Lee Roy LeRoi has worked in Southeast Asia as a reporter, writer and editor for more than 15 years. He has recently moved back to Bali after an absence of three years. He resumed his Bali Skeptic column in the Bali Advertiser in the Dec. 30, 2009 issue.
(First published in the Bali Advertiser, June 30, 2010)
“Dear Lord, please send us another oil boom, and we promise that this time we won’t piss it away.” – Yet another Texas and Oklahoma bumper sticker from the oil bust of the 1980s
The music didn’t stop until after 3 a.m. It never does. You’ve heard it, same as me, with that thumping bass that comes across the rice fields at night from some near or distant hamlet. Maybe it’s a youth bazaar, maybe some enterprising young man has set up a café in a nearby village to give poor Javanese girls a place of employment (out of the kindness of his heart, you understand).
The first night, Friday, I thought maybe a banjar was having an outdoor screening of the World Cup competition and had a band playing between the matches. But Saturday the music kept pounding right through the late game hours, on toward 4 o’clock.
The problem, of course, is that there aren’t any real enforceable zoning laws for noise or much of anything else. If you are on good terms with the local village pecalang constabulary, sometimes they can be of assistance; if the musical disturbance can be identified only as coming from “over there somewhere,” quiet, sleepless rage is the futile option.
Pity the couple that flies in for a quick romantic getaway from Perth or Singapore only to find that their idyllic bungalow is across the river from the desa where that weekend’s dance never stops.
Add this to the list of complaints that make frequent appearances in the letters section of the local English-language press, alongside gripes about roadside trash dumps, hours-long arrival queues, venal taxi drivers, the high price of alcohol and daily traffic jams. It would seem that even after 40 years of an economy committed to tourism that government officials on every level still struggle to manage the competing wants and needs of local villages and businesses and the expectations of the paying clientele.
The full consequences of this mismanagement aren’t just handfuls of upset tourists and malcontent resident expatriates, as pointed out in the mouthful of a booklet, “Rapid Assessment on Climate Change: Potential Threats and Impact on Bali’s Economy and Community, Livelihoods and the Role of the Tourism Industry” – which was reviewed by Toku Buku in the previous edition of Bali Advertiser (Google “Muriel Ydo climate change” for an online version).
Poor management of solid and household wastes, agricultural land and villa development, transportation infrastructure, energy use, and coastal areas and waterways, when not causing possibly unfixable problems on its own, is exacerbating environmental degradation caused by global climate change.
And in the midst of a tourism boom that has arrival numbers at unprecedented levels and growing in double digits, no one is seen on the horizon with the political will or the commercial courage to put on the brakes and stop the happy-days-are-here-again madness.
How else to explain that sick and queasy feeling I have in my stomach? It’s the same feeling I get when watching the home team in the midst of a late-in-the-game rally, but with the knowledge that ultimately my side will fall, victim of out-of-date coaching strategies and the unsteadiness of post-expiry-date veterans.
Think that I and other commentators (for one, Anak Agung Gde Agung, the social affairs minister under former president Abdurrahman Wahid, in the Jakarta Post on June 9) are deluded doomsayers?
Well, back in another life, when I was a financial journalist covering the oil markets for a living, the price of a barrel of crude oil shot up to US$150 in mid-2008, and market analysts said it was a new day, that the market was different this time, that this time we’d never see oil below US$100 a barrel again. Then they explained it with charts, double-speak and surging demand from China -- and before the end of the year oil was right back down at US$40 a barrel.
It’s just natural that busts follow booms, and that’s as true with commodity tourism as it is with oil futures.
So, somebody – officially or unofficially – had better start paying attention to the complaints of unhappy customers and the myriad warning signs being given off by the overtaxing of resources and the environment, because soon, what used to be thought of as an it-can-only-go-up market will become a nowhere-to-go-but-down market, and hotel, bungalow, restaurant and spa owners will be standing around looking at one another and wondering what happened, where did everybody go?
And right about then the full scale of the problems caused by Bali’s unsustainable development will become too obvious to ignore any longer, only there won’t be any money to put toward fixing the mess.
When that time comes, call me. I’ve got the bumper stickers already made.
(First published in Bali Advertiser, June 16, 2010)
“I against my brother, I and my brother against our cousin, I, my brother and our cousin against the neighbors, all of us against the foreigner.” – Bedouin proverb
Some ideas should die at inception – Donald Trump’s comb-over, any Pamela Anderson movie, using large concrete balls to plug up a mud volcano – and it is often difficult to understand why some concepts too cornball to survive serious scrutiny, actually do.
Indonesia’s own most recent one – in a long line of grand beauts – is the still-not-dead idea of requiring foreign men wanting to marry Indonesian women to pay a “security guarantee” of 500 million rupiah ($55,000). A further stipulation in the proposed marriage reform law that contains this clause is that the deposit would apply only if the bride is a Muslim woman, and not if she is Christian, Buddhist or Hindu. If a couple is still together after 10 years, they can claim back the money as joint property; if they divorce or the husband leaves, the money goes to the woman.
This enlightened idea – promoted by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Islamic clerics as protection for women and their children from “foreign” men that might abandon them – is destined to be voted on by parliament by the end of the year, according to a May 31 Agence France-Presse story.
Once one has done laughing at the sheer ludicrousness of the proposal, though, the thought has to come: They won’t actually go through with this insanity, will they?
Here is a paragraph from a Reuters news story after the country’s anti-porn bill was passed in 2008: “The anti-porn bill was pushed by a small group of Islamist parties in predominantly Muslim, but officially secular, Indonesia. Minority groups, especially Christians and Hindus, said the bill was a threat to artistic, religious, and cultural freedom. But despite big protests in Jakarta, Bali and Papua, the bill was eventually passed by parliament.”
That is, there is every possibility this bill will pass into law, and then we’ll have some real fun with all sorts of unintended consequences. The fallback position for most Western man-Muslim woman marriages in Southeast Asia has always been for the man to convert, even if only nominally. Will Indonesian Muslim women now start converting to other religions for the sake of “foreign” love and to save their men the dosh? Will couples resort to “living in sin” or going overseas for marriage, in both instances giving the women and any children from the unions less protection than they would have had otherwise?
Over the next few months running up to any vote, there is going to be a growing realization – as there was with the anti-porn bill – that the bill’s sponsors are going to keep trying to push it through, that they won’t desist, and that no politician or media pundit is going to be able do anything to dissuade them.
And as with the anti-porn bill, the elected members of parliament are going to be too afraid to be seen going against anything supported by the religious authorities, all notions of secularism aside.
Now, let’s not fault the bill’s supporters purely on religious grounds. Every society and religion in the world has always tried to protect its women from the real or perceived depredations of foreign men. Think not only of the Brits and Australians and their attitude toward the American “Yanks” during World War II, but of traditional resistance to most marriages that cross religious, racial or national lines.
Even during the 90s, my brother – an American working for an oil company in Perth, Australia – still ran into the charge that he was “stealing our women” when he was dating his current wife, and likely any Caucasian man anywhere in Asia is familiar with the sentiment in one form or another. It isn’t then a prejudice that is restricted to Muslim clerics holed up in their pesantrens.
The real question here is where do the clerics get the idea that all “foreign” men, almost surely code for Caucasian males, have large wads of cash lying around? Have they never met a starving Jakarta-based English teacher whose only hope after paying the rent and other monthlies is that he’ll have enough left over for a couple of weekend Bintangs? Or how about the freelance writer trying to make ends meet editing corporate communication material and writing cheap advertorials for the country’s glossies?
There is such a naked combination of ignorance and greed revealed in the proposed law, one would think that soon the adults will show up and this particular item would be removed from the bill.
They won’t, and it won’t, so, quick, call your wedding planners and matchmakers before the cost of love soars.
(First published in the Bali Advertiser on June 2, 2010)
“Please don’t tell my folks I work in the oil patch. They still think I’m a piano player in a whorehouse.” – Texas and Oklahoma bumper sticker
The men and companies who help keep this old world running – which it mostly does on coal, diesel, gasoline and jet fuel – aren’t having such a good few weeks. There is BP’s little problem in the Gulf of Mexico, the collision between two tankers on May 25 in Singapore, and then the series of recent mining accidents that remind us that thousands of miners die each year -- because of poor safety practices or just the plain misfortune of working in one of the world’s most dangerous industries.
It is easy to tsk-tsk the greed of the men and companies that go in search of black gold in liquid or chunk form and bring the stuff up from the ground for us to use in fuel tanks and power plants. But that’s forgetting that it is our demand for such products that drives the exploitation of the earth’s energy resources. There would be no need of it if we didn’t insist on the right to monthly budget flights to all points Asia, air-conditioned riding comfort on our way to yoga classes and farmer’s markets, and making day out of night for our reading, viewing and social pleasures after the sun goes down.
Only our frequent warm showers (produced by hot water heaters run on electricity from coal-fired power plants) help us forget that we are stained with the same black hydrocarbon that is now keeping pelicans and other water birds grounded in the marshes and wetlands of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
Granted, and in the interest of full disclosure, the LeRois are an oil ‘bidness people from way back. Uncle Charles worked for 30 years for Amoco – bought by BP in 1998 – retiring as a vice president of offshore exploration long before the present troubles. An engineer brother works out of Australia in service to the oil division of a major commodity and mining company. My own first job out of university was with a small independent operator in the go-go oil fields of Oklahoma in the early 1980s, and other friends and family are scattered around the globe, if not making fortunes from oil, then making their living from it.
And it just isn’t justifiable to try and assign these folk – or even the CEOs and top executives of companies like Shell, BP, Exxon and Total – the sole blame for the results of our addiction to easy and convenient energy. That’s like blaming poor coca farmers in Columbia, Peru and Bolivia for the ravages of cocaine use among the celebrities and East and West Coast party hounds of North America.
No doubt there were many safety and regulatory lapses leading up to the disaster that continues to unfold in the southern waters of the United States, but the answer to getting America’s oil monkey off its back isn’t in the inevitable calls for a moratorium on offshore drilling. As with the production of illegal drugs, that just means the black energy the U.S. needs will be produced elsewhere – as most already is – and imported into the country to feed gas-guzzling SUVs and RVs.
The solution is only going to come when people -- in the U.S. and all around the world -- stop buying and using products either made from oil or produced using energy from oil and coal. But if you’ve been anywhere lately besides the old-hippie hangouts of Ubud, you’ll know that the buying hasn’t even slowed down, and even among the righteously clean and green you’ll find that they often have the latest in cell phone and computer technology – made of petroleum-based materials in oil-intensive processes and creating toxic waste disposal problems of their own because of the heavy metals used in their batteries and electronic components. Too, doesn’t traversing the hippie trail for the younger set consist mainly of hip-hopping around the globe on one long never-ending jet-fuel bender?
The problems and foul-ups such as what we are seeing now in the Gulf of Mexico aren’t going to end until each of us starts examining the way we live and the competition amongst us ceases to be about who can get more, but about who can get by with greater efficiency and less of everything – even if that means such hardship as eating rice, vegetables, chicken and pork instead of insisting that living in or even visiting Bali means we don’t have to give up Australian beef, French wines and cheeses, European beers and American junk food.
I’ll see you at the warung and the wet market, and we can compare the luster of our sheens.
