Bush in ‘da House!

It seems like the biggest news to hit Indo this week – besides the story of the “Real Batman” in Radar Madiun – is that George W. Bush will be gracing the capital with his presence today. Granted, he will only be here for six hours between visits to more geopolitically strategic or tumultuous places like China, Japan, and India, but still, it has all of my friends, most of my co-workers, and nearly every motorcycle mechanic that I meet brimming with pride.
Every TV channel is playing clips of protesters burning American flags around the archipelago, and my opinions on Mr. Bush’s politics have become the teachers’ new favorite pastime at SMAN 2, the local school where I work. I tell the teachers that for US$12,500, the sum that I will receive during my year as a Fulbright grantee, America could have alternatively bought four-and-a-half M-16s in Iraq. I ask them, in Bahasa Indonesia, what they think about that, and they laugh – the prototypical Javanese reaction to the uncomfortable. He is the leader of the Free World, and I do carry a passport from his country, but most of the time it seems to me that we just live in different worlds.