Ah well, another week, and the cartoon saga drags on apace. I'm actually utterly sick of reading about the great cartoon wars; it has all got just a bit boring by now. However, as a final, humorous postscript to the story, I read last week that Danish pastries, popular in Iran apparently, have had their name changed to, "Roses of the Prophet Mohammed", by irate locals.
This would bring the Islamic world into line with the U.S. Congress who famously renamed French Fries, "Freedom Fries" after the French refused to capitulate to Dubya and join him on his Iraqi sojourn. Whatever next? Spanish Omelettes renamed Liberation Omelettes by ETA? Irish Stew turned into Republican Stew by the Real IRA? Leave the food out of this, I say and can we move on please, world?
In other news, last week's The Jakarta Post featured a photo of some prospective, civil service job applicants in Aceh. This is not in itself strange. What was strange, however, was the fact that there were 120,000 of them and they had to be accommodated in a soccer stadium. Now Aceh may be a special case; reconstruction and all that, but is the situation so different elsewhere in the archipelago?
Just popping around the corner to my local bakery last week for some Freedom Fancies and a few Roses of the Prophet, I counted no less than 13 girls behind the counter, stepping on each other's toes and generally confirming that old adage about too many bakers spoiling the bread.
The demographic pressures upon Indonesia mean that jobs have to be created out of thin air, even if they may be superfluous to requirements or not even real jobs at all. European countries get panicky if the unemployment rate reaches the dreaded one in ten level, i.e. 10 percent of the workforce.
Indonesia's official unemployment rate hovers at around 10 percent but anyone who has lived in this country for any length of time will scarcely find this a credible figure. So many people seem to turn their hand at any form of informal occupation they can find in order to sustain a hand-to-mouth existence.
My favorite job-non-job would have to be the parkir fellows on the street whose smart uniforms, loud whistles and smiley demeanors help distract from the utter uselessness of their occupation. God bless every one of them. Without these guys' ceaseless kiri (left), kanan (right) and terus (go ahead) I would have no doubt ridden my Nissan Grandroad into a brick wall on numerous occasions. If there is one thing us motorists need, it's having brick walls pointed out to us.
The civil service, of course, soaks up a lot of the unemployed workforce, shoe horns them into ill fitting, green, hessian uniforms and then largely forgets about them. Then there is the daily exodus of kaki lima (food carts) around the city's streets. The warung (street eateries) are perhaps the ultimate form of self-employment in Indonesia and there is some great food to be had out there (If you are brave enough to eat it).
Unfortunately, my local sate (kebab on a stick) seller has recently decided to go nuclear and has replaced the gentle tok tok sound with a car horn attached to his trolley. I'm on the verge of storming out there telling him exactly where he can stick his sate ayam.
Then there are the other, non-food vendors who utilize every square inch of street space in an attempt to turn an honest profit, only to be hounded by thugs and hoodlums for their pains. Traditional market stalls spill out onto the road impeding the traffic and even footbridges are jammed with DVD, bandana and screwdriver salesman (always with the screwdrivers, God knows why).
The pembantu (maids) and satpam (security guards) are also a symptom of a large population struggling amid an undernourished labor market. I often point out to middle-class Indonesians that people in the West often don't have an underclass to utilize like there is here.
First-Worlders we may be, but we actually have to do our own cooking and cleaning as well as hold down a job. Just looking out the window now, I do in fact feel a bit sorry for the satpam outside the house across the road from me. Sitting in a chair for more than 12 hours each day doing precisely nothing would test the patience of the Dalai Lama.
In a sense, it is not surprising that reactionary Islamic groups find it easy to recruit from among the huddled masses. Most young, idealistic school-leavers in the capital have little to look forward to except a life of boiling meatballs and squalor with only the occasional visits by public order officials in order to smash up their wooden shacks to break the monotony. They say Jakarta is the city of "a thousand kampongs" although you could perhaps replace the word kampong with ghetto and get nearer to the truth.
Joining the FPI, (Local equivalent of the KKK, except with an Islamic twist) or whatever, gives these people a sense of power that they've never had before; a sense that they too are important, even if their methods and aims are questionable.
Also, of course, the ascetic, fundamentalist ideals of such groups can help to sublimate their members' sense of social jealousy and financial inferiority -- "If I can't afford to go to a disco and have fun, then no one can," would sum up this unspoken goal, I guess.
However, these groups would perhaps do better to rethink their moral objections to condom machines. Indonesia's unemployment problems are partly a problem of overpopulation. Capitalism is predicated upon the infinite expandability of the consumption/production cycle but
I reckon that Java, the most densely populated island in the world, will be one of the first places on the planet to run into the environmental and demographic buffers that are rapidly coming into view to derail the whole free-market, capitalist project.
Perhaps the FPI could consider a compromise by only allowing the sensible, Durex Extra Safe condoms to be vended for contraception purposes and forbidding the more hedonistic, ribbed varieties, which are designed for a bit of er.. extra stimulation. Ah...ahem... where was I again?
Oh yes, the unemployed. Hopefully things will improve here. On the plus side, Indonesians do show great restraint in their unemployment by not rioting every week.
Unemployment, in Europe at least, is a great fomenter of social unrest, despite the Social Security safety nets that exist there. People here, though, accept their fate with admirable calm and stoicism, especially when you consider that the country's 220 million plus citizens still have to pay off the debts run up by about 100 devious swine during the 1998 financial crisis.
On the other hand, perhaps we could do with a little more class warfare in this country of plutocrats and oligarchs. Cast off the opiates of religion and nationalism. Here's hoping the National Union of Pembantu (Maids) is soon founded and rise to the top by holding the rich's socks to ransom. Let us pray, comrades.
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