Polishing turds
So, Suharto got the funeral ‘they’ thought he deserved. Personally, I thought it would have been more fitting if his corpse had been fed to a pack of wild dogs and the footage put on YouTube, but that’s just me.
Sure, like everybody else, I’ve tried to see the sunny uplands of the cuddlier aspects of the old butcher’s personality, but the view was obscured by piles of bodies.
Still, it goes to show again that if your personal standing is flagging, all you need to do is die to give it a real boost. Or get a serious disease. I’m quite looking forward to getting cancer. Sure, there’ll be terror and screaming and having bits of me lopped off, but I’ll never be more popular.
Say whatever else you like about cancer and death, they have the beneficial side-effect of curing all manner of personality deficiencies. Reputations have a near 100% survival rate.
Update: ‘[T]here may be some controversy over his legacy,’ said Cameron Hume, the U.S. ambassador in Jakarta. Feel that understatement. If only they would bottle it. Just imagine what you could get away with just a few swigs of Bush Administration Patented Rhetorical Restraint.
Posted on January 28th, 2008 at 1:17am under Miscellaneous misanthropy
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• 1 Comment |
Did you mention legacy?
It doesn’t appear to include killing anybody. Though there are hints of corruption, if I read properly between the lines in Suharto’s biggest flaw was a virtue that he carried too far: loyalty to old friends and family.
But no massacres. No killings., No purges. No invasions.
Note that the author of the piece isn’t some nobody. He’s the editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
It’s like the editor of the Economist writing a piece in praise of Franco that left out all the executions and repression.