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(Tony Jaa in The Protector, one of the greatest martial arts movies in the last decade, basically a long string of Tony Jaa storming into rooms and shouting "WHERE IS MY ELEPHANT?" and then kicking everybody's asses. Includes this amazing continuous shot sequence.)
The Korea Times came out with a howler of an article recently, mistakenly using the headline "Tips for Keeping Partners from Cheating" on an article that was clearly meant to be titled "How to Suffocate Your Partner and Poison Your Relationship With Mistrust." This is a far cry from its 2009-10 nadir (setting the record straight, and alien graveyards), but still. My response on Facebook was sarcastic, but basically: 1. Don't trust your partner? Find another. 2. Partner asking for your passwords? People usually extend to others the amount of trust they deserve themselves. Memo for everyone: possessiveness and obsessiveness aren't cute and charming. They're creepy uncomfortable suffocating and insulting.
Not to be topped (bottomed?), The Korea Herald ran an article by Dr. Kim Seong-kon, a longtime contributor there, titled "Korean Mother: A Cultural Icon" - now, Dr. Kim has been writing an article a week for a very very long time, so maybe we have to forgive the occasional stinker, but this one went over the line.
Kim suggests "the Korean mother" as a cultural icon for Korea - a symbol of Korean culture, or essence, or somesuch. Nothing terribly wrong with that, though compared to the examples he gives, like Japanese samurai, which only Japan has, choosing something every living person necessarily has seems odd.
Kim describes the sacrificial and nurturing quality of Korean mothers, name-checks "Please Look after Mother" by Shin Kyung-sook, compares Korean mothers to birds that feed their babies while they starve, and even points out how Korean mothers are different from the mothers in his anecdote, AND in this one TV show he saw, which is enough to satisfy a scholar these days, I guess. (Peer review, here I come!)
Asia Pundits raises a number of objections to the article - asking whence Korean teen suicide, if Korean mothers are so great (but acknowledging the issue is waaaaay more complex than that), and in what way trundling kids off to hagwon until 8 or 10pm is different from sending kids to their rooms early in the evening. Asiapundits also outlines the pressure Korean moms often put on kids to get into a good school -- even using the threat of violence to bully kids into studying harder. The article is worth reading. The top comment (as of now) below that post mentions "stage mother superficiality" - making parenting decisions based on what the other moms in the sewing circle will think, rather than what's best for the kids, which happens, I suppose (elsewhere as well of here, of course).
Newer blogger Wangjangnim weighs in a little more emotionally, with his best point being that Dr. Kim's description of Korean mothers is a not-too-subtle disguise for a series of normative statements about gender roles that are a generation or two out of date, and which also fix the acceptable standard for motherhood ridiculously high. (Meanwhile, Chosun Ilbo English headline this morning: "Actress Park Si-yeon Happy to Focus on Being a Mom" -- still waiting for a major daily in Korea featuring a headline, "Famous and Accomplished Woman Happy To Focus on Career For Now" with a positive write-up). Wangjangnim also mentions (though briefly) overseas adoption, which has created a whole bunch of Koreans who are alienated from their Korean moms.
Both AsiaPundits' mention of teen suicide, and Wangjangnim's mention of overseas adoption, as presented, are probably unfair "Yeah but what about this!" reactions. Both reduce very complex issues into pot-shots in a conversation about something else, far less than these two issues deserve. (Honestly, though, adoption sprang to my mind as well during my kneejerk-rage reaction phase.) Neither of those fraught and complex issues are fair to lay solely at the feet of Korean mothers: both require far-reaching discussions of Korean society. There are other little digs one could make -- my facebook feed featured a funny wisecrack about the prevalance of car seat use, for example. Moms in Korean dramas notwithstanding, I have several main problems with the article:
First: When I try to talk about an entire country of over 50 million as if it's a single, undifferentiated mass, my commenters give me hell. Essentializing an entire culture is always fishy territory, whether it's a foreigner or a Korean holding the broad brush. Korea is a pretty big, complex thing: big enough, and complex enough, that you can find evidence to validate any bias or agenda you bring to it, from the fuzziest of happy purrs, to the bitterest of angry yawps. This gets us no closer to the bottom of things.
Second: There are tons of moms in Korea who don't fit the rose-tinted profile Dr. Kim offers. Hell, if Doc Brown and Marty McFly skipped back in time and showed this article to a seventeen-year-old Dr. Kim, I bet he wouldn't recognize his own mother in it. Nostalgia does that.
Next: for Koreans whose moms were less than ideal, or for Korean moms who aren't living up to Dr. Kim's standard, I'd hate to compound their hurt or guilt, by making them feel like their family issues also problematize their bona fides as Koreans. In my first year here, I dealt with panic attacks from a kid whose mother would beat him for bad scores. I had another kid in my second year who had internalized her mother's verbal abuse so completely I never heard my brightest student of the whole year say a positive thing about herself; she came to class with bruises sometimes, too. I've dealt with moms whose kids' accomplishments seem more to be baubles for boasting to their friends, than for their kids' own benefit. They were all Koreans. I know someone who had a (brief, doomed) engagement with a man whose parents had dropped the guillotine on OVER THIRTY previous prospective fiancees. But those three anecdotes, as well as the mom I saw on a Korean drama that my mom-in-law likes, who is a manipulating, selfish badword, don't mean all Korean moms are like that, any more than Kim's anecdotes and TV reference mean American moms are all deficient.
Dr Kim: "But those mothers don't typify REAL Korean motherhood!"
The "NO True Scotsman" fallacy: Justifying funny pictures of men in kilts since the Internet
There are also tons of moms outside of Korea who do all the things Kim describes. Tiger parenting? Pressure to succeed? Sacrifice for kids? Emphasis on education? Those ring a bell to more than Korean kids, as does every other behavior (good or bad!) you name when you describe a stereotypical, or an idealized Korean mother. Except maybe making kimchi, which not all Korean mothers do anymore.
The book thing: Kim points to "Please Look After Mother" as an example of Korean motherhood... now Gord Sellar has problems with that book; I myself found it touching at first, but trying too hard, and finally reaching maudlin territory. I have doubts that the author set out to write a book about Korean motherhood; I find it more likely she was trying to write about her mother. The conversation about whether or why any piece of Korean culture that finds success outside Korea's borders is quickly labeled "representative" of Korea is a long one, and off point here, except that I find it frequently spurious, especially because the designation is usually post-hoc. Except for D-War.
(Source) Common sight at night in drinking districts.
For that matter, how can Kim claim Korean motherhood is unique if the book became a New York Times best seller? If a book becomes a best seller, it's fair to say that means it's struck some kind of a chord with readers. If a book resonates, that means an audience can relate to it... which means all those Americans buying the book must have connected to the portrayal of motherhood in it at least a little, since the book is about nothing else... the success of that book SHOWS that Korean motherhood isn't as unique as Dr. Kim claims it is, doesn't it? If Korean motherhood were totally singular among world cultures, it stands to reason that the book would only have been successful in Korea, and not found a mass audience outside of it.
Finally, I just find it tiresome that Kim gives into that all-too-common impulse, where one seems unable to talk about a great Korean thing, without comparing it to a foreign thing that isn't as good.
Nobody has to tell me that Gyeongbokgung is in more harmony with nature than Beijing's Forbidden City, for me to be impressed by it. In fact, bringing up the Forbidden City mostly reminds me how much smaller and less fancy Gyeongbokgung is, how much more famous the Forbidden city is. Telling me hamburgers are shit does nothing to impress the health benefits of Korean food, except show me that someone has an inferiority complex, and is a bit petty, and doesn't understand American food: the Korean correlative to hamburgers is something closer to ddeokbokki than bibimbap. And it isn't necessary for American mothers to be told they suck, before we can properly celebrate Korean mothers. If it is necessary, that's a shitty kind of patriotism.
This type of argumentation is tone deaf if the author is appealing to anybody except Koreans themselves (of course he's writing this to Koreans... why in English? is the real question) Picking USA (and Japan, the other standby), again and again, as the points of comparison to show Korean superiority, also betrays a type of colonized thinking, because why USA and Japan? They're the two countries who have most recently dominated Korea politically and/or economically, so they're the two burrs in South Korea's saddle, when it comes to national pride and perception of national sovereignty, that's why. Showing that Korea is culturally superior, even with less economic or military clout than USA or Japan, is simply a tacky ploy at restoring a Korean pride somebody imagined has been damaged.
But the fact that pride is always measured against these countries over others, reveals that the Koreans who write articles like Dr. Kim's (which, to be clear, is a subset of Koreans - not the whole lot) still haven't gotten over the period when Korea was colonized: they can't leave that scab alone, and simply celebrate what Koreans are: these ones have to get a dig in. Using those specific measuring sticks to show Korea's better, unintentionally underscores that Koreawas well bested by them in the past.
Korea has enough kit now that it would be utterly possible to celebrate its culture on its own terms -- between the Korean Wave, the achievements of Korean businesses on the world stage, OECD membership, Ban Ki-moon, Psy, and Storm Shadow, the growing popularity of Korean food and the medal standings of the last few Olympics, there's enough there to stand without comparisons. But compare they do (some of them), and it comes across badly every time. (Example: Why Korea Sucks at Marketing Itself. Discuss.)
Lee Byung-hun as Storm Shadow. Making Korea's national status look goooood.
Given his output, we have to expect Dr. Kim will write a clunker from time to time. But this one was over the line.
I'm glad you had a good Chuseok weekend with your mother, Dr. Kim, it shows. But please try to express your love for your country and your mother without shitting on other countries and their mothers, and next time ideas are thin, maybe take a week or two off from your column over pinching out a turd like this one.
Funny footnote: I have some history with Kim Seong-kon - a letter to the editor in response to his article was the first time I ever sent writing of mine to a publication other than my university's poetry journal. You can read it here.
Special note for commenting: let's try to keep this comment discussion more nuanced than just telling everybody how horrible Korean moms are, OK? There are horrible moms and great moms in every country.
This is a re-worked version of a post I wrote last month. If you read that one, don't bother with this one. I don't like editing posts after people have already left comments, so instead of just editing that one, on the advice of a friend, I'm putting this one out as the version of record.
Removed: a bunch of stuff about gendered spaces, which I blundered through last year, and, on the advice of said friend, which I'm going to leave alone until I have the tools and background to write on it more credibly. To sum up: I got it wrong before, perhaps got it less wrong with that last post, and I'm still working on getting it right.
Tumblr feminist probably fits in a category with pejoratives like "armchair quarterback" and "slacktivist" and "Randroid"... but the term, strikes me as mean-spirited - more than those others.
To be clear now, not every feminist on tumblr is a "tumblr feminist," just like not everybody linking events and causes on facebook are slacktivists (some back the "likes" up with action). The term seems reserved for the bottom rung or two of the hierarchy of disagreement (source), and not writers and thinkers who ply in the top section of the pyramid, those who've done their background reading, invested time and thought into making a meaningful contribution. But then, the term is not clearly defined, which makes it more useful for name-calling -- moving goalposts is an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for making generalizations.
The term "tumblr feminist" set off alarms right from the start. Google tricks (a keyword timeline search mostly) confirmed my suspicion: "tumblr feminist" was probably coined in that
obnoxious youtube clip above: the first time that exact word combination appears is the month he published it. Subsequent mentions up until last month, when I suddenly came across it four or five independent times, had that same tone: contemptuous, and originating almost entirely in men's rights-type
forums. It ventured outside of those realms mostly in response to comments or potshots from within it.
Since the start, the term has been used as a "straw man" (straw person) to whom people have ascribed the views they want to argue against -- basically, the Men's Rights folks have been using "tumblr feminist" the same way Fox News uses "the liberal media" or "the gay agenda" as a boogeyman. And that'd be the Men's Rights folks who use that flag to mostly act like sexist pricks, not the group that are said to exist, who have done all the same gender studies reading as feminists have, but are picking up the stories and issues on the male end of the gender spectrum. (As a side note, that latter group might do well to find a different name for themselves that doesn't confuse them with the former group. Perhaps one with enough jargon, or long enough, that online misogynists find it cumbersome to co-opt.)
In the last month though, people outside of Men's Rights forums have been using it in name-calling exchanges, in "am I really a TF?" "why ____ is a TF" or "I'm not a TF because" type blog posts. It's gained a little traction. Personally, I don't like that: labels are useful for introspection -- asking myself "is there mansplaining in this blog post/comment? Am I gaslighting?" But this label has been weaponized from the start, and using labels as weapons leads to defensiveness (follow-up with gaslighting), or anger (follow-up with tone policing) to derail conversations.
Along with its troublesome origins, my other problem with the term is this:
Every topic on the internet draws responses ranging from knee-jerk reactions to clear, informed reasoning, and discussion on every topic features too much knee-jerk and not enough clear, informed reasoning. Every single one.
Naturally, the same is true of women's issues. Writing that lacks clarity, rigor, or perspective? That's about 70% of the entire internet, isn't it? (That statistic is made-up. It might be more.) "Tumblr feminists" may or may not be an actual thing, but I know for sure I haven't heard a satisfying reason why they should be singled out over everybody else also using the internet less like this...
Everybody's using the internet this way. Lots and lots and lots of men do. Every discourse has a few worthwhile voices and a lot of noise and people simply out of their depth. So if the group that becomes a target for derision is a subset of feminist writers (though if the term becomes common, wanna bet it remains reserved only for those feminist writers it originally applied to?) and they're simply acting the way most people (most men included) on the internet act, it's time for a motivation check. Does the simple existence of the term automatically indicate feminists, or women online in general, are singled out for persecution? Not all by itself, though given the term's origin (first yellow flag) and patterns of sexism on the internet (Food for thought. --Patterns which trace right back to the origins of the internet, when the photo used to test compression algorithms was part of a playboy centerfold) it'd be worth looking into. A cursory look around suggests that we might be onto something.
To tie this to Korea: it's like the __ __ 녀 or "ladygate" videos (more about Korea's online misogyny at Koreabang and Yonhap News): after a while, it stops seeming like a coincidence that every viral video about shameful public behavior features a woman behaving unacceptably, and we have to ask what's behind the singling out of women for shaming. You think men never fight, smoke, or act out drunk on subway cars? (You've never been on line 1, have you?) Yet it's the women doing the above whose videos go viral. Weeeird. Or maybe not.
I remember my first blog posts about Korea culture... they're painful to read, and full of mistakes and signs that I was way out of my depth, talking about stuff I didn't really know much about. My enthusiasm far outstripped my understanding. I got better: I learned more, and my comments got more moderate and thoughtful. I'm glad I didn't get too badly bullied, shamed, or disparaged, back there during my starting point... that would've sucked. If I had been using my blog for emotional catharsis, I hope nobody would have mistaken my writing for attempts at elevated discourse: that mismatch of expectations leads to misunderstandings, and people forget that not everybody who writes on the internet is actually doing it for an audience. I hope that as so-called "Tumblr feminists" use the internet to sort through, hash out, and ripen their ideas about gender issues, or just to vent pent-up emotions that their everyday life doesn't let them, their readers are as patient as mine were, or are discreet enough to look the other way, rather than singling them out for bullying and disparagement, the way a phrase like "Tumblr feminist" does. The internet is big enough, and there are enough people writing thoughtful, well-reasoned things about gender issues, that we don't have to seek out the "tumblr feminists" to pick on them, do we?
I may have something to say here about culturalism, once I've processed some of the stuff from one of the classes I took this semester. But today... flash mobs. Because why not.
This is a flash mob. This is one of the first flash mobs. The NYC Central Station "Freeze"
I've always liked flash mobs. It seems like a cool thing to have happen, to break the monotony of your day. I love imagining the people who encountered it, going home and telling the story. "And then suddenly, like 300 people in street clothing were dancing along to The Sound of Music in the subway station!
Improv Everywhere did some of the early ones. Another I liked:
Here are probably the two best flash mob videos.
Beethoven's 9th in Spain:
On Reddit today, I saw a link to a "Flash Mob" where a group of classical instrumentalists played a rendition of "Arirang," and then the Korean national anthem, in a public square in insadong, one of the popular streets in Seoul for tourists to vist, and one of the first four places your new Korean friend will take you if you just got off the airplane.
It was alright. Here it is. It's a great tune.
But I'm having trouble calling it a flash mob. Wikipedia makes a distinction between a "flash mob" and a "smart mob." Here's a working definition of a flash mob I've written, based on the entirely subjective metric of which videos I saw on teh internetz and though "this is described as a flash mob, and it's awesome."
A flash mob is...
1. an organized group action
2. in a public place
3. where ordinary people do something surprising and a little extraordinary
4. that has been planned and maybe coordinated beforehand
5. and then everybody goes about their day.
Bonus points for:
1. People not involved in planning it can join in (watch the Antwerp DoReMi again- people have jumped in without knowing where to step next)
2. including people under age 13 or above age 45
3. a video shorter than 4, preferably 3 minutes, unless it's friggin' awesome!
4. that "what on earth is going on?"/"wait a minute... I live in a musical?" feeling at the beginning, as apparently random people somehow seem to know the steps, or pull musical instruments out of their jackets.
Negative points for:
1. the number of people involved who appear to be professional performers. Also, music stands.
2. that general stink of being staged by PR people
3. any agenda other than "let's give the people in [this place] something to talk about when they get home from work" ... and the more obvious that agenda is, the more points you lose.
4. having a space cleared out before it starts. Feels like it was planned, and that's anathema for that "what on earth is going on?" feeling I mentioned. 5. Being this. Thanks for ruining flash mobs forever, FOX.
So... flash mobs now:
Wikipedia calls agenda-driven flash mob-like activities a "smart mob" -- if you're too clearly trying to sell me something, if your political demonstration involves apparent passers-by doing a choreographed dance or a freeze (while holding signs and slogans), or if they're clearly professional dancers (again, about the music stands), or if it was run by any business, but especially one larger than a community theater... sorry, kids. I'm not sold, and you're a smart mob, not a flash mob.
I wanted to make rule number 3 there hard and fast... no selling shit... but googling around revealed that the Antwerp Do Re Mi, and the Spanish Beethoven were both sponsored too. With a light hand, in the Antwerp case, but the Beethoven video does kinda finish with a corporate logo... so I realize that this "flash mob" thing has a fuzzier definition than I'd like. But here go those criteria, for the "This Is Arirang" video:
The "This Is Arirang" project was planned by a bunch of Korean student organizations (listed at the end.) According to the video description, "This is Arirang Project was designed with the aim to let foreigners know the Korean folk song, 'Arirang' and the 'Korean national anthem'"
Nothing wrong with that at first pass. Run by students is better than "run by a mobile company"(as slick as the T-mobile liverpool flash mob was)... though I can't help wonder why a bunch of university students care so much that foreigners know about their folk songs. Somehow I would have liked the video more if its purpose were to celebrate a beautiful song (cf Spain's Beethoven, the possible inspiration for it), rather than being to perform a beautiful song for "foreigners." Who cares if foreigners know/like arirang? The way "foreigners" are constructed in Korean promotional efforts is often problematic for various reasons, and the fact Korean culture becomes constructed as a performance of "Korea" for foreigners, bothers me sometimes, when Koreans should be doing the things Koreans do because it's meaningful to them, because it's beautiful, or fun, or connects them to who they believe they are in the world. There's a big difference between that hottie who dresses up because looking nice is nice, and the one who does it to fish for compliments.
Because, to steal from an old riddle, if the Arirang played, and no foreigner heard it, would it still be a beautiful song?
Yes. Yes it would. And it doesn't need foreigners to say "ooh! What a beautiful melody!" before Koreans can celebrate it, love it, and sing it. For their OWN damn benefit.
I was going to do a part of this blog post where I complained that flash mobs never really caught on in Korea -- even though Korea would seem like the perfect breeding ground for an absolute flash mob craze:
a culture of people who like doing things in groups (check)
everyone has a cellphone camera (check)
everybody already knows a set of dance moves and steps because of popular kpop songs (check)
one of the world's most wired populations (check)
a youth population prone to grab onto fads and run them for all they're worth, if so inclined (check)
I was going to complain that given the above, there are surprisingly few flash mobs in Korea.
Except I would have been wrong.
Now, many of these fail my own nitpicky criteria for a flash mob, because they're for a poltical cause, promoting a Kpop single, they're not in a public space, or they're too obviously staged. But then again... some of my favorite flash mobs fail one or more of those criteria, so I've got to be more forgiving.
As for flash mobs in the Korean news: well, they're popular enough to have been made illegal. Hankyoreh on that. And must be registered in advance. Wouldn't have happened if they'd been used for fun instead of for statements. But then again... I'll never begrudge someone giving a damn about the political situation in their country. Even if it means no Do Re Me song when I walk by Chunggyecheon.
Hi everyone. As part of my ongoing work studying and writing about multiculturalism in Korea, I've created a pair of surveys. The data collected is anonymous, and it will be used in future work about multiculturalism in Korea.
Right now, I'm focusing on "multi-racial" or "multi-ethnic" Koreans -- people living in Korea who have one, but not two, Korean parents. I've looked before, and will be looking at other groups of various types of Korean heritage, at different times.
This is a survey for multi-ethnic people.
Do you have one parent who is Korean, but not two?
Do you live in Korea?
(Or did you live in Korea for a significant amount of time?)
Please take ten minutes to fill out this survey: it'll help me a lot. Or take 20 minutes and answer the optional questions, too.
Hi everyone. As part of my ongoing work studying and writing about multiculturalism in Korea, I've created a pair of surveys. The data collected is anonymous, and it will be used in future work about multiculturalism in Korea.
Right now, I'm focusing on "multi-racial" or "multi-ethnic" Koreans -- people living in Korea who have one Korean parent, and one non-Korean parent. I've looked before, and will be looking at other groups of various types of Korean heritage, at different times.
This is a survey for the parents of multicultural children.
Do you have a kid?
Was one parent Korean, but not both?
Do you live in Korea? (Or did you live in Korea for a significant amount of time?)
Please take ten minutes to fill out this survey: it'll help me a lot.
So here are two very cute videos of Babyseyo I made this month. Because I've been writing papers and things and not writing blog posts.
Yes. I refer to myself in the third person when I talk to Babyseyo. It's because I want him to grow up to be a professional wrestler.
You do not have to think my kid is as cute or brilliant as I do... and to help you keep your judgment friendly, I've made both videos less than two minutes.
His favorite song is Gangnam Style. When he wants me to play a video on my computer, he does the horse dance, which is as much "baby sign" as we've done.
I've been studying North Korea, and have some interesting things to write about that.
I'm also writing about multiracial/multi-ethnic Korean-ness this semester, and you'll see something about that soon - perhaps before today is through.
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.
The Olympics came and went. And all the flag waving with it. I've been busy -- I got a very unexpected promotion at work, and between doing the "Blog Buzz" section at TBS This Morning every week for quite a while, and also writing a "Blog Of The Month" thingy for 10 Magazine, I seem to have gotten blogged out... more on that later, perhaps. So I didn't comment on the Olympics as they were happening. Tough nuts.
And that Korean soccer player may or may not get his bronze medal after holding up a sign that said "Dokdo Is Our Land," and there's been buzz that he may even still have to do his military service, which would happen in Korea's soccer or olympic organizations don't want the IOC or FIFA to be mad. Or maybe he still won't, because now that the Korean media's picked this up, he may come out of this a minor hero.
Sigh. Grumble grumble grumble.
The whole news story is pretty much stupid from top to bottom.
To begin, the idea that the Olympics are not political is just stupid from the start. The Olympics always have been. After World War II, cities from all the major Axis nations were each awarded Olympics games, partly to symbolize normalization with the rest of the world (Munich, Rome and Tokyo), but not before London crowed in 1948 (Who won the war? Fuck yeah! We did!). Those city selections were political choices, no doubt about it. Apartheid and cold war politics saw mass boycotts of the Olympics through the 70s and 80s.
The awarding of the games to a particular host city has ALWAYS been a huge granting of status, and a form of validation in the international arena that is all the more powerful for its rarity -- after all, there's only one Summer and one Winter games every four years - that scarcity makes it a much bigger deal than if, say, the Superbowl, which happens EVERY year, went to a different city worldwide each year. And you can't award the Olympics to Beijing, but not the political prisons. The games go to the host city, baggage and all.
And the Olympics have turned a blind eye to some awful shit in their day, hiding behind "The Olympics are not political" when their hypocrisy becomes too glaring -- a few year after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the president of the IOC was encouraging china to make an Olympic hosting bid for the 2000 games that went to Sydney. Seoul got the 1988 games in 1981, only about a year after Korea's military massacred democracy protesters in Gwangju.
But while the International Olympic Committee goes through the paces of not being about politics, it's always been about politics. And money. And prestige. The countries being awarded the games have always been western countries, or countries that can put on a mask of appearing similar enough to the West to make the high-up mucky-mucks feel assured of their superiority.
So the idea that the Olympics are not political is rubbish. They're intensely, intrinsically political, and you only get smacked for being political if your politics don't agree with theirs.
And in fact, I'd rather they were MORE political, if it meant they were a little less commercial. Banning logos and making it illegal for companies that weren't official sponsors of the Olympics to use the word "London" and "2012" too close together -- and the amount of resources spent policing the above -- let everyone know what the Olympics are about now. And it made me pine a little for some political showboating, if only because the black power fist doesn't translate onto a Wheaties box.
At the more "mass" level, the Olympics are about nationalist chest-thumping and flag waving. I realize I'm not saying anything new. The Olympics have also always been about nationalist chest-thumping and flag-waving. Leading up to the 1908 Olympics (also in London), the Olympic project was in trouble. A handful of other potential host cities had balked at the cost, and Rome actually cancelled after repairs from Mt. Vesuvius' eruption drained public coffers. The Olympics had no home, and London became the host on short notice, because it was hosting the World Expo at the time. Can't even find a host city? The Olympics were in rough shape.
But then the guy carrying the American Flag refused to dip the US flag as the US contingent passed in front of the British King's box (all the other nations had), and that insult, followed by some misunderstandings about the rules for a few sports, led to an acrimonious rivalry developing between British and American athletes. These territorial controversies made the olympics much more interesting than some high-minded nobles prancing their horses around, and the Olympics started down a path it would not be able to return from.
Olympics have always been about nationalism -- all the way from that fifth Olympiad. Before that, the Olympics mostly ran as afterthoughts concurrent with and overshadowed by a few world fairs, in Paris and St. Louis. In fact, I'm gonna say that if nationalism hadn't gotten tied into the Olympics, the whole project would have sputtered, and the world would give about as much a damn about the Olympics as the world gave about the 2011 World Athletics Championships (who hosted them? Quick! Without google! Betcha nobody outside the host country can tell you) or the 1986 World Expo (Betcha nobody outside the host city can tell you were that was). For what it's worth, cheering for a country helps people get excited about the Olympics -- it gives us a hook to hang our interest on, when otherwise nobody'd give a damn about mixed pairs badminton or synchronized diving.
I don't think nationalism is going anywhere regardless, just because a nation is a large enough unit for human beings to feel aggrandized by connecting their identity to it, but a small enough unit that we can remain provincial and prejudiced toward outsiders, and wrap our minds around that morsel of identity in a way that sets up an ingroup and outgroup. That ingroup-outgroup shit seems to matter with us homo sapiens.
And what of Park Jong-woo?
Well, to begin with, he didn't make the sign himself. But he could read it. But he had just won a medal by beating his country's (percieved) nastiest rival. But he had to expect what was coming.
Honestly, I'd do some dumb shit too if I'd just won an Olympic medal. The people I blame are the Korean fans who handed him the sign.
I hope they really feel like shit.
Not just for getting a guy stripped of his medal, but in the larger picture, for making, and bringing, such a shithead sign to an event that (despite my descriptions of the IOC's hypocrisy above) is supposed to be a celebration of excellence, and is described as an opportunity to resolve, or at least suspend, national differences through competition. Resolving rivalries through competition is ass-backwards thinking... but then, would a billion people world wide turn their TVs on to watch the open ceremonies of the "International Leadership and Team Building Activitiad"? "Bulgaria won a gold medal in the trust fall on Tuesday, but their representative placed dead last in the 'Back-pat and Multi-step Handshake' event."
They're kinda dumbasses... but I can hardly blame them, because if THEY missed the point of the Olympics, then EVERYBODY's been missing the point of the Olympics since 1908.
I've been reading about nationalism for some of the papers I wrote last semester, and this Dokdo sign stupidity is just another iteration of other historical real and perceived grievances in the arena... as for Dokdo itself, go read this article. I like it.
But as for antagonistic nationalism in East Asia?
Well, you know how the basketball or soccer team where the players are making the extra pass and sacrificing their own stats for the sake of team success, are usually the teams that win the big games? And how the teams where players are trying to run up their statistical totals for the sake of their next payday... usually don't win the big game?
And you know how in the long run, history is kinder to the athletes who pass on individual glory for the sake of the team, and those guys who score lots of points for the last-place team get forgotten, while everybody remembers the folks who lift the trophies?
Well right now, all the countries in East Asia are the players gunning for individual stats, rather than trying to figure out how to win the effing game.
The USA and China will benefit from this, because if the smaller countries can't get their shit together, they'll keep setting up the pieces to dominate the pacific rim, and the Asian continent, by continuing to pitch smaller countries against each other.
The smaller countries in Asia will either be forced to choose between USA or China, or allowed to keep vacillating, which renders their influence in the region pretty much impotent.
I mean... Europe's not doing so hot right now economically... but if you look a little closer, the idea that "We're in this together, and we've got to help each other out of this" underpins most of the debates about what comes next for the EU... and that shared experience of mutual support is going to pay dividends in the future, when nations begin to trust the institution of the EU more.
And Korea and Japan and China will probably still be screeching at each other about this island, and that mountain, and the truth about some historical events.
