Sometimes a good dose of head scratching does not go amiss. Every day I have several “what the….” moments.

I had one yesterday when I came across this story about US soldiers handing out coins implanted with the Lord’s gospel in Fallujah of all places. This being a week or so after another soldier was using the Koran for target practice.

Update: it seems said Marine has had his hand smacked, but for (whichever) god’s sake, half a decade on, don’t they explain these things in some detail before they get there. I guess not.

Then there is the truly bizarre Rachael Ray / Dunkin Donuts story. I’ve always assumed that Michelle Malkin is a very smart woman who has figured out there is money to be made by exploiting the prejudices of simpletons. As Rupert Murdoch knows, it’s a lucrative industry stateside. But even Rupert has bowed to the inevitable it seems, and now wants to meet Obama. After all the vileness that Rupert has foisted on the world in recent years, not least of which was playing his part in the deaths of however many in the Middle East, one would hope that Obama would refuse his handshake and tell him to fuck off. But I’m guessing that political expediency being what it is, he’ll just bite his lip.

And I scratched my head when I watched John McCain last night on one of the network news channels. He looks so very old, very puffy and quite unhealthy. Much worse than he did only two or three months back. The most positive thing I could say about his posture and demeanour is that if I was an American voter, I’d be very nervous about putting this man into the White House. At least Reagan had some style and zest before his first term.

And I scratch my head when I drive around this once beautiful island of Bali, at the billboards and rubbish that swamp every traffic intersection, the gruesome square residential blocks that are rising in Kuta, at the permitted visual pollution everywhere. But I guess, if there is no profit to made personally by some “official” then this is the future.

And that’s before I mention the Dreamland development. You look at that and you can almost breathe the bad karma that it exudes. This island will bite back there and it won’t be pleasant. I’m not naturally a suspicious person, but I’m thinking (actually, not thinking, more feeling) that you invest there at your own risk, something much commented on by the Balinese I know.

As a positive aside, I love the Quiet Village Podcast over at Resident Advisor. The site’s podcasts have been fairly technoid over the years, which may not suit some (although I love them…banging, snarling, noisy techno makes me feel like my youth is still not lost I guess, and then I go all soft around the edges when the same genre gets moody). However, it’s been hell of a source of audio amusement for me over that time, and I like the way the regular podcasts are getting nicely eclectic.

Nothing to scratch ones head about there….

Thank you:

In fact, Flash-based web sites are quite possibly one of the most useful pieces of network technology around. Like heroin or microlights, they ensure that those who think it’s a good idea aren’t around to annoy us for too long.

I think, like most people, when I see a Flash authored website loading, I just close the tab and move on.

About two months ago The Straits Times in Singapore…the governmental mouthpiece…ran what I guess they would consider a fairly safe piece canvassing the various US Presidential likelys (then at least) on China, and it’s emergence as a world superpower.

This, naturally, is an important topic, but especially so in Asia, where China is now easily the dominant power…something Americans at almost every level seem unable to come to terms with, or simply don’t get…the transition has essentially happened, the torch was passed without one party even being aware of it.

So each candidate was asked what their position was on China. Their answers were illuminating.

1. McCain said that he would seek to use America’s economic and military muscle to limit China. He mentioned using aircraft carriers to ‘contain’ China.
Beep. Wrong answer: in this part of the world at least the US is already on the backfoot and the perceived failure of the six hundred billion dollar military to defeat even a rag-tag adversary in the Middle East makes the US military look slightly less scary and a little more like an over-teched, slightly impotent monster. And we’re not even gonna mention who has the growing economic muscle, including a billion and a half strong domestic market cushion.

2. Hillary’s answer was that she would allow China to emerge but within US terms.
Beep again. Wrong answer. Who’s gonna allow who to do what. You don’t make the rules anymore Hillary. See 1) above.

3. Obama’s response was that he’d work with China. He said America had to come to terms with what was already a fact.
Bing: the penny drops.

I know quite a few Americans…some of my good friends over the years have been American (yes and all that sort of thing). I have online conversations with Americans. They are pretty much decent, caring, thinking, smart people.

So, since I guess they are representative of a part of that massive and diverse land, what I truly have never been able to understand is why so many Americans, and in particular the leaders, not only want, but actively to go strive to war. Not just now and then, but since 1945, almost continually. And as a nation it seems to go out of it’s way to always find some person or some country which it can vilify to a level where great swathes of it’s population think they / it are a threat to not only the USA, but to mankind as a whole.

Take Iran. Now, Teheran and its president and the religious leaders may not be the world’s most pleasant regime and I don’t want to live there, although I have little doubt it’s not as gruesomely unpleasant on a day to day basis as we are supposed to believe, but if you can take a step back and rationally look at Iran, you’d need to be seriously deluded to think that they presented a threat to anyone outside their region, or for that matter anyone close. Their two major crimes seem to be, firstly, backing Hezbollah who are, it must be said, enormously popular in the parts of the Lebanon where they hold sway, and in the region as a whole with one or two exceptions; and secondly, and this is the far greater offence, tweaking the nose of the USA in 1979. Repeated claims as to their role in Iraq seem to lack credible evidence.

But no candidate is willing to step back from the platform that Iran is a looming threat to mankind as we know it, despite any evidence to the contrary. For nutty old McCain, stuck in the depths of the Cold War and Vietnam, they are evil and need to be destroyed. I know who I’m more worried about.

Hillary also threatens to ‘obliterate’ them.

Fucking hell…..it’s like The Alamo all over again, with those plucky US Marines, and the heroic USAF B-2As defending the Righteous Empire against the Mexican savages, who are now apparently carrying Korans.

Even Obama, whilst he wants to talk, won’t back off from the war footing stance that America seems to regard as its destiny.

Margaret Talev in McClatchy says:

For McCain, who supports the unpopular war in Iraq and is running in a tough year for Republicans, Obama’s lack of military experience may be his strongest line of attack in the fall.

In other words, he’s not entwined enough in the war machine to keep middle America happy. He may not be “Commander-in-Chief” material!

What in god’s name is wrong with this country???

It wasn’t always this way. After they’d finished dealing to their indigenous peoples, and the folks in the Philippines, the USA had a pretty benign (if you were white) half century. Sure they went to war in 1917 but Germany had taken to sinking their ships and killing their civilians so I guess German miscalculation and provocation played a bit of a role there.

And as the troops went home the USA went back into it’s shell. So much so that in 1940 they really had no real standing military of any size.

And they had to be forced unto WW2. Remember, it was Hitler that declared war on the US.

But in that war, something seemed to snap. I guess, firstly, they made lots and lots of money out of it without suffering in the way that just about every other combatant nation did, thus the victory was both profitable and relatively painless. The victory gave the nation a taste of power which was something they’d not seemed to crave before. And secondly, they seemed to like it. They liked all of it. As a nation they decided they liked wars, it gave them a sense of national identity. They liked the ego boost that the endless flexing of military muscle gave them. They made countless movies about and still do. They liked the fact that having enemies and fighting them gave them, the nation, a chance to flex those muscles. America liked having evil empires to rail against and fight wars, albeit often proxy wars, with.

And the nation settled into the Orwellian state of perpetual war, which is pretty much where it’s been ever since.

The end of the cold war removed one enemy but it didn’t take long to invent a couple more. Serious discussion in Washington asks now if war with China is inevitable.

Inevitable…why for gods sake.

Why do you need to invent these enemies, why?

Well I guess war is one of the few growth industries the USA has left, but it’s a largely self defeating one, especially as the nation borrows to fund the industry and seems to spin into an ever bigger defence / war spending hole as China, Japan and Germany look on with loans at hand.

An increasingly unhappy endgame seems closer than any of the candidates, or their electorate, realise and one needs to worry what sort of lashing out is going to take place when that reality sinks in.

One of my cinematic joys is the work of pioneering Scottish director Bill Forsyth. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched Gregory’s Girl (ok, everybody had a thing for Claire Grogan back then and I wasn’t immune, don’t ask why now) or Comfort and Joy. I smile at the mere thought of Dickie Bird and the Glasgow Ice Cream wars. Sadly Hollywood chewed up Forsyth and this hugely influential director has only made a single film in the past 20 years, apparently broken by the process in California.

My favourite Forsyth film deals with the modern world treading, somewhat harshly, upon a quiet, isolated village in the Scottish Highlands. It’s called Local Hero and it’s a truly wonderful hour and eleven minutes (despite having a soundtrack tie to the odious Mark Knoffler).

Tonight we had a Local Hero moment or two.

We’d decided to go to a charity dinner to support BARC…The Bali Adoption Rehabilitation Centre. There are three or four charity organisations dedicated to the welfare of Bali dogs. The state of many of the dogs on this island is both heartbreaking and disgraceful and there seems little impetus with any governmental agencies here to do the simple thing and pass an animal welfare law or two. It’s not hard really and it’s to Indonesia’s shame that they have not.

The dinner was at a place called Medahan, north east of here, just off the highway to hell..the Sanur to Candidasa roadway, which may or may not compete with the Semerang to Jepara road as the most dangerous road on this planet. Grossly overloaded trucks meander along at 120km, often on the wrong side of the road, pausing only to overtake you, usually into oncoming traffic on a two lane bridge. This morning a truck decided that the best time to overtake me was when I overtaking a bemo..thus turning this two lane death trap into a three lane death trap. Said truck had painted out most of the glass on his windscreen excepting a small star, which gave excellent forward vision.

Fortunately the traffic police are on top of this…stopping tourists and motorbikes, usually when it’s close to lunch or dinner time, as these steaming overloaded behemoths roar past, about to take out a family of eight crowded into a four seat 1997 Suzuki Jimny (whom I should add, are also overtaking on bridges and blind corners).

Anyway, we’d had to go north to a place called Belong, about 20 minutes above Ubud, and decided to head south-east to the dinner / party in as direct a route as possible. I studied the Periplus Bali Road Map and discerned a likely route. Years of experience have taught me that this book cannot be relied on. For example, JL Sunset Rd (yes I know Jalan is the Indonesian word for Road so it’s repeating itself but that’s what it’s called), perhaps the major thoroughfare in Kuta / Legian, does not exist in it…or at least part of it does, but it goes in the wrong direction. Don’t ask.

Thus, at 5pm we, being the nuclear family of three, got in the Jeep in Belong and meandered down the map. All was fine until we reached the Satria turnoff. The map showed a clear route south through to the highway. It was a win-win. We avoided most of the H-To-H traffic, and made it in a reasonably quick time. ETA was 6pm.

We followed the route south and it began to get perilously narrow for our large-ish Cherokee 4 wheel drive (which, travelling roads like these daily…and much worse, we can, I think justify more than the X5 in Neutral Bay or Pajero in Remuera). Of added concern were the number of people, including a fair number who were half naked -it was mandi (washing) hour- in the waterways and creeks who were looking at us with some bemusement.

Nobody said a word though.

We smiled and waved at the kids.

As the jalan narrowed it forked. To the left it turned into a gang (lane) wide enough for a motorcycle, to the right the road continued. The map showed it going straight ahead, which was not an offered solution. Thus we veered right. There was a lady in the creek, dressed but doing the laundry in the now very dark (which I guess is a good way to hide any dirt), with a child. We drove slowly past her, she gave a confused look and our hopeful road turned into a dirt driveway and stopped.

Ever so carefully and slowly we backed up, avoiding the lady and went into a driveway to turn. She smiled at us as her child ran behind our wheels and I stopped quickly. Not a word from the lady, who was now happily ignoring us despite the fact that we’d almost squashed her little one.

Gingerly we edged back towards Satria, past the increasingly bemused looking people with their clothes off and back to the main road where the map indicated that a turn to right may yield better dividends. On the way out we passed two small, full, tourist buses heading inwards, and we guessed they had the same Periplus map.

So east we went along the next marked road and it seemed to make sense. We followed it right then left then right again then left then did a u-turn because we found that the road we were on seemed to be going in the wrong direction, and instead headed off, past a temple with a bunch of people doing gamelan practice, and past many more semi naked people largely ignoring us. And then we wound down, very steeply, into an overgrown river valley and followed the ever narrowing road until it became a goat track. With nowhere else to go the Jeep became a goat and we wound up the very steep track until it widened and we found ourselves in the small village of Anggarkasih, which was next door to……… Medahan (see above!)

So map in hand I discovered the road through to Medahan and headed off down it. The family sitting, conducting a cleansing ceremony, in the middle of the road, like everyone else, looked bemused. I guess waving expat families in Jeep Cherokees don’t make it to their ceremonies that often.

The road narrowed and narrowed and then…uhhh…stopped. And it seemed we might have to back over the ceremony, but fortunately we found a bit where the road got an inch or so wider, and making use of the 4 wheel drive to get the front wheel out of a ditch, did a 43 point turn. The family moved their ceremony again and we found our way back on the main-ish road, where, after the first guy I asked had looked at me and walked away, someone explained the way to the road to Medahan. It was a major road that was NOT on the map.

2 hours after leaving we arrived at the Charity do…just ahead of the two mini-buses we’d passed earlier…it was just starting and a chap with long grey hair in a strange red wizard’s outfit was just about to make his welcoming speech. We wandered to the bar and bought ourselves a beer (at some 7 times the going rate) and Brigid noted that she was perhaps the only woman in the place not wearing animal prints. Perhaps it was a sympathy thing with the dogs…

Three staff spent 15 minutes, with a calculator, trying to work out how much change to give us from Rp102,000 when the bill was Rp72,000. They got it wrong.

We also noted that the crowd was one of those typical of charity dos, with a few moneyed couples but here, with a decidedly feral and eccentric edge. Older Australian eccentrics tend to have an affinity with this island, and there are lots of them, I guess since Byron Bay got too gentrified. We found a quiet table away from everyone and waited. The wizard and the lady from BARC continued to welcome everyone and made a few in-jokes amongst the feedback. Clearly they all knew each other, and we slipped down into our seats a little more, happy that no-one else was sitting with us at our table.

Then three couples wandered in and pointed in our direction. As they arrived they introduced themselves….Dick, Sheena, Bob, Ted, Carol and Alice or something like that. One guy looked like a leprechaun, but with a big red nose, and the women had very, very heavy makeup. They were loud, English and very Costa del Sol sorts, but also very friendly. And they were smart. They were not gonna pay Rp30,000 (plus 21% tax and service) for a beer. They’d bought their own drinks..cans of coke, something cheap with bubbles and a plastic cork, lagers and an eski full of ice.

Carol then reached over, picked up the bowls with the toothpicks and sugar sticks in them, tipped these onto the table and handed these to Bob, Ted and the rest to use as ashtrays.

The wizard then announced the buffet was served. We went out and noted that it looked like it had been sitting there for some hours so we put our heads down and headed off down the highway to hell to Sanur for a pizza.

The point of all this, as long winded as it may seem is the dogs (the one above on the left is ours, Star, a loving loyal, friendly…sometimes…Bali dog). We may have wandered aimlessly for hours like bule-bule gila (crazy white people) and have done a runner from the actual function but at least we gave to the dogs.

And you can too…..please.

BARC

Bali Street Dog Foundation (with Paypal)

Bali Street Dogs