Article 28e

By N. Mark V. Castro



I have read much of the heart-rending testimony of authorities and lawmakers who are working so hard to press the Commission on Pornography to pass a clear guideline that would arrest the growing moral decay of Indonesia. As of yesterday's posting of the Jakarta Post, which was prominently displayed at the front page, Muhammadiyah chairman Din Syamsuddin said the "country needed a pornography law to "reverse the situation" of an increasingly liberal society.

"We are concerned by the moral liberalization that will lead the nation to the brink of collapse, unless it is stopped as soon as possible," he said."

It is clear to me that the Indonesian Government must be given the power to suppress the words and images which are the causes of sexually motivated insanity and crimes.

I myself make my living with words, and I am now ashamed. There is the word "motherfucker" one time in my published article OUT, as in, "Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker." (Ever since that word was published, way back in 1989, children have been attempting to have intercourse with their mothers. When it will stop no one knows.).

So in view of the terrible damage freely circulated ideas can do to a society, and particularly to innocent children, I beg Indonesian government to delete from my works all thoughts which might be dangerous. I want to help the elected leaders in bringing my thoughts into harmony with their own and thus into harmony with the thoughts of those who elected them.

That is democracy.

Attempting to make amends at this late date, I call to the attention of the lawmakers the fundamental piece of obscenity from which all others spring, the source of all evil, the taproot of the deadly poisonous tree. Kill the taproot and the tree dies, and with it its deadly fruits, which are rape, sodomy, wife-beating, child abuse, divorce, abortion, adultery, gonorrhea, herpes, and AIDS.

I will read this most vile of all pieces of so-called literature aloud, so that those who dare can feel the full force of it.

I recommend that all persons under 14, and all persons under 30 not accompanied by an adult, should leave the room. Those remaining who have heart trouble or respiratory difficulties, or who are prone to commit rape at the slightest provocation, may want to stick their fingers in their ears. And what I ask you to endure so briefly now is what the selfless members of the pornography commission do day after day for the good of the children. I am simply going to dip you in filth, and pull you out of it and wash you off immediately. At terrible risk of infection, they have to wallow in pornography. They are so fearless. We might think of them as sort of sewer astronauts.

All right. Everybody ready? Tighten your G-strings. Here we go:

Article 28E

(1) Every person shall be free to choose and to practice the religion of his/her choice, to choose one's education, to choose one's employment, to choose one's citizenship, and to choose one's place of residence within the state territory, to leave it and to subsequently return to it.

(2) Every person shall have the right to the freedom to believe his/her faith (kepercayaan), and to express his/her views and thoughts, in accordance with his/her conscience.

(3) Every person shall have the right to the freedom to associate, to assemble and to express opinions.


source: The Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia



That Godless loop of disgusting sexuality, friends and neighbors, happens to be a basic law of this country. How could this have happened? Some communistic, pederastic, wife-beating congressman must have attached that when Indonesia was declaring her independence. It should be expunged with all possible haste, in order that innocent children can be safe again.

Adolf Hitler blamed the Jews for inspiring every sort of sexual ugliness in Germany, so he tried to kill them all. Say what you like about him, incidentally, it can't be denied that he led an exceedingly clean life sexually. In the end, he made an honest woman of his only sexual partner, Eva Braun. And lest we forget, the recently dead Slobodan Milosevic likewise expunged Moslems from his country under the guise of moral renewal and nationalism.

Oh dear - have I slipped into pornography yet again? It is so easy to do.
Hitler was wrong about the Jews. It is unclean images which are responsible for unclean sexuality.

In order to protect innocent German children, all he had to do was get rid of the First Amendment. In no way can this be interpreted as an anti-Semitic act.

Apparently, it is not enough in Indonesia that sex crimes of every sort are already against the law, and are punished with admirable severity. It is up to the leaders, and particularly to the large Moslem organizations, to persuade a large part of the citizenry that even the most innocent fashion which was once was perfectly legal, and even celebrated in some godless quarters, because of the permissiveness of the Constitution must be prohibited, and arouse the thoroughly misinformed citizenry to rise up in righteous wrath to smash the aforementioned article.

As such, ancient or even old art forms, so long as it involves a naked woman, would no longer be allowed to be viewed in the counry. For instance, how can anyone now appreciate ancient Greece's interpretation of "Leda and the Swan"?

After all, even Michaelangelo's 1530 rendition of such tale is a testament to Zoophilia (from the Greek Zôon, "animal", and Philia, "friendship" or "love"), which is a paraphilia, defined as an affinity or sexual attraction by a human to a (non-human) animal. Such individuals who engage in such acts are called zoophiles. The more recent terms zoosexual and zoosexuality also describe the full spectrum of human/animal attraction. A separate term, bestiality (more common in mainstream usage), refers to human/animal sexual activity. To avoid confusion about the meaning of zoophilia - which may refer to the affinity/attraction, paraphilia, or sexual activity - this article uses zoophilia for the former, and zoosexuality for the sexual act. The two terms are independent: not all sexual acts with animals are performed by zoophiles, neither are all zoophiles interested in being sexual with animals.

And if you may indulge my point, I shall yet again post here another blatant pornography that must immediately be deleted!


Article 19.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

source: Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which the Republic of Indonesia has been a long-standing signatory since 1948.

Full support to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights must be immediately withdrawn, as continued participation would subject Indonesians to what Muhammadiyah chairman Din Syamsuddin referred to as the growing liberalization of the country.

Apparently, the collapse of a nation does not rest on the gross ineptitude of leaders, the infringement of human rights, the blatant corruption of leaders, the loss of faith in morality, and the death of economy. Oh no, you incompetent political scientists, the collapse of a nation depends on one piece of ugly literature called pornography. Continued reading of such materials might somehow cause a person to wind up in a furnace for all eternity, which would be worse (if you consider its duration) than being raped, murdered, and then mutilated by a man maddened by dirty pictures.

I am not here to ridicule Muhammadiyah chairman Din Syamsuddin or any of Indonesia's moral and even elected leaders. He in fact won my sympathy. He may not a be television evangelist, although he probably preached on radio from time to time. (They all do.) He may be a profoundly sincere Moslem and family man, doing a pretty good job no doubt spreading the teachings and life of Mohammed as he understood it, sexually decent, and not pathologically fond of the goods of this Earth and so on. He is merely trying to hold together an extended family, a support system far more dependable than anything the Indonesian Government could put together, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, whose bond is commonly held beliefs and attitudes. (I had studied anthropology, after all, and so knew in my bones that human beings can't like life very much if they don't belong to a clan associated with a specific piece of real estate.)

So the Commission on Pornography, a traveling show about dirty books and pictures put on the road, is a much-needed moral renewal.

This above all should take precedence, instead of the crazy quilt of ideas all its members had to profess put the Council of Trent to shame for mean-spirited, objectively batty fantasias: that it was good that civilians could buy drugs so easily; that anybody doing or thinking acts other than the preferred lifestyle should be called "infidels" at every opportunity; that the contents of wombs were Government property; that people with AIDS, except for those who got it from mousetrapped blood transfusions, had asked for it; that a billion-dollar general's house was well worth the price; and on and on.

Others may find the Commission on Pornography as blatantly show business, a way for the moral groups to draw attention to its piety by means of headlines about sex, and to imply yet again that those in favor of freedom of speech were enthusiasts for sexual exploitation of children and rape and so on.

I have a resigned, world-weariness about much of my writing, as you can so clearly see, for I have accepted the futility of railing against the evils and injustices of life.

To be 'anti-infringement of free speech' makes as much sense to me as being 'anti-earthquakes'. We are at the mercy of our biology: people have chemicals that control their brains, which are sometimes subject to weather.

So it is with grace that I, as a newfound resident of Indonesia, do hereby obey and follow her laws, such as the original form of the Pornography Bill which "allows the imposing of fines on women who refused to cover "sensitive" body parts, such as their hair, shoulders, midriffs and legs.

Violators risk jail terms and fines up to Rp 2 billion (about US$214,000)."

In relation to this, the penalty for killing someone in cold-blood, a little past the strike of midnight of a new year, for no apparent reason other than being served a restaurant bill, in plain sight of all innocent bystanders, the penalty is only Rp 100 million (about US$10,000), plus a two-year suspended sentence.

Hey, life may be cheap, but fashion is not.

End of joke.

 

A Kiss Is Just A Kiss, A Sigh Is Just A Sigh

In deference to the recent issue that has idiotically gained airtime on TV, print publication, current affairs, and my friend's petition, whose identity we shall protect from the authorities and so shall hide under the pseudonym Wusamah Margono Halimun, I am, in case you-eavesdropping-rumor-mongering authorities happen to understand a bit of English and therefore would like to know what my name is, or aliases if any, which is Manda Azhairie ... or Tom Cruise; I am herewith reprinting an article I'd written when the issue first came out.

My ignorance ignited my acquiescence, my moronic belief that such an issue would have died its natural death. Unfortunately, it didn't.

After all, the only way for a bad thing to exist is for the good people to do nothing.

I'm not good. Never was and never will be. But some of the people still are.

Therein lies the hope.

A KISS IS JUST A KISS, A SIGH IS JUST A SIGH
By N. Mark V. Castro

You arrive at the Soekarno-Hatta Airport after being away for some time, you see the woman you love patiently waiting for you, and caught between the winds of winter and summer, you kiss her passionately, with much longing in your heart, with much happiness that, at last, you are home ... then they cuff your hands and lock you up in jail for 10 years.

That, in a nutshell, is part of the New Criminal Law.

"The proposed draft includes provisions banning public kissing, unmarried couples from living together and adultery. Offenders caught kissing in the open could be jailed up to 10 years and fined as much as 300 million rupiah (33,000 dollars) under new penalties," according to AFP News, France.

As most expats go, we tend to look for things that we neglected or enjoyed back home in a new place where we insist on it being our new homes. We may have different views about daily living, even belief, but scratch that skin and you will find Malay blood coursing through it. Hence, Indonesia and the Philippines have shared a symbiotic relationship over the years, as neighbors, as trade partners, as allies, as friends, as ASEAN brothers.

But the proposed New Criminal Law range from the almost apologetic to the openly apoplectic. One is positively apocalyptic, invoking the wrath of God to fall on those human creations that do not extol His glory.

But a kiss ... I have meticulously searched all the Holy Books known to man and have not come across a single entry on God's desire to punish any living creature from kissing each other, either in public or in private. And yet, here we have gifted men walking on earth with us who invoke morality and righteousness as though only they were ordained with wisdom by God. Given the chance, I wouldn't be surprised if they chose who got Wind or Sun today. Ironically, sinners or saints both get the same privilege under God.

"This is in response to the wishes of the people," Abdul Ghani Abdullah, Indonesia's director general of legislation, told the Associated Press news agency.

What people? Which people? All 200 million of them? Besides, even if an ordinary kiss gets out of hand in public, there is already an existing law that curtails them. Why add more? It's not like we see young teenagers or even adults kissing in public all the time. I have spent a lot of time in Indonesia's premiere malls and have not come across a couple of kids spending hours on the bench or even standing up kissing each other. I barely see any couple kissing each other inside the theatres.

What people? Which people? Which country?




Mankind is replete with history of people kissing. Artists, poets, singers have all written much about a kiss. And here we are, way into the birth of a new millennium, trying to curtail it? Wait, wait, wait and backtrack a bit. Are we going forward or backward? Do you really have to spend taxpayers' money for two years debating over public kissing? Shouldn't that money be allocated to the poor instead? Besides, I'd rather prefer a couple kissing in public anytime, anywhere than two people fighting.

"Kissing in public is a crime if the people around are not happy and lodge a complaint. But if they think it's all right, then no action will be taken," justice ministry official Abdul Gani Abdullah told AFP as reported by Matthew Moore, Herald Correspondent in Jakarta.

["Well, my officemate stinks and I'm not happy! Shouldn't that be a crime as well?"]

 

But who decides when it becomes a crime and when it isn't, the public? Therefore anybody can make an accusation. This is a big headache waiting to happen when it could have been avoided to begin with. A kiss? A kiss becomes a crime? What kind of kiss? A French kiss? A peck? Isn't there a law that prohibits acts of lasvisciousness? Must we go to the extreme of deciding which kiss is criminal? It wasn't even a question of whether or not it's immoral. It goes right away to being criminal.

A kiss.

Articles 469 and 473 dictate that anyone may be charged with violating pornography laws --- which carry sentences between 5 and 12 years.

The bill couldn't even pin down what constitutes "lewd" or "pornographic". It almost makes you think their authors spent or plan to spend a great deal of time dwelling on it or are engaged in some kind of acts projecting their fantasies and prescribing punishments for them. I can almost picture their research assistants watching stripshows all over the world intently in dark joings and telling grinning acquaintances who espy them in scornful tones, "In aid of legislation."

But this is the sort of seemingly trivial thing that has not very trivial consequences. You can't afford to dismiss it blithely. I can appreciate how some parents might feel at having the frail sensibilities of their children assaulted by ads in newspapers, TV and billboards that show women (and men) in a state that little improves on the one they got launched into the world in. Though while at this, surely the frail sensibilities of those children stand to be more ravaged by ads that ask them to change the color of their skin through skin whiteners? Yet no MP has thought to protest this. But these bills do not make things better, as decency goes, they make things worse. This is one cure that is patently worse than the affliction.

At the very least, it poses a danger not to pornography but to art. A lesson in caution, how do you decide Leonardo Da Vinci's work on The Man? Further, you likewise cannot invite your Egyptian neighbors for their cultural dance because they show their belly buttons for their belly dancing. And you can now see the decline on traditional dance and music such as Dangdut, Jaipongan, and even Balinese culture. All these cultural values that have been handed down from one generation to another, all these gone, forever erased from the memory, and all because of a legislative act that wanted to be Godly?

Indeed, pornography is not an easy animal to identify. Naked bodies, particularly as those locked in the exchange of body fluids, the thing that particularly stokes the wrath of the authors of these bills, should be interpreted in context.

The five bills themselves, vying with one another to ferret out evil and cast it into eternal fire, are a surefire guarantee of a plunge to an artistic Stone Age, where only "The Sound of Music" can be shown. Maybe not even that, as some idiot can always say there is something ungodly in Julie Andrews' choice of a widower to a nunnery.

More than to art, the bills pose a clear and present danger to freedom of expression. Or indeed to freedom of the press. This is not something only tabloids should be protesting against, all of media should. The bill is especially frightening in that respect.

Can an idea be more insidious, or idiotic?

I remember editing my college newspaper and often getting into arguments with the board of regents simply because I refused to let them touch it. Whenever they would so much as open their lips to declare that ours was a free press, I'd laugh right out in the auditorium and say that it's as ridiculous as having the Church edit Penthouse. You can't have media and preside over it. You have media and you let them polic it themselves. You let it mature. Otherwise, settle for brochures.

And finally, these bills pose a danger to society itself. I don't know if this is part of a plan to shift gears towards authoritarianism or fundamentalism or any other "-ism," but plan or not, it can be used to shift gears toward iron-fisted rule. It is all a piece with the rhetoric and practice of anti-terrorism and with calls for emergency measures to meet all sort of threats, for the most part of government's own making. Anti-smut has always been the Trojan horse of fascism. It was so in Germany, when Nazi youth raided cabarets and Jewish synagogues alike, proclaiming both to be obscenities. Ironically, the cabarets became the last bastion of defense, in the form of satirical revues, against the coming of the night. Yet similarly, what has FPI been doing again as of late?

Give bureaucrats and ass-lickers power and they are not going to stop at pornography, they are not going to stop at anything. The point is not to choose between the five bills, to embrace the one as more reasonable than the other. The point is to reject them altogether. The job of policing the ranks of media belongs to media, however they have often been remiss in it. That is so for all excesses of media, from lack of sensitivity to lack of taste.

The alternative is more than worse, it is disastrous. In a free and democratic state, no one is allowed to enter your house under the name of Allah or the Government, unless they have an arrest warrant or they're with Keannu Reeves playing Constantine.

You start policing the media and you're inviting everyone to polic your house. If so, then it's time to quit calling this a democratic country and start calling this Republic of Coca Cola, which will always be a friend to my country, Republic of Pepsi Cola.

The laws also propose to ban black magic and witchcraft.

Indonesia, in her attempt to rid further Western influences, is ironically moving more and more towards the early mistakes of the West.

"Anyone using black magic to hurt or kill faces five year's jail," but Indriyanto Seno Adji, a member of the Government appointed committee responsible for the laws conceded it was very difficult to define such offences in a criminal code.

Black magic and witchcraft.

One word comes to mind: INQUISITION.

So we may agree to disagree. But we all want to have a better world than the one we found, the question is: at what point do we sacrifice a person's right? A person's right, remember, something that even God would not dare coerce, interfere with, banish or some such. As I've said, come tomorrow, both the sinner and the saint would share under the same sun, breathe the same polluted air and live in the same shrinking planet. Imagine giving that ultimate power to your local priest or Imam.

I'd shake your hands as a gentleman, but then again, I'm afraid it might be against the law.

 

N. Mark Castro is a Corporate Crisis Management Strategist in the Philippines and US, PR / Media Adviser, and has served in English-based international magazines as former TEE OFF Golf Magazine editor-in-chief, MAN Magazine columnist, MABUHAY Magazine columnist, Filofax columnist for Manila Bulletin; In the business field, he has been an  International Business Negotiator, and a Strategic Business Analyst. He specialises in strategic communications planning, media relations and business advocacy. He has likewise been involved in film & TV production in the Philippines. He has broad international experience in organization business structures across Southeast Asia (Thailand, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia) and business partnerships in Europe (Italy) and North America. 

He has served as a managing consultant to Singapore-based Enaya Management Consultants, Pte. Ltd., and has held positions as Strategic Business Analyst, General Manager, and COO for PT. Bunda Global Indonesia. He is the CEO of media group consulting (mcg), a Makati-based public relations firm in the Philippines which is presently a consultant for several congressmen, mayors, and multinational companies; EVP / Corporate Communications of Titan Brigandine, Inc., a mobile marketing solutions company in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore; and he likewise sits in the board of Hexagon Envirosystems, Inc., a large-scale water-treatment Italian-Philippine company whose main principal is W.T.D. Trattamento Acque, s.r.l. of Italy.


Presently he is the COO of INFINITI Professional Development Centre (a subsidiary of P.T. Bunda Global Pertama), and is a Senior Media Adviser at IDA SUDOYO & ASSOCIATES PR Firm in Indonesia. He also sits as a Corporate Communications Director / Lead International Negotiator for Malaysian-Indonesian mining company P.T. Total Tenaga Prima Persada.

He may be contacted at nmvcastro@gmail.com or mediagroup@consultant.com