Well duh, I didn't need a quiz to tell me that

I'm not writing my paper right now!




You're the true leader of the Aqua Teens. You are wise and powerful, unlike your teamates, who are always getting into trouble. You keep everyone in line without pushing people around.

Which Aqua Teen Hunger Force character are you??

truth stranger than fiction

In the writing of my monstrous research/analytical paper (can't forget those theories...), I was going to write down an opinion expressed by a man I'd only written down as B.M. Diah, and wanted to find out more on him - who was he?  how was he not a member of the Indonesian political elite? - so I googled his name.  His name came up first on Indonesian wikipedia, but since I wasn't sure if I'd be able to understand formal Indonesian, I went to the page in English.  But it wasn't his page - it was his wife's.  In fact, B.M. Diah doesn't have a page in English wikipedia (although it turns out he was a journalist and published several Indonesian political journals, and became an ambassador, and is general considered a "prominent" non-politician political Indonesian - you know, the kind of person my father was supposed to be, if he wasn't "late, could have been great"). 

Herawati Diah, his wife, is an Indonesian journalist.  She founded The Indonesian Observer, one of the earliest English-language Indonesian magazines, with her husband in 1955.  She has three sons.  She has outlived her husband and published a book, An Endless Journey: Reflections of an Indonesian Journalist.  She also graduated from Barnard College.  Class of 1941.

When I told this to Kim, she said, "Dude.  Maybe it's fate."

I just looked her up further.  Apparently she was "the first Indonesian woman to obtain a degree from an American university" (majoring in sociology, Kim) an act that "aroused the ire and the suspicion of the Dutch East Indies colonial authorities", leading to her imprisonment for three months when she arrived home - released by the Japanese conquistadores - I mean, imperial forces - in 1942.  It ran in the family.  Her mother, who ran Indonesia's only women's magazine and refused to send her daughter to school in the Netherlands, and sister, who studied in Japan, were also dangerous nationalists held on political charges.  She met her husband working at a radio station.  She later met Gandhi.  She was part of a coalition of women insisting that many rapes took place in the May 1998 riots. 

To be fair, she isn't perfect, far from it.  She's a member of the Indonesian elite, and it shows in her support for Suharto - her husband was even information minister of Suharto's administration.  I am not a Suharto supporter, largely because my father was not.  Then again, my father wasn't around to see colonialism, as he was born two years after Indonesia's independence.  He was part of a younger generation than Diah, with its own frustrations - she was clearly influenced by an older nationalism.  That of course is the clincher about Suharto's era.  He was good for Indonesia in a lot of ways.  My Chinese donor couple I met last night at the Torchbearers Reception, upon hearing when I was in Indonesia, made the remark: "Oh, you were there in the good years".  Politically speaking, these years right now are the good years - Indonesia has a president who believes in democracy and human rights, not one who re-elects himself for 32 years.  But economically, yes, I was there in the boom era, because Suharto caused the boom era.  That was when the Chinese, as the donor couple said, professed love for Indonesia.  And when my father's friends, some of them former student protesters themselves who decided to get MBAs and go into business, got rich (my father did not - he stuck with his Ph.D in Political Science and became a poor, suppressed university professor).  Of course, as Vatikiotis argues, economic development serves as a political placebo.  But that doesn't take away from Indonesia turning into an Asian tiger under Suharto. 

My father knew this too.  It didn't change his mind.  He was part of the people that saw economic development as a political placebo, I think.  From what I've gathered from his writings, he felt that economic development was an especially powerful placebo for the middle class, and it kept them from voicing opposition to Suharto, which was, in his opinion, what the counter-Suharto forces needed.  Anwar - a woman, I might add - confirmed this: the middle class gave Suharto free reign to pursue economic development over political democracy after the anti-Communist bloodletting in 1965.  Suharto often said that he was Indonesia's shepherd.  My father would say that yes, Indonesians are apparently dumb goats, in need of a shepherd.

I still think Diah is an interesting figure.  She's now ninety years old.  Yes, ninety, and still "segar" - healthy and fresh.  She had been a tomboy as a child.  Short hair.  Dolls bored her.  Born exactly thirteen years after the death of the most influential Indonesian woman among Indonesians, Raden Ajeng Kartini.  This is an observation about Columbia.  "At Columbia University, it can be seen how varied Americans are, physically speaking.  Minorities are very visible.  American Jews, for example.  During lectures, they are very aggressive and want to be number one.  Many succeed."  Amazing stuff, isn't it, given that she was quoting events of the '30s that could be written today. 

All in all, I seriously wonder why - why oh why - she has never been mentioned by Barnard when they go on rants about the incredible women who have graduated from our school.