Word: faithful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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President Sukarno has never been a man who liked to take orders or even suggestions, however calm and collected the voice. From the start, he has held a mystic faith that he, and only he, speaks for the Indonesian people. "Don't you know that I am an extension of the people's tongue?" he demanded of a critic once. "The Indonesian people will eat stones if I tell them to." His charm can lay ghosts, his oratory stills critics, his famed "luck" has led him safely through imprisonment, exile, uprisings, attempted assassination and narrowly averted coups...
From his father, Sukarno learned the Moslem faith and the seeds of nationalism; from his mother, the long cycle of Hindu epics that have sustained Bali in its centuries-old resistance to the Mohammedanism of the surrounding islands...
...combination left him securely dedicated to no faith. As a member of the priyayi, or gentry, the class that monopolized the few bureaucratic jobs left open by the Dutch to natives, he was socially far above the marhaen, or peasants, who were to become his most ardent followers...
...Faith & Doubt. Everywhere the new President was beset by signs of liberty sliding out of control. The endless sweep of the frontier had recently been shut off; the trend was on to the tenement. Capital, levering itself out of the chaos of cutthroat competition, was forming monoliths of monopoly. Labor was adolescent, agitated, angry. Government at best was minimal and at worst could be bought. The radical vote was rising. Said Theodore Roosevelt: "There had been in our country a riot of individualistic materialism . . ." But the darker portent, as the new President saw it. was that the nation was lurching...
Trouble is, the picture is hardly worth stealing. Based on a Good Housekeeping story by Nelia Gardner White, it assumes in its audience an unquestioning acceptance of those articles of faith that have made women's-magazine fiction what it is today: I) men are such babies; 2) women know best; 3) children are cute; 4) marriage is the continuation of childhood by other means; 5) home is where the hurt is, and the most practical thing a woman can put in her trousseau is a crying towel; 6) love makes up for everything, even for not helping with...