MBG, Mas Bahlil Ganteng

 

Here is something you need to understand about Indonesia, about the particular way laughter moves through a country where laughter has always been a survival skill: it spreads the way certain fevers spread, not because the joke is funny—though it often is, God help us—but because it is true. Because truth, compressed into a pop song or a three-letter acronym on someone’s cracked phone screen, travels faster than any official denial. Faster, certainly, than rice.

The song was called “MBG, Mas Bahlil Ganteng.” Ganteng means handsome. Whether the song meant it sincerely is a question you probably already know the answer to.

It blew up the way things blow up in the feed age, which is to say instantaneously and without mercy, a brushfire that crosses from telephone to telephone, WhatsApp group to WhatsApp group, before the man being mocked has had his morning coffee. Bahlil Lahadalia—Energy and Mineral Resources Minister, a man of considerable visibility and, depending on your politics, either considerable accomplishment or considerable audacity—watched it happen in real time. You have to give him points for speed, at least. He went public almost immediately, urging people, with the particular tone of a man trying to sound reasonable while something unpleasant crawls up the back of his neck, not to weaponize the acronym. MBG stood for Makan Bergizi Gratis, you see. Free Nutritious Meals. The crown jewel of President Prabowo Subianto’s administration, the signature promise of a campaign that had felt, at its peak moments, almost genuinely optimistic. Now somebody had turned the acronym into Bahlil’s nickname and set it to a beat, and it was everywhere, it was just everywhere, and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it.

Maybe you find that funny. Most Indonesians did. But funny and harmless are not the same thing, and Political Communications expert Gun Gun Heryanto, a man who had presumably watched enough viral moments calcify into nothing, pointed out the other edge of the blade: songs like this become the story. The song becomes the referendum, not the policy. Three million people share a joke, and the joke swallows what it was originally about—the LPG shortages that had left families cooking over open flames and improvised solutions, the fuel distribution failures that spoke to something rotten in the management of the country’s most essential resources, the MBG rollout’s grinding, stumbling, increasingly expensive progress toward whatever it was eventually going to become. Seventy-one trillion rupiah already spent. Seventy-one trillion. Numbers that large stop feeling real after a while. They become abstract, like the national debt of a country you’ve never visited. The song, though—the song felt real. The song you could hum.

Political analyst Adi Prayitno offered a more generous read of the situation, with the careful optimism of a man who has learned to find silver linings in unusual places. The spotlight, he suggested, might actually be working in Bahlil’s favor. The public had begun to absorb him as what Prayitno called a fixture of pop-politics—a figure who had managed, through some alchemy of scandal and persistence and sheer unavoidable presence, to charm the collective subconscious. This is one of the stranger phenomena of democratic life: the politician who survives long enough and noisily enough eventually becomes a kind of folk character, like a recurring villain in a soap opera you’ve been watching so long you’d actually miss him if he disappeared.

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But Indonesia has been here before. Indonesia has always been here.

Consider Harmoko. If you are of a certain age, that name lands like a stone in still water, and you know exactly the shape of the ripples. Minister of Information for three consecutive terms under Suharto’s regime—from 1983 to 1997, which is a very long time to be the official voice of a story that was, in significant portions, a lie—Harmoko became the face you could not escape. State television was his medium and his weapon and, you sensed, his genuine love. He hosted Kelompencapir, the information broadcasts for farmers and fishermen that were designed to show the regime’s achievements to the people most likely to believe them, and Safari Ramadan, and the great loyalty rallies called Temu Kader, and through all of it he projected a kind of relentless, bovine confidence, a man who had made his peace with the specific moral compromises his career required and had arrived on the other side of that peace looking, if not exactly happy, then certainly well-fed.

He began nearly every public address the same way. “According to instructions from Mr. President.” It became a verbal tic. A signature. Eventually it became a joke, the way a person’s most distinctive feature—a laugh, a limp, a habit of touching their own chin—becomes the thing impressionists reach for first, because it is the essence of the person compressed into a single reproducible gesture.

The pro-democracy activists got to work on his name. This was not difficult. Indonesian political satire has always run on acronyms the way other cultures run on cartoons or protest songs; there is something in the compression of a man’s name into an accusation that satisfies a particular need, that says we see you in a way longer arguments sometimes cannot manage. They made Harmoko into Hari-hari Omong Kosong. Day after Day of Empty Talk. It stuck with the adhesive quality of a name that feels less like an insult than a clinical observation.

By 1998—by the time the Reformasi movement was tearing through the country like something long overdue, like a storm that had been building over the horizon for years while everyone tried to pretend it was just clouds—Harmoko had become a caricature of a specific and recognizable type of human being: the man who has served power so long and so completely that he has trouble imagining what he would say if power were not listening. The underground satirical short story “Mohon Petunjuk”—Asking for Guidance—put it perfectly, with the economy of a joke that is also a portrait. A flight attendant knocks Harmoko’s hat to the floor. She moves to retrieve it. He barks at her to stop.

Why? she asks.

I must seek guidance from Mr. President first.

It’s funny. It’s supposed to be funny. But there’s something in it that isn’t entirely funny, something that sits in the back of the throat like a swallowed thing. Because Harmoko was a real man, and the country he helped maintain was a real country, and the students being jailed and the newspapers being shut down were real students and real newspapers, and “Day after Day of Empty Talk” was—under the joke, beneath the joke, the substrate from which the joke grew—an attempt to name something true about how power works: that it fills the air with sound, with explanations and justifications and mandatory catchphrases, specifically so that nothing essential can be heard.

Years later, on Kick Andy, retired and relaxed and apparently unhurt by the whole thing, Harmoko shrugged it off. “Only a handful of people called me that,” he said. He preferred the other versions people had invented: Hari-hari Omong Komunikasi, for his ministerial portfolio. Hari-hari Omong Koperasi, for his work with local cooperatives. He presented these alternatives the way a man presents evidence at a trial where he is also the judge, calm and persuasive and absolutely certain of the verdict.

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If Harmoko was the voice, Admiral Sudomo was the fist. There is always a voice and there is always a fist; this is not a controversial observation about authoritarian systems so much as a description of how they are structured, like noting that a door has both hinges and a lock. Sudomo ran Kopkamtib, the internal security agency, and he ran it with the efficiency of a man who finds deep professional satisfaction in his work. When the student protests erupted in Jakarta in March of 1978—thousands of young people in the streets calling for Suharto’s removal, which must have felt, in that particular historical moment, roughly as achievable as calling for the moon to stop rising—Sudomo moved. He blacked out the press. He sent troops to the campuses. He arrested 143 student leaders, and if you were one of those students, and you lay on a cot in whatever facility you’d been delivered to, you might have had occasion to think about how a government that calls itself a government of the people manages, with such astonishing regularity, to arrest the people.

But even Sudomo—terrifying, efficient, unmovable Sudomo—could not insulate himself from the popular wit. Because the wit was not trying to destroy him, exactly. It was doing something more cunning than that. It was taking him apart and reassembling him into something manageable, something that could be held in the mind without the weight of what he actually represented crushing you flat.

SDSB was the state lottery. Sumbangan Dana Sosial Berhadiah, if you want the official version. Highly addictive, state-run, available to anyone who had a little money and a willingness to believe, the way such things always are, that this time might be different. The public repurposed the acronym with the ease of people who have been doing exactly this for generations: Sudomo Datang, Semua Beres. Sudomo Arrives, Everything’s Taken Care Of. A nod to his reputation as Suharto’s fixer, the man you called when a problem needed to be made not-a-problem anymore. The activists pushed further: Soeharto Dalang Segala Bencana. Suharto, the Mastermind of All Disasters.

By associating the terrifying gravity of a military enforcer with the tawdry, slightly shameful excitement of a state lottery, the public performed a kind of psychic judo—they took the weight of their fear and used it to throw something, to redirect it into laughter, which is so much lighter and so much easier to carry. This is what political satire actually does, when it’s working. Not tear power down. Not yet. But make it temporarily possible to breathe. To look at the face on the television and think: I know what you are, and I have a name for it, and the name is funnier than you.

Sudomo’s private life provided its own material. He was 63 when he married Fransisca Diah Widowati, a 31-year-old former model from Yogyakarta. The jokes came immediately, with the speed and inevitability of a tide: Sisca Datang, Sudomo Bahagia. Sisca Arrives, Sudomo is Happy. Sisca Datang, Sudomo Bertekuk Lutut. Sisca Arrives, Sudomo Falls to His Knees. The marriage lasted four years. The jokes outlived it by decades. Which tells you something, maybe, about the relative durability of institutions.

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General Soerjadi Soedirdja was a different species of New Order animal: the technocrat in uniform, the man who could quote infrastructure reports from memory and who lay awake at night—you believe this, somehow—genuinely troubled by Jakarta’s gridlock, by the inefficiency of a city where buses sat paralyzed while rail lines carried a fraction of what they should. He served as Governor of Jakarta from 1992 to 1997, a civilian office occupied by an active military officer, which was the New Order’s Dwifungsi doctrine made flesh: the military everywhere, in everything, because the military had decided that the military’s presence was what stability required. He built public housing, and some people praised him for it, and the satirical meat grinder processed his name anyway: Suruh Apa Saja Jadi. Order Him to Do Anything, and It Gets Done. The submission was the point. The submission was always the point.

His dream was the subway. He wrote about it in his memoir with the frustrated longing of a man who can see clearly what needs to happen and cannot make anyone with the necessary authority agree with him. “In Jakarta,” he lamented, “our transport priorities are completely upside down.” The rail system carrying a fraction of its potential load. The buses locked in gridlock alongside the private vehicles they were supposed to replace. He could see the solution. He had the blueprints. He did not have the political will, which is the currency that actually builds things, more valuable than money and far harder to manufacture.

He left office. The blueprints remained. Other governors came and went, each one inheriting the dream like a peculiar family heirloom nobody quite knew how to display. The ground was finally broken in 2012. The subway opened to the public in 2019—more than two decades after Soerjadi had sat in his gubernatorial office, looking at diagrams, willing the thing into existence through sheer administrative desire.

He did not ride it, probably. Or maybe he did—a retired general, older now, somewhere in a Jakarta that finally had the thing he’d always wanted for it, standing on a platform in a station that exists because someone, eventually, agreed with him. There’s something almost poignant in that, in the way policy moves so slowly and laughter moves so fast, in the way a man’s greatest professional ambition can outlive his tenure by twenty-two years and arrive in the world without his name on it.

But the jokes—the jokes have his name on them still.

They always do.