropped below 1.1 million for the first time since 1995.)

If Bali arrivals as a percentage of total Indonesian arrivals hit 30 percent in 2005, as they did in 1999, this year could see 1.8 million tourists in Bali. The problem isn’t where to put them all. Occupancy rates at classified hotels regularly run at 50 percent and at non-classified hotels at 30 percent. There are rooms, even accepting that arrival figures reflect only tourists entering Indonesia at Ngurah Rai. The problem is the quality of the Bali tourism experience will continue to drop as more people arrive to burden the island’s infrastructure and return home to report on traffic jams, polluted rivers and garbage heaped along the roads.

“Even the tourism industry is beginning to admit that if something is not done soon, the degradation of the environment could condemn the future of tourism in Bali,” Picard wrote a few years after Dalton talked of the unchanged Bali of the 1930s.

Early writers worried about cultural pollution. Economic pressures and a national television culture are probably just as much to blame as tourism for any decline in Balinese traditions. Thousands of rural communities in the U.S. have died without ever becoming “paradises.” Tourism perhaps even helped to preserve the culture by getting the Balinese to look at their traditions through the wondering eyes of the foreigners, as Picard argues. Maybe that’s why Balinese culture and traditions have held up as well as they have under modernity’s onslaught.

The primary pressure from tourism has been on the environment. Conde Nast Traveler listed Bali as the top “island paradise” destination in 2004. Time did it in 2003. Magazines five, ten, fifteen years from now won’t do so unless tourism officials and the tourism industry stop viewing Bali as a tourist Utopia to be sold, look at the real Bali of traffic congestion, dirty water, and roadside litter, hitch up the sarong and clean it up.

(The statistics for Bali tourist arrivals and hotel occupancy rates were taken from the BPS Statistics Indonesia Web site, www.bps.go.id.)

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

The God Gene

(First published in Bali Advertiser, April 27, 2005)

Skeptic – n. 1. One who believes in skepticism as a doctrine or employs skepticism as a method; specif., a member of one of the ancient skeptical schools. 2. One who carries a critical or incredulous attitude into his inquiries, or who is given to doubting. 3. One who doubts, or disbelieves in, Christianity. – Syn. Unbeliever, doubter. See INFIDEL. (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 5th Edition, 1946)

If there is a so-called “God gene,” a genetic code that predisposes belief, I’ve got it. The Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the National Institute of America says VMAT2 is such a gene and gives people a greater ability to believe in a higher spiritual force (www.telegrahp.co.uk, 22/03/2005). It is a troublesome gene for a skeptic to have.

Almost everything I was told or read as a child made my eyes go wide. Christmas was an annual two-month fantasy of gifts no skeptical child would have asked of the jolly fat man. When my belief in Santa Claus began to waver, my older brother told me Santa no longer used sleigh and reindeer. The world had too many people, he explained. Modern Santa employed teams of commando elves that dropped onto roofs from helicopters. I spent that Christmas Eve trying to stay awake to hear chopper blades.

Santa can be construed only marginally as a spiritual force. I’m assuming, though, that any genetic predisposition for belief in higher powers signals a general credulity. Maybe that’s why nations are always trying to weld their causes to God, gods and religion. I certainly believed everything a Midwestern missionary’s son was supposed to believe growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Taiwan – I mean stuff in addition to standard Christian doctrine. I believed Chang Kai Shek was a great American ally and champion of democracy; that communism’s dominoes would fall one right after another if America didn’t prevail in Vietnam; that John Wayne had helped America win every war; that Roger Stuabach, Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys were the pinnacle of athletic achievement; that America was the epitome of all that is good, right and true. Doubt only began to creep in when I left home and went away to university. My professors, Harrison Ford, Terry Bradshaw and the Pittsburgh Steelers began to strip me of my illusions.

The trouble with a tendency to believe is that it can lead to a mere bouncing from one belief system to another. People forsake Christianity for Buddhism, Buddhism for a New Age hodge-podge, the New Age for Amway, Amway for alcohol. And the tendency can surface in men and women who swing from one eternal soul mate to another, in travelers for whom each destination is a new paradise, in ever shifting reliance on the next diet, the next oil boom, the next dot.com bubble, the next tourism rush.

People like the solidity and certainty of “truth.” When one belief proves false, they look around for the next new thing to cling to. It is difficult to convert people to systemized doubt. Doubt is watery. You can’t hold it in your hands. It gives no comfort in times of grief or stress. It gives no possibility of assistance in sickness and death. Without belief, people are alone. Worse for them to contemplate, so are their children. Skepticism doesn’t dispel the notion that there are monsters under the bed.

In 1999, Jesse Ventura, former professional wrestler and then the governor of Minnesota and a U.S. presidential candidate, was castigated for challenging religion in an interview with Playboy magazine. “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers,” he said, assuring that his dim presidential hopes would come to nothing.

His statement is inaccurate and, at the same time, doesn’t go far enough. Organized religion can be support for the ignorant or lazy minded. It doesn’t have to be. Also, anything – money, status, a social group, booze, exercise, drugs, a husband, a wife, a self-image - can be a crutch if it is relied on unquestioningly and unexamined. And what does one do when the support fails?

Bali, perhaps because of its faded reputation as “the last paradise,” attracts more than its share of the credulously inclined. We’ve got stargazers and crystal gazers, astrologers and aromatherapists, meditation artists, yoga instructors, gurus, healers, and telemarketers. As a reformed believer, I often feel I’m the odd one out in a room full of kooks.

(Note to the kooks: That is a subjective statement about how I feel, not an objective statement about your kookiness.)

Bali needs a dose of skepticism, for the Balinese, for the tourists, for long-term expatriates. It just can’t live up to its billing. No place could. I say that as a person who intends to continue living here, build a home here and raise a family. I say that as a person who cried over a lost Eden on my first trip to Bali in 1998 when I read about the massacre and mass suicide of the Badung royalty in 1906. That VMAT2 gene still bites sometimes.

Bali can be magical, yes. But so can almost any place. It does no good to let the momentary magic blind one to dog excrement in the streets and trash in the rivers. Bali needs a reality check. It needs less credulity.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi