We Are What We Read

Losing access to my notes seemed, at first to be disastrous. It coincided with my annual ailment*, one that afflicts me and loads of other folk at the changing of the seasons, from dry to wet. My thoughts weren't flowing as per usual, and without access to pending posts, all stored, foolishly, on my desktop, I was stymied.

I wanted to bring you my carefully researched and linked article entitled Barack v Bakrie, the stories of one man who inspires awe because of his publically perceived integrity and of another who incites anger because of his publically perceived lack of it.

Then I was going to write about how, given that Indonesia has been in the grip of a major financial meltdown for the past ten years, it could benefit from the now level playing field, not least because the political parties are going to suffer a major shortfall in income and will have to learn from Barack and appeal directly to 'the people'. And that would be true reformasi.

And now that industries elsewhere don't need quite so much of Indonesia's natural resources, the time is ripe to buy them back and harvest them less rapaciously. The government should start with PT Bumi Resources, but put in professional, salaried, management beholden to taxpayers, rather than gambling investment funds with no stake in the well-being of Indonesia, its resources and environment.

I could have told you all about these issues, about I how I rank Obama's election up there with Kennedy's, about how it woiuld be nice to have had him continue to live in Indonesia in order to truly put in place Unity In Diversity, but I've had to leave that to Indonesia Anonymus.

I could have linked to stories of South-East Asian bloggers being jailed for twenty years or being released from jail, even though he's still being tried in a separate court on sedition charges for linking Mr Najib, who is going to be the next prime minister next March, to the gruesome murder of a Mongolian model. Altantuya Shaariibuu, the model was shot in the head twice and her body blown up with explosives in a jungle outside the Malaysian capital in October 2006.

I'd have then expressed the hope that the 1,000 Indonesians blogging for society at Pesta Blogger in a week or so agree to support their fellows who don't have similar opportunities to gather and win Nokia phones.

I could have blogged about many such things, but as I haven't been able to, you may like to know that I finished reading The Great Divide by Studs Terkel, his oral history written in the Reagan years about the rich getting richer and the poor getting screwed, on the day Studs died.

He once said,"My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat.'"

What a fine man.
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*It turns out that I've got chicken pox (cacar air)
 

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¶ 5:30 am