Stories from the Sunflower: Lucy (11)

"At the end of semester assessment, a Philosophy Professor gave one-question exam. In the classroom, he lifted his chair, put it on his desk, and wrote on the white board, 'Using everything we have learned this semester, prove that this chair does not exist.'

The students began energetically writing their answers at length enough. However, one member of the class finished in less than a minute. He turned his paper in and left the room.

When the grades were posted, the rest of the class wondered how he or she could have gotten an A+ when he had barely written anything at all.

It turned out that his answer consisted of two words, 'What chair?'"

"The famous American statesman Henry Kissinger noted that peace and war are the core business of world politics," sunflower went on while looking at a hundred thousand rupiah red note. "Even if the international agenda has been broadened by environmental issues and matters as trivial as geogebra 'the curve of bananas', it is still diplomacy that bears an enormous responsibility when situations of great peril arise. This explains why diplomacy has remained such a weighty business, mystical almost, dignified by protocol and shrouded in secrecy. It also explains why young people remain attracted to it, says Jonathan Holslag.

World politics is again poised precariously at a tipping point, added Holslag. At one end of the balance sits a large crowd of cosmopolitans, the airborne elite that hops from one city to another and considers the success of diplomacy to be measured by the number of dialogues established or the flocks of cameramen present at international conferences. It insists that the bloody history of great power politics has ended and that major wars have become much less likely. Competition, such reasoning continues, is much less likely to spark major wars because of economic interdependence. This opinion was particularly dominant in politics after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991: in Europe, which has aspired to lead by example rather than by force; in China, which has designed the doctrine of peaceful rise; and in the United States of America, where conservatives and progressives alike have championed a foreign policy premised on liberal values.

The number of armed conflicts is also growing and other international disputes have become tenser. It is in this confusing world that a new generation has to chart its way and develop the wisdom to make the important decisions that face it. Therefore, the leaders of tomorrow should be guided by good understanding of the people’s wellbeing, of economics, of ethics – and of history. As the ancient Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero put it: ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.’

If theory and ideology give you a vantage point on the world much like that gained from a helicopter ride, history brings you to the same point only after a long and arduous mountain expedition. A journey through history strengthens the mind in the same way that an expedition in nature hardens body and soul. It requires perseverance and concentration to interpret the many events along the way. It develops the perceptiveness and awareness that are needed to detect and overcome hurdles. And it ultimately leads to great heights, from where one can look back, draw conclusions, and search for the best possible route towards the horizon ahead.

There is no shortcut for this voyage. However much we trust in the rigour of theory and the clarity of ideology, if we do not accept the challenge of coming to grips with history, it is like claiming to be religious without having read any sacred texts. Compared to ideology, history can be a moderating force. It reveals not only how much progress the world has made in improving living conditions, but also how hard-fought such progress–and its preservation–has been. From this perspective, world history can be viewed as an upward curve; but it has experienced dramatic setbacks along the way, which need to be understood in order to help prevent–or at least ameliorate–new crises in the future.

Talking about history, who do you think the most beautiful woman in course of world history? Is it Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator? It seems likely that Cleopatra’s physical appearance was not more or less attractive than the next woman. Legend ascribed much of her success to her beauty and sexuality, but the ancient sources emphasize her intelligence and charm rather than her physical beauty, which they claim was average, says Stanley M. Burstein. She was reputed to understand eight languages and to be the first of her Ptolemaic dynasty to speak Egyptian, the language of her subjects. She was also supposed to have 12 written books on a variety of subjects including weights and measures, cosmetics, and even magic. This suggests that, like her ancestors, Cleopatra received a good education. Rather than physical appearance, the beauty of character, this radiating 'inner beauty' was the most renowned beauty in human history, which could be a valuable lesson for our modern fixation.

Perhaps, Helen of Troy, also known as beautiful Helen, Helen of Argos, or Helen of Sparta was said to have been the most beautiful woman in the world. Historian Bettany Hughes, in her search for the identity behind this mythic figure, uses Homer’s account of Helen’s life to frame her own investigation. Helen, says Hughes, has been known for millennia as a symbol of beauty, and also as a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield. Images of Helen start appearing in the 7th century BC. Her beauty inspired artists of all times to represent her, frequently as the personification of ideal human beauty.

Following her double marriage–first to the Greek king Menelaus and then to the Trojan prince Paris– Helen came to be held responsible for an enduring enmity between East and West. For nearly three thousand years, she has been upheld as an exquisite agent of extermination. As soon as men in the West began to write, they made Helen their subject. Hesiod, one of the earliest named authors in history, was the first to chronicle her ‘wide renown stretching over all the earth’; the poet Sappho described ‘her beauty surpassing all mankind’. The epithets endured; it is how Helen is remembered today.

Helen was married to Menelaus, King of Sparta, yet Aphrodite promised her to Paris of Troy. Paris supposedly seduced her and took her back to Troy, although some say he kidnapped her. As a result of Paris took Helen back to Troy, many Greek men took their own ships and formed an army to fight against the Trojans, alongside Menelaus, in order to return Helen to her husband. It is not known how the goddess died. Three ideas surface again and again, says Hughes. The first is that she, trailing a past that drips with gore, ends up not tormented in the underworld but as one of the blessed, in Elysium. The second is that Helen gets some kind of retribution for all the suffering she has caused, before her final journey to meet her makers. And the third finds her attaining sparkling immortality–no one wants to lose Helen, no one wants her to die.

Christopher Marlowe,in his play 'The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus'. Marlowe is talking about Helen of Troy, 'Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships. And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?'

Today, we might use this quote to say that a woman is stunningly beautiful. This saying can also be used in other contexts, for example, to say that somebody started a trend and became 'the face of a thousand (something).'

We would be living in an intellectual utopia that provided material comfort to all, a solution to climate change and a convenient alternative to dental floss, Bernard Keane and Helen Razer write. Instead, we exist in an era of 'the face of a thousands blunders'. In chess, a blunder happens when a player makes a move that negatively affects his position, it causes a player to be checkmated. In politics, Barack Obama writes, 'My staff’s biggest fear was that I’d make a 'gaffe,' the expression used by the press to describe any maladroit phrase by the candidate that reveals ignorance, carelessness, fuzzy thinking, insensitivity, malice, boorishness, falsehood, or hypocrisy—or is simply deemed to veer sufficiently far from conventional wisdom to make said candidate vulnerable to attack. By this definition, most humans will commit five to ten gaffes a day, each of us counting on the forbearance and goodwill of our family, co-workers, and friends to fill in the blanks, catch our drift, and generally assume the best rather than the worst in us.

As a result, my initial instincts were to dismiss some of my team’s warnings. [...] It didn’t take long, though, to appreciate that the minute you announced your candidacy for president, the normal rules of speech no longer applied; that microphones were everywhere, and every word coming out of your mouth was recorded, amplified, scrutinized, and dissected. [...] By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.'

Back to the topic of beautiful women, for Indonesians, perhaps, Rara Mendut—apart from Rara Jonggrang and Siti Nurbaya—is one of the many beautiful women in this maritime land. This girl, who was a loot of fight between Ki Tumenggung Wiraguna and Adipati Pragula, refused to marry Ki Tumenggung for the shake of Pranacitra, her lover, son of Nyai Simobarong, a wealthy merchant. Long before, she had also rejected Adipati Pragula's proposal.

Raised in a fishermen village on the north coast of Java, a village called Teluk Cikal, she grew up to be an agile girl who never hesitated to speak her mind. Ki Tumenggung was furious, Rara Mendut was forced to pay taxes that had not being paid by Adipati Pragulo. Ki Tumenggung's threat was greeted by Roro Mendut and she tried to sell cigarettes. Her merchandises were so popular, some people even willing to pay cigarettes left over from Rara Mendut.

Pranacitra was captured and killed by Ki Tumengggung using Kyai Jikjo, a nine-shaped keris. This keris was also used to kill Duke Pragulo. Seeing her lover killed, Rara Mendut immediately jumped towards Kyai Jikjo which was still covered in blood. The keris had just been removed from Pranacitra's chest and was held by Ki Tumenggung, and he did not realized that Rara Mendut hit the tip of his keris. She died near Pranacitra's body, for her, it was better to die than to live as a concubine and betrayed her love.

Indonesia itself, a country with a thousand islands, can be likened to a beautiful girl. Even without the 'mining product' make-up, she still looks attractive. This innocent girl will be fought over because of her strategic location. However, similar with Ni Rara Mendut, she is not in good health, especially when we are talking about her recent politics situation.

Over the last decade or so, analysts and policy makers have recognized that across large swaths of the world, clientelism is both more common and more entrenched than was once thought, Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot write. Not long ago, scholars expected that modernization, economic growth, and democratization would gradually force politicians to shed clientelistic practices and focus on the propagation of policy proposals as the principal means of wooing voters.

The term 'patronage democracy' has gained currency to describe democracies where electoral mobilization primarily takes a clientelistic form, with the word 'patronage,' referring to the goods and favors that politicians provide in exchange for electoral support. According to Aspinall and Berenschot, Indonesia’s democratized political system is saturated with clientelism. At every level, formal political institutions are shadowed by informal, personalized networks through which material benefits and favors flow. Politicians win power, often, by distributing small-scale projects, cash, or other goods to voters or community groups; they gain the funds they need to campaign by trading contracts, licenses, and other favors with businesspeople; and they engage in constant battles with each other and with bureaucrats in order to wrest control over state resources and turn them to their personal political advantage.

Patronage is 'a divisible benefit that politicians distribute to individual voters, campaign workers, or contributors in exchange for political support'. Patronage thus includes cash, goods, services and other economic benefits (such as jobs or contracts) that politicians distribute to supporters or potential supporters. Such gifts can be distributed to individuals (an envelope containing cash, for example) or to groups.

Patronage refers to the material or other benefits that might be distributed by a politician to a voter or supporter, whilst clientelism, refers to the nature of the relationship between them. Clientelism is a 'personalistic relationship of power' within which a material benefit (patronage) is exchanged for political support.

Patronage might also be derived from programmatic goods, in a 'pork barrel projects'—a metaphor for the appropriation of government spending for localized projects secured solely or primarily to direct spending—which are benefits that a person receives by belonging to a broad social category targeted by a general government programme—for example, 'Healthcare Cards', offering free treatment, or ' Direct Cash Assistance', to poor households.

According to Aspinall dan Berenschot, Indonesia’s democratized political system is saturated with patronage and clientelism. The so-called 'oligarchy literature', in which Richard Robison and Vedi Hadiz, as well as Jeffrey Winters, argue that extremely wealthy actors dominate Indonesia’s democracy, also emphasises the role of patronage as a political glue, even if these scholars devote relatively little attention to detailing the mechanisms through which such rule is exercised. At every level, formal political institutions are shadowed by informal, personalized networks through which material benefits and favors flow. Politicians win power, often, by distributing small-scale projects, cash, or other goods to voters or community groups; they gain the funds they need to campaign by trading contracts, licenses, and other favors with businesspeople; and they engage in constant battles with each other and with bureaucrats in order to wrest control over state resources and turn them to their personal political advantage. Of course, in Indonesia, as in other countries, this is not how politicians present their election victories. Politicians and their supporters generally prefer to claim they win because voters prefer their persona or program over those of their competitors, rather than because they outbid them. And, of course, sometimes they are right. Candidate quality and programmatic offerings do count a great deal in at least some Indonesian elections, most obviously in presidential polls.

For many commentators and participants, the legislative elections of 2014 and 2019 were the 'money politics' election. The term 'money politics' has been widely used to describe such practices since Indonesia’s new democratic era began in the late 1990s. In the early years of the democratic transition, people often described bribery within legislative bodies—for example, in elections to choose governors, mayors or district heads (a procedure that was replaced by direct popular elections in 2005)—as a form of money politics. Others have used the term when discussing vote buying within party congresses, or political corruption more broadly, such as when legislators skim money from government projects or receive kickbacks from businesspeople. However, usage of the term has tended to narrow. When people talk about money politics now, more often than not they are referring to the practice of distributing cash (and sometimes goods) to voters during general elections.

A striking feature of Indonesia’s democracy is that its winners—the elites who derive power, prestige, and wealth from engaging in politics—harbor considerable misgivings about how it is practiced, Aspinall and Berenschot concluded. During their interviews throughout Indonesia, politicians regularly harped on the expense, uncertainty, moral failings, and destructive effects of the 'money politics' they engage in when they run for office. Politicians had 'to play two games'—they had to be 'idealistic,' by which it meant sticking to rules and procedures, but also 'tolerant,' by which it meant breaking them in order to gain illicit funds. Once they were elected, their main concern was to 'balik modal'—recoup the capital they had expended on campaign expenses, and so pay back their creditors and accumulate enough money for the next election.

As the end of our many episodes of conversation, allow me to ask: If money talks, what does it say?

Money is multi-lingual. Money can speak the languages of pragmatism or ideology, and its fluency varies from country to country. A democracy argues about what is the proper use of politics, and what is its abuse, or its corruption. Corruption is the abuse of the political system. Thus, corruption is a matter of political values, and contested values at that, says Iain Mcmenamin. This is very different to a legal approach to corruption that seeks to adjudicate on which behaviours are, or are not corrupt, but assumes that the definition of corruption is self-evident and politically uncontested. And Allah knows best."

Even though there are still many stories can be presented with martabak dishes or in an abstract form, it is time to say goodbye, sunflower waves her leaves, while singing low,

If a picture paints a thousand words

then why can't I paint you?

The words will never show the you I've come to know

If a face could launch a thousand ships

then where am I to go? *)

Citations & References:
- Jonathan Holslag, A Political History of the World: Three Thousand Years of War and Peace, 2018, Pelican
- Stanley M. Burstein, The Reign of Cleopatra, 2004, Greenwood Press
- Bernard Keane & Helen Razer, A Short History of Stupid, 2014, Allen & Unwin
- Bettany Hughes, Helen of Troy: The Story Behind the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, 2009, Vintage
- David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, 2015, Melville House
- Barack Obama, A Promised Land, 2020, Crown
- Edward Aspinall & Mada Sukmajati (Ed.), Electoral Dynamics in Indonesia: Money Politics, Patronage and Clientelism at the Grassroots, 2016, NUS Press
- Edward Aspinall & Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia, 2019, Cornell University Press
- Ajip Rosidi, Roro Mendut: Sebuah Cerita Klasik Jawa, 1985, Gunung Agung
- Iain Mcmenamin, If Money Talks What Does it Say? Corruption and Business Financing of Political Parties, 2013, Oxford University Press
*) "If" written by David Gates
[Session 1]
[Session 10]

Bahasa