Coming to Ubud, Bali, after three months in Jakarta has made me slightly nauseaus. I hardly take my sunglasses off, and not because the light is harsh. The light is like syrup, the air clean and moist, the world a verdant, indecent green. My third day here and I still try not too look too hard at things in case I notice that it’s all just a joke: that there are seams in trees where they’ve been recently erected. That if I touch the plants my hands will come away with paint on them. That the still, crumbling buildings are cardboard cut outs. I leave my sunglasses on because I’m scared of the disappointment I’ll feel if I take them off and find that I’m not in the world, but in an adult, Bali-Disney set.
But I’ll write of the strangeness of Ubud later. Because I have Obama on my mind.
About an hour ago I got out of a session at the wonderful Ubud Writers and Readers Festival with the sort of manic frustrated energy that ideas should give you. Remembering all the reasons why politics is everything: because politics is people.
The session was called Writing in the New World: Obama and Dissent. Hosted by Michael Vatikiotis from the Humanitarian Durant Centre for Dialogue in Geneva, the panelists included Antony Lowenstein — who wrote My Israel Question a while ago in Australia and set off a spate of angry press – eloquent novelist Jamal Mahjoub, and Fatima Bhutto, niece of former Pakistani Premier Benazir Bhutto.
The panel was superbly moderated. I’ve only been to a couple of sessions here but, as with all the writer’s festivals I’ve ever been to, they’ve often suffered from lack of competent moderation.
And if there was anything that could have killed this session it would have been a bad moderator. The enormous, open marble hall where it was held perched on the edge of a ravine was packed, the audience full of maniacally twitching listeners who, as the panel went on, began to mutter and twist in their chairs, bite at nails and wind cheap batiks into knots. The middle aged women behind me started low rants half way through, as if the bottled political frustration of years was rising on their breaths like a stench. Snorting and exhaling rank disappointment and dissent, maybe more with themselves than the world.
The theme that arose from the panel was the need to criticize and watch Obama for faults. That the promise of Obama and the symbolism of his presidency was new, but that the world he was inheriting was old. Bhutto spoke again and again of the wrongs the American administration continues to perpetuate on the world and the danger of letting what she called ‘Obama-mania’ blind us to them. Dissent is not disloyalty, she kept repeating.
I could see that many people disagreed. What about, they were shifting, what about what about. What about the other people we should hold to account. Whose fault is this really? Can’t we enjoy this rhetoric? Can’t we enjoy this moment? Haven’t we won, somehow? Give him time, people kept repeating: give Obama time to realize all the things we need from him.
Their disappointment was endless, and their hope new and fragile, and you could feel the edges of despair moving in against the wall-less room as the panel went along.
For a moment, Obama’s election was a reprieve from the endless battle of politics. It’s been proof, to so many people, myself included, of the possibility of change. A visual reminder of the wonder and plasticity of human society.
What I wonder at is that anyone could ever think that was enough. The disappointment and anger that was already palpable in the high, luridly verdant hills of Ubud today was sad, not because it showed a lack of faith, but because it showed a lack of understanding of what democracy and politics are.
William Hastie, the first African-American judge on a Federal court of appeals, once said that ‘Democracy is not being, it is becoming. It is easily lost, but never finally won.’
Obama’s election isn’t the end, but just another beginning. And I wondered at the woman who stood up and asked a wonderful question but who qualified it with ‘…but I’m only a normal person.’ I wondered who exactly she thought politics was about, and who it was meant to be for.
The question no one answered was asked by a skinny, earnest US college student, who thanked the panel for dealing critically with Obama and fumbled with her microphone. And the question was this: what can we do to rectify the blunders continuous American administrations have made in the world?
Everyone laughed, the whole room, as if she’d asked something stupid, something naive. They took another question straight away, and answered that instead. I felt bad for the sloping back of her head and the way she looked around at everyone else in the room, wondering if anyone was going to bring it up again, beginning to blush and cringe as she realized that the conversation had moved away.
Because in the end, asking what we should do, what we can do is the best, the most responsible, the most fundamental of all political questions.
source:http://rubyjoymurray.wordpress.com
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I'm so proud of FB that she was able to voice her own independent opinion and not be pressurized into swaying the way of popular public opinion. From the write up you can understand that, FB seems to have had her task cut out in a seemingly pro-Obama room! Go FB!!
ReplyDeleteI second ur comment K. That's y people look up to her. Atleast she stands by her viewpoint.
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