The Meaning of the Presidency
Marathon's always hurt
I can still feel Monrovia’s hot. It’s a slow bake that settles on the skin like skeins of insulating glue. If you’re walking on Congo Road in heavy traffic, the combined heat, sweat, soot and billowing dust is not unlike being tarred and feathered.
“My opinion is this,” says Augustine, “we are confronted with a situation where the current leader has not satisfactorily dealt with corruption that has taken place under her watch. She has also not delivered on promises that her party had years to fulfill. Yet, the opposing candidate is not qualified to lead. He is not educated and has not shown sufficient example or pattern of good decision making that would qualify him to be President.”
Augustine is in Liberia and I am in New York. The mean temperature difference between us is forty-three degrees, but the sound of a struggling bush taxi in the background gives me momentary revelry to my years in Liberia literally sweating it up in work, eat and play. Augustine is calling me because it is fifteen times less expensive for him to call across the Atlantic from one of the poorest countries in the world. I learned this the hard way when Augustine visited me in New York last year and racked up $275 in charges on my phone talking to his family and friends in reverse direction. “You might as well have just brought them over by plane,” I said, “it would have cheaper.”
Then Augustine grimaced. By the tone of his voice, Augustine still grimaces as he describes not the race between Clinton and Trump but the dynamic between incumbent Liberian President Ellen Sirleaf and former professional soccer player George Weah, who ran against Sirleaf in 2005 and again in 2011. George Weah was a political outsider. His candidacy nurtured excitement particularly among unemployed and vulnerable youth disenfranchised by the status quo. As such, Weah’s supporters made a lot of people in the System uncomfortable—they were perceived as too loud, always on the precipice of violence, and kind of dumb. I myself once watched from my office while a few thousand Weah’s supporters instigated a small riot. I remember a group trying unsuccessfully to pull down a steel billboard featuring a smiling Sirleaf. Having failed that attempt, they resorted to pelting the advertisement with subsequently ricocheting bricks and rocks causing them to scramble. Another group began burning of tires, stopping traffic along Monrovia’s main road for a very long while. The thick black rising and unrelenting wafts of pungent smoke created a real impression of chaos.
I ask Augustine if Liberians are watching the U.S. Presidential contest and he laughs. “Of course,” he says, “we have CNN too.” Augustine describes a kind of disbelief, even disappointment, that a country like the United States could find itself in such a situation. “It would not be logical for a man to change repeatedly his positions on important issues with too much frequency. In Liberia we call this lying.”
“It’s embarrassing,” I say.
“But the United States admittedly sits at a level of development that we in Liberia can only dream.”
“We do do hamburgers, pizza and basketball really well.”
“Do do?” Augustine asks
“Doo-doo, yes,” I say.
On Whatsapp, my friend Hasan in Jakarta, who spent five years studying at San Francisco State pings me for a discussion of sorts. Hasan is great guy sans his love for the Warriors, which in this political season I would describe using terms hubris and turncoat.
“What’s going on with the U.S.?” Hasan types.
“Don’t ask,” I type back.
I thought Indonesia had problems
Give us your tired, poor and non-colored
Ha! Show’em the money!!
Do the dishes and pick the fruit but don’t complain. We’ll do that.
Turns out that Hasan is worried about his own country's political upheavals. In Jakarta, Indonesia’s bustling capital, the Mayor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, more commonly known as “Ahok”, has made a lot of people mad and may not survive—some hope literally. Ahok is Jakarta's first Christian Mayor and person of Chinese descent to hold the office. If President Jokowi (Joko Widodo) is Indonesia’s Obama, Ahok is Asian Batman. In only two years, with Jokowi's support, Ahok has cleaned up much of Jakarta by battling intra-government corruption, firing those who are inefficient and enforced living wages for blue-color workers to do their jobs. The first sky train for a ten-million-person city in perpetual gridlock is finally being built. Traffic laws are being enforced such as no casual driving along bus-ways or sidewalks. During the rainy season, Jakarta no longer floods because trash has been cleaned from the water-ways. In short Ahok has gotten a lot of people in power mad or worse jealous. And as such, his opposition is using religion and mass media to bring him down.
Last Friday hundreds of thousands of Muslim-Indonesians began marching on Jakarta demanding Ahok resign, be prosecuted and even killed for blasphemizing the Qu’ran. Signs and chants of "We love the police – punish the man who insults the Koran", or "Step down like Suharto”, or “Kill Ahok” were commonplace. In a heavily edited video, disseminated through Line, Twitter, Whatsapp, YouTube and BlackBerry Messenger, Ahok was excerpted as criticizing verse al-Maidah: 51, which reads:
O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you - then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.
A full viewing of the video shows Ahok saying that those who would use al-Maidah: 51 to justify not supporting non-Muslims [like himself] [in the upcoming election] were not interpreting the Quran correctly and using it for political versus spiritual purposes. This truth or the possibility that educated people may disagree over heart-felt beliefs does not appear to matter now. Hassan worries that rising anti-Ahok sentiment may lead to violence against the Chinese minority generally as it did in 1998. Then, over 1,000 Indonesian-Chinese across several provinces were killed by mobs in response to food shortages and mass unemployment. The connection then was as irrational as it is now.
“Kinda worried actually,” writes Hasan, “Islamic front wanta Ahok 2 resign cause he cussed the quran”
Really?
He says people r interpreting the quran wrong. Using that verse to go against him
Ok. This is the part of Indo that I don’t know and is scary to me. How big was the demonstration?
It was HUGE
Three weeks ago en route to Jakarta, I was in Bangkok when Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadel died at 88 years of age. The Thai king was beloved. It was not uncommon for Thai to weep and pray en mass every time King Bhumibol spoke, or when he and his entourage drove by or when the King fell ill which was becoming common these past few years. His death put into immediate effect a period of national mourning, a presence so strong that even in death it could close all bars and discos in the world’s premier party city for at least a month. That day of October 14, a Morrissey concert was cancelled as was the Full Moon festival at Koh Phangan. Sport could not be played.
Don Muang Airport
King Bhumibol was important because he was the unifying figure in a country, which has been under military rule for two years and counting. The King’s formal power in this context comes from being head of the Army. But this King had even stronger informal power. He was so respected and loved, the majority of Thai would do whatever he asked whenever he asked it, which he rarely did, making him even more powerful. So in May 2014, when a coup d'etat toppled the administration of President Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand’s first ever female Prime Minister, the King’s role became as critical as ever. This coincided with an aging and sick King without credible successor. His son Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn is universally regarded as a spoiled billionaire, a playboy who has had three wives and has lived for years on a secluded mountain in Germany without apparent penchant to lead.
I asked Nao my Thai tutor what will happen to Thailand. “We don’t know,” she said, “but I can tell you that we are in trouble. The King was very important.”
“But the King has been sick for so long,” I said.
“But he was alive,” Nao said, “and being alive in this case is important.”
Typically I would have forced myself to hold our conversation in Thai, but my time in Bangkok before Indonesia was short (three days) and my Thai too basic not to drive good Nao mad. A typical lesson with Nao would be to review the five Thai tones on various “words” used in a practical sentence. “Kai” as an example, depending upon the tone used can mean egg, testicle, fever, who and unlock. I would suggest how to say something like, “May I have a scrambled egg, please?” which would come out as, “give me now egg one, fever!” and Nao would start explanation of the correct. Nao is a great teacher and time with her is fun. I don’t think she shares the latter view.
“What do you think will happen in your country,” Nao asks deflecting her own worry, “do you think it is possible that a man like Trump will win?”
“Anything is possible in America. I didn’t think Bush II could win and he did, twice.”
“How does this happen in a place like the United States?”
“I think old thinking and communicating styles are losing to provocative thinking and faster communication networks. Also, many Americans are lazy and like to cover up lack of work ethic with blame.”
“Thai can’t be lazy because we are poor.”
“I have never met a lazy Thai. You can say the white man in America has been all at once coddled and neglected. This has led to the current environment where he attacks that which is different as a way of holding onto his past [power]. Let me repeat that word: Past.”
“It’s always about power isn’t it?”
“Yes, but power held by the right people is good. At least in theory.”
“Yes, I hope that Thailand in our February elections chooses the right people.”
“Us first.”
“Yes, the U.S. first.”
“But very first to your King.”
“Yes, first to the King.”
Harlem voting place, Wadleigh School of the Performing Arts
