TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
By the way ... Syahrini & co. may be only sane people on stage
This week it seemed that entertainers were the only sane people, fully aware that all the worldâs a stage
Change Size
T
his week it seemed that entertainers were the only sane people, fully aware that all the world's a stage.
Enter singer Syahrini, who entertained the media after undergoing questioning at the National Police headquarters.
She was supposed to be questioned in relation to suspended Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) chief Abraham Samad, who has also been questioned regarding his relations with other beauties, namely Feriyani Lim and a Miss Indonesia.
You are fully forgiven if you are confused. Anyway, Syahrini, accompanied by her prominent lawyer, elaborated that her questioning went on for three hours partly because the police missed her; that their questions included comments about her 'pretty eyelashes', upon which she removed her sunglasses for the cameras, and when she planned to marry (marry who? No idea).
News flashes also highlighted the white handbag she was carrying, reportedly just one of her Rp 1 billion Hermes leather pieces ' made from the skin of an albino crocodile '¦ what??
Also at the police headquarters was Feriyani, who did not need to explain to the press the allegations against Samad's role in her allegedly forged ID.
She just performed a 'Syahrini walk', not Michael's moonwalk but the appealing backward and forward catwalk trot for the cameras' benefit.
Thus our 'Kardashians' also benefitted from appearing on prime time news instead of being feted merely on celebrity gossip programs, by just posing pretty without growing extra wrinkles from watching today's high level, disastrous politicking.
After all, the truth these days is stranger than fiction. Various parties are largely making a show of force on the political stage, leading to odd excesses, mainly the KPK-police turmoil.
On Tuesday, employees of the state antigraft body held an unprecedented protest.
Strangely, first, they were not protesting months of overtime or picketing outside the office around the clock in real fear of the police sneaking in to confiscate documents.
Instead they were rejecting the notorious decision of their acting chief Taufiequrachman Ruki to hand over the KPK's dossier on former National Police chief candidate Comr. Gen. Budi Gunawan, a graft suspect, to the attorney general. Ruki said the KPK 'admits defeat' as it couldn't spend energy resisting all the police's sudden summons for commission leaders, ever since the KPK named Budi a suspect.
The President's nomination of Budi, a former adjutant of his party's boss, Megawati Soekarnoputri, had instantly united the divided House of Representatives like magic. 'He's clean!' they said, citing the National Police investigation into the accounts of one of their own.
Second, Ruki himself joined the protest; many were relieved that employees would not likely be punished, but only scolded by the bureaucratic reform minister.
But although Ruki said he was 'touched' by the militancy of the employees, his co-workers when he was the KPK's first chairman, his actions seemed to weaken the KPK even further. The next day he was depicted as a Trojan horse in another rally supporting the KPK.
Police members had also engaged in collective action ' which was also historic and even weirder. Last month, police members guarding a pretrial hearing at the South Jakarta District Court prostrated in murky rain water and cheered at the verdict of the now infamous judge Sarpin Rizaldi, who ruled that the KPK's naming of officer Budi as a suspect was invalid. It was the craziest and most ironic scene ever seen since reformasi ' so much for all the police reform.
Sarpin was instantly a target of public anger and teasing; now he's suing a few lecturers in his Padang hometown, following their statement that Sarpin's ruling would result in him being exiled ' which he took to mean by his proud Minangkabau ethnic community instead of by the academic community ' for the ruling, which unsurprisingly led to more pretrial requests by other suspects. 'Curiouser and curiouser!' as Alice said.
The latest in the litigation spree was an obscure group that reported Tempo magazine to the police for 'violating the Banking Law' in its recent report on the bank accounts of officer Budi.
As taxpayers, we're immensely grateful for attempts to leak such 'classified' information, either by WikiLeaks or our local media.
But in these dizzy days we must also thank our pretty socialites for their show ' not show of force ' in our not-so-funny endless comedy of errors.
' Ati Nurbaiti
