Talking Season

These days too many people are talking at the same time, telling half-baked truths, making empty promises, pretending to be someone they’re not. I suppose it is election season – a time for campaigning, speechifying and pontificating. Not just in Indonesia but also in Europe and recently in Iran.

Here in Indonesia until the beginning of July, the month of the presidential election, a lot of television airtime and every available media space are already inundated with a deluge of words from the competing presidential candidates fighting to win the hearts and mind of the voters. Words that more often than not carry no substance, significance or even any meaningful message other than the desire to be heard above the din as in some sort of shouting match.

Will all these efforts translate into the number of desired votes on Election Day? Somehow personally I doubt it. The US is lucky. They had already got their leader: a new face, new inspiration and new commitment for a changed America.

What do we have? The promise of a continuation of the same old thing, which was unsatisfactory at best and ineffective at worst or a choice of dodgy old faces with as much inspiration, promise and appeal as last-nights left-over dinner. And here they are trying refry that stale ‘nasi goreng’ and pass it off to the consumers as some fancy new-fangled ‘nouvelle cuisine’ under the heading of ‘Vision and
Mission.’

Vision and mission to do what else, pray? After all, those currently competing are divided between candidates who should be far beyond the vision and mission thing but already be well into their mission accomplished chapters, because their term as this country’s leaders has not yet ended, while the other pair has no grounds to even talk about ‘vision and mission’ as we already know what sort of missions they were able to accomplish in the past and hardly any of them worth trumpeting about.

I admire those image-making consultants helping these presidential candidates as they certainly have their work cut out for them. It’s
not easy to create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. However, it is far less effort to throw mud, which is at the end of the day what
these campaigns end up doing, than actually coming up with real answers to real issues. Far easier to promise to be faster and
better, to be anti this and anti that and to be pro this and pro that but ultimately having no clear strategy or understanding of specific
and important issues and how to solve them.

What does it mean for example, ‘ekonomi kerakyatan?’ (people-oriented economy) that is being endlessly (and inanely debated), or the
highfaluting argument about liberalism, neo-liberalism and so on and so forth, as if everybody is cognizant of what they’re actually
talking about. Who cares about terminologies as long as jobs are created, infrastructure built, businesses allowed to thrive and tax
payer’s money used to benefit the taxpayers and not to give politicians a lucrative job with easy pension?

As to the question is, will the voters be taken in by any of these big talks and promises? Perhaps some, driven by disappointment with the current administration or for primordial reasons such as ethnicity, nostalgia and emotional ties, might be swayed by these political
theatrics.

Personally however, I believe most Indonesian voters are pretty rational. After all, we have gone through a decade of radical
political changes and a series of high expectations that were invariably followed by deep disappointments, until it got to the point
where our lives have reached a level of banality and mundane routine that typifies a more or less stable democracy so that we cease to have any high expectation (hence less likelihood of disappointment) of our leaders at all, other than merely to get the simplest and most basic things done without a fuss.

Because of this, many might not even bother to go to the polling booth at all, especially seeing the choice is ultimately between this kettle and that pot – all candidates equally uninspiring (to me at least), all remnants of a past regime we long to put well behind us and all guilty of something whether by deed or by association.

But precisely because of this the coming presidential election causes me no worry. It is at the end of the day, a luxury to be able to be
bored to death by endless political debates, mudslinging, big words, little substance and empty promises; a privilege to be able to be
turned off by the amount of oral and visual pollution in our media and in the streets; a joy to be able to vent our complaints, our loathing
and our gripes to the many communication tools in our hands, such as twittering, face booking, chatting and other forms of media that allow us to publish our voice and our opinion to the world.

After all, other countries such as Iran, is not so lucky.