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