Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Interviews

    I have not had particularly good luck over the past week with my interviews.  When they happen they are good and useful.  I am just having a particularly hard time making them happen.  We make a plan for 10, I arrive at 10, but the meeting starts (at the earliest) at 10:45.  Or, something that happens more frequently these days, the meeting doesn’t happen at all and I am told to come back on some other day and time.  Given that it can take hours to get to some of these places, this does not inspire confidence.  Indonesians call their tendency to be late to things jam karet (rubber time), but this trip it’s much more than just being late for things.  Yesterday I learned that a press meeting that I had been personally invited to attend was postponed for two days–only when I arrived at the place where it was to take place.  I’m having revenge fantasies in which I am holding meetings in which I have something that they want, and if they do not arrive precisely on time I tell them to come back later.  Unlikely.

    So yesterday while consoling myself with some tasty West Sumatran food, I had an interesting experience.  The radio was playing a kroncong song that sounded strangely familiar.  (Kroncong is an Indonesian musical style that combines Western and Indonesian styles.  It frequently has a sort of reggae or Hawaiian feel to it, with heavy emphasis on the back beat.)  I thought and thought about why the song sounded so familiar, and then it came to me: it was a downbeat version of "Walk the Line."  Instead of Johnny Cash’s rich bass, the melody was played by an Indonesian flute or whistle.  Cool.

  • Aww Geez

    You take one day off of checking the Malaysian news to see what’s going in that country’s fast-moving political scene, and you come back to this.

    "Sodomy claim by aide is  fabrication, says Anwar."

    I don’t know much more about this story than what I see here.  The accuser is an aide who was hired by Anwar in March of this year.  I can tell you that the opposition media are claiming that this is a complete fabrication and that the government has engineered these allegations in order to derail his political fortunes.  I have also learned from the Malay-language media that the word for sodomy in Malay is liwat.  Never know when that might come in handy.

    The wider political context is more interesting.  In 1998 Anwar was accused of sodomizing his driver, his advisor, and his wife’s driver.  He was tried and convicted of this in 2000, although the charge was thrown out in 2004.  The general consensus among Malaysianists is that this charge was false and politically motivated, and meant to be both embarrassing (since now he had to talk about it) and to paint Anwar as immoral, offending the sensibilities the country’s Malay population.  Since then, Anwar has been in jail, was released, and was behind the stunning electoral success of the opposition in March 8 elections of this year.

    I have met Anwar.  I support his struggle for democracy in Malaysia, even if we differ on some smaller points.  I tend not to believe anything that the Malaysian regime says when it comes to the opposition.  I think that it’s no accident that Anwar has been accused of sodomy at the very time when the regime faces its largest threat from the opposition in decades.  That the accuser is a recently-hired aide is probably no accident either.  That said, I have to be careful to tread lightly here–think of how many American politicians lead double lives in the sex department!  I think that the safest position is that Anwar should be considered innocent until proven guilty, and that I am inclined to believe (1) that he is innocent and (2) that he will not get a fair trial if it gets that far.

    UPDATE. I should make clear that even in the unlikely event that Anwar were bisexual, it shouldn’t matter. Although, we all know, it probably would.