http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid=20060905.E02&irec=1
Little inspiration offered in state-of-nation speech B. Herry-Priyono, Jakarta It was noontime on Aug. 16 when a journalist from a newspaper called and asked me whether I had paid attention to the state-of-the-nation address delivered earlier in the day by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to the House of Representatives. Mea culpa! I forgot that on the eve of Independence Day, a high-pitched note is always on the air. So I asked the journalist to send me a copy of the speech, which he did by fax. Perusing the text, I could not help wondering what the speech was trying to say. The language was so flat, but that may simply have been a matter of literary style. The speech said, for instance, that "the priority of the government to eradicate corruption has, more or less, yielded results. By speeding up the corruption campaign, there has now arisen a culture of fear in committing corruption". Is that so? Disenchanted by sentences such as these, I dug deeper into the contents in a desperate attempt to find substance. I was under the impression that the speech said too much, which also means saying too little. Everything was there and nothing was there. Were I listening to the speech in that venerable hall, I'm not sure I would remember even one or two points on my way home. Only a few days later did I realize that many people were disappointed with the President's speech, and that disappointment has lingered until today. In fairness, the disappointment is also the fruit of our own inflated expectations. Only two years ago Indonesia was besotted with Yudhoyono, and his spin made us buy into his image as a Young Turk. The problem is, if that image demands veneration, then it must also pay the toll of disenchantment. Thus begins, yet again, an unpleasant story of running Indonesia as a game of image. What Yudhoyono lacks in substance, his spin could make up for in public relations. Image can easily be made up, but soon enough it hits a wall. As was immediately exposed by many observers, for instance, what Yudhoyono claimed as real achievements in poverty reduction turned out to be based on sham proof in the form of outdated statistics. Then his mandarins began to defend the numbers doggedly, using the language of "scientific validity", as if no one else understood the fanciful nature of poverty statistics and economic numbers. For astute observers, the debate simply became an object of laughter, for they knew too well that a flight of fancy is a stratagem to blot out reality. What is really scary is less about the statistics, outdated or updated, than the burning desire to break too quickly with reality. And this is what was so unconcealed in the state-of-the-nation address. Apparently this is what annoyed many people who paid close attention to the speech. When I finished reading the text of the speech, I could not help having an image of a child who, in desperation, says: "Look, things are not that bleak, so please congratulate me!" This is not to belittle the unpleasant fact that it is indeed extremely onerous to be the president of a country in a stalemate. It is precisely for this reason that any burning desire to break too quickly with reality is considered suspect. But there seems to be something deeper than the fuss over statistics. I may be grossly mistaken, but in those days before Independence Day, ordinary people were less in need of fanciful technical achievements than an insightful moment as a nation at this historical juncture. Many have mentioned this point, but the exact content remains difficult to pin down. Some of them have argued that the technicalities of annual reports (such as budget proposals) could be done on a routine basis and not on the eve of Independence Day. The reason is simple yet profound. If Indonesia is to develop into a real nation with social cohesion, the eve of Independence Day should be made into, for lack of a better term, a poetic moment. To clarify this point, let me borrow economic language -- the language of supply and demand -- if only because we seem so obsessed with economic jargon. The demand of the ordinary people on the eve of Independence Day was a sense of being united in a republic, or something which I would call sensus republicus. This demand was so strong, and the ritual for it reflected, if ambiguously, in the bursting of the red-and-white colors modeled after the Indonesia flag. Alas, this strong demand was by no means supplied by the state-of-the-nation speech. This is certainly not to say that the elaborate account of budgeting is unimportant. Not at all! The point, rather, is that such technicalities are not the demand at that moment, and that they could be taken care of on some other routine occasion. Indeed, the flatness of the speech as much as the technical nature of the content was not a supply that fulfilled the demand. If any, the non-supply nature of the speech even intensified the unmet demand. The speech could have been delivered, and the points could have been backed with the most recent and accurate statistics, but it would still not have met the demand. Again, not because the data were inaccurate (which of course is a problem), but because the demand was more "poetic" than "technical". This demand is to feel a sense of being united in this republic. We ignore this issue at the expense of our survival as a nation. How do we know that the speech didn't match the occasion? The answer is plain. Nowhere in the speech was the problem of social cohesion given any central note, in spite of the fact that sectarian tribalism is now shattering the nation into pieces. Or, if implied in the speech, it was expressed in the language of "security", which surely is different from the issue of social cohesion. There is high hope that this "poetic" issue will be taken up next year. For, indeed, a president is there not simply to utter economic statistics, but to lead us as a republic and a nation. Seek ye first the sensus republicus, and other things may be added unto you. The writer is a lecturer in the Graduate Program at Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
