In her recent article Desi Anwar asked us to be honest about Joko Widodo's speech at the APEC CEO Forum in Beijing. The article called "Desi Anwar: Joko Widodo CEO of Indonesia Inc." was published on November 12, 2014 - two days after the president first major speech in international forum. The article itself had many weak points, and of course the weakest part was the author's brain. How did the president go from being an advocate of expansive statism to become the CEO of Indonesia Inc.? Was this an act of terminological theft? And so it bore us the final question: Had the standards and attention spans of thejakartaglobe.com finally dissapear completely?
Let's put it bluntly, the president no longer really has a political philosophy as he had given it up to political lobbies hiding behind the screen. Before his presidency, Joko Widodo's stance on foreign investments can be read in Kompas.com's news item of June 15, 2014 titled "Jokowi Nilai Perlu Mempersulit Investor Asing Masuk" (Jokowi Considers the Needs to Toughen the Rules on Foreign Investments). Oh yes, he promised a slim cabinet of professional ministers, didn't he? What prevails is a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't commitment to any tenet. Moral integrity falls to personal prejudice, and hypocrisy becomes the standard of the day. But, I will not discuss the ideological evolution of our President. His mental revolution is not the subject of this writing.
What I want to tell you is how Desi Anwar try to make a "Magic Bullet Article" out of Jokowi's speech in her article. Well, Magic Bullet Article is an article that attempt to make people believe anything the mass media tells them, no matter how ridiculous or outrageously unbelievable it is. The term itself is born of the explanation given by Arlen Specter to account for how a single bullet caused 7 different entry/exit wounds during JFK's assassination.
I always thought that honesty is the best policy, so I will speak of my mind about the president's speech. The speech presentation sounded more like a commercial rather than presidential. It was english but some media called it  javanese-english. A javanese tounge of english with 866 words in the speech. Some say that they were unable to follow even the spoken word for more than a few sentences at a time. And for all these Desi Anwar proclaimed it as an effective communication of the president. But, there was more to it than that. This was a speech presentation done by a president with a hat in hand. The psychological effect of the public to the way of thinking of the president has made them accepted the idea of inferiority complexes.
A story about a supplier shop might best illustrate the problem of Jokowi's speech. The story went on to say that a shopkeeper was telling a customer that he had leather, nails, thread and needle in his shop to sell him. The customer wondered why the shopkeeper did not make a pair of shoes instead, since it was a pair of shoes that customers was looking for. This story is intended to pinpoint the failure of "our CEO" to utilize the resouces of our nation. He fails to consider the available knowledge. He fails to muster the power and strength of this nation. People in this country are starving in the middle of plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it hasn't got the knowledge that would save it, but because the leader has a low-self-esteem to use the knowledge of his nation. The media particularly thejakartaglobe.com ought to remind the president that he is no shopkeeper, and that his nation has the first claim of its natural resources before the foreigners. And that I believe is one of his responsibilities.
