Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Cash on the Barrelhead Gets You Anything
(First published in Bali Advertiser, Jan. 27, 2010)
"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand."
-- “The Rich Boy” (1926), F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is nothing wrong with my life that a few hundred thousand euros wouldn’t fix.
I am not particularly venal, and don’t especially believe that money can buy happiness. But the extra cash would go a long way toward relieving immediate anxieties about keeping the wolf from the door, and maybe the wife and I could start up that little organic farming operation cum hotel on our land in the north.
I could walk off the day job, the daydream of every working stiff since the Israelis were stacking up pyramids for the pharaohs. (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are Chinese, Thai and Lithuanian counterparts to that old Johnny Paycheck country classic, “Take This Job and Shove It,” or that a Friday night standard on every Russian jukebox is the Soviet-era “Comrade, I’ll Be Party to This No More.”)
Then, once the most pressing bills are paid off and pipe dreams set in motion, I could start thinking about more reliable, flashier transport, where to put the pool, what countries to hit on our next round-the-world cruise. Therein lies the problem of money. Spending plans tend to increase with the budget, all the more so if costs are hidden and the money comes without any pain.
That is one reason why Indonesia’s systemic corruption is so hard to eradicate: Other people’s cash is just too-easy pickings for any official with a stamp and an inkpad. How can you expect a person to give up the easy path to the good life if everyone else in the office is already discussing which options are de rigueur on the 2010 Kijangs?
Money – earned, inherited or stolen – also has a way of making people feel they deserve or are worthy of more respect, attention and privilege than the next guy over. And this feeling of deserving more is what is targeted in several European countries by a beautiful legal concept that has them charging wealthy drivers more for breaking the speed limit. Such a law had a Swiss court recently fining a Ferrari driver nearly US$300,000 for driving 100 km/h through a town posted with a 50 km/h speed limit, according to an Associated Press article.
In Germany, France, Austria and the Nordic countries, income-based traffic punishments can reach into the millions, with the top fine in Germany potentially US$16.6 million, the article said. Last year in Switzerland, six men from Hong Kong were given fines of up to US$90,000 each for driving through the country at speeds over 200 km/h in rented Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Aston Martins and Audis.
Granted, some experts say that the deterrent effect of the laws is questionable. They say that people normally don’t do a cost-benefit analysis before commit such crimes as speeding. Or that the law could lead to poor people paying “ridiculously” small fines for infringements such as drunk driving.
Still, this is the kind of populist law that a confessed slow-freak, pedestrian and bicyclist could really get behind, and if such a law were enacted in Indonesia, it might end the fantasies I have of building meter-high speed bumps to stop Land Cruisers from driving 60 km/h on the narrow roads through our village.
Alas, the law in Indonesia seems to be predicated on the concept that the rich really are different from you and me, that they really do deserve better treatment, and that those who can afford to pay the least, must suffer the most. Just ask 76-year-old Kliijo Sumarto and the 19-year-olds, Supriyono and Sulastri, all apparently desperate banana thieves so dangerous that their potential threat to society demands that they be locked up for a period of years.
And while there might be some understanding for the youngsters, a poor couple who stole a bunch of bananas hoping they could sell them for 7,000 rupiah and buy some rice, the case for Kliijo looks especially bad. Police in Slemen in Yogyakarta, according to a report in the Jakarta Globe, say the old recalcitrant is a serious repeat offender who stole a chicken four years ago.
Meanwhile, the rich and influential steal whole forests, disregard green space, traffic and environmental laws as they please, and pay off any authorities that have the temerity to challenge them.
I tell you, it is no way to run a country. Thus endeth the sermon.
Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
No City of Angels
(First published in Bali Advertiser, Jan. 13, 2010)
“I'm tired of this dirty old city.
Entirely too much work and never enough play.
And I'm tired of these dirty old sidewalks.
Think I'll walk off my steady job today.”
-- Merle Haggard
Jakarta does no favors for itself. It’s disheveled, mismanaged, clogged with traffic, and full of people so disconnected from any larger community that their own comfort and convenience trump any consideration of the needs of others or the common good. It is a brutal and fetid place.
But like it or not – and some do like it – it is one of the great cities of the world. The population of the city proper -- which can’t be tabulated accurately because of the number of people living on the streets or in illegal slums -- is probably just shy of 10,000,000, putting it somewhere in the middle of the 20 most crowded cities on earth; while the population of its total metropolitan area puts it comfortably in the top 10 largest gatherings of people on earth. As such, it probably has just as much in common with Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Mumbai as it does with its smaller sister cities scattered across Indonesia.
For those drawn to this great clumping of the unwashed hordes, Jakarta and its bright lights and broad, choked streets can mean great triumph or great failure. New hopefuls arrive in steady streams to push down or get pushed down by those that came before. Here, whole villages live underneath bridges and overpasses; camp out in plywood and sheet metal dwellings alongside black rivers; float precariously just centimeters above the ever-rising waters of north Jakarta.
The broad Ciliwung river delta is filled with a heaving mass pushing up, striving and struggling with one another to support the relatively few that can live in the world of chauffeur-driven cars, sparkling malls, clean apartments and an abundance of food and clean water. Here, the daily fight for survival is life is up close and personal, and just as desperate and capricious as in the depths of any tropical jungle. This city is not for the weak; the way here is to get strong or die. Jakarta has no soft, touchy-feely side.
Now for the bad news: Get used to the idea that Jakarta and places like it are the future.
In the past two years, the world’s urban population has finally caught up to and surpassed the number of people living in rural areas. Many developed countries passed that milestone in the 20th century – the U.S., for instance, became more urban than rural numbers-wise before 1920 – and we are increasingly looking at this as the world-wide model of living. Most population studies indicate that the world is on its way to a population of 9 billion by sometime around 2050. It is estimated that by then about two-thirds of that number, that’s 6 billion people for the mathematically challenged, will be living in cities.
In terms of Bali, if its population grows at the proportional average of the rest of the world over the next 40 years, the island will have a population of 4.7 million at the middle of the century, up from a current population of around 3.5 million. That’s another couple of Denpasars and another two Singarajas to fit somewhere on the “last paradise.” And that’s not even trying to account for the shifting (and rising) populations of tourist arrivals and off-book expats hiding out in the hills. Think of Bali with the whole central southern rice plain filled in from the Bukit to Ubud with the same jumbled mixture of commercial and residential operations now in the Kuta-Denpasar-Sanur triangle, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s coming over the next two to three decades.
I suppose now would be the time for me to offer up my solutions to prevent the coming chaos that 9 billion people will bring, or at least to jump up and down screaming that we’ve GOT to DO something to keep it from happening. Sorry, I don’t have anything in the quiver. A population juggernaut is headed our way, that is all, pretty much no matter what we do short of having another really good world war or two. We are going to have to learn how to deal with it individually and as groups, until such a time as a Mayan scourge or some other natural or man-made disaster knocks us back to sustainable numbers … or fewer.
Have a good day.
Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi
“I'm tired of this dirty old city.
Entirely too much work and never enough play.
And I'm tired of these dirty old sidewalks.
Think I'll walk off my steady job today.”
-- Merle Haggard
Jakarta does no favors for itself. It’s disheveled, mismanaged, clogged with traffic, and full of people so disconnected from any larger community that their own comfort and convenience trump any consideration of the needs of others or the common good. It is a brutal and fetid place.
But like it or not – and some do like it – it is one of the great cities of the world. The population of the city proper -- which can’t be tabulated accurately because of the number of people living on the streets or in illegal slums -- is probably just shy of 10,000,000, putting it somewhere in the middle of the 20 most crowded cities on earth; while the population of its total metropolitan area puts it comfortably in the top 10 largest gatherings of people on earth. As such, it probably has just as much in common with Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Mumbai as it does with its smaller sister cities scattered across Indonesia.
For those drawn to this great clumping of the unwashed hordes, Jakarta and its bright lights and broad, choked streets can mean great triumph or great failure. New hopefuls arrive in steady streams to push down or get pushed down by those that came before. Here, whole villages live underneath bridges and overpasses; camp out in plywood and sheet metal dwellings alongside black rivers; float precariously just centimeters above the ever-rising waters of north Jakarta.
The broad Ciliwung river delta is filled with a heaving mass pushing up, striving and struggling with one another to support the relatively few that can live in the world of chauffeur-driven cars, sparkling malls, clean apartments and an abundance of food and clean water. Here, the daily fight for survival is life is up close and personal, and just as desperate and capricious as in the depths of any tropical jungle. This city is not for the weak; the way here is to get strong or die. Jakarta has no soft, touchy-feely side.
Now for the bad news: Get used to the idea that Jakarta and places like it are the future.
In the past two years, the world’s urban population has finally caught up to and surpassed the number of people living in rural areas. Many developed countries passed that milestone in the 20th century – the U.S., for instance, became more urban than rural numbers-wise before 1920 – and we are increasingly looking at this as the world-wide model of living. Most population studies indicate that the world is on its way to a population of 9 billion by sometime around 2050. It is estimated that by then about two-thirds of that number, that’s 6 billion people for the mathematically challenged, will be living in cities.
In terms of Bali, if its population grows at the proportional average of the rest of the world over the next 40 years, the island will have a population of 4.7 million at the middle of the century, up from a current population of around 3.5 million. That’s another couple of Denpasars and another two Singarajas to fit somewhere on the “last paradise.” And that’s not even trying to account for the shifting (and rising) populations of tourist arrivals and off-book expats hiding out in the hills. Think of Bali with the whole central southern rice plain filled in from the Bukit to Ubud with the same jumbled mixture of commercial and residential operations now in the Kuta-Denpasar-Sanur triangle, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s coming over the next two to three decades.
I suppose now would be the time for me to offer up my solutions to prevent the coming chaos that 9 billion people will bring, or at least to jump up and down screaming that we’ve GOT to DO something to keep it from happening. Sorry, I don’t have anything in the quiver. A population juggernaut is headed our way, that is all, pretty much no matter what we do short of having another really good world war or two. We are going to have to learn how to deal with it individually and as groups, until such a time as a Mayan scourge or some other natural or man-made disaster knocks us back to sustainable numbers … or fewer.
Have a good day.
Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi
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