fair warning..

Jakarta, as a place, drips with contradictions. Take a movie billboard for an Indonesian version of ‘American Pie.’ Besides the surfeit of unusually good-looking youngsters, leather jackets, and fishnet stockings, the bottom of the advertisement comes with a warning, like a pack of cigarettes. It translates: “Warning: Careful with free sex.”

In a country where no one pays any attention to posted warnings, the inclusion of this one bears pause. Not just that there are 10 meter tall, hair revealing (shocking, I know) representations of saucy vixens on the street, but that the cultural gulf between Jakarta and everywhere else is so wide.

If anything, this type of warning is a reminder—‘Hey! You down there! We are still religious and traditionalist!’—more of its own impotence than of society’s underlying piety and conservatism. Outwardly, almost every place in Jakarta bears the markings of Westernization. You can assuage your personal lotioning needs at The Body Shop, buy bathroom fixtures at Ace Hardware, see a movie on the same day it premiers in the United States (I saw Iron Man), and even find the greatest American tradition, the wet t-shirt contest.

Of course, if you duck back into the kampoengs (traditional neighborhoods), you get catapulted back in time. Gas lanterns hang from pushcarts selling porridge and boiled peanuts; old men spend the day leaning against a greasy bench watching luxury cars jockey for space in the confined alleyways. If you ask an ojek (motorcycle for hire) driver to take you to a café with wireless, they stare at you blankly.

Indeed, Indonesia still is very religious and traditionalist and one need not trek to Banda Aceh for evidence. Mosques belonging to the Ahamadiyah sect of Islam are frequently attacked no more than 30 km from the city. The government with announce its decision on the potential banning of the sect on Monday. It may be difficult to perceive from the glossy thoroughfares of Jakarta, but Indonesia remains agrarian, religious and reactionary.

In many ways, Jakarta embodies the stark economic inequalities of Indonesia and in truth, the ‘westernized’ represents a stratus of consumption that few Indonesians can hope to attain. Economic growth in Indonesia was resource-led and these factors of production were concentrated in the hands of very few to whom immense wealth accrued. Jakarta, which over the past decade has managed to evolve a middle class, in large part because of its never ending supply of cheap labor, is an Indonesian exception, both because of its exposure and its middle class.

For most Indonesians, the benefits of growth have been concentrated among the few. The majority of the agrarian base has very little purchasing power, access to credit only through government-run pawnshops (a laughable concept I may blog about at some point), and are enslaved by a narrow and cyclic menu of consumer goods (satellite tv and motor scooters on long-term leases). These people are under-exposed, nominally Muslim, superstitious and, except for satellite tv and motor bikes, unchanging. I was talking with an ojek driver who asked me how many women I lived with back home. When I explained none, he seemed genuinely stumped. He was kind enough to explain to me that in the movies—satellite TV, and HBO no less, strikes again—bules are sexually involved with many women at once, so why was not I? That I was not trying to land an Indonesian girlfriend he called a downright lie.

So, I saw a funny movie poster; what any of this mean?

I cannot say I know for sure, but Indonesia is two countries, on the same billboard, even on the same boulevard, but sometimes they seem irreconcilably far adrift.