Jakarta Night Quotes

American movies, English books - remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.

The night skyline was stunning. I could see the Monas and Istiqlal Mosque bathed in brilliant white lights and a dozen other places of cultural and historical significance. It’s an amazing, beautiful world we live in … despite Uncle Google’s abysmal view of American schools, the security checkpoints and vehicle inspections that seem to be everywhere, and the need to be vigilant because of the things we do to each other.

In a game, there is a main character raised within American culture: he speaks in slang, lives for sex and pleasure, feels "successful" if the opposite sex chases after him, shows off by driving cars and motorcycles, obtains respect if he buys a yacht, worships money and wealth, has numerous tattoos and ornaments, spends his nights in clubs and casinos, feels "powerful" when he holds a gun, makes racist jokes, swears in every sentence, thinks and acts like he is at the center of the universe, and so on. Even if this game is produced in the United States, due to the fact that the whole world has now been made interconnected and interdependent, it easily spreads and influences other unconscious peoples. A child in Jakarta, Stockholm, or Prague begins to use the exact same sayings and do the exact same actions born of Brooklyn streets, Californian frat parties, and Los Angeles gambling centers. The result is that even the culture of a completely different country on the other side of the world ends up becoming American; the narrator in the game becomes the very thing children dream of, teenagers chase after, and adults turn into reality.