THE FILTHY RICH AND THE FURY

'Twas Wednesday morning, stuck in another dismal macet due to the sudden close of the tol road and as I squirmed in my frustration and boredom, I was temporarily relieved from the stagnant misery by a surprising and delightfully aggressive VIEW POINT article in The Jakarta Post entitled 'Yet another big fat Jakarta wedding'. I've long given up my usual traffic jam activity of gazing at the endless lines of cars, for as far as the eye can see, and calculating roughly how much money I'm looking at on the road in the form of expensive, spanking new vehicles while my poor taxi driver tells me that he can't afford his family on his one million rupiah a month take home pay (on a good month that is), after driving for fourteen hours a day. Anyway, back to this article in what is normally a five minute morning toilet read; The Jak Post, by Julia Suryakusuma, it was a real refresher. She started off having a go at posh Jakarta weddings and then preceded to furiously trash a recent keluarga Soeharto wedding, at which, according to the piece, each of the two hundred high profile guests in attendance received a stemmed rose wrapped in money. As the writer pointed out; a rather tasteless welcome gift but perhaps this was a private in joke "fuck you" statement on behalf of the family to all their critics. In a rising tirade of anger that seemed to boil right off the page, she lashed out at the Indonesian public calling them "a bunch of spineless, cowardly, pusillanimous, opportunistic, gutless, lily-livered people" for being indifferent to and even celebrating the mammonesque wedding party. Wow! I don't recall reading such welcome vitriol in The Jak Post for quite some time. I don't really care one way or the other about these people and their expensive parties but I can sympathize with Ms Suryakusuma's sentiment; I mean it's only been eight years since the old man went, the economic crisis continues (for most) and since 1998, that family have committed serious crimes and have been exposed in international bribery scandals, not to mention the alleged ill-gotten $15 billion, that a mere slice of would have gone a long way to help the recent victims of the tsunami, earthquake and current Sidoarjo mess, but where is the public disgrace that most ordinary Indonesians apparently seem to fear so much ? These days the Soehartos are treated like celebrities, with cozy, fawning interviews and glamorous profiles in the pop media. Ms Suryakusuma is clearly very angry about this wedding party that she describes as a "tasteless, vulgar, crass, insensitive, disgraceful display at a time when the country is still reeling from various crises", but if it makes her feel any better, perhaps the money for the bash didn't come from the years of local looting but came from saving the hard earned 16.5 million pound bribe that Tutut (the handsome young groom's Mum) got from Alvis, the tank manufacturer in Coventry, England, several years ago to secure a sale of FV101 Scorpion tanks to the Indonesian government, which were then used to kill people in East Timor and Aceh, but were never paid for and cost the British taxpayer, through the UK government's Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), 93 million quid. Nice article though, and let's hope that The Jak Post can get some more local writers with Julia's keyboard fury to brighten up what is usually a rather dreary daily read. NB: Being a bit of an oaf; I had to double check the meaning of pusillanimous and it's basically a synonym for all the other highly unflattering adjectives used in the same sentence and on a further note; there is a pusillanimous.blogspot.com entitled "All about credit cards" by a blogger in Albany, New York. Might have to Bookmark that one...