Saturday: In Padang, Indonesia, in 1990-91, I lived in a quiet neighborhood surrounding the private university where I taught English. I stayed in two rooms attached to the house of a friendly couple and their adorable, bratty toddler. (I still see the mother chasing the girl around the small front yard, extending a spoonful of spurned rice.) They spoke little English; my Indonesian was halting. But we were more than friendly. They keyed my emotional support system, patiently helping me process the barrage of daily experiences that left me bewildered.
Our friendship remained formal, in a style that proved typical over my four Indonesian years. Rarely did I venture into their home. My rooms — a bedroom, a narrow front space I called my parlor — had no kitchen; I made do with fruit for breakfast, visits for lunch and dinner to street-side warung (bountiful stalls, bountifully spiced meals, little more than a buck). Occasionally they invited me for delicious dinners that she prepared.
Both parents worked for non-governmental organizations, made good Indonesian salaries. This gave them access to luxuries most neighbors lacked, including a small car and their own telephone.They offered me phone access, but I never placed a call there; like everyone else I used the nearest wartel Telkom, a government-run phone office, where we’d line up to use private booths.
Still, access to a telephone gave me unique status: I was the U.S. Embassy’s contact person for West Sumatra. As far as I and the Embassy knew, seven Americans lived in the 16,000-square-mile province: me; my fellow volunteer and (for that year) best friend — let’s call him My Storytelling Friend; and a family of five, whom I’ll call the Pennyfarthings. Like My Storytelling Friend, Adam and Eve Pennyfarthing lived without a phone; unlike My Storytelling Friend and me, they'd come to Indonesia to convert souls to Christ.
My Storytelling Friend and I had undergone a year of occasional training provided by our small, secular organization (which, among other things, placed U.S. volunteers as teachers or NGO workers in a range of Asian countries, to boost cross-cultural understanding). But we hadn’t known each other well until the shock of arrival in Padang (pop. 650,000), the biggest west-coast city on the California-sized island of Sumatra. Padang was a flat, dull, relentlessly steamy port that even the heartiest backpacker-tourist guides recommended leaving promptly (to the cooler surrounding highlands).
Thrown together as the only English speakers we knew, My Storytelling Friend and I hung out every day. Padang life could be hard. My Storytelling Friend not only saved my sanity, he was terrific fun. He was sandy blond, tall (maybe 6’4”, in a land where 5’5” put me above average), skinny, a face of sharp planes, long limbs that when animated flailed and flapped. He was smart, kind, funny. His tales were richly brocaded, filled with colorful jags, spot-on impersonations. They were also, I discovered, imperfectly wedded to the truth as I had lived it — not false, exactly, but enhanced in ways truer to the experience’s emotional resonances than to precise fact.
Our social lives were hardly ample and the Pennyfarthings were generous of spirit, but we saw them rarely. Our visits were awkward. The next year, when I moved to the capital city of Jakarta, I met plenty of expatriates trying to recreate Western lives: shopping for bread and milk and cereal, say, or enjoying gyms and cocktail hours at international-chain hotels. But Padang’s few Westerners — mostly international NGO workers from Western Europe — worked to adopt local customs, in part because so few Western customs were accessible.
Adam and Eve Pennyfarthing were unique. We never quite worked out what they were doing. Islam is Indonesia’s primary religion, and Padang is the center of Minangkabau culture, known for, among other things, strict Islamic beliefs. The city housed a few churches, but the Pennyfarthings didn’t seem to be affiliated with any. We weren’t sure how they made money — maybe English teaching? They were apparently on their own mission, three boys (ages 6, 4, 2) in tow, setting an example of Christian life. They were like white folks homesteading in Choctaw Nation in the 1840s, though less like pioneers and more like evangelical versions of Ward and June Cleaver.
Both were educated and thoughtful, if not erudite. They spoke Indonesian well. Eve was a missionary’s daughter who’d grown up in Indonesia. Son of a military chaplain, Adam was a former officer in the Army Corps of Engineers with an advanced degree in cross-cultural communication and teaching English as a foreign language. On the surface we had things in common; our Indonesian friends assumed we must be peas in a pod. But their relentless focus on Biblical teachings often strained conversation with us devout agnostics.
All the Pennyfarthings' knowledge and experience passed a set of unyielding filters. If we spoke of our students, they outlined the failures of the Indonesian educational system. If we mentioned food, they explained shortcomings of the local diet. (Eve made her own bread, undersalted.) If we heard the local mosques' calls to prayer, they told us why Islam could never be the path to peace, to say nothing of salvation. Even when our beliefs overlapped we found their perspective hard to credit.
One night, after a remarkably bland dinner of chicken and rice, one of the boys began behaving badly. Adam grabbed a wooden paddle, took the child over his knee, pulled down his pants, and dispensed several hard whacks, intoning over the screams, “He who spares his rod hates his son. But he who loves him disciplines him promptly.”
“Proverbs 13:24,” Eve told us.
Afterward Adam took the boy's shoulders, demanded his gaze be met, said, “I hope you understand: That hurt me more than it hurt you.”
My Storytelling Friend and I shared a glance. "Those poor kids," he said later.
Adam was in shape and adventurous. While Eve kept the home fires burning he set out to climb several of the local volcanoes, many still active. One evening Adam regaled us with a harrowing tale of his most recent climb: at the ascent, while he and a few local friends stood on the lip, the volcano erupted. Molten boulders flew out of the mouth, landing near them, rolling downward. The hikers scattered, scrambled. One friend fell, breaking his arm. Adam sheltered beneath a rock outcrop; hot ash drifted onto his windbreaker, catching it on fire; he noticed only when his flesh seared; he ripped the jacket off, stamped it out, headed down without further mishap. He pulled down his T-shirt's shoulder, showed us the wound.
“I knew I was protected,” he said. "The whole time, I knew I was in the presence of the Lord.”
My Storytelling Friend took a breath.
“Adam,” he said, "why do you think the Lord blew up the volcano in your face?”
I barely heard Adam's response (trials, tribulations, whatnot), so suffused was I with love for My Storytelling Friend.
After a year my friend moved to a teaching gig in Bali, I to another job in Jakarta. Adam and Eve stayed in Padang for seven years, having another boy along the way. We made no effort to stay in touch, but years later Adam and I reconnected through social media. We share almost no perspectives but occasionally chime in on each other’s posts, generally about politics. I’m not sure why we do it. Like most everyone’s, our feeds are 97 percent echo chambers of agreement, his from military Christian friends, mine from pacifist heathens. We go months without connecting, then, sparked by some article or other, we engage in respectful disputation. Neither has ever convinced the other of anything. He always — always — gets the last word.
Adam finds many of the president’s words and behaviors distasteful but believes him a reasonable and essential national steward. He considers the Mueller investigation a plot animated by Trump animus among deep-state actors. On Friday, he posted the Justice Department’s filing to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn.
He wrote, “I suspect this is the first of many shoes that will drop on an FBI leadership that was committed to ends justifying the means as they took sides in an election where both candidates were pretty corrupt. It'll be interesting to see how the mainstream media spins dropping shoes to come. The actual court filing is pretty damning.”
That struck me as wrongheaded enough to prompt response. I posted without comment an article from LawfareBlog, which I’ve found an even-handed, insightful commentator on the president’s attempts to eviscerate the rule of law.
“Yep,” Adam wrote. “Pretty clear ‘end justifies the means.’”
“That is not what that article concludes,” I wrote.
“My spin,” I wrote, linking to another LawFareBlog article: “The end of clearing Trump and cronies of association with the Russian investigation justifies the means of trashing the FBI and damaging the rule of law.”
“Thanks for weighing in,” Adam wrote. “I'm pretty sure that holding the FBI accountable for pursuing an ends-justifies-the-means style of investigation preserves the rule of law rather than damaging it.”
“I'm pretty sure the FBI investigation was reasonable, and this is gross political interference to protect the president. Barr's patterns are clear; this will continue.”
“Lying to the court is at least as bad as lying to the FBI,” he wrote. “The investigation itself may have been reasonable, but it wasn't prosecuted reasonably or even lawfully unless lying to the court is lawful. Rule of law requires prosecutors and investigators to follow the law.”
One of his sons chimed in: “There is an important distinction here. Conservatives are not maintaining Flynn is a good person. They are maintaining the FBI did a bad thing. Objection to that position hinges on maintaining that the FBI did a good thing. The first position alleges that there are two bad actors, and in doing so holds no delusions about who and what is corrupt. The second position alleges that there is only one bad actor, and in so doing holds delusions about the FBI's activities the last years.”
This was followed by Eve (now a lawyer — her entering a discussion was unprecedented in my social media experience with Adam): “To put this in context, a prosecutor friend of mine commented once on the Project Innocence cases (where a number of people have been exonerated of serious crimes by DNA evidence). She noted that in all the cases she had reviewed, the prosecutors broke the rules of law and proper handling of evidence in order to get a conviction. Maybe they really believe that people were guilty, but breaking the ethical rules led to serious violations of justice. It is important for investigators and prosecutors to be held accountable to due process.”
I rarely get snarky on Adam’s feed, but I’m an imperfect child of God, struggling to find my way.
I wrote: “Yes. I'm a newcomer to understanding prosecutorial and police abuse; I'm deluded about the FBI's history; I've never read about, oh, say, J. Edgar Hoover. I'm sure that's why you'd all join me in voting in support of progressive DAs and AGs actually curbing the types of abuses Project Innocence investigates, such as Larry Krasner in Philadelphia or Tish James in New York state. And I'm sure that if Janet Reno or Eric Holder were telling the FBI and career Justice prosecutors to call off the dogs on investigating Sandy Berger or Susan Rice for lying to FBI officers about their interactions with, say, China, if Reno or Holder were saying, Just drop the case because we're so concerned about this horrific abuse of police and prosecutorial power, and said career Justice prosecutors were resigning and removing themselves from these cases en masse to let Clinton's and Obama's lackeys carry the cases forward, you'd all stand up and cheer this powerful and righteous defense of the aggrieved national security officials, who could then return to work re-electing their bosses and make us all feel better about the American system of justice.”
I then posted a recent Masha Gessen commentary from The New Yorker: “We won’t know the exact moment when democracy dies.”
One of his friends wrote, "We're a republic, not a democracy!"
Adam waited a while, then wrote: “Thank you again for stimulating a lively debate. Regarding disappearing ‘democracy’ in America: You and I both saw the pattern in Indonesia. Democracy becomes a sham when all of the civil servants, educators, and national police belong to one party and when those same unelected civil servants who are running the administrative agencies replace the legislature at making laws. Also, one way to understand the ‘deep state’ is that it is what happens when one party comes to dominate so thoroughly in all of the administrative agencies that they become ungovernable by the other party. With fewer than 7 percent of journalists identifying as Republican, I think you can put the fourth estate in with the civil servants when it comes to taking the temperature of Democracy in America.”
As during my Padang visits to the Pennyfarthings, I find our exchanges enervating. They’ll patiently hear dissent but have all the answers. Their steely certainty, their undertone of sanctimony and condescension, leave my mind dulled.
In more generous moments, I recognize this as a mote/beam problem (Matthew 7:3: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”). But I’m not always generous.
I wait a day, then write, “I disagree with your characterization of the Suharto-era ‘deep state.’ On a list of significant influences on non-existent Indonesian democracy in the early ‘90s, I’d include: Suharto’s execution of political enemies upon taking power; his consolidation and banning of political parties; the expansion of the army’s political role; the usurpation of independent political activities via legal restrictions and the golkar system; the control of an independent press through licensing overseen by a federal Ministry of Information; the requirement of allegiance to the federal philosophy of pancasila; the restrictions on peaceful assembly (which required me to get permission from at least four police and military agencies to hold my volunteer organization’s benign annual 25-person conference); the routine crushing of dissent, including through warrantless arrest and torture; and, directly to your ‘deep state’ point, the necessity of civil actors across all government agencies, from federal to the local level, to implement policies created by the president or his minions — the precise opposite of the independent expertise the U.S. has fostered in government agencies since civil reform movements of the early 20th century ended such corrupt vehicles as Tammany Hall. This is the system our president seeks to destroy, to install cronies and hacks who can further his and their own grifts. This is precisely why I speak of the destruction of the rule of law and the threat to U.S. democracy.”
I post it, promise that I won’t post on the topic again, await Adam’s final word.
(New York state numbers on Saturday: 333,122 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.8 percent; 226 dead, to a total of 21,271, up 1.1 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,555, to a total of 72,950, up 2.2 percent.)
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