Squid Game Season 2 Predictions: Before I Watch

 Okay. Here are a few thoughts before I start watching Squid Game Season 2:

First, on the scale from "Sequels that made the orignal better" to "Sequels that were either unnecessary, or disappointing" (from T2 to Matrix: Revolutions) I give it... 75-25 odds that it will be a Matrix 2, not a Terminator 2.

Because I'm Rob, and this is my dang blog, we've got to overthink things, naturally, so here are some recipes for a good sequel. For simplicity (HAH!) we're skipping reboots, spinoffs, second chapters that had always been part of the plan, and prequels here, with apologies to Fury Road, Lightyear, Dune Two: Dunin' Time and Exorcist: When Pazuzu met Father Merrin.

1. The T2 template.

We saw a little of a world, but the film didn't explain everything, and at the end of the first movie, we still had Questions, or there were themes rich enough to warrant Further Investigation.

The T2 template takes a sequel that fleshes things out. It answers some questions, and might look at the same/similar issues from a slightly different angle. There will be some new stuff -- characters, ideas, or wrinkles, and it might even introduce new themes, but everything is still of a piece with the original. At its best, it makes a world feel bigger, and more lived-in. The conflict or the Thing the Protagonist Wants might have grown in scale, complexity or nuance, and we understand more about how things work in that world, what tools the hero has to solve the problem, and what kind of person the hero is.

Successful examples: Terminator 2 and Empire Strikes Back are the high points of this template. John Wick 2 fits here, and the first two How To Train Your Dragon sequels.

Less successful attempts at this template: The Matrix 2 -- you forget how much exposition Matrix 1 had, because the pacing was so good, and the concept was so fresh, but The Matrix 2 was really, really talky, too much even for peak Monica Bellucci overcome (noble attempt, though). Were Avatar: The Way Of Water and Terminator 3 different enough from the first one that we really feel like we learned more about the world, or the main characters? Did they expand on the themes of the original enough to feel satisfying and unique, or introduce new themes that fit the original? Or was Avatar 2: The Way Of Water basically just Avatar, But Underwater, and Terminator 3 simply T2 Again, Except A Babe?

2. The Godfather 2 template.

Take a world that gave us a character we liked, and put that character into a new or different situation that reveals something new about the character, and/or about the world, and/or deepens the ideas or themes or characterizations. It might even question the initial premise of the series, forcing us to reexamine its themes. 

Successful examples: Godfather 2 is very much the same world as 1, but Michael Corleone is in a very different situation now, and the film takes the themes that made made the original resonate: family, loyalty, ambition and power, and really puts them to the test. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade took that same great Indiana Jones character... and gave him an impossible-to-please father. Suddenly the confident swashbuckling hero is just another kid trying to win his father's approval, at the same time as dad is trying to keep up with his son on the swashbuckling side. It's a different look at a great character... but still the same package: it's very much an Indiana Jones film in pacing, storytelling and tone. Spider-Man 2 (Tobey Maguire, 2004) had Spider-Man asking if it was worth being Spider-man when it put his loved ones in danger and complicated his life. Meanwhile we saw more heroes, more aspects of Peter's life, and more complexity in the relationships established in Spider-man 2002.

Iron Man 3 gave an interesting version of this when it gave us Tony Stark dealing with PTSD after saving the world -- we'd been accepting the idea of superheroes stepping up to save the world for a long time by then without being asked, "Would a person who became a superhero... be okay?" Captain America: Winter Soldier asked, "What if the ultimate loyal soldier realized he couldn't trust that his commanders were the good guys?"

3. The Aliens template

Take a world we've seen, where we know the basics of how it works, and offer us more of everything. This is similar to the T2 template, but taken further. More characters, more settings, more action, more things the protagonist or antagonist can do. On rare occasions, this type of sequel can even be a whole different genre: Alien is a slasher/horror film, and Aliens is a military propaganda shoot-em-up '80s action movie.

A lot of superhero and fantasy sequels do this one, with varying levels of success. Iron Man invents a  suit that does more stuff. The Chosen One character studies under a mentor and masters the five point exploding palm technique, or travels to a new country to find The Really Important Thing. Thor unlocks new powers and goes to a whole new planet. 

1 and 3 are both on the "take the original premise further" spectrum, and this is the tightrope many sequels must walk: take the original premise too much further, and it might not even be recognizable as part of the same world (Gremlins 2... though some argue that film is a work of genius); don't take it far enough, and the sequel is just a rehash, stale leftovers that add nothing. (Taken 2-11, Austin Powers 3: The Spy Who Repeats Gags, all the Home Alone sequels, and Jurassic Park: I Lost Interest.)

4. The Mission: Die Harder Faster and More Furious Forever Template

Just keep cranking out copies of the original. Make the chases more expensive, make the explosions bigger, make the technobabble more bewildering, and put the characters into new settings and adding new characters, and a certain kind of audience will keep coming back for second servings.

This is fine. It's fine. Nobody got mad at James Bond for offering... basically the same movie... twenty times in a row, resetting the premise like a sitcom episode, before Daniel Craig's Bond first demonstrated that he remembered what happened the film before. Tom Cruise's commitment to practical effects and his insanity in doing his own stunts in the Mission Impossible movies will continue to be compelling until his body gives out. Just keep mixing the elements together in new ways, like shaking a snow globe, and give us more John Wick suits and pistols, more Halloween rubber masks and meat cleavers, more superhero wisecracks and brain-addled slurring pirates, and more sneaky velocirapors and xenomorphs in your Jurassic and Alien franchises. Our appetite is bottomless, apparently.

 

Offering the same themes, feelings, and characters again and again can still work,  even on critical and artistic terms. Somehow the Toy Story series keeps adding installments, and each time we first think, "It's already perfect. No need for another!" and then the new one feels as essential as if it had always been part of the plan. They're not changing the industry with new ideas, but the Paddington movies are just as charming on the twentieth rewatch as the first. It's magic, what they do.

It's like a late night booty call: you know why I called, and I know why you answered the phone.  It's not exactly romantic to show up at a FWB's door half-drunk at 1:30am, but that wasn't expected, either. Nobody overpromised, and everybody got what they wanted. It's fine.

5. The Rambo II Template

Grab a few working parts from the original, patch them together, and run with it. Some filmmakers even tell their creative team NOT to read/watch/learn about the source material. Sometimes this works: Army Of Darkness turned a low-budget horror film and its high camp remake into a sublime supernatural time-travel horror-comedy. Rambo II had little connecting tissue with First Blood other than muscles and guns but it put bums in seats. Sometimes it doesn't work. Cars was a sports movie, Cars 2 was a spy movie, and other than the occasional "Kachow" and, you know, talking cars, they were so different I had whiplash. If you went into Gremlins: The New Batch expecting anything like what you got from the first Gremlins film, you didn't know what the hell you were watching. (You were watching a work of pure cinematic genius, that's what. The final embodiment of the slogan, 'Every idea is a good idea.')

So... before I start watching episodes of Season 2 of Squid Game (and yes, I know that a new season of a TV show might work differently than a sequel to a movie... but the limited play time, and the long period between original and follow-up make me feel more like I'm watching extended movies or mini-series' than straight-up TV shows), I'm going to predict a few things, and then see if I'm right.

First, I think Squid Game is in a difficult spot. The hardest sequel to make is for something that everybody loved because it was so fresh, so unique, so unlike anything we'd seen before. We'd seen "games to the death" shows and "making sport of human lives" shows before (Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Hunt, The Running Man, Escape Room, many inspired by a famous short story titled, "The Most Dangerous Game" --these films have been coming out since the 1930s), but the cognitive dissonance of using children's games, bright colors, recorder music, and absolutely one-of-a-kind production design created a mood that nobody had seen before, a mood where the contrast between the silliness of the games and the dread of the consequences grabbed the audience and added all kinds of layers about how the elites are treating the desperate class. It arrived in the middle of the first pandemic year, when everyone was sitting at home, inequalities had just been given a big old boost, and a lot of people were feeling fed up with... just .... things in general, as well as feeling jerked around be elites who didn't understand or care about them. It was the perfect set of themes, packaged in the perfect way, at the perfect time, to an audience perfectly prepared for it. It really was lightning in a bottle.

But how do you offer season two of something everybody loved because it was unlike anything they'd seen before?

It's not unlike anything they've seen anymore: at the very least it's like, you know, season one. And that's the problem. 

You can't make a Squid Game season that will cause the sensation that Season 1 caused. We're not shut in on lockdown anymore. We're still jerked around by the elites, but we have different outlets for that feeling now, whether that's the rantings of this or that politician, or this or that angry podcaster, or constant refreshing for updates on that story about that guy who shot that other guy. We've seen the primary colors and the kindergarten shapes and the childish games with deadly consequences all before. We've rooted for characters only to see them die in gut-punch twists. Nothing will ever land like the gut-punch of episode 6, the marbles episode, because we already saw that one, so now we know the showrunners are willing to do... that to the characters we care about. Like killing Ned Stark in Game Of Thrones -- after the first one, you already know that anyone might be next, and that cat doesn't go back in the bag.

All that to say... for everyone expecting something as fresh and novel as Squid Game season one was... this season has its work cut out for it.

So which template should Season 2 follow?

The T2 template: add more, fill in more background, add new characters maybe, and expand on existing themes.

Well, I'd say that the final episode of Season 1 already filled in what background we needed. The conversation with the guy who invented the Squid Games basically made the statement the showrunners wanted to make about human nature. I don't see that adding backstory or depth would really add much to the characters here. The characters in competition already had nuance and depth, and most of them died. The characters who weren't in competition -- The Salesman, and Front Man, and the guards and the VIPs -- work better if they are cardboard cutouts, I think: defining the parameters where the deadly games occur, and the basic inequality on which the games are premised. The cop who was undercover already revealed who he is, and dedicating an episode to his backstory isn't going to add much to the role he is playing in the story. The VIPs work better if they're cartoon caricature villains, mustache twirling bad guys with brazen vices and idiotic concerns. I don't care which of them has a backstory that makes me pity his emotional vapidity... it doesn't strengthen the story for me to know that.

Can they expand the story into new settings and situations? Not really -- at least, not without Squid Game starting to look like other shows and films. Send them into nature and you've got Battle Royale. Send them into a booby-trapped nature or urban setting and you've got The Hunger Games. Send them into the city again (which they already did in Season 1, when everybody came back) and you run the risk of reminding viewers that... the desperation the characters felt in real life is the desperation we all feel already, and ... then Squid Game is a bummer, and yet another "life is hard" drama, instead of a fresh new view of that frustration and exploitation.

It's really hard to think of ways for them to do something new within the premise, other than the totally, TOTALLY expected move of having the inmates revolt and try to blow up the games... just like they did in Hunger Games 2. Just like almost every hero in a "Humans hunting humans" story turn the tables on their hunters in the end. How else can you expand the premise?

I guess we'll see.

The Godfather 2 Template

Is there a place where there's room to subvert some of the characters or themes of season one? Not a whole lot, because most of the interesting characters died -- including the most interesting one, constestant #1, the old man. I'm not wild about the idea of dedicating part of a season to the motivations of a character who's gone. Maybe Front Man and his cop brother would have something interesting to add... maybe... but the themes of frustration, desperation and inequality? How do you poke at those or subvert them? The only way is by pointing out that we are watching these characters suffer just like the VIPs are... so why are we feeling empathy, or identifying with the contestants, comfortable in our living rooms with netflix on? ...there is some room for that, if the show finds a way to get that meta without being heavy handed, and even with very strong themes, Season 1 never struck me as being preachy, moralistic or heavy handed.

Who would have second thoughts, anyway? One of the guards? How would that play out? The idea of seeing the games undermined... that could create some strong rooting interests. The theme of fair play -- "at least in these games, everybody has an actual shot" did run through last season, and breaking that trust might be interesting -- in Season 1, the doctor who was cheating suffered the consequences, reinforcing the feeling that fair play mattered. Also, that feeling of "That's not fair!" "He was cheated!" outrage... we HAVE already felt that in episode 1, at least once, and maybe more.

Other than that, which of the themes would bear being subverted? Your desperation isn't really that desparate? This inequality isn't really that exploitative? Nah. Those aren't working for me. I doubt I'll see that. Packaging similar themes in new, poignant ways is probably the best way for this season to run, and that will come down to bringing us a new set of characters we care about as much as we cared about the contestants in season 1.

The Aliens template

This could be interesting -- offering more Squid Games, in bigger, broader and more impressive ways, and a lot of it could be achieved simply with which games they choose to play this time around, what contestants are asked to do. Maybe the compound where the contestants are kept can be shown, explained, and expanded. Maybe we can learn more about the guards... though that would take a lot of doing, a guard revolt could reveal interesting things about how the games work, except that it's pretty clear stepping out of line equals a bullet in the head for guards. A police raid? That would puncture the sense that this whole thing is enabled by collusion of the powerful. That wouldn't fit the themes at all. An escape attempt? Now we're getting warmer. That is my best bet for ways to expand and explain the Squid Games world while keeping its premise and main themes intact. Another would be further adventures of Hwang Jun-ho, the undercover police officer, perhaps exploring the compound and/or making contact with some of the contestants. That might be an interesting wrinkle, especially if his brother, Front Man's loyalties are put to the test. 

The Die Harder Faster and More Furious Forever Template

This might happen. We might see another well-crafted season of engaging characters, devious games, stomach-punch twists and devastating conclusions with unsatisfying answers to existential questions... leaving us ready for a third season of the same. And... I think I'd be okay with that, if the story unfurls beautifully. Sure. Give me another season of that. And another.

The Rambo II Template

No thank you. Could they make Season 2 the story of Gi-Hun, now with his hair dyed cherry red, training himself into a killing machine, tracking down and hunting the VIPs and the guards and every person involved with making the Squid Games possible, spouting 80s movie catchphrases and perhaps even walking away from some explosions? Oh, they could. And it might even be satisfying. But it wouldn't be devious and gut-churning the way season one was. It would be hard to offer a new cast of characters we cared about and identified with as much as we did with the contestants in season one, rooting for them to live or die, if instead we're watching Gi-Hun running through his Kill List like The Bride in Kill Bill. Could they find other ways for Season 2 to completely eschew Season 1's themes, genre and tone? Sure they could. But it wouldn't be the same show, so I'm not going to go into the possiblities here, because, I mean, if it's not going to stay the same show, anything could happen, so I'm rooting for aliens.

I think formally, the franchise Squid Game resembles the most is the Alien films, with primary colors and kids' games instead of shadows and spaceships -- most of the characters are just scenery for the monster to chew, except here the monster is The Game + human avarice + desperation + exploitation of the powerful instead of a black beast that hides in walls and spits acid. At most you can have a tiny handful of characters appear from one film/season to the next -- maybe Gi-hun, maybe a VIP or two, and a Front Man here and there, like the recurring androids in Alien, who mostly function to set the stage and set up the themes and conflicts. Then, if the writing's good, we care about a set of characters, and hate a different set of characters, and aren't sure whether to hate, pity or love two or three characters, as they figure out what will help them get through the Squid Games and win the top prize. And if it's done well, it'll be another season of compelling, sinfully watchable drama, and I'll be ready for season three as soon as I finish season 2.

Anyway, that's what I expect to see before I have started watching. Do I expect it to be popcorn-candy watchable? Hell yeah. Do I expect a few good characters and a few stomach punch twists? Hell yeah. Do I expect the VIPs to be better cast with higher quality actors? Hell yeah, now that the first one made a billion dollars for Netflix. I would actually love to see some stunt casting here. Bring in... Meryl Streep acting like the President of the USA from Don't Look Up, or Leonardo DiCaprio as a version of his evil plantation owner from Django Unchained, or... one of those groups of comedians who are always in each other's shows and movies, the Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, David Cross, Ed Helms, Jason Sudekis set, or the Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Danny Green, Bill Hader set. Go bananas here!  

I think they'll try to take bigger swings, but season one was such a big swing it's going to be hard to follow-up, much less top, while still seeming like the same thing it was in season 1.

But... to impress me? To make me feel like they really did top Season one? that'd take something risky... not just 'We're going to have aliens or other twists that make no story sense' but 'we're really going to bring the satire home now' risky. How to do that? 

Give me a set of VIPs who are deep-faked with the faces of our actual world's VIPs. Have them take off their masks, and it's ... Mark goddamn Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, and maybe a Vladimir Putin, and JD Vance or a Viktor Orban. Now THAT would take some brass ones, and really make sure the themes land, even for those who haven't been paying attention so far.

OK. Those are my thoughts and predictions about season 2 of Squid Game, without having watched or read a single thing about them, except season 1 and a few IMDB pages. I will definitely be watching it, and probably binging it, and honestly, I'm trying to keep my mind as open as I can for the show to impress me on its own terms, because that's how I enjoy TV. No spoilers in the comments, please, at least until... oh... February 2025, and if you don't want the show spoiled, and it isn't Feb. 2025 yet... don't read the comments.

I said what I said. Now off to actually watch them.

Martial Law FAQ: Why/How Did Korea Give Martial Law the big Nope?

So in my previous post I wrote about how and why Pres. Yoon Seok-yeol set his political career on fire.

In this post, I’m going to talk about the first of two big questions that have been on my mind ever since.

Question one: Why/How did South Korea put the Kibosh on Martial Law so Quickly?

I think there are a few factors feeding into this that are relevant to Pres. Yoon’s situation, and also to the next big question. 

The first thing, I think, is that President Yoon really, badly miscalculated what South Korea’s people would put up with, badly misreading South Korean peoples’ desire for a thriving democracy. And honestly, this is the headsmacking strange part for me. It should have been easy for him to properly calculate this. Like, really really, REALLY easy. 

Ya see, go right back to when my dad was born in the 1940s and earlier and every election in Canada has been free and fair. We haven’t been invaded or colonized. There have been ups and downs, and sure, the political process has gotten sticky and even raucous a few times (President Pierre Trudeau once declared martial law because a terrorist group was kidnapping politicians and threatening more), but every Prime Minister has more or less respected the will of Canada’s voters, at least insofar as giving up power when defeated at the ballot box, and acting as if their legitimacy as a leader was given to him by the people. That is a remarkable track record of stability that might even be called boring, and yeah, stability can breed complacency. People can forget how much it means, and how rare it has been historically, to have a stable democracy with a long unbroken string of free and fair elections, and ruling parties who have at least nominally been concerned with using the state’s power to try and make life better for the citizens.

But in South Korea, our first free and fair democratic election is within living memory. Within MY living memory, and I’m not that old, even if kids today can’t rap the intro to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 1987, a year I remember, was the first time South Koreans voted for their president without enough corruption, cheating or other shenanigans to doubt the outcome. 

Put another way: South Koreans who are alive today remember choking on tear gas, facing down firehoses and truncheons and worse, in demanding their own democracy. South Koreans who are alive today ran from bullets in 1980 Gwangju, when shitstain president Chun Doo-hwan pointed the military’s guns at his own people. Oh, by the way, Chun Doo-hwan’s military coup? That was the last time a Korean president declared martial law. South Koreans who are alive today can tell their kids and grandkids what democracy means, why it matters, and warn them about signs of leaders losing respect for the will of the people, because they saw it with their own eyes, and bore the bruises on their own arms and legs. In fact, if the average age of South Korea’s elected representatives are in line with most countries’, many of today’s elected representatives are about the right age to have been there themselves in 1987, adding their voices to the democracy protests that finally turned the tied. They know firsthand how hard you have to fight to get democracy back once it’s lost, because they were called upon to fight it!

Dear readers, that is NOT a generation to mess with. That is a fuck around and find out generation, and they will show you what they are made of again and again. 

Yoon fucked around, and he is nowhere near finished finding out. 

And that is the main point of this blog post.

There’s more, but it isn’t as important.

Why else did Yoon’s coup fail? If you want to undermine democracy, you need one of two things, and probably both: you need the people (or at least a large enough segment of the people to effectively bully, browbeat, intimidate or gaslight the rest), or you need the military on your side. Yoon did not have the people: he is/was never a highly charismatic leader who drew people to his side, or caused people to feel more loyalty to him than they felt to their democratic institutions. He’s so uncharismatic that even now, after weeks of scandal, I can’t picture his face in my head.

As far as I know (and please correct me if I’m wrong, readers,) Yoon didn’t even had some meaningfully influential sector on his side — all the buddhists, all the christians, all the union members, everyone in the southeast, everyone above age fifty or some such group— the kind of group that might rally to his side and try to drag along the rest. One or two demographics solidly on his side would have given him… not quite a fighting chance on its own, but it would have given him a puncher’s chance maybe, if everything broke exactly right for him. But Yoon? His popularity dropped within a month of becoming president, and his approval rating has been in the toilet for the entire 2 1/2 years of his presidency so far. This made it easier for opposition politicians to defy him, and it also meant that he’d never have enough people on his side to annoy/bully/badger the rest of the population into submission/resignation. There was nobody willing to break into a government building for him, and even when the police did it on direct orders, they weren’t happy about it. They did as little as they could while holding the positions they’d been assigned, not putting up a vigorous or well-organized defense as Korea’s people and politicians surrounded the National Assembly buildings and got the lawmakers over the fence so they could vote to repeal the martial law order. 

In general, Korea’s people were surprised by his move, against it from the drop, and showed where they stood. Compare with 1980, when Chun Doo-hwan successfully repressed a protest movement: in 1980, Chun Doo-hwan had friends highly placed all across the Korean military, and he was a military man himself. He know he could count on the generals coming to his side over president Choi Kyu-hah. Yoon didn’t have the military or the people. 

There was no way this coup-attempt succeeds. Not from this president, in this country, at this time, against this opposition.

Martial Law FAQ: setting a political career on fire, why it didn't happen in Korea, but it still might in America

 Okay… this one’ll probably be short.

So yes, South Korea’s (for now) President Yoon Seok-yeol declared Martial Law a few weeks ago, in a spasm of frustration about being blocked from his agenda by the opposition party (hey there buddy… politics get you down? Then don’t go into… politics.) The first impeachment vote failed for various political wrangling reasons, but public pressure grew, more politicians from Yoon’s party flipped, or decided it was politically advantageous to distance themselves from Yoon, and on December 14th, the National Assembly voted to impeach him.

As far as I can gather, declaring martial law this way was a pretty harebrained scheme, poorly developed, and clumsily delivered, and as soon as he did it, the backlash was swift, furious, and unambiguous. Korea’s political scene, and Korea’s people responded with a big, emphatic, “Nuh uh.” In the middle of the night, no less!

There have been tons of summaries, reviews and takes on this, it’s been a few weeks, and it’s all been very dramatic, so I don’t have a huge amount to add about Pres. (for now) Yoon’s move.

1. It was half-baked and poorly planned.

2. It could only have been half-baked and poorly planned, because, put very simply, any advisor with enough sense to develop a better plan, would also have enough sense to tell Yoon this was the stupidest idea from a world leader since Trump floated the idea of bombing hurricanes. Or injecting bleach to fight covid. Whichever of those you think is stupider. If you are limited to the advisors who don’t have much sense to begin with, this is what you get.

3. Some dipshits on youtube were talking about Korean politicians who broadcast their efforts to get into the Korean national assembly buildings live online, as if this was some hilarious attention-grabbing stunt that was totally epic (or whatever the kids are calling it these days. Fleek. No cap. Dab. Sus. Brat.) It was not. Keep in mind, youtube doofuses (Youtufuses), that under Martial Law, people can be arrested without reason… but it becomes a lot harder to arrest a prominent politician if he can say ‘See that camera? 15000 viewers are watching you arrest me right now. Some of them are recording the clip. Are you sure this is how you want to become famous?” There was a very, very, very good reason for him to be live streaming his effort to climb the fence and get into the National Assembly buildings.

4. Since Martial Law was overturned, protests have been growing in size, and the first effort to impeach him failed in the National Assembly when nearly all the representatives in the same party as Pres. Yoon left the National Assembly, so that they couldn’t vote, meaning the vote to impeach didn’t reach a quorum (a certain percentage of all representatives have to be present for some kinds of votes, or the vote isn’t valid — or else you could pass laws by saying ‘Everybody from my party, let’s meet at the legislative building at 3am, and we’ll pass these laws unanimously. Mwahaha!”) On December 14, as public pressure continued to grow, including street protests that have sustained impressive numbers, a movement to impeach passed.

5. This means the impeachment will be referred to Korea’s Constitutional Court — kind of like USA’s Supreme Court, with less corruption and politicization (low bar to clear). They will investigate the case, and ultimately either uphold the impeachment, removing Yoon from office, or overturn it, and return him to power.

6. How shameful if Korea’s conservative party has two conservative presidents impeached in a row! How embarrassing that after being utterly humiliated by the Park Geun-hye scandal, they have apparently learned nothing.

It’s kind of weird to me that two presidents in a row, from the same party, have proven so unfit… usually the kinds of politicians that survive long enough and rise high enough to become a party nominee have learned to be cagey, careful, and prudent by then. Politics is a meat grinder, sure, but the folks who reach the top tend to be survivors. And there are lots of ways politicians can be stupid, rash and corrupt in ways that won’t result in outright removal. Lots of scandals blow over.

It seems they didn’t after Park Geun-hye’s impeachment, but I really hope Korea’s conservative party will now have a serious rethink of how they choose candidates.

7. Part of the rhetoric Yoon used to justify declaring martial law was one of the old saws of the Korean right: claiming that politicians on the left were either in league with, or actually were North Korean agents, sent to destabilize South Korea. There is a very long tradition of hard right Korean politicians calling their opponents Norks (usually without evidence, or at least unconcerned whether there is evidence or not) to delegitimize them, to undermine the validity of their positions or the policies they argued for. When Chun Doo-hwan’s men gunned down student protesters in Gwangju, he arrested the leaders under allegations of them being North Korean spies (they weren’t) and future President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Daejung was arrested and nearly murdered under the same pretense. Waves of union-busting and protest suppression has been done under the same pretense. When Koreans demanded democracy in 1987, people accused the movement’s leaders of being in league with North Korea as a pretense to illegally arrest them. Every time someone suggests South Korea adopt any policy further to the left than “Perhaps it is the government’s job to rein in out-of-control corporate greed,” somebody calls them a North Korean commie pinko, either out loud in front of cameras, or in one of those viral chain text messages my Father-in-law receives.

And… you know what? Can the fact Yoon used that same stupid, ungrounded accusation as justification in his doomed coup attempt please be the dying breath of this move? Can we just accept that some people support progressive policies for their own sake, and not because they were compromised by North Korean spies? Pretty please could that stupid worn-out loser’s pot-shot now be retired from public use?

That would be nice.

8. Yoon Seok-yeol was a prosecutor before he became President. Before him, previous president Lee Myung-bak, the businessman, had trouble being president after being a CEO. And it strikes me that being a prosecutor is a really different type of leadership than being a politician. A prosecutor chooses their team, decides the parameters of their investigation, decides which investigations to pursue and which to abandon, and then builds the strongest case they can with their team, letting a judge or jury decide on the result. It’s a very one-sided approach to an issue, because the defense takes the other side, and you get a clear outcome with the judge and jury’s findings. Almost nothing about this process resembles the process politicians use to create and pass legislation.

The type of leadership you need to pass a law or a bill or a budget is completely different. It’s communication and compromise intensive, it requires listening and balancing different people and different groups’ wants, needs, and dealbreaker red lines. Being a CEO also looks nothing like politics, by the way — you can fire your opposition as a CEO, but you can’t fire the opposition leader in the national assembly. You can’t hire the team you want when some high-level government positions have to be approved by the house of representatives, who get to nix appointments they dislike. Every step of the political process is about persuading, negotiating, playing ball and adjusting to the needs of the other side, and calculating what result a move will get, but also how it will be perceived by the public, in ways that CEOs and prosecutors don’t really have to do in the course of their job.

Perhaps, just maybe… government would be more effective if parties nominated candidates for president… who actually had political experience?

Just thinking out loud here.

But here are the two big questions that have been bopping around in my head since I got text messages from my American friends (it was late in Korea: most people were sleeping) asking, “Hey Rob… just got the news. Everything OK there?” (I was watching a movie — I actually had to pause and google ‘Korea news’ to find out what it was)…

Question one: 

Why/How did South Korea put the Kibosh on Martial Law so Quickly?

I have a few answers, but I’m going to hit publish now and answer my two questions in future posts. So stay tuned!