Listen, and I’ll tell you a story about Dadang.
Dadang was thirty-five years old, and he lived in Karawang,
and like a lot of men who’ve been married long enough to know the difference
between Saturday night and Monday morning, he made a mistake. His wife’s best
friend—Mrs. Etik, thirty and ripe as summer fruit—came over to confide in his
wife. Only somehow, someway, Dadang ended up doing the confiding. Or something
like that. Something that involved sweat and guilt and the kind of temporary
insanity that feels, in the moment, like the only sane thing in the world.
When his wife found the evidence on his phone (and they
always find it, don’t they? The phones remember everything, like patient little
witnesses), Dadang didn’t even try to lie. “But it was only once!” he said, as
if that magic word—once—could erase what had been done.
That story ran in Pos Kota on April 9, 2021, in a
column called Nah Ini Dia. And if you think that’s just another tabloid
tale, another bit of garbage journalism for garbage people, well, friend, you’re
missing something. You’re missing the whole point.
Because Nah Ini Dia is a mirror. Not a clean
one—nothing in Jakarta is clean, not really—but a cracked, dirty mirror that
shows you something true anyway. Maybe because it’s cracked and dirty.
The Yellow Sickness
Yellow journalism. The term makes you think of jaundice,
doesn’t it? Of something diseased. And maybe it is. Or maybe it’s just honest
about the disease that was already there, festering under the skin of polite
society.
Back in the 1890s—when America was still young and stupid
and convinced of its own righteousness—two newspaper magnates named Pulitzer
and Hearst figured out what every carnival barker and snake-oil salesman
already knew: people will pay good money to see the freaks. Only the freaks
weren’t in cages. They were in boardrooms and bedrooms, in alleyways and
churches. The freaks were everywhere, and all you had to do was point a
spotlight at them.
They used sensational headlines. Crime stories. Sex
scandals. They had a comic strip called The Yellow Kid, and that’s where
the name came from, but the real yellow—the real sickness—was in the reading
public’s appetite. That hunger that never quite gets satisfied, no matter how
much you feed it.
Pos Kota understood this. The paper started in 1970,
founded by a man named Harmoko who had the sense to go down into the crowded
neighborhoods—Tanjung Priok, Jatinegara, places where the working poor lived
their desperate little lives—and listen. What he heard wasn’t political
theory or economic analysis. What he heard was gossip. Crime. Betrayal. The
small, vicious dramas that play out when people are pressed together too tight,
like rats in a laboratory maze.
The first issue printed 3,500 copies. Within months,
circulation exploded to 60,000. By 2005, over 600,000 copies sold every day.
Two and a half million readers. That’s a lot of people holding up that cracked
mirror, looking at their reflections, and pretending they’re looking at someone
else.
The Keeper of Secrets
His name was Gunarto Tjakra Sutino, but everyone called him
Gunarso, and he was the sole writer of Nah Ini Dia for over three
decades. Think about that. One man, feeding the beast, story after story, year
after year. A religious studies teacher turned journalist, he joined Pos
Kota in 1977 and started writing the column in November 1987.
He had a system. Every story followed a pattern—predictable
as a heartbeat, comforting as a familiar nightmare. First, you introduce the
characters through stereotypes. The names are fake (they got sued once, back in
the ‘90s, and learned their lesson), but the types are eternal. The womanizing
man: “old but still spicy,” “an old engine freshly serviced.” The seductive
woman: “a Spanish guitar figure,” “a blooming widow.”
These weren’t just descriptions. They were justifications.
When you describe a woman’s body in those terms, you’re telling the reader that
the man couldn’t help himself. She was asking for it. She was a trap, waiting
to be sprung. And maybe, in the dark corners of the collective unconscious,
that’s exactly what people wanted to believe.
Then came the conflict. The affair. The betrayal. But here’s
where it gets interesting—where Gunarso showed his craft. You couldn’t describe
sex explicitly. Not in a newspaper. Not even in Pos Kota. So he used
metaphors. Automotive terms. Food. Sports.
“Engine overhaul.”
“Sampling the neighbor’s vegetable stew.”
“Scoring a goal.”
These phrases did something clever—they satisfied the
censors while firing up the imagination. They made sex into something
mechanical, consumable, competitive. They made it safe and dirty at the same
time.
The Raid
Every story ended the same way. The raid.
You could set your watch by it. Someone always found out. A
neighbor. A security guard. The legal spouse. And then came the exposure—the
public shaming, the half-naked flight, the hiding under beds. Slapstick comedy
with a moral underneath, like a razor blade in an apple.
The raid served multiple purposes. It was punishment. It was
entertainment. It was proof that the universe had rules, even if those rules
only seemed to apply to the poor bastards who got caught.
In fancy academic language, you might call it “symbolic
justice.” But really, it was something older and meaner than that. It was the
village mob, the public stoning, the scarlet letter. It was the knowledge that
someone, somewhere, was watching. And when you stepped out of line—when you let
your appetites get the better of you—you’d end up in Pos Kota, your
shame printed in bold red letters for everyone to see.
The Language of the Street
The column didn’t just report on the working class. It spoke
like them. Words like naksir, bini, ngutang, doyan,
sembrono—street slang mixed with proper Indonesian, creating something
informal and intimate. It was the language of bus terminals and coffee stalls,
of neighborhoods where everybody knew everybody else’s business.
This wasn’t an accident. Language is power, and Nah Ini
Dia used that power to collapse hierarchies. A corrupt official or wealthy
man, once exposed in the column’s pages, became just another fool caught with
his pants down. Status meant nothing. Money meant nothing. You were all equal
in the eyes of the raid.
For readers who spent their days being talked down to—by
bosses, by bureaucrats, by the educated elite—this was revolutionary. Not
politically revolutionary. Nothing that would bring down the government or
change the system. But it was a small, sweet taste of revenge. The mighty
brought low. The hypocrite exposed.
The Global Appetite
This hunger—this need for other people’s
downfalls—isn’t uniquely Indonesian. It’s universal as original sin.
In Victorian England, The Illustrated Police News
published graphic illustrations of murders and animal attacks. Working-class
readers devoured them, while the respectable middle class tutted and called
them trash. Sound familiar?
In modern Britain, tabloids like The Sun and the
now-defunct News of the World made fortunes off sex scandals and
celebrity mishaps. When they exposed Formula One boss Max Mosley’s sex parties,
were they serving the public interest? Or were they just giving people what
they’d always wanted—a peek behind the curtain, a glimpse of the powerful at
their most vulnerable and absurd?
In France, they had a whole tradition called fait divers—strange
incidents, bizarre crimes, accidents that revealed the random cruelty of fate.
Roland Barthes, being French and intellectual, called it “modern mythology.”
But really, it was the same old story. People looking at other people’s
disasters and thinking, “There but for the grace of God.”
Nah Ini Dia belonged to this tradition. It was
Jakarta’s version of the same dark mirror, reflecting the same human appetites
dressed up in local clothes.
Why It Survives
The column has lasted over five decades. Think about that.
Governments have risen and fallen. Technologies have transformed beyond
recognition. But Nah Ini Dia keeps going, feeding the same hunger it
always has.
There’s a German word for it: schadenfreude. Pleasure
in others’ misfortune. It’s not a nice thing to admit about yourself—that you
enjoy watching people fail, that their suffering gives you a little thrill—but
there it is. Human nature, raw and undisguised.
For the working poor of Jakarta, struggling through their
exhausted days, Nah Ini Dia offered something valuable. Not just
entertainment, though it was that. Not just moral lessons, though those were
there too. It offered certainty.
In a chaotic world where the powerful seemed to play by
different rules, where justice was a joke and fairness was a fairy tale, the
column provided a kind of cosmic order. In Nah Ini Dia, cheaters always
got caught. Affairs always ended in raids. Sin was always punished.
It was a lie, of course. In the real world, plenty of people
got away with murder—sometimes literally. But it was a useful lie. A
comforting lie. The kind of lie that lets you sleep at night, believing that
somewhere, somehow, someone is keeping score.
The Mirror Cracks
So here’s what Nah Ini Dia really is, when you strip
away the academic analysis and the media criticism and the hand-wringing about
journalistic standards.
It’s a window into the human soul. Not the noble parts—not
the courage or compassion or capacity for love. The other parts. The parts that
take pleasure in others’ pain. The parts that judge and condemn while secretly
wondering if we’d do the same thing, given half a chance. The parts that need
to believe in moral order, even if we have to invent it ourselves.
Dadang from Karawang thought it was only once. That magic
word. Once. As if that made a difference. As if the universe kept a
tally and gave you credit for restraint.
But the universe doesn’t keep score. People do. And when
they write your story in Pos Kota, when they turn your private shame
into public entertainment, they’re not really judging you.
They’re judging themselves.
And finding themselves, by comparison, just a little bit
better. Just a little bit safer. Just far enough from the mirror’s edge that
they don’t have to see their own reflection staring back.
That’s the real horror, isn’t it? Not that we’re fascinated
by scandal and betrayal and the messy failures of human decency. But that we need
it. We need those stories like we need air. We need to see other people fall so
we can feel, for just a moment, like we’re still standing.
And Nah Ini Dia, for over fifty years, has been happy
to oblige.
Sleep tight, friends. And remember: they’re always watching.
Always waiting. Always ready to turn your worst moment into their breakfast
entertainment.
Because that’s what the mirror does. It shows you exactly
what you are.
Even when you’re trying very hard not to look.
Comments
Post a Comment