Meanwhile in Bali…..

I had a cup of coffee this morning with my good friend Gerry. We do this fairly regularly and spend much of the time solving the world’s problems, particularly America’s. (Gerry is from Maine and proud of it.)

This morning he commented on my latest post and, bless him, praised it. He recently returned from a trip to his home state and I, as usual, was like a Pavlovian dog, begging for tidbits about what the average American thinks about what is going on, not only in Maine but in America as a whole.

He thought about it for a while before answering. He concluded that Americans, in general, don’t really talk about politics anymore; they’re suffering, he said, from political fatigue. He did mention, though, that some of his friends find it curious, as I seem to have a better handle on the workings of American politics than they do, despite their knowing next to nothing about what goes on in my backyard.

This set me to thinking.

I spend much of each day in Bali trawling through news feeds, podcasts, and anything written about what is going on in a country half a world away, then spend many hours writing about it. Gerry felt I had become obsessed with what was going on in his country, and he’s right.

Yes, being informed is good. But obsessing over a man sliding into what can only be described as King George’s madness is another matter entirely. It can do damage.

To counteract this, I take comfort in the thought that while Donald Trump spends his days fantasising about conquering countries, his nearest neighbour, Canada, is providing a clinic in how mature democracies actually work.

There might yet be hope for America.

America is now run by an authoritarian regime built on fabricated claims of conquest, needless aggression, and crippling tariffs wielded as proof of strength, a desperate apparatus dressed up to conceal its own internal collapse.

Meanwhile, over here in Bali…..

Bali is universally known as a haven of tranquillity, and it absolutely is, as the Balinese are among the calmest and kindest people on the planet. They don’t worry about, or indeed care about, the disruptive antics of Donald J. Trump; they have other things on their minds, namely family and their sacred religion, Hinduism.

Not a bad doctrine to follow, when you think about it. I am, and always will be, a foreigner in a foreign land, a guest in the Indonesian archipelago of seventeen thousand islands, on one in particular that carries five thousand years of history. America, by contrast, is celebrating its 250th birthday, and its leader is behaving like a toddler throwing a tantrum at the party.

Nowhere is that 5000 year history is more visible than in how the Balinese have quietly organised themselves to need almost nothing from the nation’s capital, Jakarta, or from anyone else, for that matter.

Every village in the province is run by a banjar, a hyperlocal community council that predates the Indonesian state by centuries and, frankly, makes most Western local governments look like a shambles. Every married couple belongs to one. Attendance at meetings is not optional, nor is turning up when a neighbour is building a house, burying a relative, or staging a cremation that requires a hundred people. This is gotong royong, or mutual assistance. It’s not a slogan printed on a cap and sold for $40. It’s their complete operating system.

No city council meeting descends into a shouting match over parking permits. Disputes are settled within the banjar under customary law (adat), which has quietly outlasted whatever Jakarta has been doing for decades. Nobody here hires a lawyer. Nobody storms out of meetings, because you simply cannot afford to fall out with people who will, sooner or later, be cooking the rice at your ceremonial funeral.

Balinese life has outlasted the Dutch, the Japanese, and several Indonesian presidents, and I guarantee it will outlast the current occupant of the White House too.

One critical element underpins how a harmonious community works

The subak is the thousand-year-old irrigation cooperative that manages every rice terrace on the island. Now UNESCO heritage-listed, not for the rice terraces themselves, however photogenic, but for the philosophy behind them: Tri Hita Karana, the harmony between people, nature and the divine. It operates flawlessly.

Water flows downhill from a single temple-controlled source, along stone channels. Every farmer, no matter how far down the slope his paddy sits, gets his fair share. The community negotiates the flow, not whoever happens to own the land at the top. Nobody dams the flow for themselves. Nobody sues a neighbour over water rights. It simply gets shared, because the whole system collapses the moment one man decides his rice matters more than everyone else’s.

Compare that to a country where neighbours report each other for displaying the wrong lawn sign, and where the man at the top of the hill is damming the flow of life-giving water for himself.

Perhaps that’s the real difference. Bali’s oldest institutions were built entirely around the idea that no single person gets to hoard the water; the terraces only work if everybody downstream gets their share too. Unlike Donald, who, if handed the keys to the temple’s water gate, would almost certainly try to brand it, put his name on it in gold, and charge the villagers a toll.

So, while Washington drowns in its own noise, I’ll be here, on an island with no mad president, no Congress, and no cable news, just a series of villages that worked out fifteen hundred years ago what America still hasn’t: that sharing the water is cheaper, in the long run, than fighting over it.