Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror
II.iv
I am writing this poem
about the 1965 massacre
of Indonesians by Indonesians
which in an article ten years later
I could not publish
except in Nottingham England with
a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since
himself been murdered
no one will say by whom but I will guess
seeing as this is
precisely poetry
the CIA's and now Peking's Cambodian
assassins the Khmer Serai
In that article I estimated
a half-million or more
killed in this period
it took Noam in a book
suppressed by its first publisher
to quote Admiral Sudomo
of the Indonesian junta
more than 500,000
and now Amnesty International
many more than one million
so much for my balanced prose
But none of us experienced
that pervasive smell of death
those impassable rivers
clogged with corpses
Robert Lowell is that why
even you a pacifist
had so little to say about it?
Or you gentle reader
let us examine carefully
the good reasons
you and I
don't enjoy reading this
Like the time
in the steep Engadine
we saw the silent avalanche
fall away from the mountain
hair and eyebrows
the first to feel
the murmurations
of the spreading
killer wind
IV.i
Mégève coming down
beside a rainbow
into a shower
glissade 1000 meters
on wet grass
laughter at falling safe
think married a Venezuelan
and lives near Lausanne
tell me now you
with homes in the mountains
who are at hand
and know all things
where we hear only rumor
of the captains
at Bilderberg meetings
one has to sound
like a John Bircher to talk about
between the Rockefellers
the Agnellis and the Rothschilds
at whose Megeve resort
we were lodged in uncomfrtable
luxury as delegates
to the International Student Service
Bilderberg meetings
supplying Prince Bernhard with
an almost unrivalled network
not just for the European Movement
financed with German counterpart funds
but also for the recruitment
of old intelligence contacts
as conduits for Lockheed payoffs
through the Temperate Zone
Research Foundation
for Antelope Cobbler the Italian premier
which supplimented the CIA's
financial support
to parties canidates
and incumbent leaders
of almost every political persuasion
and under Sukarno
which is why I am telling all this --
not just recalling
the swampy fields
around the Rockefeller lodge
in the Connecticut valley
where the Liberty Lobby discovered
the Bilderbergers in '67 --
Jakarta payments deflected
four months before the coup
at legal risks to Lockheed
towards the very wealthy
General Alamsjah
epitome of
the military entrepreneur
whom a Lockheed memo
called the second man
the coup made at once
funds available to Suharto
a Lockheed web
extending from Geneva to Jakarta
millions to Japanese officials
where every move made
was approved by Washington
the money through Deak
back to Shig Katayama
in the Cayman Islands
the Wildlife Fund the Sultan
Castle Bank in the Bahamas
Helliwell narcotics CIA
the name Richard M. Nixon on the list
It was at a Bilderberg
meeting that Prince Bernhard
was introduced by Baron
Edmond de Rothschild
to Tibor Rosenbaum of the ICB
the International Credit Bank
(later exposed by the Baron
after the Vesco coup
as a source of secret funds
for the Mossad
Israel's intelligence service
and one of the country's primary
weapons brokers)
and whose colleague Ed Levinson
was the power behind
the Havana Riviera
and the Serv-U Corporation
of the Bobby Baker payoffs
which began to be exposed
in November 1963 --
My book would have asked
as the Warren Commission staff
working for Allen Dulles
was unable to
why Levinson's pit-boss
McWillie gambler and murderer
from the old Binion gang
in Dallas and Fort Worth
who had a fix with Mr. Big
I don't think we'd better
go into that phase of it
twice brought to Havana
most likely as a courier
his close friend
Jack Ruby
A dumb subject
The book went into galleys
and was photographed
for the Pocket Books spring catalogue
but never published
freeing me
to write this poem
Do you remember yes
just for an instant
the sun warm on our shoulders
and beyond the mists
rising from the meadow
Mont Blanc
IV.ii
From the Bay Bridge
on the way home from the opera
you could look down on the searchlights
of the Oakland Army Terminal
where they loaded the containers
of pellet-bombs and napalm
into black Japanese ships
over which the cranes
bent like anxious surgeons
in the calm and glassy night
People of good will
of whom at first there were many
were willing to sign petitions
or to help in drafting
the letter to the Times
about how six months
they had moved from true to false
reports of the North Vietnamese
negotiating position
that the letter never published
and the music changing
bonfires to still the streets
the first smudges of tear gas
the Yellow Submarine
(acid in Bir Sur
Allen kneeling to pray
for Johnson's health)
at the rock poetry festival
no sensations from my first joint
except for the difference
between the salt and pepper
I felt being shaken
on my bare left arm
Owsley by parachute
at the Human Be-in
Mika on Carole's shoulders
one mine so they could see
the Brave New World
worms in the rose
the party's hostess
some new drug in the basement
crying like a child
CIA personnel
helping local chemists
set up LCD labs
in the Bay Area
to monitor events
STP Serenity
from Dow Chemical
and the Edgewood Arsenal
like being shot out of a gun
men with their Sunday morning
rifle range target practice
Black Panthers Ku Klux Klan
women who shyly hinted
at ineffable orgies
of acid nakedness
Ed Sanders the Fugs
investigative poetics
Out demons out
with no respect whatsoever
for the unassailable logic
of the next step
two hundred pounds of daisies
from Peggy Hitchcock
to skybomb the Pentagon
Fort Funston Beach
the Barb's first nude-in
under the fixed gaze of the mounted police
dunes of iceplants and callas
linnets in the sun and mist
(To shoot a policeman
is a sacred act)
the women in seaweed and surf
wading as if to be washed
as clean as seals
IV.viii
Clifford Geertz having just
reread your Notes
on the Balinese cockfight
how you were first accepted
by cautious villagers
after you all fled
from the Javanese constabulary
and how slaughter
in the cock ring itself
after red pepper
is stuffed down their beaks
and up their anuses
joins pride to selfhood
selfhood to cocks
and cocks to destruction
a blood sacrifice
offered to the demons
to pacify their cannibal hunger
depicting how things are among men
not literally but almost worse
imaginatively
what it says is
it is of these emotions
that society is built
and of the combat
between terrible witch Rangda
her eyes bulging like boils
and the endearing monster Barong
a clash between the malignant
and the ridiculous
It is not your belief in men
every last one of them are cultural artifacts
that I now question
or even that the imposition
of meaning on life
is the major end of human existence
that Virgilian flourish
in your footnote to Max Weber
but your recurring interpretations
of the Balinese massacre
after what you choose to call
the bungled coup and its savage aftermath
My complaint is not
of your early field project
for Ford and the CIA-funded
Center at MIT
in which you preceded Pauker
or your commissioned study
on which local elites
would best play a role
in Rostow's pre-take-off period
I will not cast that stone
from this front window
of the world's largest weapons lab
you who know about
puputan and Tjalonarang
have the right to recall
the fact of the massacre
through the medium of the cockfight
the theatricality of trance
but why did you write
several hundred thousand
people were massacred
largely villagers by other villagers
though there were some
army executions as well
when even Shaplen admits
the murders in Bali
did not start until early December
that is until after
Colonel Edhie's commandos
with unit-names like Dracula
had finished in East Java
the army began it
then handed the job over to the Balinese
that is to the special teams
set up under Nasution's
and Suharto's orders
and finally stopped the bloodletting
as the smell of burning houses
overpowered the customary
fragrance of the rich island flora
Clifford Geertz sometimes
the world is not as mysterious
as you and I might wish
why can you not write
as straightforwardly as Time
about the land to which you returned
on a junta visa
and how can you write
about the integrative revolution
in a book that is indexed
to sixty-one countries
Paraguay the Soviet Union
but not the United States?
IV.ix
When some toys from the West
where stolen out of the back seat
of our Peugeot in Saska Kepa
I went without thinking
to the Warsaw police
A moustached officer
wrote down everything
I had to say
which was very little
and then asked me
Was the door locked?
I said I had no idea
probably not and he said
Prosze Pana excuse me
but it would be good in the future
to keep your doors locked
Our children are not used
to seeing toys from the west
and you do not want
to encourage them in crime
those Sunday walks with
Cassie in her blue pram
the well-dressed housewives
offering in illegal dollars
twice what we paid for it
I told the officer
I was withdrawing my complaint
He smiled and began to talk
about his life as a policeman
how much easier it had been
after Stalin had died
in those days no one
wanted to talk to us
even our own children
sometimes mistrusting us
despite what they learned at school
We talked for two hours
and I think of him often
as I read in the papers
of Solidarnosc suppressed
how those must be
privileged moments
one can so transcend history
how today he would not dare
to have such a conversation
nor I have the heart
And yet those two hours
in that ill-furnished precinct
seem somehow more true
than the street battles since
My own life is easier
no longer having to be consul
I suspect that on our side
officials of U.S. Steel
IV.xvii
And now East Timor
where in 1977
the Indonesian minister admits
perhaps 80,000 might have been killed
that is to say one person out of eight
by his own government's paracommandos
these gentle midnight faces
the beetles which crowd their eyes
From 1975 to 1977
the New York Times index
entries for East Timor
dropped from six columns
to five lines
Copyright Credit: “Coming to Jakarta: II.iv, IV.i-ii, IV.viii, IV.xvii” by Peter Dale Scott, from Coming to Jakarta, copyright 1988, Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Source: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1988)