Unpresidential words

Foreign minister Alwi Shihab may be right, that the President's latest untempered words regarding Singapore will do no lasting harm to Indonesia's relationship with that country. Or The Jakarta Post may be correct in suggesting that the President might have done irreparable harm to this special bilateral relationship. What seems certainly harmed is the President himself. Thanks to the President's own words, which are increasingly inexplicable, the question inevitably will be about his health of mind.

Has the President's judgment been impaired by his multiple strokes? Has the burden of his blindness had an overlooked emotional effect which has disturbed his thought processes? Blindness is more than a physical handicap. For a man like Abdurrahman Wahid, a life-long intellectual, reading must have been one of the most important activities and greatest pleasures of his days. It was that which put him in touch with history and the universe of ideas. His knowledge and even his wisdom, two of the things that brought him to where he is today, came largely from reading. Blindness has deprived the President of that pillar of his sense of personal strength.

Blindness that comes later in life requires a bigger adjustment than does blindness from birth. Learning to walk unassisted in public and learning to read Braille, for example, are more difficult at 60 years of age. To speculate on a person's emotional state publicly is in poor taste and normally out of bounds. But this is the chief executive of the country, and given his unusual behavior, it may be time to consider whether the impact of the President's blindness, the frustration it must cause him, is affecting his performance.

People can function well in executive positions even with physical and mental handicaps (political correctness in the U.S. prohibits even the use of that word) like blindness, paralysis, dyslexia, or depression, if they find effective ways to compensate for their particular limitation. What will the President do to compensate for his physical limitations, so that he will feel more in control and less given to counterproductive public defiance?

DONNA K. WOODWARD

Medan, North Sumatra