Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 99

Indonesia Honors a Political Cartoonist
with a Postage Stamp
In March, 2000 Indonesia honored cartoonist Wayan Gunasta Pendet, better
known by his pen name of Gun Gun, with the postage stamp shown in Figure 1.
The caricature on the stamp is not the artist but rather his trademark character, I
Brewok, whose name translates as “Whiskers”. What is quite surprising and im
pressive is that Gun Gun is a political cartoonist more like Garry Trudeau of
Dootishury fame than one who aims to win universal appeal by not offending
anyone, as Charles Schulz has achieved with Peanuts .
This article will focus on some of Gun Gun’s most important cartoons during
two historical periods. The first section will focus on problems inherent in the
policy of President Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime (1966-1998) to de
velop Bali’s tourism infrastructure very rapidly in order to make tourism Indonesia’s
largest earner of foreign exchange. The second section will focus on problems
inherent in implementing the reform agenda advocated by the coalition of political
parties that won Indonesia’s 1999 parliamentary election (its first relatively free
and fair one since 1955) and got two of its leaders elected president and vice presi
dent later that year.
Suharto’s Tourism Exploitation Policies
Three of Gun Gun’s cartoons that cleverly drew attention to the problems
inherent in the ways Suharto’s corrupt and repressive regime sought to exploit the
foreign currency earning potential of Bali’s tourism attraction were presented in
the February, 2001 issue of Popular Culture Review Three more will be presented
and interpreted in this section.
A Most Dangerous Inundation
In the Figure 2 cartoon. Gun Gun warns that four powerful outside forces are
threatening Bali’s all-important traditional cultural values and behaviors. A tradi
tionally dressed Balinese man (who symbolizes Bali’s traditional rural, agricul
tural villagers) is panicking in the middle of an intersection because he sees that he
is about to be inundated by frightening waves of people coming from all four
directions. On the left he is confronted by a flood of strange-looking foreign tour
ists. On the right is a towering wave of outside investors with suitcase-sized brief
cases that probably contain the plans for tourism development projects—plus the
money to pay the bribes necessary to obtain the permits to build them.