{"id":330,"date":"2004-02-11T01:26:19","date_gmt":"2004-02-11T08:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=330"},"modified":"2004-02-11T01:26:19","modified_gmt":"2004-02-11T08:26:19","slug":"free-brunei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2004\/02\/free-brunei\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Brunei"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it comes down to it, if somebody were to put a gun to my head and credibly demand to know my one favorite bar above all others or else, I’d have to go right ahead and betray Bouche Bar<\/a> in favor of International Bar<\/a>, on 1st between 7th and St. Marks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yes, the place looks like a biker dive, with cheap-beer neon in the window to scare away tourists; yes, it has blinking Christmas lights strewn year-long along the length of the railway carriage shaped space; and yes, it has a yellowed map of the world in the back on which Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union are forever forces to be reckoned with; but boyo what generous cheap martinis! And the jukebox is the best in NYC — it’s where I first heard Stereolab<\/a> — and they let you bring pizza slices into the bar to have with your drinks on rainy winter sunday afternoons… And the bartenders all just walked off the set of a Suicide Girls<\/a> shoot.<\/p>\n

One of them used to bartend at Downtown Beirut<\/a> a few blocks up<\/a> the roadThe perfectly adequate but tame bar Standard<\/em> has taken its place.<\/span>, that legendary but now defunct punk rock bar from a time when the East Village still scared people. She took her attitude seriously: When American moviestar Buddhists successfully ignited the Free Tibet<\/a> campaign in the late-middle nineties\"ft.gif\"<\/span>, she put up a sign behind the till that read, “Free Tibet (with every drink)”. To me, that line will forever nail our jaded end-of-the-millenium take on the world, from a time when people still smoked and 911 was a Porsche model.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to today’s Swedish papers, which ganged up on their king for comments he made<\/a> while visiting a fellow monarch, the Sultan of Brunei: King Carl Gustaf thought Brunei<\/a> a lovely place, “a country which is much more open than one may imagine,” with an absolutely delightful host of a Sultan who “holds an open audience where anyone who wants to can come and present his wishes, and presumably his complaints also.”<\/p>\n

The problem? The Swedish government considers Brunei to be a dictatorship, and King Gustaf, politically neutered by law, is not supposed to make normative statements about anything weightier than the weather, unless it’s about global warming, in which case he better shut up and not sweat either.<\/p>\n

Except that Brunei, an absolute monarchy, is filthy rich, and the Sultan has more than enough money to rule his 350,000 subjects through patronage. The human rights situation in Brunei, compared to all the other countries of the region, is really quite good — certainly better than any other Muslim country that I can think of — and improving. The 2002 Amnesty International country report<\/a> documents the release<\/em> of evangelical Christians who were held as prisoners of conscience. The 2003 Amnesty annual report<\/a> does not bother with Brunei at all; few countries manage that featSweden isn’t one of them. Both the 2002<\/a> and the 2003<\/a> Sweden country reports document police brutality, deaths in custody and a suspicious police killing. Going by Amnesty’s numbers, then, you might want to go live in Brunei — and imagine, they have no income tax<\/a>.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

So perhaps it was bit opportunistic to criticize the king for being publicly grateful to his host, especially if in a narrow sense, his comments are not factually incorrect. It is certainly the case that we are not in a situation where the oppressed Bruneian masses are yearning to breathe free, like they do in Tibet; and this in turn frees me to revisit, just for the evening, my jaded views of yore: To all those members of parliament who paraded in front of the cameras, condemning in the strongest possible terms the evils of the Sultan’s regime in a country they had to look up on the map this morning, go ahead, buy yourself<\/a> a Free Brunei T-shirt, or mug. I’m selling at cost, since the Brunei Relief Fund is not short of cash. It should go nicely with that previous icon of jaded chic — the Free Winona T-shirt<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"9804905_B_tn.jpg\"<\/a><\/span>\"9804844_F_tn.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I suspect this whole affair has absolutely nothing to do with Brunei, and everything with the monarchy. Let’s face it: Monarchs, be they Belgian, British, Swedish or Bruneian, have more in common with each other than they do with their subjects — they are born cossetted rich parasites through no fault of their own, but choose to remain so in their adult life, and that is inexcusable. Monarchies symbolize the superiority by birth-right of one man over another. If the monarch also wields power, as in Brunei, this at least makes sense according to some internal logic. But in a constitutional monarchy, this symbolism is a jarring anachronism, because ostensibly, democracies are meritocracies.<\/p>\n

Maybe I’ll go make some Free Belgium T-shirts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When it comes down to it, if somebody were to put a gun to my head and credibly demand to know my one favorite bar above all others or else, I’d have to go right ahead and betray Bouche Bar … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-economics","category-sweden"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-5k","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}