Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 50

46 Popular Culture Review three motorcycles. This campaign strategy worked especially well in the Carenang sub-district in which twenty precincts and four villages delivered all their votes to Golkar. Overall, Golkar raised its share of the votes from 57% (in the 1992 election) to 72%.^ Thus, it seems apparent that the cartoonist was targeting a serious defect of the political system Suharto imposed on Indonesia after his troops took over the country (in response to an alleged communist party coup attempt) in 1965. It is too easy for Americans to criticize Indonesians who sell their votes for material gain. I like to ask my students whether they would vote for a different presidential candidate in response to a rival party’s promise to install a satellite television dish on their dormitory building (plus hook every room up to it) free of charge if everyone who lived there voted for that party’s candidate. (This was an actual situation reported^ by a graduate student doing research in Indonesia in 1997; her building’s residents yielded to the temptation!) Very few of my students claim that they would turn down such an election campaign bribe offer. I hope a U.S. candidate like Donald Trump doesn’t read this, buy a satellite television company, and launch a successful presidential campaign! The fact that the Indonesian government promoted the 1997 elections as a “festival of democracy” probably gave Tusuaria the idea of using the Hindu temple festival ceremony as a metaphor in this cartoon. That this cheerful government slogan is a shameless example of doublethink is made clear by the following facts: 1. Only two opposition parties were allowed to contest the election against the government-sponsored Golkar party. 2. When Megawati Sukarnoputri appeared to pose a potentially serious challenge as leader of one of these opposition parties, she was deposed from her position by a “government-backed coup”.^ 3. Direct cirticism of government policies or government posit