Prayer of Unbelief

(First published in Bali Advertiser, December 20, 2006)

Heaven is for the weak at heart
And those who never are as smart as me
But I would trade all that I believe
And keep no trick card up my sleeve
Just to know the angels hold you in their arms tonight.
-- Heaven, by alt-country band Freakwater, on the 1998 album Springtime

James Kim’s story is a sad, nasty reminder that sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you love your children, how much you try to keep them from harm, how much you strive to be brave and staunch in the face of cold death and starvation. Sometimes, you, or they, just die.

That’s what happened to Mr. Kim when he made a wrong turn in southern Oregon trying to get his family back to San Francisco from Seattle after Thanksgiving. The car got stuck in the snow on a road closed for the winter, and after a week of subsisting on the little food they had in the car, and with his wife breastfeeding their four-year-old and seven-month-old daughters, Mr. Kim struck out in snow and cold for help. Two days later searchers rescued his family, and two anxious days following that, they found Mr. Kim’s body floating in a creek only a mile from the car, although he had walked more than 10 trying to find help.

His efforts to save his wife and the two girls have been called ‘heroic’ and ‘superhuman,’ and they were. They were also unlucky. He walked away from and not toward an unoccupied hunting lodge a few miles from where the car was stuck. He tried to follow a creek bed down the mountain – an old standard wilderness survival technique – hoping to find housing and settlements; it was another wrong choice. Getting stuck in the first place was also poor luck. Already lost, but still on a main mountain road, the Kims turned down a road that should have been gated. Vandals had broken the lock and left the way open.

And in spite of James Kim’s bravery and desperate courage and love for his family, he died. Why do people think it can never happen to them, or their children? Why do people persist in thinking that their God, their religion, their positive attitude, their secret mantra, can spare them from the vagaries and accidents of life, from the mosquito bite that brings malaria and encephalitis, from the freak accident that maims or kills, from anything and everything that can go wrong and change life forever from one second to the next?

No choice, really, for some of us, in the interest of sanity and mental comfort.

My father, a Baptist minister from the age of sixteen and a missionary in Asia for 35 years, once told me he could not live without his belief in God, that he would commit suicide if he thought there wasn’t a God. Richard Dawkins, atheist and author of The God Delusion, would say my father is delusional. I would not completely disagree. My father is a Republican. He listens to Rush Limbaugh and Paul Harvey. He gets his news from FOX.

For all that, my father isn’t any more delusional than most, not even Mr. Dawkins himself. The major delusion of the God question is in believing certainty is possible in the answer, not in believing or hoping He is out there. Mr. Dawkins is as delusional as my father in that respect.

Contrary to what Mr. Dawkins believes, there is not a high probability in the non-existence of an all-knowing, all-seeing deity. After a certain degree of improbability, God is no more or no less likely than just the universe, just as it is. One or the other, in the end, just has to be, to halt an infinitely regressive search for a primary first cause. It’s a 50-50 bet. Either there is a God or there isn’t. Either the necessary a priori assumption is the universe or it is God.

My father, I am pretty sure, wasn’t talking about taking his life over the waste of sixty years in service of a delusion if he one day discovered definitively there was no God. He meant he didn’t think he could bear the thought of a chaotic world without God in control, that the world is not to be faced without at least the idea of God. As husband and father, but mostly as father, I, too, hold to the thought there is some ultimate plan. I grasp the skyhook that Somebody or Something is in charge amidst the everyday hatred of people who blow, burn, and shoot each other up, the dying of the fish in the seas, the poisoning of the air, the always threatening potential for immediate, unseen destruction by man or nature. And sometimes, facing these everyday frights, prayer to a possibly non-existent God is the only thing that makes me strong, steady, and able to face the possibility of an accidental world not in His hands.

Get that? Prayer to a possibly non-existent God helps me to deal with the possibility of His non-existence. And I hope that God – delusion or reality – was of some help to Mr. Kim as he was scrambling wet and cold along a freezing creek trying to save his family. He deserved it.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Wait! You be the Canary

(First published in Bali Advertiser, December 6, 2006)

“No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation." – Abraham Lincoln

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself …” – Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’

Wouldn’t you know it? Two weeks after boasting of my stamina and appetite for news, I go into full-blown information overload meltdown. I can’t muster interest in the Tom-Kat-Suri celebrity wedding of the year, the maneuverings of the newly victorious Democrats, or the P.T. Barnum bluster of the Murdoch-FOX media circus with its O.J. ‘confessional.’ The only news item that has stirred anxious excitement has been waiting to see if the Dallas Cowboys would defeat the undefeated Baltimore Colts this past November 19. (Contenders again!)

I’ve got a news hangover. I wake up irritable, the afterglow of the previous day’s red-carpet photos gone, no lift left from seeing Bush and Rove and Cheney humbled, no glimmer of glee from the fall of yesterday’s American Idols. Not even old standbys like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have been able to jolt me back to my accustomed highs of outrage and hysteria. Outrage has passed to ennui. I patrol the Internet, getting no satisfaction, checking my in-boxes reflexively, feeling like a monkey with a cocaine habit. Not even the potential of U.S. President George Bush playing the fool in Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia raised my spirits.

Bush’s visit to the region should have stirred old instincts. In my reporting days, it would have been time to suit up in dress shirt and khakis, grab recorder, pens, notepads, extra batteries, laptop, and mobile phone, and join the press gaggle. Security agents wouldn’t have allowed my colleagues and I to waylay Bush like we used to manhandle oil officials and executives across Asia, but we could have tackled the minor officials and hangers-on for real quotes to go with the dry comments of the official press conferences. And there would have been plenty of man-in-the-street interviews, maybe with some Bogor bakso and drink vendors, who no doubt got bang-up business in November from all the extra policeman, soldiers, and protesters.

But Bush’s visit left me flat, without any wish-I-was-there wistfulness. More and more, I find myself watching all realms of officialdom, and thinking the Marx brothers, Danny Kaye, and Charlie Chaplin have all done the same show, only better and funnier. It all suddenly looks so slapstick to me, from the military juntas and the self-congratulating political strongmen of Asia, to the self-important bureaucrats of international development banks and the United Nations, to the masters of the non-apology apology ‘statesmen’ of Western democracies.

It makes me feel uncomfortably jaded, this cynicism. I’m half ready – God help me -- to take up Bubba’s six-pack and forgo the news to potter about pleasantly in the rice fields. But I can’t afford to be a cynic for long. Fathers (mothers, too) can’t be cynics. Fathers without hope – without some belief that this life or a next offers something better than what we see when we look at the world without the rosy-shaded filter of an off-the-rack, all’s well philosophy – give only despair to their children, and that’s a terrible thing to give a child of any age. Some belief has to leaven the cynicism. Complete unbelief and distrust is no more sophisticated than straight-down-the-line doctrinal adherence to any governmental or religious creed.

So I’m done being the canary down in the news mines, risking my sanity digging for the evidence that the whole beetling shebang is going to tumble down on our heads, risking the end of standing on a street corner mumbling to myself and shouting incoherent prophecies about the stock market collapsing if Angelina Jolie’s lips get any bigger. Christmas is just around the corner, and I welcome back my habit of thinking at this time of year that everything good and true is possible, that at the bottom of every pile of manure there has to be at least one pony, that even if my glass of eggnog is empty there is still a pitcher in the fridge and a bottle of rum in the cabinet.

Oh, I’ll come right about mid-January, revived by the resurrecting power of the New Year, the ritualistic washing away of the sins and excesses of 2006, able to face the dim hope of the warming, erratic, warring, irrational, bloody world with a bitter smile, a shouted laugh, and new appreciation of the absurd. They haven’t got me yet, and I’m already feeling better. Really.

I’ve got a new umbrella; only acorns fall on it. Not a thing to worry about. Hear me whistling? Chirping, even … I’m fine now … Was that a pussy cat?

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

My Name is Lee Roy, and I Watch the News

(First published in Bali Advertiser, November 22, 2006)

“I say get off our treadmills, grab a six pack and return to the old days when the news reports only lasted 15 minutes a day. Or better yet, follow the example of the Bali Advertiser who prints just 10 minutes of news once every two weeks. That’s enough for me. Yes, we would be a less informed populace but we Americans pride ourselves in being uninformed. It’s our heritage.” – Bali Bubba in a October 25 Letter to Bali Advertiser

Thank God the US elections are over. Now I can get back to following Britney’s break-up with K-Fed, Madonna’s adoption of that Malawian baby, Keith Urban’s stint in rehab, and the 24-hour cleavage coverage of Anna, Paris, and Pamela (Headlight News?). And what’s the latest on Mr. Crumbly Nose now that he’s moved to Dubai? Hasn’t dangled any babies lately, has he?

Mr. Bubba suggests a daily 15 minutes for a six-pack and news. That’s too fast even for watery American beer, and not enough time to get hysterical over the latest fright, the faddiest diet, the most recent report on the poisons in the air and water and the anti-toxins that counter them, the scariest current conspiracy to divide and conquer and make us buy McDonald’s burgers and American cars and submit to the United Nations, and the most up-to-date death tolls from bird flu, AIDS, poverty, malaria, cancer, and the war in Iraq.

Even if we could squeeze all that into a short quarter of an hour between chugging down the beer, how would we ever keep up with the lives of the celebrity stars that govern the universe? Or have time for the ‘Odd News’ bits about people stupider than us, who kill themselves in funny ways, mistake the gas pedal for the brake, attempt robberies and get stuck in the chimney flue, or do something wonderfully inventive and self-destructive with their buttocks and bottle rockets?

And that’s only if we try to keep up with what’s going on in the Western world. Apparently, judging from the number of celebrity ‘news’ shows on Indonesian TV, there is just as much cleavage to cover in Indonesia, and by extension and extrapolation, we can assume there are government scandals and public health dangers to keep up with as well. And wait a minute, aren’t there other countries, too? And they’ve all got television stations and newspapers? And now Al-Jazeera has an English-language channel? Talk about fair and balanced.

How to keep track of it all? I was going to suggest we organize in shifts, but from their comments, I fear Mr. Bubba and Mr. ParacelsusAsia have lost their enthusiasm for it. No doubt, they are right, we, the general public, do collectively spend too much time watching what passes for TV news, studying the Internet, and reading newspapers, tabloids, magazines, and gossip sheets. But there are real questions about how much is too much, how much is not enough. Do we ignore the world or barely skim the basics and risk getting caught unawares by something everyone else knows? For instance, do we risk continuing to cuddle chickens long after the bird flu pandemic has finally struck? Or do we go the other direction and check every story against several sources? How far is too far to go, how long is too long to discover ‘just the facts, ma’am’?

The first approach carries economic and personal risks for anyone living in a globally connected world, when a virus on a farm in China can be in New York City tomorrow, and when your India-based business making widgets can suddenly fail because a factory in Indonesia is violating your patent and flooding the market in Europe (trans-shipping through China, of course).

The second manner of dealing with the news – double-checking FOX, CNN, and MSNBC with stories off Yahoo News and the Web sites of the Washington Post, New York Times, Houston Chronicle, and USAToday, with a few odd-ball sites (WorldNetDaily, CounterPunch, et al) thrown in to get the crackpot versions – threatens to overwhelm. Especially when you can get constantly sidetracked by celebrity breakups (there’s a sex tape!) and stories of the latest alcohol and drug binges of the famous and infamous (my aversion therapy; there but for the grace of God…).

But now I feel I am coming close to confessing myself the charter member of the Bali chapter of NAA, News Addicts Anonymous: “My name is Lee Roy, and 15 minutes is too little, and 5 minutes more is never enough.”

Or maybe I can think of myself as the ‘canary’ down in the news mines. As long as I am chirping happily and nonsensically along every couple of weeks, readers can be assured that all is well, Mount Agung hasn’t exploded, the barbarians haven’t landed on the beaches, mercury and formaldehyde levels in local tuna haven’t reached fatal proportions. But should the chirping go silent or suddenly take on a frantic tone …

Run for your lives! Head for the hills! ‘They’, ‘it’, got me days ago!

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Saving My Father's Marbles

(First published in Bali Advertiser, November 8, 2006)

“… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” – St. Matthew 6:21

We cleared out my parents’ attic this past trip home, and my father was happy to find he had not lost his marbles. They were in a box of keepsakes from his mother’s house, and we loaded them into the trunk of the car along with other items of more dubious sentimental value and took them to the storage unit we rent for a few hundred dollars a year. The same unit and facility hold the books I’ve never managed to get to Asia and sweaters I have no use for in the tropics. My older brother’s keepsakes and decade-old financial documents are there, too, and my sister’s wedding dress, and our childhood treasures, and odds and ends of past family life – a softball bat, a marble chess set, a rocking chair, old suitcases, stacks of National Geographic magazines, baseball hats and rotting gloves, and pairs of cowboy boots more hole than boot.

Anyone who’s been to the US recently has probably noticed the space given over to these concrete and steel blights on the landscape of modern America, taking up land that might once have been useful pasture or parking lot. My father says the storage facilities are a better racket than motels and apartment complexes, because owners and management don’t have to deal with living tenants, only castoffs that people can’t bring themselves to take to the dump.

My own prediction is that in fifty centuries, when archeologists are sifting through the sediment levels corresponding to our age and come across the local U-Store-It, they are at first going to be excited at their discovery of such a well-laid out series of tombs – so obviously catering to royalty and attendant court figures with the varying sizes of compartments. Then they will be confused at finding so many valueless collections of junk and no royal bodies. They will scratch their heads over what will become known as The Collector Society, and puzzle over 21st Century Americans the way we puzzle now over the elderly dead found in New York City apartments under mountains of old newspapers, transistor radio parts, and cheap Japanese dolls.

We will be thought a population of cat ladies and rat-packing kooks, peeping out doorways and making hurried runs to auxiliary cache sites, storing up trinkets and Crackerjack prizes, instead of grains and foods against lean years. We will be an archeological joke, something to tease anyone who saves anything at all in the great throwaway future that is coming. Perhaps this obsessive storing up of so many items of questionable value is linked to anxiety over what we already throw away daily -- pens, lighters, razors, contact lenses, cups, plates, napkins, diapers, cameras, ketchup and mustard packets, batteries, and stacks and stacks of newspapers, magazines, TV guides, and sales advertisements. It is hard not to think, “Shouldn’t we be saving some of this?” – and then attach an unreal greater value to anything not built to be obsolete in six months.

Or maybe we are just overrun, not neurotic. Today’s ordinary middle class American or European lives more comfortably and in greater ease than the pharaohs of Egypt (without the willing temple virgins and servants ready to sacrifice themselves on command). We have as much stuff, not bejeweled and made of gold, but it is ours and we love it and don’t want to part from it. And absent the sensible option of burying it with us when we are gone, we stack it in tin sheds and in the attic, and periodically visit the tomb which will never hold us and sift through the dregs of earlier days. The mummified pharaohs probably did the same all those centuries in their grand pyramids until the deserts finally robbed them of fluid movement and they rested at last.

But what else does one do with the things that stick? Letters, books, a favorite letter opener, a pocketknife given by a grandfather, a necklace of white shells bought one perfect summer at the beach when one certain girl gave you reason to hope, a stone and brass ring from Sumatra, a gold braided shirt from somewhere else. Their value is in the memories they stir, and we hold on to them as long as we value the memories, or until the memories have become so internalized that the things no longer need to be fondled and caressed to recall them. Or maybe we are always aware of the eventual disintegration of even the most durable items, no matter how we wrap and preserve them and ward off their destroyers with mothballs and incantations. Perhaps, too, we care for life’s detritus only because it reminds us that we will one day crumble ourselves, and all that will remain is another box of dust hidden away from sunlight and air.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Next Time, I Go by Land and Sea

(First published in Bali Advertiser, October 25, 2006)

“There is not much to say about most airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you’re grateful.” – Paul Theroux in ‘The Old Patagonian Express’

Forty years ago August, I made my first trip overseas on one of American President Lines’ last remaining passenger liners. I was too young to appreciate it. We traveled the way civilized people should travel. We had separate places to eat, sleep, and relax. We could exercise and dance and run riotously on the decks. We had time to get to know our fellow travelers. At a slow, measured pace, our bodies adjusted to the day and night rhythms of our destination. Even our worry over any potential shipping disaster was more relaxed than the instantaneous terror spikes and white knuckles that come with every bump and shudder of an airplane.

I used to enjoy flying before it became a horror of delays, cancellations, security checks, and fears for the worst. Now I face the full brunt unprotected, without resort to unlimited beers and bottomless wine glasses, no longer cheerfully shuffling my way through airports and connections, oblivious to the havoc of modern air journeys. I am husband and father and responsible for the safe and healthy travels of wife and son. This has its compensating pleasures, but the airline attendant who wished me to “enjoy” my meal does not the know the rant she almost invoked in the middle of a 12-hour flight from a responsible, nauseous husband and father tending a sick, incapacitated wife and a bored two-year-old.

How could I have enjoyed my meal? Even if it had been good, I could not have eaten it. I was too busy making sure my son did not poke his eye out with a fork or dump his yogurt into his mother’s hair. And even if I had been able to eat it, it would have come up again – as had everything I had eaten in the previous 20 hours.

The only possible way to fly with enjoyment is to fly single, in business class, on someone else’s tab. Civilized air travel is otherwise too expensive for all except Gates and God. At the moment, recovering from this last trip, if I were looking for a job, I would work without pay forever if offered business class tickets for all work and leisure travel. Economy seating is for fools and sardines. Economy food service is for anyone who thinks McDonalds sells hamburgers.

Why do people subject themselves to such misery for unessential travel, for another notch on a suitcase handle, for more pictures for show and tell on their return? My wife, son, and I were traveling to see family in the US, a price we have to pay every so often for my oversea expatriate life. Most vacation travel these days, on the other hand, isn’t about maintaining family connections or even about relaxation; it’s about going somewhere, anywhere, other than home, another form of our age’s trend to selfish indulgence.

Holidays did not used to be just about going somewhere. Middle class fathers drove days across country to spend two weeks with Aunt Edna, Uncle Herb, and the cousins. Well-to-do fathers would send their families to the beaches in the summers and continue to work and live in the city during the week, and maybe join the family for a couple of weeks or a month at a cottage or hotel returned to year after year. Poor fathers took their families fishing and camping on the weekends, because weekends were the only real holidays they ever got. Holidays and vacations were not about exotic distances. That was for the luxuriously wealthy, poor travel writers, and well-heeled adventurers. Holidays and vacations for the rest of us were about family and real rest.

Why in this age, too, of instant, practically-there, on-line, in-your-ear communication, do businessmen still rack up the annual airplane mileage? Only because it’s good to brag at the club about being just in from Beijing? Or because it really is fun to fly up front, in business class, when all the poor, unsuccessful, lesser blighters are back in cattle class where they belong?

We economy flyers have let ourselves be fooled by long distances and speed. If life is a journey, and the journey is the thing, then the only journeys that count are the ones that are taken well, no matter the destination. No one really gets anything from two weeks in Thailand one year and two weeks in France the next – at least nothing in comparison with two weeks at the same camp site year after year, or summers at the same lakeside cottage for generations. It is not where you go or where you live, it’s in how slowly and deeply you drink the waters -- of the local farm pond or the Nile. The pyramids can teach only as much about life as the 100-year-old Lone Star Cemetery on Rattlesnake Hill Road outside Brooksville, Oklahoma. They are both graveyards after all. And both reveal their most important secrets only to anyone lucky enough to drive or ride by them on the way to work everyday for a lifetime.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

The Demise of America

(First published in Bali Advertiser, October 11, 2006)

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1933 Inaugural Address

Coming home takes time and I don’t usually feel it until I’m doing 70 miles an hour down an Oklahoma blacktop, Merle Haggard on the radio. Each trip home, though, there is less to return to, less to see. Relatives and friends die or move away. Old familiar haunts close down and disappear. Towns crumble back into the prairie, and the rusting remains lie in weedy neglect.

America is dying. Its innards are shriveling up while its intellectual life – as evidenced by glazed-over television eyes – creeps into senility. And Americans are afraid, although they manage every now and then to rise to a weak old man’s bluster. They are afraid terrorists will strike the US again. They are afraid of what their government is doing to protect them. They are afraid of oil and house prices and interest rates. They are afraid they are too fat; they are afraid they are too skinny; they are afraid Mexicans and Asians are taking over America; they are afraid someone will take away their guns; they are afraid their no-credit-bad-credit, payday loans for their cars, houses, and RVs will eventually bankrupt them.

Democrats and Republicans fear each other and believe every political opponent is working to destroy the country. The “mainstream media” and bloggers warn that the practices of their news market foes signal the deterioration of American rationality, fairness, perspective, and objectivity. Christians and pagans shake their heads together over the path to hell that the other has chosen. There is no doctrine, belief, ritual or its opposite that wasn’t ordained by God, founded by tradition and the forefathers, and which, if neglected, won’t lead directly to the destruction of the nation.

America has been even more strange and confusing than I imagined it would be. First there was non-stop coverage of the death of an ex-playmate’s son. Then there were three school shootings that claimed the life of nine people (at present count). Babies have been snatched. Children have been found drowned in a washing machine. A congressman has resigned over e-mails and instant messages he sent to teenage congressional runners. An ex-president has sparked both love and loathing in a confrontational exchange with a TV interviewer. A whole state has been up-in-arms for two weeks over a blown call in a college football game. And somewhere hidden in the news each day is the report of how many dozens died the day before in Iraq.

For outsiders and baffled returnees, it is like trying to understand cricket knowing only the contest rules for baseball. Everything at first seems to make a kind of sense, but every TV news “personality” presents the news with a smirk and a wink that implies we both know what any given story is “really” about. Straight news reporting has given way to a brow-beating badgering to put across a particular viewpoint. And when not flogging one brand of propaganda or another, news anchors are working to stir the faithful to a righteous indignation over the latest crisis.

The problem is that there are too many of these assumed “shared” viewpoints, with adherents of each believing in a universal acceptance that doesn’t exist. When most Americans lived in the now dead and dying small towns or at least were born in them, there may have been a homogenous American belief system. But the death of those towns and that broader community has been replaced by a big-city cacophony amplified and broadcast and dictated coast to coast.

It may in the end result in a healthy change – a broadening of a narrow, nationalistic, parochial outlook. For now, many Americans still cling to the illusion of a monoculture that no longer exists – that has disappeared along with Selman and Slapout and Paruna and the thousands of other towns and communities that have passed on in Oklahoma and the rest of America.

America’s earthy, country-boy vitality has been sapped. All that remains is a big-city, American Idol cheesiness that used to be just the polish on the apple. Now there is only the polish, no apple – a shiny, red wax job and no ’37 Coupe underneath.

America’s small towns and communities were its strength and base. Rural America provided the boys and men that fought and won two hot world wars and one cold one. Rural America provided the common, down-to-earth sense that kept the national political and intellectual life from divergent extremes. Without that solid, massed center to keep the balance, America is cracking apart at the cross beams -- like an old-time playground seesaw overloaded with modern, American-sized school children at each end.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Here There Be Giants

(First published in Bali Advertiser, September 27, 2006)

“These people must be very fat.” – Wang Haiyun, the daughter of Chinese cotton farmers, commenting on the Americans for whom she stitches about 600 boots a day at her factory job in Tianjin, China, (International Herald Tribune, August 3, 2006)

America is very clean. Dog poop does not litter the sidewalks and roads. Plastic doesn’t float in the rivers. People do not burn their trash mornings and evenings, sending smoke wafting through windows. Even if two Americans disagree on everything else, they can usually agree that things should be kept generally tidy. Cleanliness is next to godliness, you’ve heard.

It is a shock, though, that the country that practically invented punctuality and timetables has so much trouble keeping air passengers on course and on time. This trip I’ve been flying domestic US carriers for the first time in five years, and it is hard to get used to the routine delays and hiccups. Sitting waiting for one flight that was eventually canceled for a “minor” electrical problem, I heard gate agents announce delays for several other flights, and one agent warned passengers they would be flying without a working bathroom on board their plane. “It’s an hour-and-a-half flight. If you need to go, go now and get back as quick as you can,” the agent said.

It’s the sort of thing one expects to hear waiting for a Merpati flight in Bima. And amid so much American plenty and excess, there is startling pettiness. Except for international gateways such as San Francisco, for instance, few airports provide baggage carts free of charge. The only option for travelers who wish to manage their own bags is to rent carts at US$3 a pop. Then there are the soft drinks and bags of cheap snacks that replace any attempt at food service.

American excess is, of course, what everyone does expect. It seems a sort of cheap extravagance that has consumers demanding super sizes of everything, unlimited drink refills, and no dining experience that isn’t all-you-can-eat. I’ve been here two weeks now, and it is hard not to feel it is a sign of something fundamentally wrong with America, something beyond war and politics and religion. It signifies some sort of spiritual malaise, an inner emptiness matching the expanse of the outward landscapes and no better filled than the Nevada desert is by Las Vegas.

It is as if the room and space that once led Americans to the ever far frontier has now left them frightened and worried since more than 200 years of effort hasn’t completely tamed and filled it. And in some neurotic subconscious linkage, the still empty wide open spaces now only make their stomachs grumble. There is so much room for expansion, and Americans – on almost every level – seem to want to do their part to fill it. Small-scale, small-town Main Streets have given way to mega malls and warehouse wholesalers. Streets are lined with business and stores, each with their own paved acres of parking lots and entrances and exits. It is no wonder that American waistlines are ever expanding under the influence of so much civic gigantism.

It is tempting to mark it all down to selfishness, a collective capitalist greed, an out-of-control sense of “mine-ness.” But there is something more at work here. It is a level of self-centeredness that has everyone claiming the right of the firstborn. More so than ever, individual Americans are isolated in their cars, their houses, their own backyards. Perhaps by cutting down on the cast of supporting characters each one can more easily believe themselves the star of a personal reality TV show. And perhaps the shrinking communities and extended families further drive the space-filling neurosis as each person endeavors figuratively and literally to expand to fill the holes in their lives. No wonder then, too, the American obsession with “living large.”

What will ever fill the American hunger for the biggest ever of everything? SUVs haven’t done it. Double-bacon-cheeseburgers, extra large fries, and 44-ounce soft drinks haven’t done it. Home entertainments systems in “McMansions” haven’t done it. All-you-can-eat Chinese food buffets on every corner haven’t done it. Americans still want it all, and all still always means more.

Where it all ends is no better illustrated than by the company Goliath Caskets, Inc., maker of oversized caskets for more than 20 years. The company’s “Homestead Style” casket comes in sizes up to 52 inches wide – about as wide as a standard double bed. And funnily enough, the man that started the company in 1985, Forrest Davis of Lynn, Indiana, was nicknamed Pee Wee. One imagines the nickname will be long out of fashion 50 or 100 years from now, or maybe it will only be used as an affectionate term for freakishly small people – probably not Americans.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Back to the US of A

(First published in Bali Advertiser, September 13, 2006)

“They took my Blistex.” – Bill Hunstein, 39, of Fairbanks, Alaska, on the ban on liquids, gels, and other personal toiletries on airlines after the discovery of a terror plot in Britain (New York Times, August 11, 2006)

We are preparing for our first trip to the US in three years and I am wary. Maybe there’s some worry about personal inconvenience after the foiling of the airline bombing plot in Britain in early August. Will I be able to keep my laptop with me as carry-on? If we can’t bring our own bottled water into the cabin, will the stewardesses supply enough to keep us from thirst and thrombosis?

Maybe a few times during the flight I will worry about being blown out of the sky by exploding hair gel. Mostly, I expect, I will accept that flying is statistically safer than traveling by car, and that, if anything should happen, it would be over quickly. A few seconds of screaming terror is all.

Six weeks in America is another matter. It won’t be quick. It won’t be painless. The country has grown strange to me the past 13 years. Three visits in that time have barely spanned three months, and I often contemplate “home” with bewilderment. Perhaps, too, I remember the fear on long family trips home when I was an adolescent and suddenly became the outsider who didn’t know what was cool and never got the jokes at school.

And still there is much in America that is confusing and contradictory:

For instance, just how big does a weapon have to be before it is unacceptable to say you won’t give it up until someone pries it out of your cold, dead hands? I mean, why does the premise that concealed weaponry makes everyone safer not hold when dictators and theocrats want to pack nuclear heat? At what caliber does, “Everybody’s got to have guns,” become “Everybody’s got to have guns – but not those guys or those guns.”?

Or how to explain the many US organizations and politicians that say they stand for family values and the protection and nurturing of children with the public outrage when US parenting magazine Babytalk had the “courage” to carry a cover picture of a baby breastfeeding? How can there have been a taboo against showing women’s breasts in parenting magazines in the first place? People can generate the same indignation at a picture of a breastfeeding mother as at a primetime, Super Bowl nipple flash?

Or how can religious Americans not see the illogic of ridiculing and reviling Islamic religious states and “fanatical” devotion to a prophet’s words -- and then working to institute prayer in their own public schools, advocating home or religious schooling to counter secular education, and trying to redefine science because they believe the earth to be 6,000 years old according to Biblical reckoning? Does every religious difference have to be reduced to my-god-said-your-god-wears-army-boots simplicity?

Or how can a country with supposedly the best university and education system in the world have such large numbers of people that apparently believe Elvis, Jimmie, and Jim still live, aliens are keeping watch, The Da Vinci Code is a documentary, Pamela Anderson’s breasts and reality TV are real, and Geraldo Rivera is a journalist?

America leaves me wanting to laugh hysterically or weep, and usually doing the wrong one at the wrong time. When in-country, I constantly worry people are looking at me weirdly and keeping their hands on their pistols. A friend has recommended buying a flak jacket and putting it on enroute. I want to warn my wife to keep her hands away from her pockets and in plain sight in most public situations. Maybe we should wear signboards saying we are not “carrying.”

Yet, it is home, in a historical, ancestral sort of way, and I cannot deny being an American. Baseball was my first sports love. The Dallas Cowboys were my and America’s team in the 1970s. I get cravings for chicken-fried steaks and bacon-beef burgers, and believe home pizza delivery is a fundamental human right. I like to look at the gun and knife catalogs at my uncles’ houses and review my cousins’ new toys that go bang. Most tellingly, I am proud when I hear of Americans doing something noble and self-sacrificing and feel personally embarrassed every time Americans screw up on the world stage.

So back we go to the land of plentiful excess, where Darwin is a myth and creation is a science, where it no longer matters how or what you say as long as you say it on TV, and where everyone shops at Big ‘N Tall. Here’s to safe journeys and returning sound and sane without any bullet holes that cannot be mended. Hold the exploding hair gel, please.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Sermon on a Beer Crate

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, August 30, 2006)

“So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the laborers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.” – St. Matthew 20:8

A friend came over downhearted a few weeks ago. She had been working three jobs and the day before all three of the do-gooder organizations she worked for had told her they couldn’t pay her. Another friend used to complain that an employer often expected her to stay late without extra pay – but docked her whenever she took time off for a ceremony or illness.

Another Balinese woman I know once worked for a Western boss who never did get around to paying her the rate agreed at the start of the employer-employee relationship. It was always, “Can you wait a few more days?” or “This is all I can afford this month. I’ll make it up to you later.”

I’ve heard the stories time and again from maids, secretaries, personal assistants, and yayasan staff. They are hired at a starting rate – sometimes below market – with promises of an increase in a few months when things get going. The increase never comes. Paydays are delayed. Meanwhile, the expatriate boss – who is so pressed for cash, as employees are told – leads the usual “Bali” life of bars, cars, spas, and restaurant dinners.

What’s funny is to then hear the fly-by-night entrepreneurs and charity doyennes complain about the difficulty of getting good help, how the Balinese and other Indonesians are so poor at planning ahead, how the Balinese have no business sense.

Some of it may just be incompetent money management. It doesn’t seem like it costs much to start and operate a business in Bali, and people jump right in. Also, a lot of people starting businesses in Bali are primarily right-brained – and must assume they get a free pass for being “artists.” Sad to say, artists still have to pay the bills and the help, even in Bali.

Then with yayasans and non-profit organizations, the hired staff may be expected to have the same altruistic devotion and hair-shirt mentality as the foreign do-gooders. And maybe many yayasan workers do feel bad they can’t volunteer to work for a good cause for nothing, but they may need money and help just as much as the people the yayasan is set up to assist.

And some expatriates have a neurotic fear that every Balinese dreams of getting both hands in a foreigner’s pockets. A couple of years ago, before I took to the clean life, my afternoon beers and cigarettes were delivered by my landlord’s son. He’d tack on an extra 1,000 rupiah a bottle to run to the local store. After the daily runs had become established, though, he went into business for himself. He’d buy a case of Bintang at the supermarket, keep the beers in the family fridge, and instead of making 1,000 rupiah a bottle, his take was almost 3,000 rupiah per serving – because the home delivery price didn’t change. I was kind of proud of him and me, too, when his parents reported a few months later that he’d saved his first million rupiahs.

When I related this to a new neighbor, suggesting she make use of my young go-getter beer merchant, as several other people in the area already did, she was certain it was just the sort of trickery the Balinese are born to. She begrudged the little enterpriser’s profit increase to 30 US cents per unit by the cut in his supply costs, maybe thinking that an American little boy, some young would-be Donald Trump, would pass on any savings to customers. Part of the Bali boy’s cunning, apparently, too, was that he had been born cute. They are sneaky like that.

It isn’t the responsibility of visitors and long-term residents to repair the Indonesian economy or get the government and local business community to raise the standards set for minimum pay. But if you caught the statistic reported in the August 20 Jakarta Post, that the number of poor families in Indonesia increased to 19.2 million in August from 17.8 million this January – a rise to almost 40 percent of the total 52.3 million families in the country – and want to do something about it, don’t start another yayasan. Just pay your house help and business employees a fair and equitable local wage, pay them on time, and maybe give something extra at the usual bonus times. An unexpected 100,000 rupiah is only US$10 or so to us “rich” foreigners; to local workers, it can be up to 20 percent or more of their usual monthly income.

And if you happen to live in Penestanan and aren’t yet reformed, start taking home beer deliveries. I know a beer merchant who’s suffered a drop in sales volume.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Put Another Dime in the Jukebox, Baby, and I'll Shoot You

(First published in Bali Advertiser, August 16, 2006)

“Dead or Alive.” – how U.S. President George W. Bush once wanted Osama bin Laden

Maybe it is a good thing guns are hard to come by in most Asian countries, because there is a high level of satisfaction in putting a .45 slug through an entertainment system when it is blaring at 3 o’clock in the morning. At least I have imagined it to be so ever since living four years behind a University of Oklahoma fraternity house in the early nineties. Once a week, it seemed, I’d lie awake imagining the mayhem that would end the noise.

Now we have moved recently and are not hidden back in the rice fields. A small art shop across the way is where the local Bali boys gather at night after they have done hustling for transport work and mining for gold strikes amongst the tourist ladies. It wouldn’t be bad if their after-midnight conversations weren’t accompanied by music blasting over a Kijang stereo. It’s enough to turn me into a raging, run-amok shootist. Fortunately, my home defense is made up of a couple of ‘Walking Tall’ sticks and a fat dog.

So far I have satisfied myself with shouted requests to kill the music. I try to be polite and not sound too much like a raving, mad foreigner. It only makes it worse that everyone in my own household gets the giggles when I start to stalk and stomp in the wee hours.

“What are they doing to my Bali?” is the troubling question that is sometimes not far away. Maybe I’d prefer to look out on a moonlit early morning and see the local youths leading cows out to the paddies to plow in the cool part of the day. Or maybe I’d like to see them squatting through the witching hours, swapping village gossip and fighting mock rooster battles. Their late night noise, for some reason, irks more knowing that they have just ended an evening playing bad reggae and chatting up Japanese women -- as if that somehow makes them less Balinese.

It was easier to fantasize about taking out an early morning yoga dance class that met near one place we used to live. The noisemakers were foreigners, for one thing. It was no trouble at all to think that they were “ruining Bali” – although I never could reconcile their spiritual demeanor of the afternoons with their early morning shouts, hoo-rahs, and poundings. What did that have to do with yoga at 7 o’clock in the morning? I had always thought yoga a quiet pursuit. Woe unto them if I had ever found one of the RPGs of my dreams.

Not all nighttime or early morning noise throws me into a rage. I can sleep to a frog chorus and other natural night noises. My tolerance line for man-made ruckuses, though, is an arbitrary, “cultural” one. I don’t mind a temple gamelan or a raspy voice over a scratchy loudspeaker late into the night. I don’t mind the occasional bazaar concert serenading the countryside for kilometers around. If the noise can be judged part of Balinese or community tradition, then I can accept it with equanimity; if it is associated with the tourist trade, or can be seen a result of a “detrimental” Western influence, then I cannot forgive or forget.

Thus, the local wannabes playing all night a couple of times a year in a village bazaar are tolerable. The same wannabes playing all night every week in an Ubud establishment are not – at least, not within the range of my sensitive sleeping eardrums. This does not make any sense. “Culturally pure” noise keeps me awake, too. Shouldn’t I be upset at any noise that disturbs the night hours? Maybe I could be more tolerant of cultural intrusion if it were some good old Johnny Cash and not always covers of the same three reggae songs. As long as we are going to have Western influence, can’t we make it Country and Western?

Now I suppose some weak-hearted, weak-kneed artsy-fartsy type is going to write in to say I shouldn’t even joke about shooting people … or their radios. And I wonder myself about the appropriateness of such a vengeance fantasy with Israel and Hezbollah seriously trying to blast each other to bits, dozens of people dying every day in Iraq, and two shooters just being arrested in Phoenix, Arizona after a year of what one of them called “random recreational violence.”

But give up joking about shooting somebody? That would be giving into the terrorists, wouldn’t it? It’d be letting them win, right? Agree or I’ll shoot you. Call it the TV Western influence.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

With Us or Against Us? Americans and Soccer

(First published in Bali Advertiser, August 2, 2006)

“World soccer rules desperately need an overhaul; in that regard, they would do well to look to the USA, which designs its game rules to ensure that the better team comes out on top.” – Thomas Rice, in a letter sent to USAToday.com

A friend and I have been trying to figure out why Americans -- that is citizens of the United States of America and not citizens of any other American country -- don’t appreciate the game of soccer, aside from the fact that they aren’t any good at it.

“Some of my male friends think the game is too hard to follow, or there’s not enough scoring. Or they just say that they don’t get it,” my friend says. She’s working on a theory of “a parallel between a country’s political history and its love of the game.”

The basic tenet is that people in countries with long histories of political unrest and uncertainty – such as some South American and European countries – are better able to understand, play, and cheer the game. Whereas in the US, with its relative political stability the past 200 years, the orderly, controlled, chess-like American football is the popular game.

She might be onto something, although I’m not sure the theory works in Asia, where the developed, orderly countries of Japan and South Korea are the football powerhouses, not the basket-case countries of Southeast Asia. But my friend would seem to have no less an adherent to her theory than Claudio Reyna, captain of Team USA the past three World Cup campaigns.

“When I see youth soccer, I see too much organization, too many kids standing around in line waiting to shoot," Reyna said in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated (as carried in an Associated Press article July 14).

Another theory I read of several years ago is that Americans have no feeling for real football because it is mostly a game of failure. That is, most Americans cannot believe anything good can have happened in a game that ended in a 0-0 draw, when it may have been all end-to-end action, with sparkling mid-field play and many near misses. Americans are too oriented towards results to enjoy such a game was the thinking, and I’m willing to go along with that, too.

But I fear the attitude displayed by the USAToday letter writer is more common. Americans don’t take to the game simply because it is not American. They can sit through the four hours it takes to play the official 60 minutes of an American football match, with all its timeouts, half-times, and commercial breaks for quarters and two-minute warnings. They can watch a baseball game into extra innings -- debating the wisdom of pinch-runners, pinch-hitters, suicide bunts, squeeze plays, and the hit-and-run -- much of the time while absolutely nothing is happening on the field. They will hang on until the last tenth-of-a-second tick of a basketball game in which the final 10 minutes is a series of trips to the foul line as the trailing team tries to mount a comeback. And then they’ll lecture the world on what needs to be done to make soccer a better, more exciting game?

It reminds me of the mother watching the military parade, proud her son is the only one in step.

There are the obvious parallels to be drawn in the American reaction and attitude towards real football and the US diplomatic approach to the rest of the world the past several years. And is there a whiff of racist nationalism of the kind that allowed Americans for decades to ignore, even ridicule, its domestic Negro baseball leagues, Asian and Cuban baseball, European basketball, and any sports – badminton, ping pong, rugby, skiing – at which the best and brightest stars are seldom homegrown American boys? Would a bicycle race ever have received coast-to-coast coverage in the US had not Lance Armstrong recovered from cancer and dominated and won the most famous of all cycling races for a record seven straight years?

But if we are going to make nasty insinuations, let’s go for the real low blow. Real football isn’t a major US sport, because soccer is too lean a game. Americans like their goals and their scores like they like their chicken. They want them to come in Herculean, super-sized buckets. They are not satisfied with preparations that rely on quality, style, presentation, and build-up. They want all-you-can-stuff-into-yourself buffets, jumbo, big-gulp drinks, 72-ounce, Texas-sized slabs of goals. It is un-American, un-thankful, ungrateful to walk away from a table wanting more, or from a stadium or living room couch not completely satiated with games, scores, wrap-ups, and half-time extravaganzas -- without several whole enchiladas as it were.

Man! It must really bite now that some itty-bitty, little Japanese guy has been beating all American comers in the annual Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest the past five years. How beautifully ironic is that? Shall we say it?

Must be hard to stomach.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

I'm a Family-of-Man Family Man

(First published in Bali Advertiser, July 19, 2006)

“‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” – G.K. Chesterton

This last July 4th – the day on which the United States of America celebrates its declaration of independence from England – I was out of the country for the twenty-sixth time out of 44 opportunities so far, and it was the thirteenth time in a row I have not marked the day with any private or public celebration. Someone will probably remark that these statistics reflect poorly on my patriotism. I will admit only that the figures make it less likely I will be taken for a scoundrel.

The demand that good men and women love their countries is one of the most illogical of the many absurdities visited on us by being born human. First off, it’s easy to be born into a really lousy country. It takes almost no effort. Little helpless babies manage it every day, although likely we will never hear of any of them, because they and their countries will never figure in anything important like the World Cup or the Stanley Cup Finals. Yet they’re expected to love these countries above all others simply on the basis of the bad luck of being born in them?

Even for people fortunate enough to be born into one of the rich, “good” countries, the idea of loving it doesn’t hold up under study. One can love a town, village, or geographic area; one can love a culture and tradition; maybe one can even love a small, Luxembourg-sized country. But loving a country as large as the US, China, India, Russia, or Indonesia? Which part are you supposed to love and what does loving it mean? Loving the government? The rocks, dirt, and trees that actually make up the country? The people? The culture?

Nationality is not the personal accomplishment some people think it. Few people ever choose their country. Persons born in an American state since 1776, for example, are American by default. The current adult generation of East Timorese has chosen to be Timorese, not Indonesian, but anyone born in Dili since 2002 is Timorese only by geographic coincidence.

One’s citizenship is no less an accident of birth than the color of one’s eyes and hair. And when people urge you to fight and die and live and love simply on the basis of chance, they should be looked at with cocked eye and quizzical turn of the head -- especially considering that science and statistics has just proved that we are all related.

That’s right. It is no longer just feel-good talk to speak of the human family. In fact, sometime 2,000 to 5,000 years ago, it is a “mathematical certainty” that there existed one individual that can count everyone alive today as a descendant, according to author Steve Olson (Mapping Human History), Yale University statistician Joseph Chang, and neuroscientist and computer expert Douglas Rohde (Associated Press, July 1). And sometime 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, everyone alive was either an ancestor of all of us or someone whose line died out between now and then.

Working backward, you see, the ancestors of each of us grow exponentially with each generation. We’ve each got one set of parents, two sets of grandparents, four sets of great-grandparents, eight sets of great-great-grandparents and so on. By the 9th century, about 40 generations back, each of us has more than a trillion ancestors … and, of course, there has to be lots of crossover in our family trees, because each of us can’t have had a trillion separate ancestors living in the 9th century. There were only about 200 million people around at the time.

And the further back you go, as the calculated, theoretical number of ancestors for each of us grows and the actual population shrinks, the more mathematically certain it becomes there was one common ancestor who appears in all our tangled and overlapping genetic histories. And back from that person, it becomes certain that there was a point in time where the entire human population was made up of the forefathers and foremothers of us all.

Thus, when anyone requests that we make distinctions or take up arms based on color or creed, religion or country, they are asking that we discriminate against or draw down on family. And to my way of thinking, this new, scientific certainty of blood relation among all of us should trump any difference based on philosophical human constructs such as gods and nations. It’s not that I’m not a patriot. I’m just a good family man, and there is no telling who might be my cousin’s brother’s uncle’s aunt … er, or my cousin’s brother’s aunt’s sister?

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

They Said They Was Family

(First published in Bali Advertiser, July 5, 2006)

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” – Robert Frost

What Frost does not mention is that when a crowd of people shows up at your door in Bali claiming to be kin – with documents and the family nose to back them up – you can’t really send them down the path to the nearest losmen. So, we checked their credentials and put them up at the villa next door, and let them get the impression that life here is all shopping raids, walks in the rice fields, and afternoons by the pool. Now, they all want to come back, which is the blessing and curse of family. Sometimes family is there when you need it and want to fact-check stories about crazy uncles; sometimes family just shows up and eats all the nachos and drinks all the beer.

I’ve heard expatriates joke that the nicest thing about living overseas is that it makes it so hard for family to drop by. But Western minds seem to have gone past just joking about it. Family obligations and duties have become responsibilities to shed like old luggage and boxes in the attic. Families are no longer comfort zones and sources of spiritual and material aid; instead, they represent onerous responsibility cramping individual style. Fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, and lesser cousins are people to keep at a distance, if not entirely unknown and hidden.

Almost a quarter of Americans surveyed recently said that they have no friends with which to discuss personal matters, according to a June 23 Reuters story. More than 50 percent said they had two or fewer confidants, usually immediate family members. That’s a big change from 20 years ago said Duke University Professor Lynn Smith-Lovin, lead author of the study. Americans surveyed in 1985 most commonly said they had three close long-time friends and almost as many said they had four of five close confidants in their social network.

This drop in American social connectedness reflects a different sort of society from the one I remember from the odd school year in the US in the 1970s. Then, it seemed, everyone had cousins, aunts, uncles, and relatives-twice-removed on the next block or in the next classroom, ready to be summoned in time of need or just for a weekend BBQ. And the distinction between family and friend (and sometimes foe) was slim. Maybe it struck me forcefully then because I was isolated from my own extended family, which most always was on the far side of an ocean.

This week, a couple of days after my parents, siblings, and assorted hanger-on spouses left Bali, I had a look through some old photos scanned onto a CD by a brother-in-law. My wife and another Balinese family member were amazed that in many pictures I couldn’t pick out and name who was who. The truth is that I was with many of those people only a few times after I reached the age of four. The people in the pictures were both strangers and strange to me when I returned for university, and visits were often awkward social occasions I tried to escape or avoid entirely.

Many Americans may have developed the same sort of attitude while sojourning in the realm of electronic wizardry and invention. Maybe the pervasive television culture has made sitcoms and soap operas more real than their own towns and cities; maybe the glitzy, smarmy flash of pop idol and reality show competitions show up the wholesome grit of cattle exhibitions and pie contests at state fairs. Or maybe the Internet and ever more complex virtual realities have undermined the patchwork social fabric of the mid-1980s. One gets the feeling many Americans are home alone in front of TV or computer and will soon emerge red-eyed to go on shooting rampages.

Families, if nothing else, control that sort of rage simply by being around. The friction of familial contact smoothes our rough edges and gives us patience and understanding. Families teach us to expect both more and less from other people. They are the networks into which we are born, and like it or not, provide our first connecting points to the greater world. Even if we get rid of their physical presence, the traces of their patterns guide almost all we do. We are stuck with them for as long as we are lucky enough to have them around to build our character and mirror our faults.

So, I invite all the scattered LeRois to Bali every year. They can come when they like, stay as long as they wish … because we are moving to Lombok, maybe Timor. We’ll write.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

What the Movies Have Taught Me

(First published in Bali Advertiser, June 7, 2006)

“I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.” – John Wayne as John Bernard Books in his final movie, ‘The Shootist’, 1976

A man’s got to be strong, and when he falls, he’s got to get up again, with no crying and no complaints. He’s always got to do it when it’s got to be done, bleeding, crippled, or broken, no excuses. Even when he’s bad, he’s got to be good, and honest and loyal, even if a thief.

Goofy, bumbling, true-hearted suitors always win women’s hearts. Women may at first go for the flash, the money, and the ruggedly handsome cads. In the end, they come to their senses and see the value in the simple, the kind, and the good.

Women are only truly evil if they are German or Russian or speak with some foreign accent -- unless the accent is French or Spanish, then they are cute, innocently sexy, and good-hearted. Women of the future are cold, especially in space; but if not icily calculating, they are just as brave and strong and warrior-like as the men -- only they go all gushy sometimes, and it’s okay because, after all, they are women even when they captain a space cruiser.

Men in the future always triumph over evil robots and computers by doing the unexpected or the illogical – that is, the human. At least one machine always remains good and remembers that it was created to serve humanity, not destroy it. Good robots are the ones who try to understand what it means to cry or laugh. They try to tell jokes that are funny only in the failure to make anyone laugh. They learn to cry right before going off-line to save the world.

In war, the soldier who shows anyone a picture of a girl dies; officers are always cowardly and foolish; intelligence men are cynics working on their own agenda; politicians always sell out soldiers, country, and principles for riches and power.

When two men are really good friends, since childhood, for example, one will always save the life of the other after a misunderstanding drives them apart. And if one of them does betray the other or the cause, he will repent and come back to his true self, make amends heroically, and then die.

Indian couples never have sex or even kiss until after singing and dancing to a dozen songs, one of which must be danced and sung around a tree or in a field of knee-high grass. Bad Indian women are sexier and hotter than good Indian girls, but they always die after repenting their sinful ways for the love of a good man. Bad and good Indian men always have a humorous sidekick, and bad Indian men are rotten to the core. If offered babies for breakfast, they only stipulate whether they prefer them boiled or fried. Good Indian men are sometimes foolish, but they can never be faulted for their motives, which are always pure. They will come back from the dead many times to avenge an insult to themselves, their mothers, their sisters, and their fathers. Their guns never run out of bullets unless every gun runs out of bullets.

Chinese gangsters shoot their guns sideways and are essentially honorable men in a bad profession. Chinese cops can always teach their American counterparts a thing or two if they are ever on assignment in San Francisco or Los Angeles -- where they should be like a fish out of water. That’s funny to see. The converse holds true when American policemen go to Hong Kong, Shanghai or Beijing. Either way, cross-culture cops always end up with a grudging respect for one another and have new adventures in whichever one’s country they weren’t in the last time. Chinese gangsters’ lips sometime move funny when they talk English. They all know kung fu and eat weird, stinky foods. That’s funny, too. That’s the Chinese, funny and so cool.

All mad scientists are German. Russian men, like Russian women, are always evil. Scots and Irishmen can always be trusted. Englishmen are usually dastardly madmen, no matter how cultured and urbane they appear. Frenchmen are almost never evil, though everyone thinks they are, because, well, they are French. Italian soldiers make love, not war. French soldiers never fight unless they are Legionnaires. Then in every battle they lose every man but one.

Life is grand and glorious and is full of drama and sweeping musical scores, and I am so lucky to be alive in the age of movies, VCDs, DVDs, home entertainment centers, and cable TV.

Otherwise, I might have ended up with an unrealistic view of life.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Is This Thing On?

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, May 24, 2006)

“Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it.” – Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University professor emeritus, in his essay ‘On Bullshit’

Every good reporter is supposed to have one – a first-class, grade-A bullshit detector. Mine seems to be broken. The batteries must be dead or the contacts corroded. You’d think a few days at the second Quest for Global Healing Conference in Ubud in May, and it would have registered at least one red-line alarm. Maybe the Bali damp has messed with the calibrations.

It should be as easy as falling off a log to poke fun at this meeting. One workshop promised to get people in touch with their animal spirits. People were asked several times to “sit and be with themselves for a moment” after especially inspiring speakers or performances. Betty Williams, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1976, made a reference the first day to the “ruling military junta in Washington” and was cheered. The audience chuckled at every report of a witty remark by that impish rascal, the Dalai Lama -- whom many people said they had met personally. Speakers talked of letting go and journeying together on voyages of sharing and discovery in transformative processes. And the five days closed with the burning of a Peace Altar to “consecrate the intentions, understandings and commitments birthed at the event.”

Nothing more than a gathering of “loony left” escapees from California is the tempting judgment. Friends usually more open to this sort of thing steered clear for fear of it being too “New Age-y.” A few had the impression that it was just a bunch of rich, ex-hippy Americans with nothing better to do with their organic money than attend a feel-good conference in Bali. But, for some reason, it did not all seem to be hooey. Maybe it was having Desmond Tutu as one of the headline speakers. Maybe it was the focus Day 4 on the practical business side of activism.

And also there’s this: As I sat in the audience for three mornings, listing things wrong and weird about the conference, one question kept coming back at me. What are you personally doing about any of this, chump? Because that’s the question that can always silence anyone sitting in the scorner’s seat. Do you have anything better? Do you have any suggestions? Can you do anything except sit there and snicker at the smirking remarks you’ll make later in the pub?

No matter how high my eyebrows raised at the odd mix of the New Age, “local” and “native” wisdoms, and the just plain made up stuff, there wasn’t any escaping the fact that many of the issues talked about at the conference – poverty, hunger, war, environmental degradation, abuse of the helpless – are among the things that sometime keep me awake at night. But I would never actually try to do anything to end them, you know. Or, if I hold the thought until morning that maybe someday I might get around to helping feed a few of the 40,000 or so kids that die each day from malnutrition, I usually get busy answering e-mails and getting on with my morning schedule. And the environment? I honestly don’t do enough to keep my own family’s ecological footprint from being larger than it should be; and I’m too worried about my personal finances to be anxious for long about half the world’s population living on less than US$2 a day.

Then there’s the factor of just being overwhelmed by the magnitude of things wrong with the world. Even if the folks at the conference can be dismissed as so many bearded prophets foretelling doom if repentant action isn’t taken promptly, it is not a great philosophical or symbolic insight that the world dies and is reborn every second. And in that light, isn’t it better to focus on the rebirthing and renewal rather than on the dying? No matter how one feels about animal spirits, moon burnings, and righteous, wrathful wood nymphs?

Too, the role of religious sentiment, traditional, loony, or otherwise, can’t be completely ignored when trying to inspire people to action. “One’s capacity to move into something bigger than what you might not have been able to do before, does require, I think, at least the recognition of something other than just your own humanity being at play,” said Marcia Jaffe, co-director of Quest for Global Healing in an interview. She’ll begin living in Bali part-time from July to form an institute aimed at getting non-profit organizations, businesses, and world leaders to cooperate together on changing the world. If that sounds grandiose, it can’t be any more damaging to the cosmos than other hobbies people take up after the kids leave home.

If nothing else, it’ll give me plenty of opportunity to test this darned BS meter of mine. Anybody got a Phillips?

(The second Quest for Global Healing conference was held at the ARMA Museum in Ubud May 3-8. Speakers included Nobel Peace Prize recipients Betty Williams and Desmond Tutu, as well as former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, or Gus Dur. The third QGH conference will be in late 2007 or in 2008.)

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Excuse Me, Are You an Artist? What's Your Position?

(First published in Bali Advertiser, May 10, 2006)

“We almost had it there for a moment. We were this close.” – A friend’s foo-foo husband chagrined that the conversation of our beer-and-poker crowd had reverted to the topics of baseball and other manly sport after taking a short tease toward ballet and the classical arts

Most men, according to the funny papers and American sitcoms, don’t do well faced with the choice of taking the wife to some artsy thingamajig or watching the big match on TV. Fortunately, the invitation to the evening of modern dance came to my e-mail box and not to my wife’s. It only took a moment to note a scheduling conflict with the Chelsea vs. Manchester United match.

I binned the invitation and ended up cursing through the game as John Terry and crew dismantled MU. As football fans know, the worst thing about the game -- besides Chelsea winning -- was the injury to England’s Wayne Rooney ten minutes from time. At least now that Chelsea has won the English Premier League title, we can turn full attention to the World Cup.

Okay, not everyone. My friend’s husband from university days probably still holds the opinion that any conversation not concerning literature, art, drama, or dance is beneath his finely tuned, rarefied mind. That is, he probably still holds that opinion if some other beer-poker-and-peanuts crowd hasn’t torn him limb from limb and left his bones to bleach among the weeds and rusting cars out back. We threatened him with that shortly after he made his persnickety remark, and he was only too happy that we were all set to prove our barbaric nature. It would have been a real pleasure to watch that grin baking in the Oklahoma junkyard sun, but just then someone drew an ace and a potential full house. We had also run out of chit’lins.

Patrick, for that was his name, abhorred the idea that one artist can make a statement with a ball and football boots just as well as another can with brushes and paint or chisel and stone. But it’s true, you know. Most of us who pick up a musical instrument, paintbrush or pen are pikers, just no-name hacks fooling ourselves that we’ve got any talent, any skill. And while it’s maybe easy to admit that we aren’t a Picasso or a Steinbeck, it’s more difficult to accept that some beer-swilling, skirt-chasing, working-class lout from north London has more talent and artistry in one tiny little toe than we’ll ever have ever in our whole bodies, no matter what we do. So, we disparage the athlete’s art as something for the primitive man and feel better about ourselves.

Then again, the argument in its logical extreme ends with the meaningless concept that everyone is an artist and everything is art. After all, if we accept that athletes are artists, too, why not ordinary professionals -- taxi drivers, factory workers, shepherds, and such? Surely among the transport drivers of the world there is one drive-for-hire purist that knows the way to every destination and always gets you there on time. Or somewhere in the industrial wastelands there must be a drudge that never saw an extruder or stamper he couldn’t run faster and better than anyone else. Or somewhere in the world’s pastures one shepherd must have never lost a sheep.

And if we allow that ordinary people can be artists, can’t ordinary things be art? Empty pizza boxes, crumpled napkins, overflowing ashtrays, and half-full beer cans piled on a coffee table; a light bulb clicking on and off in an empty room; a white porcelain urinal. Some bachelor guy stacking pizza boxes and empties to the ceiling of his lonely apartment may be making a statement of sorts, but should we pay to see it? Is art a field of discipline or a way of viewing life? Do we have to pay millions and millions to hang it on our wall, a couple hundred to see it in a stadium, or even a few bucks to see it in a museum gallery? Can’t we all just walk around being art, being artists, watching everyone perform and create and make personal statements?

The first couple of weeks of May, according to an April 30 Financial Times article, Christie’s and Sotheby’s expect to sell close to US$1 billion of Impressionist, Modern, and contemporary art, including one Picasso painting – Dora Maar with Cat – for US$50 million. There’s something wrong with that. There are much better uses for the money, supporting starving writers in Bali, say, or getting another top-notch striker for Liverpool, any striker other than Peter Crouch, really. We could probably spend hours arguing about it, but trust me, Crouch has got to go. Maybe we could wrestle for it. Come on, two out of three falls. Loser gets a noogie.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Almost Nekkid in Indonesia!

(First published in Bali Advertiser, April 26, 2006)

“If we are inwardly strong, behave piously and praise God sincerely, we need no law, police, force or prison to make us capable of enjoying inner union with the Supreme Spirit. Temptations need no chasing, no fussing. They are sure to vanish in futility.” – Cartoonist T. Sutanto speculating in commentary in the March 17, 2006 Jakarta Post on the ‘sermon’ conveyed by a painting by Mustofa Bisri, a prominent Nahdlatul Ulama ulema

Every time Inul Daratista turns up on our television, which happens less frequently each passing week, my wife makes a sulky remark about my “girlfriend.” I confess to a mild obsession with Inul’s hip-gyrating “drilling dance” and strip-tease stage frolics, although not from any infatuation with the dangdut performer herself. What boggles my mind is her and her many imitators’ appearance on even government TV channels in what is often called the world’s largest Muslim country (disregarding a secular government and bureaucracy). Then there are the transvestites that play the clown on almost every Indonesian variety show, sitcom, and drama.

My idea of US television boundaries are probably dated, but it is hard for me to imagine much of it making it past American primetime television censors, considering the outrage and self-flagellation following the Super Bowl flash of Janet Jackson’s nipple two years ago. And considering the standard Indonesian television fare and the overflowing pulchritude pointedly staring at me from the cover of a recent issue of FHM on local newsstands, I can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about over the Indonesian version of Playboy. By all accounts, it is tamer than men’s magazines already on the market and less provocative than most of the cleavage-rich late night television. Not that I could score a copy. The 100,000 published were snapped up by eager buyers or burned by protesters long before I had a chance.

It’s hard to imagine, too, that the Islamic Defenders Front, or FPI, is ever going to be successful in shutting down the local version of the magazine, or that further protests by them or other groups are going to do anything other than provide free publicity for the not-even-near-nudie magazine. Press coverage of the debut issue, which appeared in Indonesia Friday, April 7, alternates between quoting members of FPI on the destructive “moral terrorism” of the magazine and quoting “readers” disappointed that the pictorials didn’t deliver more of the goods.

Why do those who would defend any society against moral turpitude never ken to the fact that the more fuss made over threats to the decent and good, the more interest stimulated in them? Indeed, the Jakarta Post reported April 8 that some vendors were sold out of the inaugural issue by 3 am on the day of its release. “Some buyers had placed reserve orders for the magazine days ahead,” the Jakarta Post said. So much for dissuading people from buying the less-than-soft-core Indonesian version of Hugh Hefner’s lifetime ode to fevered adolescent fantasies.

Hefner realized in the early 1950s that other men and young boys liked to look at naked women as much as he did. And in some countries outside the US, where pictures of naked women are against the law, men and young boys will look at pictures of women wearing fewer clothes than they normally do on the street -- which is what the Indian and Indonesian versions of Playboy and the many beer-and-bikinis lads’ magazines base their readership on. As immature as it all may be, there’s no denying the economic sense of it. Wherever the line of morality is drawn, one baby step beyond always produces the titillation desired or feared -- unfortunately for those wishing to protect the eyes and morals of innocent youth through censorship, bans on revealing clothing, prohibitions on displays of affection, and regular burnings of anything even mildly erotic.

A female friend of mine once traveled to a Middle Eastern country where local women did not venture out without wearing the full-length burka. She wanted one as a souvenir and went to a shop in the bazaar to try on a few. A crowd of men gathered at the front while she, fully clothed, tried on one robe after another, the equivalent of a repeated strip-tease performance in the middle of the market. When the shopkeeper realized what was happening, he hustled her into a backroom and rushed to shut the door. In Victorian England, men fell into rapturous, poetic lust whenever they were fortunate enough to see a bare ankle.

It’s ludicrous and inevitably futile for any one group in Java to demand that their limits set the standard for every culture across the archipelago. Mustofa’s, or Gus Mus’s, sermon in a painting? The gyrating Inul doing her drill dance in the midst of devout Muslims praising God and ignoring her, according to T. Sutanto. There’s gotta be a lesson in there for almost everybody.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Singing Songs and Carrying Signs

(First published in Bali Advertiser, April 12, 2006)

“Thaksin Get Out!” – Protester’s sign at a Bangkok rally

Until the day we left for Bangkok, I didn’t stop to think that I might be taking my family into an unpleasant situation. Only a couple of days before, a large protest march against caretaker Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had stopped traffic on Sukhumvit Road. The day after we arrived, three of the main shopping centers along the same road said they were closing for two days in anticipation of further protests. It’s always fun to be in a country when the international media is warning of crisis and collapse … except when they’ve actually got it right.

The second evening we were there I went out to have a look at an anti-Thaksin rally, leaving the family at the hotel on the slim chance of Year-of-Living-Dangerously violence. I needn’t have worried. Protesters sitting on mats along a couple of hundred meters of the street had indeed closed off Sukhumvit Road again. Political chants and cheers greeted me as I stepped out of the train at Siam Interchange, and it was near impossible to exit from the station. But the biggest threat was dehydration from the heat of the bodies massed together in the tropical night.

The few police I saw were lethargic and disinterested, or maybe just taking a studied pose of non-confrontation. People crowded at the railings of the Skytrain station to get a glimpse of doings below were polite and didn’t shove or elbow. The flow of people up and down the stairways to the station was less pressing and slow than it appeared. I wouldn’t get back up for hours, I thought, but it turned out to be relatively easy. The sweat-soaked Thai cameraman hauling his 30-pound rig up from below had a much more difficult time of it.

Other than remarking that ‘rioting’ and protesting Thais remain polite, I’ll try to avoid jumping to the same mistake of the international commentators that parachute in weekly to different places to bring the ‘inside story.’ I had enough trouble in Bangkok the first two days just finding the best places for good, inexpensive food. I don’t feel confident that a week of reading The Nation and the Bangkok Post makes me an expert on Thai political developments, especially when almost every analyst and commentator has described the situation as confusing.

Martin Petty, writing in the April 4 edition of Thai Day of the international perception of Thailand’s political situation, noted the New York Times had called the April 2 poll the most unusual election in recent Southeast Asian history, Australia’s The Age said it a “bizarre parody of the democratic process,” and London’s Daily Telegraph declared it a political gamble that would backfire and send Thailand into “a constitutional crisis.” In Asia, Petty wrote, the Straits Times declared the election had ended “with a mood of despair and unease.”

I saw none of it. Thailand just never seemed a country on the brink of political collapse, whatever that’s worth from a person who can barely name the main players in the political drama of the past two months. Admittedly, too, I never made it far out of the central shopping areas on this trip. Still, all the breathless rhetoric about the disaster Thailand is headed for has seemed overdone, perhaps borne out by Thaksin’s announcement that he will not accept the premiership for a third term and handing over caretaking duties to a deputy.

That apparently doesn’t clear things up, though. The anti-Thaksin contingent is worried he might be pulling a Nixonesque, you-won’t-have-me-to-kick-around-anymore exit. And it is hard to imagine Thaksin disappearing entirely. He sold his primary business assets to Singapore for US$2 billion in the tax-free deal that sparked the two-month campaign to oust him; anybody with that much money and any political aspirations at all is hard to discount. Also, he will remain the leader of the Thai Rak Thai party, which won most of the votes in the April 2 election.

Even so, with the risk that I’ve got it all wrong and that a day after I finish this column Thailand’s ‘bizarre parody’ of a confusing political democracy will descend into farce, I’ll declare that Thailand will survive this most recent ‘crisis.’ And just maybe, with its ‘no vote’ option, it provides an example for other democracies to follow. I’ve certainly wanted to register my non-votes as an active political decision in a few American elections. Maybe there is some lesson, too, in the retention of a monarch to referee the bickering, stunted personalities that usually go in for politics.

Because, in the end, it may have been the Thai King, Bhumibol Adulyadej, that prompted Thaksin’s withdrawal. Thaksin has said in the past that only the king could force his ouster, and he announced his resignation shortly after a meeting with the revered royal. It’s enough for this American to long for the good old days of King George, instead of just George.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet

(First published in Bali Advertiser, March 29, 2006)

“I’m hunting wabbits.” – Elmer Fudd

It’s almost upon us, the day of silence, and the village near our house has been taking its preparations very seriously. Bamboo cannon have been reverberating nightly. The dog doesn’t like it, we don’t like it, and two days ago, a dinner guest asked what all the shooting was about.

Nyepi quiet would have been a satisfying, mute, “And this for you!” to the teen artillerymen. But we won’t be spending Nyepi in this house or in Bali. This year we will be in Thailand, the first time in four years that I’ve missed Nyepi, and I feel I must defend myself: I am not a Nyepi-hater that runs in fear of quietude to Nusa Dua or Lombok resorts. For me, twenty-four hours of no electricity and lights and the absence of the noise of internal combustion engines isn’t enough.

Neypi should be a minimum of three days. With twenty-four hours, you are just getting used to the novelty and starting to think maybe of trying a few moments of contemplation. Then it’s over, and the motorcycles start puttering by again. Twenty-four hours can be endured. Make it seventy-two hours and people are forced to do things differently. Twenty-four hours can be passed with the covers over the head; seventy-two hours -- without the television and the DVDs and the laptop -- forces people to turn inward.

But even 72 hours really isn’t long enough. By the scientific method of Googling, I’ve found that it takes 21 days (and $50 cash) to form or break a habit. So, if we’re going to get back to a horse-and-buggy sort of world, the first thing to do is get people out of the habit of driving cars and motorcycles, and for that we need a three-week Nyepi. We’ll make the usual exceptions for emergencies and people who need night lights for small children, but otherwise, the party’s over, the lights are out, and the fossil fuel ships have sailed.

I am ignoring the religious and traditional aspects of Nyepi for the moment. I just think darkness at night a divine idea; that days when you hear only the wind, the dogs, and the water are magic; that gathering the whole clan of grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, and nephews on a carpet on a dark front porch is cozy. Also, unnecessary early noise makes me cranky. I want bans on leaf and snow blowers and morning mowers, no chainsaws, no screaming airplanes overhead, no wave-runners, no ATVs, no honking taxis, no tuk-tuks tuk-tuking out clouds of exhaust. In the mornings, all I want to hear and smell, when the wind is just right, is the cow chewing its sweet cud on the other side of the river.

You see, my Nyepi fantasy every year is a growing realm and order of silence spreading out from Bali, adding one more day, one more island, one more time zone each passing year. Could we put up with a Nyepi-like regimen for three weeks? We could -- if forced to it by catastrophe or accident that knocked out power and dried up fuel supplies. We could if we had no choice. People used to live like that all the time. Could we do it voluntarily for three weeks? Not turning on a light switch immediately on entering a room, not hopping on a motorbike to run a couple of hundred meters to the warung, not turning on the television every night at 8 pm? Harder, but not impossible. Many people already do something similar.

Islam’s month of Ramadan is a good example. A month of fasting from sunrise to sunset interrupts a Muslim’s normal routine of the rest of the year. Office lunch appointments are put off, everyone rises early to eat something before the sun comes up, family and friends gather at the end of the day for the fast-breaking meal. And every afternoon, hunger reminds the faithful that the month lies outside the normal run of days. Christmas was a similar period of suspension of routine for Americans and Europeans before it became a quick orgy of greed and gluttony.

Year-end celebrations in pagan times used to be like that, too, with several days taken “off book” to keep inexact calendars lined up with the change of seasons. The days had no official existence; they were just a gap of time from the end of one year to the beginning of the next.

Nyepi, then, is only a good start. It needs to be extended and expanded to become something completely out of the ordinary. Contemplating that is your Nyepi assignment this year. I expect a full report when I return from Bangkok.

Now where’s that wascally wabbit?

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Which Idiot Are You?

(First published in Bali Advertiser, March 15, 2006)

Gere Fears AIDS Epidemic Hitting India – Associated Press headline in February on Richard Gere commenting on the AIDS crisis in India

Why should I care what Richard Gere, Buddhist and aging movie idol, fears in India? He’s pals with the Dalai Lama, yes; he’s been in a movie with Julia Roberts; he’s been both an officer and a gentleman. But as far as I know, he’s not an epidemiologist or any other kind of medical doctor.

Headlines all the time have celebrities saying this and that. Sometimes it’s a comment about a serious issue; sometimes it’s just Barbara Streisand opening the hole below her nose. Or it could be the usual Hollywood suspects – Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Martin Sheen, Mike Farrell and the rest of the M*A*S*H 4077 cast – protesting the death penalty and war. I’m not crazy about state-sanctioned death and war either, but if I want a reasoned viewpoint on capital punishment or mankind’s periodic tendency toward mass mass-murder, I’ll go to a philosopher, academic, or some other intellectual, not to people who play dress-up for a living.

I’m not sure who are the bigger fools: the celebrities who think the world is waiting to hear their every utterance, the society reporters who take down and report everything they say, or the people who listen when the “useful idiots” speak. Or maybe the fool is me, for thinking and writing about people who think it important what Alec Baldwin said in his latest anti-Bush rant, or take seriously what Ted Nugent last said about his love for God, guns, and the NRA.

(For non-Americans, that’s the National Rifle Association, which was headed by Hollywood great, Charlton Heston, from 1998 to 2003. Moses must have gone potty in his old age, not for believing in the American right to own guns, but for becoming poster boy of the gun loonies.)

“Useful idiots” is how Vladimir Lenin is said to have once referred to Western communist sympathizers and political leftists. Later, during the Cold War, anti-communists used the phrase to refer to people supposedly too naïve to understand they were “being cynically used by the Soviet Union … thus unwittingly being a traitor to (their) home country,” according to Wikipedia.

These days, judging from my frequent, obsessive dips into the wacky world of the right wing section of the World Wide Web, a “useful idiot” is anyone one not falling into the pro-Bush, pro-guns, pro-life, pro-the-only-good-Muslim-is-a-dead-Muslim crowd. But in turnabout, the leftists of the WWW say the real “useful idiots” are the sheep manipulated by Robertson, Falwell, Rove, and the authors and talk radio hosts making piles of money riling the American faithful.

The true idiocy is in both sides having their own parade of idiots – the liberals and Democrats with Alec Baldwin and the fur-shunning, tree-hugging Hollywood crowd -- the conservative and Republicans with the other, “born-again” Baldwin, Nugent, and Heston. My favorite such “idiot” is John “He helped us win every war” Wayne, who once chased hippies down the street waving an American flag. Duke and Old Glory sure scattered the flower children, but it was hardly sober discussion of opposing viewpoints on American policy in Vietnam.

My fear is that one day thirty years from now I’ll tune into Meet the Press and Jessica Simpson and Brittany Spears will be on panels debating American foreign policy in the United Arabian Republic and the moderator will be that wise old newsman, Jon Stewart (a funny man, apparently, but The Daily Show is still comedy). Farfetched? Not when nearly half (47 percent) of Americans under 30 said they “at least occasionally” learned news about the 2000 presidential campaign from late night talk shows. Significant percentages said the same thing of comedy shows (37 percent) and MTV (25 percent).

Some one is going to tell me I’m worrying about things that will never happen, that pigs don’t fly, that actors, country and western singers, and professional wrestlers never become governors or presidents. But the line between our reflection on the tube and actual reality is getting less and less clear, and not just in America. Actors keep confusing their heroic roles with real life, and viewers keep trying to inject themselves into the box through “reality TV.”

I’m convinced it’s all going to end with the American Idol format being used to settle elections and people in TV Land phoning in votes for the contestant-candidates that most pander to the crowds. I’ll go for it only if Donald Trump can summon to the boardroom any winners who turn out to be lousy presidents, senators, or congressmen. Now that would be some television worth watching.

(Statistics taken from the Web site of The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.)

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi