by Judy Jones
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING A GERMAN: Essentially, there are two easy-to-distinguish models, the Wessis and the Ossis. (The Stasi were the East German secret police.) The Wessis are the relatively well-to-do former West Germans, with their pigskin bags and BMWs, plus all those rules and laws and habits for which their country has long been notorious; the Ossis—there’s that ost again—are stuck with the polyester and the simulated leather and the rattletrap Wartburgs and Trabis they drove over from Thuringia in. Ossis complain that the Wessis are hostile and patronizing; Wessis insist that it was never made clear just how expensive, inconveniencing, and endless this reunification business was going to be, and note that the Ossis are gauche and slow and have obviously forgotten how to work. As resentments continue to simmer, Germany’s skinheads—with their Doc Martens and baseball bats—are on the march, with their signature chants of “What do they want here, anyway?” and the eloquent “Oi, oi, oi,” but they’re being forced to share the headlines (though not yet the photo ops) with a rising number of alienated teenage immigrants from Turkey and Uzbekistan, who fill their empty after-school hours by playing video games and bashing in the heads of their German-born classmates.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: Ach. It’s not that your date’s parents don’t like Americans, it’s just that there are so many potential conversational land mines, of which the Holocaust is only the most obvious. Also try to avoid too many references to reunification—a triumph, yes, but a high-priced one. Even if Vati and Mutti have managed to keep their jobs at the Porsche factory and the little beer brewery down the road, the postwar German standard of living (the envy of the entire industrialized world) has been heading south for a while now and, given all the tax increases meant to defray the costs of reunification and make sure the hordes of refugees and their kids have somewhere to curl up for the night, they’ve had to say good-bye to those fabulous month-long holidays and big unemployment checks everybody got so accustomed to. You could talk culture: German was, after all, the language of that intellectual holy trinity, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, nor is there any ignoring Kant and Hegel and Goethe and Nietzsche, not to mention all the composers, but even that will backfire if someone in the group wonders aloud where all that dark, heavy, unrelenting stuff ever got Germany. Which reminds us, try not to compare Germany to other countries, and especially don’t compare her to France. While it’s true they remain ostensibly the best of friends, too much talk of her more glamorous neighbor may remind Germany how (1) she doesn’t have twelve centuries of consolidated national identity to fall back on, and (2) nobody ever watched her with envy and admiration when she took to the dance floor. INDONESIA
THE LAYOUT: Wins the most-fragmented-nation award: more than seventeen thousand islands, about six thousand of which are inhabited, strung necklace-style along the equator, just south of Indochina. (Java’s the most important of them, but you’ve heard of Sumatra, Bali, Borneo, and New Guinea, too). Lushly tropical, with torrential rains, machete-proof jungles, snakes, tigers, elephants, crocodiles, etc. Also volcanic, fertile, and full of Asia’s most enticing assortment of natural resources, including oil. The fourth most populous country in the world (after China, India, and the United States) and the most populous Muslim one, with more people than Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and the Arabian Peninsula combined. Ethnically complex, with over three hundred mutually unintelligible languages and dialects; fortunately, everybody’s agreed to speak something called Bahasa Indonesia, much touted locally as the purest form of Malay.
THE SYSTEM: A former soldier state struggling to survive as a baby democracy. The president is the major power player here. Previously, the presidency was decided by a thousand-member People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), 60 percent of whom were appointed by the president—which made this a great country in which to be the incumbent. In 2004, the president was elected by popular vote for the first time. New rules also dictated a maximum of two five-year terms (Suharto, Indonesia’s last strongman, had just begun his seventh term when he was forced to step down in 1998). There is now a 550-member House of Representatives and a restructured MPR comprising the members of the House plus four reps from each of the country’s thirty-two provinces. The governing ethos here is Pancasila, the five principles—literally—on which modern Indonesia was founded: belief in a single supreme god (almost any god will do), concern for one’s neighbors (all 210 million of them), nationalism, democracy, and social justice, all of which add up to a sort of live-and-let-live, unity-in-diversity, shades-of-Woodstock thing. (In practice, government here has traditionally been an exercise in enriching oneself and one’s circle of friends at the country’s expense.) Although the armed forces have, for the first time, been officially excused from political duty, Indonesia’s military, which has served as the ruling party’s power base since independence, remains the only thing in the country resembling a national institution, so don’t expect the generals to retire to little fishing villages anytime soon.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That it will be at least ten years before the country recovers from the effects of the 2004 tsunami. With that in mind, a little modern history might also help. From the end of World War II, when first the Japanese and then the Dutch were kicked out, until 1998, Indonesia’s history revolved around two men and two men only: Sukarno and Suharto. (One-word names are common in Indonesia, especially in Java.) The former, flamboyant and charismatic (with an adman’s gift for slogan-making, e.g., among many others, both “Pancasila” and “the year of living dangerously”), fought for its independence, guided it to nationhood, became, in 1949, its first president, and went on to take his place, with Nehru, Nasser, Tito, and Nkrumah, in the pantheon of “nonaligned” leaders. At home, he adopted the authoritarian system he called “guided democracy,” dissolved existing political parties and ruled by decree, and left the inflationary economy pretty much to fend for itself. Abroad, he flirted with the Chinese Communists, set out to crush neighbor Malaysia (that was in 1963, the “dangerous” year), grabbed the western half of New Guinea from the Dutch, and withdrew in a snit from the United Nations. An abortive pro-Communist coup against the anti-Communist military in 1965 gave strongman Suharto his chance: He removed Sukarno (implicated as an engineer of the coup, though, thirty years later, nobody really knows what happened), slaughtered somewhere between 100,000 and a million Indonesian Communists plus anybody else who got in the way, turned his back on Peking, made nice with such pro-West neighbors as Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, dug for oil, rejoined the United Nations, fixed his attention on such matters as national identity, agricultural self-sufficiency, and industrial growth, and called the whole program the “New Order.” His two big PR blunders: gobbling up the miniscule adjacent Portuguese colony of East Timor and treating its population—already ragged and run-down—even worse than Portugal had; and rewarding his wife, children, and old friends with lucrative business deals worth, conservatively, hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, Suharto managed to hang on to power until the late Nineties, when Indonesia was battered, more or less simultaneously, by the Asian economic crisis, the worst drought in fifty years, and the results of a lot of unhelpful advice from the International Monetary Fund. When Arabs joined Christians and workers teamed with students in mass protests, even Suharto’s best buddies knew it was time for him to resign. From 1998 until the elections of 2004, three successive presidents did their uninspired best to stabilize the economy and lure back foreign investors while the poverty rate tripled, Islamic extremist groups made headlines with bombings in Bali and Jakarta, and separatist violence— including the slaughter of 1,200 people by government-backed militias in newly independent East Timor—raged from one end of the archipelago to the other. By the time of the 2004 elections, Indonesia’s moderate Muslim majority was waxing nostalgic for the law-and-order days of the generals and showed a new willingness to contemplate the return of a father figure in uniform. Which is what the
y got.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING AN INDONESIAN: Let’s begin by assuming that your date is a pribumi, a “son of the earth,” i.e., an ethnic Malay, from a family that’s been in Indonesia forever. More likely than not, he or she really does work the land, growing rice or cloves or peanuts or sisal, or sweating on a rubber plantation, or in a bauxite mine, or cutting down giant teak or mahogany trees—Indonesia’s got it all. Alternatively, your date may work in a factory shelling shrimp or making shoes or rolling cigarettes, working ten to twelve hours a day for a fraction of the $2.50 minimum hourly wage (especially if your date’s a woman, like the majority of Indonesia’s factory workers, or a nine-year-old child). Labor laws, like most other laws of the land, are rarely enforced. Of course, some pribumi have managed to get themselves educated; in fact, there’s a cadre of technocrats who are famous locally for all having studied economics at Berkeley, and a wave of trendy thirtysomethings whose racy chick-lit evocations of sex and the city (known locally as wang sastra or “fragrant literature”) are topping the bestseller lists (admittedly not a great challenge, given how little Indonesians, as a whole, read; still, it is taken as encouraging evidence that this is no Saudi Arabia—yet). By the way, how open-minded are you about religion? Indonesia is an impressively mixed bag. Besides all those Muslims (88 percent of the population, most of them moderates, though the number of fundamentalists keeps growing), keep an eye out for a considerable Christian minority, Hindus, Buddhists, the mystics of Java, and the volcano- (or soybean-) worshipping animists of the outer islands. Now, let’s think about where you and your date will live (sorry, don’t mean to rush you). The odds favor your settling in Java, which boasts all the big-city excitement—video arcades, supper clubs, gay bars, etc.— and most of the picturesque courtly refinements you’re likely to find in Indonesia, not to mention 60 percent of the country’s population in 7 percent of its area. Also a possibility: Bali, predominantly Hindu and one of the world’s longstanding vacation destinations—that is, until Jemaah Islamiyah, a homegrown Islamic terrorist group, bombed a packed nightclub in 2002, bringing the entire Bali tourist industry to a halt. You’ll want to think twice before buying real estate in the devastated, mostly Muslim province of Aceh, on the northwestern tip of Sumatra, where, even before the tsunami hit on December 26, 2004, leaving 170,000 people dead and missing and another half a million homeless, thousands of civilians had been killed in the crossfire between separatists and government troops since the mid-Seventies; or on Sulawesi, Indonesia’s fourth-largest island, where Muslims and Christians have been snuffing each other quite efficiently with homemade bombs, guns, and bows and arrows; or in Papua, currently in a state of emergency and bleeding both from decades-old secessionist battles and from clashes between the region’s Muslims and its Christian and animist populations; or in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, where the indigenous Dayak people, enraged by the influx of outsiders brought in under Suharto’s massive transmigration program, killed a couple hundred migrants and chased thousands more right off the island; or even in the Moluccas, the chain once known as the Spice Islands, where Muslims and Christians lived peacefully together until about 1999, when they began slaughtering each other by the thousands. Peace accords brokered in some of these areas over the last couple of years have reduced the violence to sporadic skirmishes and occasional church bombings, but separatist sentiment, religious conflict, widespread unemployment, mind-boggling government corruption, and the fear of another tsunami, coupled with the growing influence of Jemaah Islamiyah, Laskar Jihad, and other Al Qaeda wannabes are likely to keep property values low throughout the archipelago for some time to come.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: You may find your prospective in-laws almost surreally laid-back; try to remember that they, like most Indonesians their age, were brought up to eschew confrontation and displays of ambition. For fifty years, they managed to avoid our worst-case scenarios for them—Communism in the 1960s, Islamic militancy in the 1980s—as well as separatism, Indonesia’s worst-case scenario for itself. So there’s no telling how they feel now that the last two, unleashed in the laissez-faire atmosphere of the post-Suharto years, are today’s in-your-face realities of life. At least the flight of foreign investors has meant that your date’s parents no longer have to sit by and watch as the rice paddies of their childhoods are turned into golf courses. (Although they still have to watch all their quality topsoil rush by during the rainy season as a result of out-of-control logging practices.) Most likely, they still take solace in the islands’ arts-and-crafts, sarongs-and-amulets traditions: wayang, the famous shadow-puppet shows, featuring elaborately painted buffalo-hide puppets, and occasionally humans, that you watch from either side of a screen, depending on whether you want to monitor the figures or—illusion and reality, illusion and reality—their shadows, is the one no Winnetka tourist would miss, and for no extra charge it’s often backed up by a gamelan, an up-to-forty-piece percussion orchestra that should satisfy your craving for gongs well into the next century. Don’t ruin a pleasant evening by bringing up your hosts’ recent colonial past. Yes, we know, back in college you spent an idyllic three days exploring the museums and canals of Amsterdam, but the Dutch still aren’t likely to be on your date’s parents’ list of favorite people. From the seventeenth century on, when they established control over Java, the Dutch were famous for their lack of a sense of fair play (also of humor), and they showed their absolute worst side in the late 1940s, when they refused to get out even after the war for independence had largely been won. As for the Japanese, just remember that Indonesia (then still the Dutch East Indies) spent most of World War II as the centerpiece of Tokyo’s “Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere.” ITALY
THE LAYOUT: Unlike Orion’s Belt or the Great Bear, Italy actually resembles the thing it’s supposed to look like: an old boot, high-heeled and in need of resoling, trying to kick Sicily across the Mediterranean. You can, for convenience’s sake, pinpoint Rome just behind the kneecap and Florence at about mid-thigh. You’ll run into trouble when you hit northern Italy, though, where a cloud of smoke seems to be issuing from the top of the boot. Don’t let it throw you; northern Italians would just as soon not share an image with the backward Mezzogiorno (i.e., everything south of Rome; pronounced “METSO-jyorno”), and smoke is a perfectly appropriate symbol for the industrial heart of the country. The way the smoke seems to be disappearing into the rest of Europe makes sense, too, given northern Italy’s historical ties with France and Austria. Across the top of the country stretch the Alps, nice for skiing but never very effective at discouraging foreign invaders. The Apennines, running the length of the country, served for centuries to keep Italy region- rather than nation-minded and to make it virtually ungovernable (remember that Italy, like Germany, came together as a country only in the last century). To the west, in mid-Mediterranean, lies the big, barren, mineral-rich vacationland of Sardinia, which is not only an integral part of Italy but a reminder of how times have changed in this part of the world; Sardinia has belonged, in various periods, to Genoa, Pisa, Spain, and Austria, and was a kingdom on its own for a while, encompassing Turin. Just above Sardinia is the island of Corsica, which, though Italian by culture and temperament, belongs, uneasily, to France. And on 100-plus acres within Rome, the Pope holds court as absolute monarch of the Vatican City.
THE SYSTEM: On the surface, the world’s most fluid parliamentary democracy, with a president elected every seven years and a new prime minister appointed, it often seems, weekly. There have been fifty-nine governments (quite possibly more by the time you read this) since the end of World War II, when Italy ceased to be a chaotic monarchy. Lots of political parties to choose from, but for forty-five years, the inevitable winners were the center-right Christian Democrats; keeping them in power was Italy’s way of ensuring that the PCI, the strongest Communist Party in the West, would never get its foot in the door (the front door, at any rate; ever pragmatic, the
Christian Democrats usually hustled the PCI in through the service entrance). This formula held from the beginning of the Cold War, when Italy decided to cast its lot with Western rather than Eastern Europe, to its end, when, the “Communist threat” having disappeared (and the PCI having changed its name to the Democratic Party of the Left), the system began showing signs of dry rot. In the early 1990s, a series of corruption scandals finally laid low the Christian Democrats, discrediting, along the way, just about everyone who was anyone in politics and industry and prompting a lot of people to wonder if this whole Italy idea belonged in the recycle bin. But, not for the first time, the country demonstrated the miraculous regenerative powers of a steamrollered cartoon cat. In 2001, media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, became prime minister, heading a right-wing coalition led by his party, Forza Italia (“Go Italy!” after a soccer chant), and managed to remain in power longer than any head of government since Mussolini. (How’d he do it? It certainly helped that he controlled, directly or indirectly, nearly all of Italy’s mass media, including 90 percent of its television networks; that he personally employed a hefty portion of the country’s electorate; and that, by tinkering with the judicial system, he successfully avoided prosecution on charges of accounting fraud, bribery, money laundering, conflict of interest, and other equally colorful misdeeds.) Meanwhile, back in the real world, each of Italy’s twenty regions has its own bicameral government, a situation that, on one hand, tends to keep business humming on the homefront whenever the national leadership falls apart and, on the other, adds to the bureaucratic red tape, the opportunities for graft, and the general impossibility of getting any real work done.
