I heard a rumor that North Korea's going to do another Nuclear test.
Here's how we can use that test to defuse this whole North Korea thing: Right here.
NK claims victory. The rest of the world moves on to some other story.
China starts working its behind the scenes influence in North Korea to make sure little Kim falls in step (because nobody else has enough influence in North Korea to make anything happen up there) and we can all go home.
As we all know, the best way to disarm a shit-talker is to let them feel like they've made you back down, when actually you've decided to ignore them.
And my family might well be worried about what's going on over here, so it's time for a few comments. Buckle up. This might get lengthy.
I came to Korea in 2003, shortly after NK expelled UN Nuke inspectors from North Korea (leading to this great satire of UN impotency in the Team America World Police movie). Since then, we've had regular threats, missile tests (including one the Monday after I returned from a weekend trip to Geumgang Mountain Resort in North Korea), more missile tests, even a successful missile test, a disputed nuclear test, and then a pretty successful one.
And every single time, the western media does this.
How far out of the norm is this?
You know how if your friend who never calls you in distress, buzzes you up and goes "Hey. I'm not sure who to call, but I need someone to help me talk my way through something." ... well, you drop everything, because it's really unusual for your stable friend to be batty like that.
But you know that other friend who sends you two text messages a day saying "I can't take it anymore. Call me please before I do something rash!" ... you know how after a while you start ignoring those messages, because they're coming twice a day, and they're always something dumb like "My shoes came untied during my morning jog" and when your friend DOES have a serious incident, they show up at your door looking like a mess and forego the messages anyway? Those messages get easier and easier to ignore, don't they?
Well that's where South Korea is with North Korea. And maybe your attention-starved friend starts jacking up the intensity of those meaningless text messages -- saying "I swear I'm going to kill someone" rather than just "FML This is too much" ... you know it's the same song and dance, just with slightly different steps... so it remains easy to hit that "ignore" button. Because North Korea doesn't announce it when they ARE going to attack. Yeonpyeong Island and the sinking of the Cheonan came without warning.
So is this an abnormally provocative bit of bellicosity? Yeah. It is. And the reason is because nobody's biting, and giving North Korea the kind of attention it wants. And by attention I mean unconditional aid. They keep having to come up with more and more meaningless bluffing gestures to show how serious they are.
But when North Korea talks tough, the image in the South's mind is more like this:
Than this:
Because South Korea knows they and the US military could reduce North Korea to this
if they wanted to.
Fact: Reddit is more excited/upset about North Korea than South Korea put together.
So you're Saying This Happens More Often?
Here are the times when North Korea threatens annihilation on South Korea and its allies:
1. Every time a new president comes in (in order to get them to back down and show who's boss)
2. Every time USA and Korea do the Eagle Foal Joint Military exercises
3. Pretty much every spring, when there's a bit of dead time before planting season
4. Whenever the UN, or some other country or group of countries, or an important world leader criticizes them (my favorite of these incidents)
5. When the presiding Kim's balls get itchy
6. When things are getting a bit unstable at home, an the leadership needs to galvanize the people against an external threat, in order to distract them from being inadequately provided for by their leader
Now, 1, 2, 3, and 4 definitely apply, I'm going to take the liberty of saying 5 does, and it's hard to know just what's happening in North Korea, so number six might apply, too. The North Korea histrionics cycle is a bit worrisome the first few times, but then after realizing it's just noise... it stops being so worrisome.
Point three: The Dog and Pony Show
Because we can't see what's going on inside North Korea, it's easy to forget this important fact:
A country's foreign policy is a performance for several audiences, including the international political community, the international business community, and domestic publics.
Leaders and populations of countries that are allies and rivals, as well as international watchdog groups and institutions, watch how a country's leadership behaves. Things like human rights, UN contributions, and goodwill or aid efforts are performances for the international community.
The performance might be calculated and cynical, for example the HIV testing case currently before the Commission for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (read more here) makes it look like South Korea never had intentions of following the convention. Other examples are strings-attached aid or the kinds of interventions that impinge on another country's sovereignty. (Hey everybody! Let's bring freedom to a country with shit-tons of oil!)
FTAs and certain types of regulations and measures are performances for international finance markets. They mean to attract international investment, and can also be a mere performance. For example, signing a Free Trade Agreement, but stirring up a national health panic in order to poison the market for a certain country's beef, before it arrives in stores, is one way a country can cynically go through the motions of opening up economically, while still protecting their markets. (Not naming any names.)
Another, perhaps the most important audience, is the domestic population: they're the ones voting for or against you, and the ones who could take to the streets and Gaddafi your ass if they're mad enough about the way you've been leading them. Most of the stupid nationalism undermining relationships across east Asia (every land claim dispute, Yasukuni Shrine, history book controversies, demands for apologies) passes for politicking in East Asia because it's a certain type of performance for a domestic audience of voters who want to feel like their leaders will vigorously defend their country's interests and national pride (not in that order). Every country suffers from a little frog-in-a-well myopia.
When domestic populations have a problem with their leader, the best way to get people to stop shit-talking their leaders, is to find someone else for them to shit-talk. Domestic groups are a bad target because they're within voting and striking distance. But a foreign baddie probably won't overthrow you, because most countries don't like going to war. And a foreign baddie can't vote against you. And if you speak a language the foreign baddie doesn't speak, you can say a lot of stuff and count on most of it not getting translated, or pick and choose what gets translated in order to enhance the performance for the home crowd.
A foreign baddie is the perfect way to deflect discontent, when you're not keeping your promises to the people you're trying to lead.
So North Korea continues to play the part of global internet troll, saying inflammatory shit to get a reaction (aid). And like a troll, if you ignore it, they'll stop trying.
And no matter what the world does, NK's propaganda machine can spin it.
World gives aid: world pays tribute to Kim Jong Un, in fear of his power
World doesn't give aid: Kim Jong Un is trying to help his people, but the baddies are being so mean to North Korea that your spring food rations won't be coming.
World doesn't go to war with NK: world fears us
World does a few surgical and devastating attacks to key NK targets: guess why your spring food rations have been diverted to the military...
By controlling all the information within the country (to some degree) the Tubby One (or the generals pulling his strings) can spin this sequence of provocations and responses however he want, and they're getting lots of footage of really famous world leaders talking about North Korea, which can be edited to tell whatever story they like.
So What are they Doing/Saying in South Korea?
Well, they're not rushing supermarkets and buying up all the non-perishables they can find. Canned goods are still available. They're going on picnics and commuting to work and looking for the best place to catch spring blossoms, which are just now reaching Seoul.
Meanwhile, South Koreans don't talk much about North Korea at all. They're aware of what goes on, but they're about as interested in talking about it as your family's interested in talking about the alcoholic uncle who gets drunk and wrecks every family event.
When Koreans do talk about North Korea, it's messy.
North Korea is a wedge issue in South Korean politics, like gun control or abortion in the USA: as with discussions about gun control, you might have an edifying conversation about it, but in many cases, discussing North Korea is like discussing certain events and characters in Korea's history: the way you talk about it is more a way of signaling your political alignment than an attempt to really hash out the nuances of the situation.
When North Korea comes up, both sides fall into the truisms, slogans and commonplaces of their political party, if it’s discussed at all in South Korea’s politically partisan media. Because Park Geun-hye is a newly inaugurated president, what I’ve seen of the media in South Korea is presenting this ongoing story with a strong angle of “How is the new president going to respond?” (so far, with more tough talk). The local media usually reports on North Korea with a jaded “here we go again” tone. The international media is the group that gets excited and worked up at every repeat of the cycle, not the local media. Locals don’t find the story new or exciting - it doesn’t sell papers here the way it does internationally - because it’s been the same story so many times before.
So what happens next?
North Korean leadership has backed itself into a corner with all this tough talk... but the leadership knows it's hopelessly outgunned. Problem is, North Korea's people don't necessarily know that, which makes the situation a bit less predictable. The world response -- censure and bloviation -- is probably encouraging North Korea to posture more, in order to gather more footage of world leaders talking about North Korea, for propaganda purposes. North Korea will eventually run out of symbolic gestures -- moving military vehicles around, fueling and moving them, making statements, cutting the few remaining points of contact between North and South, and coming up with more and more bellicose ways of saying "No this time we're serious! Nobody better mess with us!"
The stakes are higher because of North Korea's successful nuclear and satellite tests, but the basic outline of the relationship is unchanged, and the fact of China's fading support for its erstwhile ally, means that North Korea's on a weaker footing than ever before.
Until now, China benefited from having North Korea kicking up dust in East Asia, because every eyeball fixed on the Kim dynasty, was an eyeball not fixed on China's human rights record, its political prisoners, its newly aggressive, bullying brand of foreign relations, or its epic housing bubble. However, North Korea's behavior has gotten so indefensible, that the cost of backing the Kim dynasty is finally, truly outweighing the benefits. That's bad for North Korea.
Where should I get information about North Korea?
A few things:
1. don't trust any foreign "expert" who doesn't speak and read Korean (including me) very far
2. don't wholly take the word of South Korean experts or (especially) politicians, who were raised and trained inside South Korea, or speaking to a Korean audience, because of the way North Korea is a wedge issue here, so many South Koreans aren't really talking about North Korea when they're talking about North Korea -- in the same way U.S. Americans often aren't actually talking about abortion when they're talking about abortion.
My favorite North Korea commentator is Andrei Lankov, and if there's one Must-Watch North Korea video, it's this one, which actually has the expertise and the perspective other commentators usually lack. If Andrei Lankov is worried, I'll get worried. Till then...
What Will Happen Next?
Kim Jong-un has painted himself into a corner, and something will happen before he can ratchet down the tension he jacked up. It'll probably be some shells dropped on an evacuated village, or a bit of posturing somewhere along the DMZ, or a boat wandering across the Southern Limit Line and shooting a few rounds across the bow of a Korean warship and scampering away. I hope South Korean leadership keeps a back door open for Kim Jong-un not to go to war, when he does something he now pretty much HAS to do, to save face, while also not looking like a wimp. Long run time: What should South Korea, USA, and the World Do about North Korea?
In the longer term, belligerence and standoffishness have two effects:
1. estrangement and unpredictability
2. increase in Chinese influence in North Korea
That doesn't get us anywhere we haven't been multiple times before.
The fact is, as long as the Kim regime is in charge, we're probably going to see the same blackmail-for-aid thing continue. And North Korea will keep playing the same game, counting on the four (in USA) and five (in Korea)-year election cycle to bring in a whole new set of chumps for them to manipulate.
If North Korea is to change, it will be because North Korea's people demand it, and gather up the mobilizing strength to back up their demand. We might be closer to that than we think... but until the revolution, the thing that will speed it up will not be belligerence and estrangement, which more likely causes them to band together in support of The Tubby One.
Contact and engagement, meaningful interaction with North Korea, until affinity, trust, and even kinship develops between North and South Korean publics, will help North Koreans become receptive to other ways of imagining their country. Increase of contact across the border, even if it's expensive, even if we have nothing to show for it, for a while, will increase the rest of the world's ability to reach, and mobilize, the people in North Korea who could become leaders of a sea change in that country.
Until the Kim dynasty is dislodged, I don't think they're abandoning the military first policy. And some aid will be diverted to the military. Can't be helped for now. However, if contact between ordinary North and South Koreans increases, communication will lead to new ideas being introduced to younger generations of North Koreans, new truths about how things are in the south. A different point of view.
As of now, those ideas are impossible to plant, because there's so little of any kind of contact. An Arab Spring type uprising can't happen in North Korea, because not enough of them have enough access to modes of communication and contact with the outside world. That's no good. Anything that increases that access is a good thing. And if increasing contact leads to accusations of being Kim Jong-un's running dog, so be it: it's become clear that the Kims are only interested in Threat/Aid/Thread/Aid, and regime preservation, so may as well try to open other venues for contact that will outlast the Kim dynasty and might be a catalyst for change. Get satellite cellphones into the country, and radios that pick up other stations. Invite North Korean students to institutes of higher education around the world. Push for more ways to tour North Korea and make contact (however meager) with North Korean people. Blanket the country with radio signals, not just with psychological warfare messages about the inevitable doom of the Kim dynasty, but with music and entertainment and stuff from the world outside, that makes North Koreans start thinking the world outside might not be a bad place.
North Korean leaders are going to break promises. Some of the aid money and materiel will not go where we want it to go. But more of it WILL go to the right place. Even if the trust building exercise only goes one direction, if that allows us to make more contact, with more North Koreans, and further break the stranglehold the Kim family has on what information North Koreans take in, the sooner North Koreans will start thinking about different ways they might be led, and start thinking about the choices they can make to make their country become what THEY want it to be. There are cracks in the machines of the North Korean state -- Korean drama dvds and news are leaking across the border, and people are starting to realize what a shit condition their country's in.
From here, some patience, and a commitment to engagement, even when it seems unhelpful, will, in MY opinion, lead to an actual change in North Korean society, if not leadership, eventually. It's a long game, that takes more patience than a four-year or five-year election cycle allows in US and Korean politics, and that's one of the reasons North Korea's survived this long: because every new president changes course, and North Korea has been manipulating that inconsistency expertly, so far.
I'm mostly interested in this because it's a huge departure from the "No gays in Korea" line that I heard regularly during my first few years in Korea. Now, I live well in the city, so maybe I'm in an area where people are a little more blasé about gay culture -- the annual pride parade is less than an hour's walk from my house -- but it should also be noted that many at that parade still wear "Please do not publish my photo" ribbons, though they do show up... so we're farther out of the closet than we used to be, but not all the way yet. (In comments under previous posts about LGTB culture, I've also been told farther out of the big cities, the "no gays in Korea" thing still happens)
It'd be cool to see Korean gay culture being a little more open and unashamed... on the other hand, I cringe to imagine the day when Korean Promotions inc. realizes there's some kind of cachet to be gained from promoting Korea's gay culture, and suddenly the promotional material starts telling everyone about Korea's proud and ancient gay culture, which is better than teh ghey culture of other countries in the region. (which, now that I've mentioned it, you can totally imagine happening, can't you?) Which would be sad not because of the attempt to make acceptance of various gender identities the norm (that'd be awesome) but because of how obvious the cultural promotion-y people can be when grasping at angles to make Korea seem like a cool and advanced place, truth and actual experience of gays in Korea be damned.
I hope you all had a merry christmas (or whatever you prefer to call it), and that you're gearing up for a great 2013. My Christmas was full of sick -- the baby, the wife, the mom-in-law and I all took turns on the toilet/change table this christmas. So the best I can say is that most of us are now on the mend, and I hope your Christmas was better than ours.
And new-years is coming, with the new-year reviews...
and of course a 2012 pop music mash-up (along with year-end best of lists, one of my favorite things about the winding down of an old year)
2012 has not been as prolific as previous years at Roboseyo... but I'd like to hope that (for the most part) the quality has increased while the quantity decreases. Does that make up for SUCH a decrease? Well, dear readers, I sure hope you've done something else with your time than sit by the computer hitting "refresh refresh refresh" waiting for new Roboseyo... maybe get some exercise.
Anyway, as a look back on the year... here are the most popular Roboseyo posts of 2012, in order:
Most popular... by a TON, and one of the five most popular posts on the blog ever: The Blackface post
So Park Geun-hye, if the news tells it right, just won the Korean presidency, and we get five years of her in the iron throne.
I wrote earlier about my misgivings about her being held up as a female role-model actually being good for Korean women, because in her (an unmarried woman) the career/family dichotomy remains dichotomized, but now the I-Think-Women-Have-Come-Far-Enough-Thanks Koreans get to say "Look! We've got a female president! What more do you want?"
I also have misgivings about her being the daughter of a dictator... so I'm going to try to keep this short, but the context matters to the point I want to make in the title.
Her father was Park Chung-hee, perhaps the most polarizing personality in Korea. You've heard the story by now: he set the table for Korea's spectacular economic growth in the 80s and 90s by investing heavily in infrastructure and heavy industry in the 60s and 70s. While sure, he (like all the presidents in Korea so far) was corrupt... but unlike other presidents, he attached his favors to activities that fit with his long-term plans. He controlled the foreign aid money that came into Korea, by controlling the banks, meaning that he could give favorable terms to companies that cooperated with his master plan, when they applied for business loans.
Through this, the industries and business leaders Park hand-picked became mega-rich, but they also set up businesses and industries that helped Korea become wealthy.
To accomplish this, Park and his business leader buddies did a lot of union busting and suppression of workers' rights, in order to reap the benefits (nationally and personally) of a cheap labor force.
To make it easier to keep the little man as little as possible, Park is well known for using torture, kidnapping, and... let's call it... suspicious deaths of key people (a euphemism as sharp as calling sex slaves comfort women).
His legacy now is mixed: for those along the Seoul Busan Highway (where most of the industrialization took place) he's the genius whose long vision led to Korea's success today. For those whose parents and uncles and aunts were kidnapped from their homes and had their fingernails pulled out, he's kinda beastly.
and in a lot of ways, this election was, in part, a referendum on Park Chung-hee's legacy: if Ahn Cheol-su didn't do his tease act, it would have been the main narrative of the election... and perhaps the reason Ahn held on for so long was specifically so that the issues the Left wanted to bring to the table would get some play.
So that's the background.
Now, two things you may not know:
1. Park Chunghee was not a beastly military goon for his entire presidency. He was at the beginning, after the takeover, when he kept the elected president in office for a while as a puppet until he resigned in frustration. (that'd be Yun Bo-seon). But then, in the 60s, he ran for president and managed to win three elections in order to stay in power. He won elections in 1963 (by a hair) and 1967 (by a lot)... and maybe those elections were rigged, but they weren't as rigged as Rhee Syngman's, whose opponents had a way of dying. (see here... one of his other opponents was later executed under Korea's national security law). Park had three elections where the other guy might have won, and the last one (1971, where he barely beat Kim Dae-jung) was what pushed him around the corner and led to the "Yushin" era, when he declared a national emergency, suspended the constitution and basically concentrated all power to himself, and his enemies and threats started mysteriously disappearing.
2. The economic growth that came through Park Chunghee's efforts nearly didn't happen. After securing foreign funds with the (very unpopular) normalization treaty with Japan (the 1965 one that Japan points to as absolving their responsibility for war crimes) and by sending troops to Vietnam (earning aid from the US), Park saw the US pull out of Vietnam completely... well, if US pulls out of Vietnam when it's no longer politically useful, what's to stop US from pulling out of Korea? The next step in that logic is, "Korea'd better have a self-sustaining industrial background and military before that" -- so he invested in six heavy industries: shipbuilding, industrial machinery, automotive, heavy chemicals (oil refineries etc.), electronics, and steel, (also known as the six most necessary ingredients for developing your own military). But after investing SO FRIGGIN' MUCH in these industries, the world economy slowed down in the late 70s, and suddenly heavy industry was a bad place to have sunk your nation's entire wealth! To stir up capital, Park sent construction crews abroad, to build things in the middle-east (those oil rich OPEC countries that were undermining the other industries he'd invested in), and this barely kept Korea afloat until the economic boom of the Reagan-era 80s, when that heavy industry infrastructure suddenly led to MASSIVE economic growth for Korea when Chun Doo Hwan presided over the payoff of Park's investment.
This is more my opinion than clear fact, but here's a third thing about Park Chung-hee's legacy: being assassinated and followed by Chun Doo-hwan did more good for his legacy than anyone can account for.
Huh?
Well... when you're assassinated, when you die mid-stride, your legacy gets a bump from what we might call "dead rockstar syndrome" -- if Axl Rose had died one week after releasing "Use Your Illusion I and II," we'd rank him with Kurt Cobain, instead of being sad about his "Fat Recluse" phase. Ditto if Michael Jackson had died in 1988. If Jimi Hendrix were still alive, the amazing things he did in 1968-70 would be diluted by those two albums in the 80s when he experimented with synthesizers, his religious phase in the early 90s, and his Grammy sweeping 2011 duet album with Taylor Swift. Park Chung-hee died... so he never had to spend time in jail, never saw the humiliation Korea's other ex-presidents suffered when later presidents jailed them to make themselves look cleaner, never had his corruption publicly revealed by whistleblowers or whatnot during a trial.
Second: the ugly parts of his dictatorship got smoothed over, because he was immediately followed by someone who was even worse. If M. Night Shyamalan had retired after The Happening, we'd all still be howling about what a bad movie it was. Instead, he went us one worse, and made The Last Airbender, and it was SO bad that all our The Happening jokes were no longer relevant. Chun Doo hwan managed the difficult accomplishment of making Park Chung-hee look like the GOOD strongman, which gave people the ability to gloss over that part of his legacy, and made it way easier to get nostalgic about him.
You don't see Chun Doo-hwan's kids in politics, do you?
So... all of that is in play, when you look at where Park Geun-hye came from.
Now, to wrap this up, I have one prediction, and one suggestion, which, as mentioned above, could revitalize Korea's politics...
The prediction is gross.
Opposition rhetoric during this presidency could be... has the potential to be... and therefore probably WILL be the shrillest, harshest, most polarizing, and most infantile, we've heard in Korean politics so far. Because every single time President Park introduces a policy the left doesn't like, they're going to play the dictator card, tell her how much she resembles her father... and that name calling will further polarize an already polarized political scene.
All the young people who were excited about Ahn Chul-soo's promise for a new kind of politics that doesn't involve brinksmanship and name-calling will get further jaded, and the broken system will get more broken. And even if you didn't like Park Chunghee... it'll be bloody annoying to hear the left jibjab about how the apple doesn't fall far from the tree... Park Geunhye at least should get a chance to show her own colors.
But here's the suggestion... Park Geun-hye could do something that would not only nip all those ad hominems in the bud, but completely change Korean civil society, meanwhile also showing that she is not simply riding her father's legacy, but that she'll be a new kind of leader appropriate for modern Korea. By doing two things:
1. Severing government ties to Korea's mass media. The fact that the government owns large stakes in most of Korea's major media entities is ridiculous... especially because the previous president actually had been interfering in the way government-owned media are run. Canada manages to keep the CBC run by government funds, without conflict of interest accusations coming out every month. BBC is generally seen as above reproach in that regard. These government run institutions are allowed to criticize their governments. And that's healthy.
2. And this is the biggie:
Striking the National Security Law from the books... or severely and specifically limiting it. The National Security Law has been the law that every president has used to stifle their critics or opponents. It's a vaguely worded catch-all law that allows a president to pretty much arrest or harass anyone who is doing something they don't like. It's been around since the cold war (1948)... when maybe vaguely worded catch-alls were needed, and "anti-state acts" could have meant a lot of things... but when retweeting a pro-north Korea tweet got somebody arrested? When an unemployed blogger gets called in by the national police? That's just ridiculous. Either a group of lawyers from both sides needs to get in there and add enough specific language that the National Security Law only catches North Korean spies... or it needs to be abolished entirely. Amnesty International and international human rights groups have been encouraging Korea to abolish the National Security Law for years, and the (mis)use of the National Security Law is one of the reasons that during Lee Myung-bak's presidency, South Korea went from "Free" to "Mostly free" on international press freedom indexes. (more at Amnesty International)
If Park Geun-hye does these two things, especially early in her presidency, she'll cut the umbilical cord, so to speak, from her father. She'll clearly distance herself from the kinds of behaviors that have plagued the Korean right for a long time, and open space for a healthier, less polarized civil society to develop more strongly in Korea. She'll also pull the rug from her opposition, so that the "dictator card" is unplayable, because she'll be able to toss back at them, "I abolished those laws, and removed the president's influence on the media. What are you talking about, I resemble my father? Take another look." She'd have the space to create her own legacy.
It'd be a genius move. Absolute genius.
Maybe the amount of name-calling in the national assembly would finally decrease... which might give more hope to those disenchanted voters who wanted Ahn Chul-soo to run for president. Maybe Korea's civil society would get a little less screechy, and we'd be able to have a conversation about issues without somebody calling someone else a dictator sympathiser or a communist. Maybe.
Well, since I'm not writing a lot these days, let me direct you to Scroozle, whose "State of Public English Education In Korea" is pretty spot-on, and suggests a set of reforms I could get behind.
TL:DR: (as a Marmot commenter once wrote:)
1. Good foreign English teachers
2. Many foreign English teachers
3. Cheap foreign English teachers
Choose 2.
(Right now Korea is choosing 2 and 3, and forgoing 1)
It's no secret that I REALLY like Shin Joong-hyun, one of Korea's original rock'n'roll badasses.
And I LOVE his signature song 미인, which takes the sounds of that majestic Korean chanting and call-and-response sound that you hear in traditional performances, and lays a blistering guitar lick over it... and makes it really, really work...
I generally like what I've seen of Ali (알리), the singer who does this version. She can actually sing, and she's sexy in the way real people are sexy, not in the way Kpop stars or cardboard cutouts are sexy.
Ali does a version of Shin's song here - I saw it on TV this weekend... and I liked it.
It goes in three movements, laying out, in a way, three of the features of Shin Joong-hyun's original song -- the primal wail of sexual energy turns into a slinky come-on in the first part, the messy fun of Korean folk culture (which animates the vocals of Shin's original version) somes out (to varying degrees of effectiveness) in the second part [in my opinion, the rap section could have been dropped], but I liked the samulnori bit (the part with ribbons on hats and Korean drums) and then flying with the energy charge of psychadelic rock and roll at the end.
I like that young Korean artists are listening to older Korean music, and bringing it to a new generation.
The Wondergirls also did a version of Mi-in as well, with the (slightly dirty sounding) name "Me, In"
And let's not forget Big Bang doing Lee Mun Sae: Sunset Glow
the original
Oh, BTW... in 2006, Shin Joong-hyun still had it... I mean, REALLY had it:
I had a short conversation today with someone who wanted to convince me to vote for Park Geun-hye
(If, that is, I had a vote.)
Now, I haven't studied too deeply into the politics and policies of the candidates for Korea's upcoming presidential election. I expressed my skepticism about Ahn Cheol-su's candidacy a while back, and I usually list to the left politically, but I just have a few things to say about Park Geun-hye and her pop... because it's impossible to talk about Park Geun-hye without referencing her late father. And that works both for her (with one group of people) and also against her (with another group, at least a few of whom have to vote for her, unless Ahn Cheol-su continues splitting the vote on the left, gift-wrapping the presidency for her).
These are my scattershot thoughts -- I just don't have it in me these days to string together long and coherent arguments on teh blarg these days (hell, I can barely be arsed to write a post a month)... but here are a few things about Park Geun-hye's candidacy, and her pop's legacy.
1. Park Chung-hee's legacy will always be mixed. I visited his museum, not far from the World Cup Stadium, last spring, and it was pretty much a hagiography, glossing over things like his training and experience in the Japanese military, or the sketchier parts of his story. The emphasis was economy economy economy. What he set out to do? He did in spades, spectacularly... but at a hell of a cost.
2. What he did was really good for the time when he came along. A leader cast in his mold coming along now, when the world is a very, very different place, just doesn't fly. Remember LMB's grand canal plan? Korea doesn't need a grand canal anymore, because it ain't 1965 anymore. In the infrastructure area... we're good, thanks. Nor does Korea need another president who puts economic growth above everything --Korea's mostly in a good place right now, but some of the other components of democracy, like civil society and social welfare and equality, have a ways to go--, or plays nationalist cards in order to score points in favor of their economic projects, or who continues to stifle civil society and go on with the old tradition of appointing buddies in high government positions, or having two cabinet graft scandals per month, or hobbling civil society, free speech, and human rights organizations. International communication is too good, too instant, and too fast, to try and pull that kind of shit anymore.
3. I hate the way talking about Korea's history is so politicized -- that vast tracts of President PCH's story go ignored according to one's political stripe, and the same goes for many other characters events and entities in Korea's history. It's depressing, because it means people don't listen to each other. Then again, looking at the way different countries talk about the history of the region, it's no surprise there's such a sharp contrast between the stories domestically, along political lines as well.
4. The narrative my conversation partner gave me was this one: That Park Geun-hye didn't get married and start a family, because "Korea is her husband" or something like that. And with that kind of narrative, suddenly it becomes possible for an ultra-patriarchal country to have a female president, but still be ultra-patriarchal. Because clearly, the norm -- what a woman is SUPPOSED to do... is have a husband. To get married and make babies. As if the only way to be a successful female politician is to remove herself from the roles she's "supposed" to do... and just so, even as Korea moves toward possibly having its first female president, even the memes around that woman's becoming president, point a big finger back to the kitchen for women who don't want to become president-- women remain faced with the false choice of either starting a family or chasing success in some other (read: men's) realms.
Now I'm not saying every person in Korea's patriarchal or sexist, or that gender roles are as rigid as they used to be, or that no progress has been made...
but it makes me sad that the narratives surrounding the woman who might become Korea's first female president actually reinforce traditional gender norms, and that along with that, all the "well women in Korea have come far enough, thanks" (mostly) men will be able to pull out the Park Geun-hye trump card as "proof" that Korea is now an equal society, so we don't need to have wacky things like a whole government ministry just for women's equality anymore, and we clearly don't need to develop laws and social programs protecting working or unmarried or migrant mothers, because if we have a female president, clearly women have come far enough!
This might not be the case. This may not be how the narratives around PGH go. I'm almost 100% sure I'm missing something, because I've been busy, and my Korean ain't that hot. Probably, things will continue getting better, faster than the old men in power would like (out come the hospital gowns!) but slower than I'd like to see... but I just really really dislike the "Korea is my husband" meme, because of what follows from it. That is all.
