Bad Demo-Craziness

by Oliver Green

2000-02-12 20:38:03

Pigdog in Cambodia

The tumultuous events in Indonesia have left Megawati Soekarnoputri in the vice-president's seat. Nationalists cheer but sensible people shudder: is she from the same Soekarno family that includes presidents, porn stars, dangerous drunks, phallus-obsessed megalomaniacs and gay dancers? She sure is! So, discarding journalistic integrity, let's take a look at her family to gauge just how dangerously insane she really is.

Her father was the independence war hero who became Indonesia's first president in 1949. He sailed along for the first decade of power but gradually grew more and more insane, desperate to build phallic emblems while his people starved. After throwing out the World Bank and all Western aid, he erected the Monumen Nasional (Monas for short) in central Jakarta -- a 137 metre high phallus tipped with 35kg of pure gold, beaten into the shape of a flame to symbolise freedom. Perhaps related to this, he had hundreds of torrid affairs and five wives before he was woken early in the morning of 1st October 1965 by a junior officer with a rifle and exiled.

His favourite and most controversial wife, Dewi Soekarno, is Japanese, a trained geisha and Megawati's stepmother. She nearly had her Indonesian citizenship revoked when she posed nude for a book of saucy photographs, but thanks to all the "presents" she gave to the military dictators who overthrew her husband she still carries a red passport. "It's art," she said of the book, but a Yahoo search for "Dewi Soekarno" turned up raunchy porn. Her infamy reached new heights at a party in Aspen with the glitterati: Dewi Soekarno got called a whore by the granddaughter of a long-dead Filipino president in front of Elle MacPherson and Ivana Trump and retaliated with a champagne glass, leaving the former Filipino beauty with 37 stitches in her face. "She just went mad," judges were told. "Sorry," said Dewi.

Megawati's brother Guruh is an arty-farty gay dancer who keeps calling elaborate press conferences to articulate his abdication from politics.

The eldest daughter, Rachmawati, only breaks her frosty silence to accuse Megawati of perfidy since Mega broke an agreement to stay out of politics that had been signed by all the Soekarno children.

Megawati herself is just silly. Before the nostalgic popularity of her father elevated her into power politics, she would rarely wake up before afternoon and when she did it would only be to slouch off to the beauty parlour. She's been doing this since she scraped through high school. No university would have her.

In the silly name stakes, Megawati scores high but not enough to dislodge the reigning champion, the head of the Catholic Church in the Phillipines, cardinal Sin, but she is at the top of the Uselessness League; since being elected, Megawati has done very little of any use at all. In January she went to the Spice Islands, where Muslims and Christians are gearing up for Asia's next full-scale holy war, but she hasn't mentioned it once. Sensible Indonesians are aghast at the apathy and ignorance which surrounds Megawati Soekarnoputri like a swarm of flies, and a quick glance at the gene pool Mega sprang from shows enough stupidity and insanity to make the Marcos family look like the Flanders. But it is unlucky that all the worst traits of the Soekarno family have surfaced in the only one to get legally elected.

burton@pigdog.org