HECTOR’S DIARY
His regular diet of worms and other non-religious fare
The Cage, Bali, May. 6, 2017
IT’S Sigmund Freud’s birthday today. The thought occurred, just at random, that it would be fun to get his, and Zeno the Stoic’s, views on our own times. Unfortunately these proved to be chiefly unprintable. Their shared view, adduced through the ether of time, seems to be that we’ve all gone mad. Freud was more pleased than Zeno about this. There’s more business for psychiatrists these days; Zeno was stoic about most matters.
Of course, it is true that the political class anywhere is not in the least interested in learning any lessons from the past, or in broadening its collective grasp of the fact that there’s rather more to life than place and (in some instances, in the imperfect democracies) re-election. It was also the anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth this week. He was a theorist who, like so many, found that robber barons in disguise suborned his ideas and swiftly turned them to their own murderous advantage. There has never been a Marxist state. There have been plenty which styled themselves communist and weren’t.
A quotation from Das Kapital comes to mind. It’s one of my favourites and it is apposite for the times whichever side of the faux political divide it is that you sit on: “Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.”
This weekend, the French will choose a new president, from a final field of two, one of whom is a banker-bureaucrat and self-assessed socialist and the other a rabid right-wing nationalist. Next month there’s an election in Britain in which the government that was formerly pro-EU but after the narrow (chiefly English) Brexit putsch in last year’s referendum now wants to give it the proper finger (and bugger vision and any chance of European leadership).
In America, the Trump regime, while continuing to claim leadership of the free world (whatever that is) carries on with its preferred business of the day: to destroy the country’s social infrastructure, to pick needless arguments with filthy foreigners, and to deflect reasonable questions about how it actually got into office. There’s more, in other places, of course, but we shouldn’t go on. It’s too tedious.
It’s as well not to ask life if it could get any worse. Tempting fate is a bad idea. And it seems pointless complaining after you’ve put the question that it was rhetorical and not a request.
Have a lovely weekend.
Wine for Two
FROM time to time we get along to the Friday afternoon party that the Legian Beach Hotel puts on for returning guests. It’s not that we are in that class of patron; it’s that general manager Arief Billah and his fine hotel are supporters of the Bali Animal Welfare Association, the leading non-profit charity here that fosters the interests of the island’s deprived dogs. It’s a cause that we wholeheartedly support.
The event yesterday was fun, as they always are, and one day The Diary will manage to pick up the steps required to perform the poco poco, an Indonesian dance that you could easily be excused for thinking was Portuguese. Think line dancing without the cowboy hats and the yee-hahs.
It was wine for two in our case yesterday because some special friends from the Netherlands, who come here every year and do things to benefit the doggies, have returned home after their holiday. We thought we should go along and drink their wine for them.
They were home in time for the Netherlands’ 1945 liberation day anniversary on May 5.
Not Helpful
WE are cleaning house ourselves, possibly temporarily, though that is moot. The Cage is not a palace, far from it in fact, for reasons both of penury and politics. Gross excess is not our bag. But we’ve lost our pembantu (house cleaner) which, if this were the first such instance might be defined as merely unfortunate. Sadly it is not the first, so as Oscar Wilde might observe, it begins to look rather more like a habit.
The problem is one that is often mumbled about here. Home help is at the lower end of the employment scale, naturally, and we recognise this and do not make demands on staff – such as others we know do – that would sit uneasily on our collective conscience.
The rule here is minimum effort. Your cleaner, without constant attention, will flick at the dust with a little feather-duster and move it around, preferably into darker corners where, apparently, employers are not supposed to look. She comes late and, unless apprehended, leaves early. Reasons not to be at work tomorrow are advised at the last moment. Most of these reasons appear on the Balinese calendar of feast days and, with a little forethought, might well be mentioned earlier. We understand that things are done differently here. We’re happy with that, for many reasons. Among them are the very reasons we choose to live here most of the time instead of in Australia, where the authorities insist that you comply with their ridiculous regulations.
But in the employment area, the principle of mutuality seems to be missing. We are apparently privileged to be in a position where we give our cleaner money and she skives off, and then gets antsy when this demerit is mentioned. And eventually buggers off, three days before pay day, with no notice, and the house keys dropped on the coffee table as you are quietly contemplating the wonders of the universe. The concept of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face is widely held, here, to be just the thing.
Hector writes a monthly diary in the Bali Advertiser. The latest appears in the current edition (Apr. 26). The next will appear on May 24.
