That’s right, a boy can get a whupping, because his hair is too long. A girl can if she’s suspected of dyeing it. (Heaven help those who are born with brown hair.)

But what kills me is when governments micromanage their societies in the same way. For example, the controversy over this song, “Mirotic” by TVXQ. Here’s a snippet from the article in the Korea Times:

Asian pop sensation TVXQ’s song “Mirotic” is under scrutiny once again as regulators are set to determine whether the phrase “I got you under my skin” is lewd.

Now, the controversy is not over whether the song is crap, surprisingly. (That much is obvious, I imagine.) It’s not over whether some of those dudes are just a little too femme, and the effect they’ll have on people… no, no, the controversy is over whether the phrase “I’ve got you under my skin” is lewd.

Lewd.

Thank goodness Frank Sinatra never lived to see this day. If that song is lewd, I imagine that old Frank was basically a scumbag secretly polluting the airwaves of America for years! After all:

I could just go on to mock the government, whose English is notoriously bad. The webpage on which the government’s proposed almost-all-English-curriculum was presented was, by all accounts and unsurprisingly, rife with screwed-up English. The idea that a censor who cannot speak English well enough to understand the nuances of what’s being said is interesting.

But then again, there’s also the nuances of what’s being heard. After all, I can say, “Ha, that censor doesn’t know enough English to know that it means, “I’ve got you on my mind,” or, “You’ve affected me emotionally in such a way that I cannot shake this effect you have on me.” But the censor’s grasp of English is…

Well, there’s the question. The Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs certainly doesn’t seem to know what the phrase means in English — though it’s well-documented, is present in popular culture, and absolutely innocuous in an English speaking context. (Even the stuff about “… deep down in the heart of me, so deep inside, that you’re really a part of me…” is tame enough to have been on mainstream TV back when sexual content was not broadcast in the States.)

But is the government’s grasp on English any worse than the “children” it claims to be protecting? I can say that the undergraduates I teach all knew what the phrase means in English, and laughed their butts off as they told me about the case. A few people were quite annoyed by the fact that their media was being censored by someone who couldn’t even understand it. I don’t know whether kids would be any more likely to interpret it correctly, and to be honest, it could be that even TVXQ thinks the phrase has an erotic meaning, or that it could be interpreted that way.

(It’s understandable that a bunch of people who don’t speak English together would perhaps get the idea that this phrase would mean something sexual, though, oddly, it’s a bunch of girly-men singing it. Mens’ body parts being outies, it’d make more sense if it was a girl group lewdly singing, “I’ve got you under my skin,” but hey, this is government censorship and pop songs: I don’t imagine logic is the biggest force at work.)

None of which is to support censorship, mind. (Generally speaking, and with certain limits, I abhor it.) I even think it’s a profound negative on the creativity of a culture. Of course snuff films and underaged actors in pornography are abhorrent, but I don’t get why our pop music and TV should be wholly devoid of lewdness. I’ve never yet seen an intelligent, clearly argued defense of that position that didn’t rely on assumptions about how media somehow magically rewires human nature — you know, that delicate system that developed over millions and millions of years of evolution, all the way back to the origins of life?

But more I just think it’s an interesting example of the weirdness of what happens with a global auxiliary language when it threads its way into popular culture the way English has in South Korean pop culture.

For if and when the original article disappears, the remainder is under the cut. But for now, click over to the KT if you want to read it.

I’ll unhide the remainder of the article if and when the original becomes unavailable. Follow the link above, and feel free to let me know when the link goes dead.

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People survived and thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without holding major festivals for specific deities, without holding big annual parties for imaginary constructions like nation-states. Nation states are all well and good, but the Earth is here, tangible, and absolutely necessary for our survival. It’s as close to sacred as one can be within a naturalistic viewpoint.

Those who complain that it makes people think they should consider the Earth for just one day a year may have a point, but I’d rather start with trying to get everyone to celebrate the planet itself for just one day a year instead of none; it’s a starting point, in other words, to a wider change in attitude that we should be trying to build, collectively, all of us who, to whatever degree, get it.

Because I think, just as snark is a psychological defense mechanism, so is holier-than-thou eco-politics. As much as I respect Theravada Buddhism more than Mahayana — from what (precious little) I know about each, the former’s intellectualism and philosophical bent attracts me more than the latter’s panoply of deities and folk myths and devotionalism and so on — there’s no way that the ascetic-environmentalist-activist equivalent of Theravada is ever going to attract enough people — let alone enough stable and sane people — to make the changes we need to make, unless there’s some kind of fascist green takeover.

What we need is environmental Mahayana: new technologies, sexy Green festivals, Greened education: more of the stuff that gets people who aren’t likely to start moving out into communes and donning hairshirts thinking about what they can (and need to) do. Maybe not everyone will get to the Pure Land that way, or maybe it will take longer, but if we don’t get as many people on board as possible, we’re not going anywhere except down the drain. That’s the fact that we need to face, and take to heart, and integrate into everything we say and so about the problems we’re faced with now.

It looks like the big celebration in Seoul was held on the weekend — and I was too sick to have gone, even if I’d been on the ball enough to remember that this happened last year too — so in lieu of that, I think I’ll try set aside some time to get to the mountain and appreciate it, thanking it in my way for the challenge it gives me every day that I climb it, and appreciating all those green plants that eat up my exhalations and shade my way as I journey among them.

(UPDATE: That’s precisely what I did: I hiked the mountain and thanked it for giving me a place to exercise. Stood there in the sunset light, my breath visible in the chill air, and listened to the branches rustle in the evening breeze. I even left an orange there for some small creature to find and feast on: a little sacrifice not so much to a San-shin [Mountain God] as to the little creatures who make the world such a vibrant place. Some squirrel got lucky last night, I’m thinking. It felt good to let loose with a little real, honest gratitude. It felt like spring.)

And finally, here’s a video my neighbours sent me when wishing me a Happy Earth Day. It’s another excellent video from TED, about the part of the earth most neglected by the “green” movement: our oceans.

ORIGINAL POST: Twitter is aflame today, where it’s still Easter Day over in North America. For my part, I ran across the news on Tobias Buckell’s feed.

Right, Amazon, do you want to know why everyone is offended by what’s been done?

It’s because intelligent people — which are presumably a big part of your customer base, seeing as you’re selling books — can’t stand to be protected for their own good.^1. They abhor it, they find it arrogant and stomach-turningly offensive. It reminds them of the way Communist governments have always presented propaganda “for the public good” while brutally suppressing different opinions.

If people have complained that they were offended by seeing a book on a topic that offends them, then you know what you should do?

(Well, really, if you weren’t out for their money, you would probably be best telling them to grow up and get lost. But since you are out for their money…)

You should offer them an opt-in filtration system. Don’t wanna see books on LGBT topics? Cool — click this button and we won’t show them on your computer while you’re logged in on your account. Don’t wanna see books on animal abuse? Hey, opt-in. Don’t wanna see true crime gore-fests? Hate SF? Can’t stand dating guides? Click, click, click.

The truth is, conservatives are intolerant, and the more liberal-minded are much more tolerant. All of the stereotypes to the contrary, it’s conservatives who bitched so much that Amazon de-ranked LGBT-related (or is it now going to be all sex-related, after a brief oops from Amazon HQ?) books — even books on the scientific study of the same — while all of the millions of liberal-minded people who could have complained to the point where Jerry Falwell and his kind would be delisted, haven’t done so.

Why? Because it is with liberal-minded people that free speech is valued. It is liberal-minded people who do not wish to live in a censorship-and-surveillance republic. So of course they’re not going to try and get involuntary filtration set up for everyone. They abhor it. But the conservatives? They don’t believe in freedom anyway.

Well, Amazon, we don’t share their slave mentality. And we know what you really care about. So until this is sorted, I will not be buying a single book from you.

Boycott is the word, folks. Oh, and you could sign this petition. Or do something more creative (though it  might not work).

Well, now he’s now out to delete all those same-sex marriages that happened in California before vast numbers of inmates members of the Church of Mormon decided it didn’t believe in separation of Church and State, and that it might be fun to lead a crusade against Family Values.

There’s a petition here for the Supreme Court to exile Starr to a society that has religious police and fundamentalist laws similar to those he promotes, like, oh, say, rural Afghanistan or Sudan to dismiss the case that Starr and his cohort are attempting to argue, which is the Constitutionality of Proposition 8.

As far as I’m concerned, people who think same-sex marriage is wrong have exactly the same rights as anyone to object to how someone lives his or her life — but no special rights to impose their ethics on others, especially not if they want to be assured that when some other religion wins the popularity contest in America, their beliefs and practices will become outlawed.

(Too bad the Christian Right in America is so busy sporting that raging hard-on for persecuting gays, or they might consider what the Bible — or, at least, the New Testament — would say about excessive greed, warmongering, and corruption. But what’s most frustrating is the thing that worries me about politics everywhere: the fact that the normal, sensible, tolerant people are mostly too busy getting on with their lives, while so many of the intolerant, stupid, and bigoted are politically active.)

“Fidelity”: Don’t Divorce… from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

(I haven’t signed the petition myself; not being a US citizen, I don’t know if it would help if I did. If there is, please let me know. In any case, they’re looking for signatures by Valentine’s Day, folks! That’s a week, now!)

I’ve posted in the past about the Korean internet, censorship, and the odious “Real-Name System” that has essentially eliminated all possibility of real anonymity online at many websites in Korea by requiring people to use their National ID number to register on a given site.

But no, no, that’s not enough control: with each celebrity suicide, the media has begun screaming about “Internet Rumors” and some politician or other lets out a rallying cry for increased control of Internet content and usage. Even the foreign media seems to have picked up the wrongheaded claim that online gossip can “cause” suicide.

The simple fact is that both sides of the (narrow) political spectrum in South Korea have been pushing for increased controls. The “Real Name System” — whereby users must sign in using their national identification number to use major portal sites — came into effect under the (relatively) progressive Roh government^1., as far as I recall.

I’ve run across online polls in the past that suggested a number of Korean internet users, or “netizens,” support censorship and government control of the Internet, and this is a position I’ve seen widely held among young people as well. The reasoning follows thus:

Click to read more on the Dog Poo Girl.

Lots of people “behave badly” online, ruining people’s lives (as in the cybermob that stalked Dog Poop Girl) or killing people. Many celebrities who have killed themselves in the last few years have done so “because of” rumors and slander online in various anonymous comment boards.

(Note that celebrity suicide seems to be construed — in the media and in politicians’ statements and thus in public discussions as well — as an involuntary response to online slander. Little or no connection is made in the media to the issues of Korea’s mental health care infrastructure, such as it is. Nobody mentions the fact that celebrities worldwide sustain comparable, if not quite the same, amount of bashing online. Nobody even brings up the other tens of thousands of people who kill themselves in Korea yearly without a bit of online slander to push them into it.)

Once it’s established that people “behave badly” and the spectre of murder by Internet is looming broadly in everyone’s imagination, then comes the punch, and the punch is increased internet controls and censorship. Indeed, the degree of control and tracking that is inherent in the Korea Internet today is at levels that would have Civil Libertarians in the USA far beyond up in arms: they would be suing the living crap out of the government, or promulgating a new wave of hacking, anti-tracking, and diasporic Net services free from government controls.

(Which, by the way, is about the best I can imagine will come of the Korean Internet: that the portal sites will finally stand up to the government by following the law to the letter, and establishing servers offshore for the purposes of giving their users the option of using the internet without being tracked and spied upon by their own government. After all, if Daum is obligated to provide this information to the government, Haum — Daum’s Hong Kong sister-company — would not be. Of course, that would require the portal companies to grow a pair, and the money’s too good for them to dare that. And sadly, it looks like a nonexistent niche, given how few people actually seem to oppose their government’s invasiveness.)

But in any case, most people seemed to be quite naive about the prospects of the government misusing this Real Name System. However, stirrings have registered online, with one very interesting case.

Minerva is the name that’s on everyone’s lips now, and I’ve been meaning to write something about this fellow ever since the Korean public started discussing him back in (I think it was) November. Now that the story has been covered by both the Washington Post and Time (both links via this post at The Marmot’s Hole), I figure maybe I might as well rail a bit.

“Minerva” is the persona used by a Korean internet user (or maybe more than one user) for his (or their) posts on Agora, a kind of forum-site hosted by Daum, one of Korea’s main Internet portal sites. As with the more famous agora that the site is named after, this website is supposed to be a place of public debate and discussion regarding issues of public interest.

In Korea, these days, there is no issue of greater public interest than the economy. The economy all but determined the general election last year, for example. Many, many people explained their choice of Lee in terms of a tradeoff: they were willing to take a man widely seen as corrupt and disgustingly sexist and right-wing–and even chauvinistically Protestant Christian^2.–as their leader in the hopes that his CEO background would be of some use in stabilizing the Korean economy.

When the economy didn’t magically recover–and let’s be realistic, it wouldn’t have anyway–the muttering started. A hot summer of protests on the heels of a number of pretty embarrassing policy gaffes only damaged Lee’s approval ratings more.

But to add insult to injury, he has been uncannily correct, or at least that’s how people see him. I don’t know whether there’s a confirmation bias at work, mind. If he made hundreds of predictions online, and only the ones he got right are being remembered, then that’s one thing… and a population as thick with PhDs as Korea’s ought to be able to disseminate that observation far more effectively than it has.

But the public seems to think find Minerva not just more accurate, but also more trustworthy, than its elected government. And with the Blue House’s move to prosecute Minerva, or at least to prosecute Park Dae Sung for the offenses of Minerva, I find their almost-instinctive distrust of the government quite understandable.

There are two points I want to observe here. I’ll keep them as brief as possible.

The first is that to whatever degree Minerva is or is not an amazing amazing genius of economics, he was an anonymous blogger. And while I absolutely repudiate the erosion of online anonymity that the Korean government has, in the last few administrations, imposed on its population, I also have to wonder how people could take so seriously the writings of a totally anonymous individual.

Part of the reasons probably lie with the government itself, increasingly seeking more and more control and oversight of net content in South Korea and responding to criticism with a heavier and heavier hand. (And to be clear, I’m not talking about the Lee Administration: odious policies were also introduced under the Roh Administration.)

But the government ought perhaps to pause and reflect on the fact that it is regarded as less trustworthy than an anonymous, random guy online somewhere who happened to get some predictions right. This speaks volumes in terms of the government’s credibility problems, and how citizens view their government. The money and time spent arguing over, and prosecuting, Mr. Park could be much better spent fixing the root of the problem.

That root is twofold: one, education–because claiming that Park “misinformed” the public is pretty a claim that the public is a bunch of easily misled sheep, which is a disturbing sort of thing for the government to imply about its citizens, especially with such a high concentration of people who’ve been to university or even grad school. The take-home message, if one even dignifies the implied claim, is that educaitonal reform is direly needed.

But more worrying is the elephant in the room: the reality that the credibility of both the government and much of the media here is below low; it doesn’t exist. To a Westerner–schlerotic as our media and governments are, and they indeed are–it’s generally mind-boggling that a government would prosecute someone for saying something in public that wasn’t a violation of human rights, or an incitement to violence, or anything like that. The fact that the media are seen essentially as puppets of the government, and that the government is seen by many as fundamentally dishonest, ought to send a chill through the bowels of Lee Administration. Again, time repairing this rent in the nation’s stability would be time well-spent.

Those details that Minister of Strategy and Finance, Kang Man Soo,   claims he wanted to pass on to Minerva: what were they? Have they been published? Why would they not have been public knowledge? What is the point of an economic information gap? I don’t know that transparency is a cure-all, but it’s odd that the details were on offer to a critic, but not to the general population. Again, one gets the sense that the government really fears publicizing information that might allow an intelligent and informed public to evaluate their options and the oncoming situation as best they can. If the public is uninformed, they will scramble for any credible source, won’t they? And the longer they’re kept in the dark, the more deeply the roots set. The Internet will continue to be a very important, and to conservative politicians on both sides of the spectrum, to be seen as a very dangerous, factor in Korean politics. The degree to which they manage to gain control of it will determine how much of a voice citizens will have on the hundreds of days that stretch between each national election.

There’s one more thing that’s puzzling. The prosecution apparently is swatting aside claims that Minerva is not just one, but several individuals. And I should add, the fact that this is in doubt is probably a reflection of the degree to which people believe in credentials. It’s been widely discussed how he doesn’t have any, as if being uncredentialed–not having a degree or advanced degrees in a subject– automatically disqualifies someone from knowing about that subject. I don’t know whether Minerva is one or more individuals, but I don’t find it ridiculous that someone self-taught could get a few predictions right. IF he got most of his predictions right, though, it’d be a little surprising. But not unbelievable.

Korea Beat reports on how a static IP is casting doubt on the case:

Prosecutors say Mr. Park used his home computer. But experts say that since he was not a person engaged in internet commerce and paying considerable sums for a static IP address he would have been using a dynamic IP. That is one reason for doubt that Mr. Park is the true Minerva and that his IP address could have been manipulated.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think having a static IP is quite so hard here in Korea. I know this because, for example, I have one. (It was necessary to prevent the Windoze-only campus internet security system from misinterpreting as a viral attack the phenomenon of a Linux PC and a Windows PC sharing a wireless connection.) Not only that, but at least a couple of my long-term commenters in Korea have static IPs. So if I understand this right, and the claim is that having a static IP is expensive and special, then there’s a hole in the argument and the hole is called reality.

(Though it wouldn’t be the first time prosecutors held up some techno-lingo while hoping nobody would notice. Highly recommended: The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. It’s even available online in a ton of formats… for free!)

<sup>1. “Relatively progressive” in the sense that it’s not the party pushing water privatization, the elimination of nationalized health insurance/health care, and doesn’t start screaming, “Commies! Commies! It’s Commies attacking us!” at every faint hint of a challenge.
2. Lee’s relationship with what we would in the West consider fanatical evangelical Christians is widely known in Korea, but not often discussed in terms of its political ramifications. Which is odd, given just how many people voted for him on purely religious grounds.
3.</sup>

A terrible audio track that my friend Jack posted that WILL make you laugh.

Sunset Grill is a webcomic made by my friend Kat.

Anyone notice that Obama mentioned non-believers in his inauguration speech without calling them unAmerican? That was interesting.

Unarmed, behind enemy lines? Click to see the source.

“Nowadays we simply cannot wait a few hundred years for something good or bad to happen in the world. Take the migration of peoples which used to drag on over several centuries: today, with our present organization of transport, it could be accomplished in three years; otherwise there would be in profit in it. The same is true of the liquidation of the Roman Empire, the colonisation of the continents, the extermination of the Red Indians, and so on. All these things could have been accomplished incomparably more speedily if they had been put in the hands of entrepreneurs with a lot of capital behind them.”

- Karel Čapek, War With the Newts, 1936 (translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers).

Owch, the satire! If you want to read the book yourself, there’s a (pretty) recent version by David Wylie available here, or more downloadably here.

Thank you. Given the limited choices, the narrow range of political possibilities, and all that, I figure you done pretty good. Nobody’s ideal, but in a choice between jumping deeper into a pit or, well, a few positive changes, I figure you chose the latter. And at the very least, you kept Alzheimer’s McCain out, and Prayin’ Palin and the Bibliomaniacs from getting a heart attack away from the Presidency.

Your countrymen abroad, as well as my Korean students, seem overall quite pleased. Or relieved. Or both. Actually, so does much of the planet.

So… now what?

One wonders whether conservativism in any government is bound to appeal only to people within that nation, while the liberal government (for a definition of “liberal” relative to the given state, that is) in a given nation is likelier to have appeal internationally?

(For example, many Westerners I know mildly prefer the Korean Left, such as it is, to the Korean Rightwing. Non-Canadians are likelier to be impressed with a Liberal government than the current one. And so on…)

And here’s a Youtube clip about the project.

Instead:

• There’s some great fiction online that I need to link to. For now, just one story: the wonderfully nastyglee party that is Tina Connolly’s “A Day Out, with Stereoscopes” is up at Birkensnake. I’ve a copy of the zine, actually, and it’s lovely. You could do worse than to subscribe. Tina has a talent for mixing the cute with the horrifying.
• Ever heard of Drapetomania? It’s this disease that can be summed up as “longing to be free and a slave no more.” Yeah, they diagnosed runaway slaves with an illness, meant to explain their desire to run away. Which ought to make you think about, say, for example, ADD and the education system a little more.
• Courtesy of NPR, this is kind of depressing.
  Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

  Maybe I should tell my students to memorize everything beforehand after all, in debate class?

• Here’s the RSS feed for new SF books at Manybooks.net. Come on, you know you want it.
• MrChiCity3 on the advantages of a well-stocked kitchen. Hint, these advantages involve women’s nether parts, and suburban chicks fawning over Snapple.
• The purposeful miseducation of America as political strategy backfires: yes, the infection has spread to the political head. Long ago, but this is just, well… Crack a goddamned book, lady. I sure hope whoever’s elected make book-cracking part of a balanced life.
• Speaking of book-cracking: maybe fundamentalists ought to read the Bible sometime?
  

  American Idol, indeed. Two words for you: Bad Precedent.

  Yes, for you viewers at home, that is a golden calf bull (thanks, Charles), with people praying to it. To save the American Economy. More here. You’d think they might have actually read the Bible, sometime before trying to shove it down everyone else’s throat. What can an educated (or even just an intelligent) person do but snicker? (Via plenty of places, but especially Oltheros, who has a rockin’ LJ.)

• You’re young. That makes you suspicious. How could young people support the Republican party? Get out! That’s how to ensure your party is supported in the future, guys…
• James Van Pelt on how to scare a reader, Mike Brotherton on writing as a career vs. writing as a hobby (another reason I’m considering going back to grad school in the medium run), mlawski on the artificiality of “strong female characters” (as opposed to interesting ones –  for interesting, read: flawed, human female characters written the way we write any interesting male characters). Also, on io9, several authors give advice about writing good characters.
• Saw some good talks on TED lately, including this one wherein Steven Pinker argues what I’ve been saying for a while: yeah, humans are still a**holes, but we’re actually getting better… quantifiably so:
  

  More good stuff over at TED. I’m not really sold on Susan Blackmore’s notion of temes, discussed here, but it’s an interesting idea. And while I don’t think Ken Robinson is a truly great public speaker — he meanders so much I start to wonder whether he’s gotten lost — I agree with his argument wholeheartedly. And this 3 minute fairytale of emoticons was fun.

Lots more to post about, but no time, so end off the post, a little happy, cutesy Korean indie-pop by Taru:

Maybe I’d hate it if I were listening closely enough to understand the words, but I’m not, so I don’t. Though watching it I wonder if, being in Korea so long, I have just stopped being revolted by cutesiness? Hmm.

Unfortunately, I think Bruce skipped the likeliest solution to the problems he outlines early on in his talk: physical restraint. I suspect that the North Korean borders will become much less permeable, rather than more permeable, when South Korea, China, and whomever else it is intervenes to stablize the North when it becomes necessary.

There are a few reasons I think this is likely:

1. It would help fend off the influx of poverty into the South, and help fend off the influx of North Koreans who, after all, are not really people South Koreans are widely comfortable about having around.
2. It would provide a reason to keep on operating mandatory military service requirements for Korean men. There are many serious reasons why this is on the South Korean establishment’s agenda, but the simplest way to put it is, this system is a powerful way of putting the brakes on social change, on acceptance of shifting gender roles and power, of reinforcing male identity as conservative and “traditional,” and of maintaining a relatively conservative political base. (Because even many Korean liberals are remarkably similar to right-wingers in the rest of the world.)
3. It would provide a huge, cheap labour base for South Korean manufacturing and textiles, while offshoring a lot of the opportunity costs (pollution, say, or the unsightly factories); this would radically reduce Korean dependence on Chinese imports. If you think this is far-fetched, ask yourself why Gaesong is such a popular idea among South Korean businesspeople.
4. It would make it easier to regulate the southward flow of people; predictably, you would see a major rise in South Korean-bound immigration of Northern women (as mail order brides, perhaps stemming the tide of South-Asian mail order brides and preventing all that “miscegenation” that’s been going on) while you would see relatively little southward movement of North Korean men. Perhaps the South Asian women would simply be rerouted to North Korea, though probably they’d go there in much smaller numbers. Likewise, human trafficking of Northern women to the South would probably rise, as Northern women would escape poverty in the North only to end up in brothels in Seoul and the countryside.

Still, I think Bruce’s talk is important and its optimism may inspire people to do better than this, because really, though I think what I’ve written above is what’s likely to happen if the people at the helm of South Korea are still at the helm when the North collapses, it’d be nice to see Korea do better.

And by the way, by “the people at the helm” I don’t mean the Lee government, I mean the whole political establishment, left and right alike. If the people running the show when fit hits the shan are the same people who remember living in Korea when there was only one flavor of ice cream, who didn’t know how to use a shower or a bed, then I’m pretty skeptical that they’re going to be able to rise to the occasion of actually launching whatever magical economic revolution that Sterling imagines.I’m sure some people can figure one out, but with a government that’s still playing McCarthy games whenever it gets a little bad press, I have my doubts about whether they’ll have the guts to embrace something unheard-of, something truly radical, something that could change the whole game worldwide after they’ve spent so long clawing their way up in the established system.

I could be wrong. I’d be pleased to discover that. But the big question whenever you want something done in Korea is, how can we get the ajeoshis to back it? And I can’t see a model for radical economic change that would benefit those rich, older men in suits who would would need to give the go-ahead, so I’m not sure I can see it happening.

Well, unless, of course, there were a groundswell of effort from precisely the people in South Korea who stand to benefit from an upheaval like this: young women, the working poor (which includes huge numbers of recent college graduates), and teenagers, especially young men eager not to have to do military service. That’s a lot of people, and they do have real incentives to harness whatever establishment-changing energies would be released by a radical reworking of inter-Korean economics. Still, whether they will rise to the occasion is a very tenuous possibility.

The effects could potentially be amazing. What if Korean business became more of a productivity-meritocracy? What if military service became a thing of the past — how would popular culture explode as young men suddenly weren’t forced to mentally and emotionally become conservative middle-aged men in their early 20s? What might happen if the majority of men had a college education that wasn’t bisected by two years of Pavlovian obedience training and unwholesome suffering? What would happen if the same economic magic worked on the North were to be worked on the less-fortunate Koreans south of the DMZ?

Like I say, I’m dubious, but I’d like to see it happen. Go on, Korea, prove me wrong. I’ll celebrate it as hard as anyone on earth.

Clarkesworld, Oct. 2008

It feels so long ago, but I still think it’s worth a look back:

My article on the SFnal side of the anti-2MB protests that rocked Seoul this past summer, titled “How Candle Girl and V Took on 2MB”, is now up at the excellent Clarkesworld.

It touches on the political reception and adaptation of foreign SF, techno-protest culture, Korean politics and food-culture, and more. Not quite something for everyone, but lots of stuff swirling around the nexus there. The ending is a bit, well, dated — I wrote it back in August, and it sounds like the protests just died down last week or something — but with that contextualized, I stand by it wholly. Yay for Nick Mamatas, who bought it for Clarkesworld. (And nudged me to make it better!)

Supporting Materials:

• My Post series on the protests.
• Photos of several protests I managed to attend and photograph.

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See, the thing is, all this watching Korean SF movies and thinking in terms of the Korean adaptation of foreign genres or narratives to a Korean context has impacted how I watch American and other foreign films now, and I was asking myself how or even whether Wag the Dog could be retold in a Korean context.

I haven’t seen many political films here, I’ll admit; The Host (2006) doesn’t feature any explicit depictions of the mechanisms within the Blue House — “The White House of Korea” — and The President’s Last Bang (2004) and The Barber of Hyoja Dong (2004) both deal with politics during (or at the end of) the rule of President Dictator Park Chung Hee.

(Although I don’t think Presidency is necessarily a sign of honor — I would imagine a degree of dishonor is necessary to worm one’s way to the helm of any nation in the world — I still think Park should be called what he was, which was a Dictator. Same for all the other dictators who get called President.)

Much as I enjoyed all of those films, I can’t help but wonder what a satirical look at the Blue House would look like, if anyone actually had the courage to make that sort of film.

So anyway, when it came out that the American President in Wag The Dog may or may not have had a sexual liason with a Girl Scout in (or, rather, just outside of) the OVal Office, because the girl leaks the allgation to a reporter, I suddenly started wondering what would happen if that happened in the Blue House. The President’s Last Bang, after all, depicts Park getting pretty touchy-feely with a couple of girls clearly hired for the occasion, after all, so it’s not like it’s unprecedented. (They weren’t Girl Scouts, of course, but it could as easily have been a regular old sex scandal in Wag the Dog.)

I said to Yae Rim, “If some middle school or high school girl accused the President of Korea of that kind of thing, it would never even get into the newspapers, would it?”

She smiled with disgust — yes, smiled with disgust — and said, “Never. No newspaper would print it. And if they did, the Blue House would just sue the girl and the newspaper. And win.” I’m not sure whether Hankyoreh would even dare, really… after all, I’m reminded of the recent (sometime last year, or earlier this year) publication in Sisa In, a news magazine, of the testimony of a whistleblower against one of the major Korean corporations he used to do be involved in doing the books for — about their countless improprieties and so on. No other publication would even consider his allegations, and I’m guessing he tried the Hankyoreh as ardently as he tried the Chosun and Joongang and Donga Dailies.

Still, I was left wondering what would happen if said girl scout, or high school or middle schooler, went online and posted about it, starting a netizen firestorm and (is it too much to hope that this would be possible?) a series of protests comparable to this summer’s, protests so big that the media couldn’t just ignore it. (Surely the Ministry of Internet Communications would erect a blog ban and issue takedown orders for a lot of sites, but would it be soon enough? Wouldn’t anti-President sites simply spread like mold, flowering all over the Korean net? Last summer, during the wave of protests I discussed in this series, even in discussion cafes populated with housewives who normally posted about their recent furniture acquisitions, political discussions exploded.) And I hate to say it, but one has to wonder whether the solution wouldn’t end up being the same one that De Niro’s character ends up using on Hoffman’s when the fella looks like he’s not going to keep his involvement a secret? (Hint: Hoffman’s character suddenly dies “of a heart attack,” wink, wink.) That seems a bit much, but what other recourse would the President have? The standard self-punishment for a major offense here — jumping off a bridge in the Han River — would be unthinkable, as it would destabilize the whole country, and letting the cat out of the bag would shame the nation entire, or at least one imagines that this is the thought process that would emerge. So if the kid refused to be intimidated into silence, and the lawsuit couldn’t stop her — I mean, she can’t be jailed for being sued for such allegations, can she? — then one wonders what recourse the Blue House would see for itself. Or, rather, one has to wonder whether the fear of such an outcome would keep the girl scout from saying anything at all in a public forum.

But really, all of that is aside to my real post, which I think is more of a question: how does the political use of “spin” differ between South Korea and, say, the USA? How do the styles of spin differ? I remember seeing Roh Mu Hyun wearing hanbok and looking wistfully out his window during the whole impeachment thing, for example. (There’s a copy of the photo here, where I discuss Roh’s apparent references to The West Wing during his tenure — interestingly, since several of the students who studied The West Wing with me said, point blank, “A show like The West Wing could never be made in Korea.”) I’ve noticed sometimes media synergy gets sapped from damaging stories by the leak of other stories, and so on.

But I also remember a lot of things that would have looked terribly embarrassing — actually, mortifying, if not utterly doom-spelling–in American politics,  which here seem to get shrugged off, or shallowly apologized-for, and then just end up irrelevant. (Like, for example, the This, in turn, makes me wonder about how spin developed, historically — after all, most really old literature we have is some kind of spin: ancient histories and poems and the Bible shamelessly spin events (real or imagined, it’s all effectively the same, as Wag the Dog argues: “Of course it happened, I saw it on TV!”), and we see it everywhere in later literature, too.

The model we all know intuitively — that binary of “free societies” and “unfree societies” is pretty questionable in a lot of ways. I wonder if someone out there has tracked the degree of freedom in a society in terms of a factor like how their governments attempt to suppress unflattering news, with forceful censorship or implicit threat of force on one end of the spectrum, increasingly convoluted and  spin on the other, and varying degrees of admixture, combined with bluster and empty apology at various points along the space between those two poles.

I don’t know enough to say more about it, but it sounds like a fascinating PhD thesis for someone out there… unless, of course, it’s been done to death. In which case, hey, someone? Remake Wage the Dog for the Korean context. I imagine it’d be a fascinating couple of hours, and really fit the mood these days… since even the people I know who voted for Lee seem to despise him, and did so even before he was elected!

(Note: the spectrum here is tentative and very much based on the present standards, not some enternal absolutes; surely other societies in the future will find other extremes to push both ends toward! And maybe I’m just looking at one characteristic axis when I should be looking at two or three…)

Jack London’s line, for me, resonated most with my own frustrations in trying to get anything done in Iksan:

“Upso,” was their invariable reply. “Upso,” cursed word, which means “Have not got.”

Which reminds me of the very neat fact that I’m far from the first Western SF author to come to Korea. Jack London is likely the first: his The Iron Heel (available free online here) is an early and apparently important radical dystopian SF novel (which, no, I have not read yet, but it’s in the list, and I’ll pop it into my ebook reader soon, since it’s downloadable and all). I’m very interested to read more of what Matt turned up among London’s works, which he hinted at in his post and mentioned to me when we met up last month.

I have to confess I simply don’t have time to make a decent contribution to this half of the discussion — why so so many Koreans seem to be so sensitive to criticism by foreigners. I have some observations to make, but no time in which to make them. Perhaps another time.

Some out there think this is a godsend to Lee, to take the heat off him for a while. I think this is deeply mistaken: nationalists will be hating Japan, but I don’t think that’ll make them hate Lee any less. After all, Lee was the one who only a few months ago urged Koreans to “let go of the past” and move on so a better, more mature relationship with Japan would be possible. To many, the timing might not seem so accidental… I’ve heard some people draw a direct line between the two events, so it’s quite possible this will just lower Lee’s approval rating even further. Yet more, since he’s gone off on holiday now, in the middle of what lots of Koreans seem to consider a “crisis” with a South Korean shot dead in North Korea, and Japanese textbooks yet again in the news.  (Yes, a short holiday by our standards, but not by those of the average Korean worker — it’s almost as long as the average worker’s yearly allotment of days off, and Lee did after all make a no-holiday pledge.)

But, okay, whatever, I don’t want to discuss all that. If you want to read foreigners ranting about it, there’s tons of foreigner virtriol online that sometimes outstrips even the most amibitious annoyances offered by Korean netizens on the subject. What I want to say is this:

Dear Korea… Please, please consider a better strategy. Please!

Personally, like many Westerners in Korea, I am so not up for a major round of Dokdo-ranting, Dokdo raving, Dokdo T-shirts, Dokdo posters in banks, Dokdo everything 24/7.

I really am not. It’s been a long enough, hot enough, humid and tense enough summer already, and I really don’t need random strangers wandering up to me to teach me about territorial disputes, or, worse, ask leading questions only to act all offended when I give the “wrong” answer. Regardless of the political significance of the issue to Koreans — and it’s their right to care about it if they want — I just find that the earnest rage and horror I saw in the last Dokdo flare-up a few years ago  didn’t help.

Obviously didn’t help, given the current circumstances, though it seems that this is Korea’s standard response to the territorial dispute.

So I’m going to offer a little foreign perspective here. When Koreans get all earnest about Dokdo, it looks silly to people abroad. It looks silly because it looks like people in Korea are actually taking Japan’s claims seriously, instead of laughing at them or saying, “Yeah, right, go f*ck yourself,” to the Japanese government.

It’s a familiar response to me as a Canadian, because many Canadians have a similar national inferiority complex with regards to whoever is less peripheral than them within Canada or internationally. Lots of older Quebecois are all earnestly anti-Anglo-Canada; lots of people out West are all anti-Ontario; and even many Ontarians feel a kind of national inferiority to the USA (and, to a lesser degree in some areas, and a greater degree in others, to Britain). And when Canadians proudly declare, “We’re just as great as the USA!” or “Vancouver is a global quality city!” or, “Canada is the best place in the world to live!” it all but drips inferiority complex.

In Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul had this to say about the phenomenon:

Positive nationalism is a humanist movement seeking continual reform in order to improve the life of the community. This does include economic well-being, but only as a result of the more important elements — service of the public good, aggressive responsible individualism and culture. What I mean by that is culture in the largest sense, with language at the core of it being used to further the communication of the culture. In the practical terms of everyday life, culture is not about agreement, but about questioning. In other words, culture is not about solidarity, but about discussion and disagreements.

Nationalism, the public good, individualism, culture — we rarely put these concepts together. But if nationalism is not a metaphor for strengthening the well-being of society, it is nothing at all. Or rather, it has been reduced to the exploitation of emotion. And if individualism — in a democracy — is not the participation as a citizen in order to affect the public good, what is it but self-indulgence?

…

Negative nationalism usually identifies a defined national crisis as the primary problem which society must first deal with in order to save itself and thus make it possible to deal with other problems. The other problems are invariably said to be unresolvable because of the national crisis. But the national crisis is usually itself unresolvable in any real terms because it is based on abstract theories of identity or power. Negative nationalism cannot help but demote social reform to a lower level. It tends, in the normal process of political opposition, to end up as an anti-reform movement. (pg. 299-200)

If you look at Korean history, this is precisely how nationalism was built up here: Korea was modernized in a hell of a hurry, but at great expense to a whole teeming mass of individuals who are now living in increasing economic uncertainty. Development was harshly uneven, which is a part of why the southwest is so unrelentingly leftist and the southeast is complacently rightist. It even relates to gender issues: somewhere in the Yonsei university library is a book I need to track down — ooh, wait, it’s this one, which was also recommended by a commenter elsewhere! — which contains a chapter or two about how women’s groups in Korea during the Japanese occupation began to push for reform on women’s issues. They were, eventually, convinced to throw in with the greater nationalist movement on condition that their own policy complaints would be addressed once the bigger issue of Korean soevereignty was resolved, but of course, a new unresolvable existential crisis — the looming threat of communism in the North — served just as effectively as a cornerstone of South Korean nationalism, and also served just as effectively to sideline feminist reforms for decades.

Negative nationalism, in all these cases, caused people to make “sacrifices” for the sake of the nation which didn’t always work out to benefit “the nation” or to address whatever “problem” trumped personal concerns and individual (or even general, common) needs — partly because those national threats have been explicitly chosen to be practically unresolvable. It’s a rather toxic, agreement-enforcing way of shutting down societal dialogue so that the elites, or government, or big business, can get on with the business of doing whatever they do — and let’s be honest, money’s a big part of whatever they all do — while the masses are busy pointing at some distraction and shouting angrily.

So here’s my plea, to all you Koreans out there who are worried about Dokdo: Please, please try a different strategy. Stop being earnest. Stop being so sensitive about this. Stop letting this become the huge issue it becomes. This isn’t a national crisis, it’s a change in textbook guidelines made by  political wingnuts in Japan.

Instead of getting worked up, laugh in their faces. Throw a little ballsy irony into the face of the Japanese government. Hold an international techno-rave part there, with DJs from around the world. (Or build a hotel there for politically conscious ajummas, as has been proposed. It’s got to be safer than sending them to Baekdusan.) Hell, why not install a little hi-tech Buddhist monastery? Spend the rest of the summer with student volunteers building it, habitat for humanity style, and then monks can live out there in three-month shifts. Put some shoulder grease into it!

Make videos on Youtube sarcastically asking whether those Japanese hardliners would perhaps like to have a little of North Korea to go along with the island? Or maybe some cherry blossoms ranges on disused mountains from Jeolla province as garnish? Chuck offensive cracks into their face about how Korean men had better lock up their teenaged daughters, considering what happened last time Japan started eyeing Korean territory. Make amusing, over-the-top translations from Japanese textbooks that reflect what you think is the Japanese government’s real mentality. Hell, make a satirical webcast of the Japanese government’s nefarious plans to take over Dokdo and open a rip in the fabric of the universe from which they can summon millions of Flesh-Eating Interdimensional Hello Kitty Ghouls to wipe out humankind. If you can work in some Akira or Ghost in the Shell cracks, the rest of the world might get it, too. Or, no, wait, I recommend Hello Kitty. Everyone knows (and hates) Hello Kitty. Imply that Japanese PM Yasuo Fukuda is channeling the ghost of Hirohito (and give the old emperor a lisp and make him talk in teen-girly Japanese, while you’re at it).

Write satirical essays on how Korea should give the rocks to Japan, because the country obvious has small-balls issues and this is the only way to stop Japanese politicians from sending young conscripts going on murder and rape ramages in Africa (the only place quite as poor as Korea was when they did it here, and perhaps the only place they could get away with it this time). If Japan is not given Dokdo, then millions of young Japanese men will be forced to contract AIDS in their war to protect Africa from, er, well… whatever it is decided is threatening Africa. (Rampaging Flesh-Eating Interdimensional Hello Kitty Ghouls?)

Explain how we should feel sympathy for the poor Japanese politicians who, after all, everyone knows are a bunch of wimp hentai and yaoi obsessive otaku fanboys and that of course they have lost their grip on reality through excessive masturbation during official meetings of the Ministry of Bukkake Relations. (Luridly cite Lord Baden-Powell or some other nutty Victorian Englishman on the effects of excessive masturbation.) Cite papers from obscure Korean medical studies “proving,” PD Diary-style, that excessive group masturbation has feralized the Japanese government, and note that Dokdo would be a perfect place for them to be placed for isolation from human society for the sake of the whole world.

Okay, maybe all of that is both over-the-top and not the kind of jokes Koreans would make to mock Japanese politicians. [And the last bunch of jokes probably wouldn't win over the Japanese left, which you should try to do.] So just mock these guys in whatever way makes sense to you, feels natural and funny to you. What I’m saying is, you’ll get far more enjoyment out of creatively ridiculing the Japanese government, and by not taking its claims seriously, you’ll look like you have this whole thing in perspective. Which, frankly, the Korean populace didn’t look like last time the issue flared up. And people will be laughing, which is very often a good thing. You won’t look like you’re lending the Japanese right any credibility.

Wait until a gun gets fired before taking this thing seriously enough to get angry or make this a major national talking point, okay, folks? And foreigners — take a hint from Rob: find other things to look at and write (or talk) about, if you can’t approach it from some other angle, lest you get sucked into the tabloidy world of Korea-blogs where a tiny minority of rage-filled extremists somehow gets mistaken for the vast, nation-defining majority, and lest you find yourself once again just ranting about how annoying the Dokdo panic is. Focus on something else! That’s what I’ll be doing!

And that’s all I want to say about Dokdo!

Part 1 discussed reasons why so many expatriates complain about Korea. Part 2 seemed to rush off onto a tangent mostly focused on Iksan, a small city where I lived for a couple of years when I first arrived in Korea, and the unevenness of its development. I ended discussing a landfill crisis there, and describing how young locals were all dressed in their usual stunning finery, promenading serenely past barricades of trash bags blocking the sidewalk. Then, with promises to return soon and finish the line of thought, I wrote:

In the meantime, consider this: why was it that in Iksan, the most (pleasantly, at the time!) backwater place I have lived in Korea, young people were so incredibly concerned with fashion, and dressing up? Why did young men almost invariably wear suits to class, or else very fashionable designer clothing? Why was the rate of infection of “Princess Disease” — the condition which people used to describe young women who were obsessed with their looks, trying to be pretty, and coaxing boyfriends to buy them something — so very high in Iksan? And what was going through those people’s minds as they gingerly treaded the well-worn paths past those garbage barricades, dodging Bongo trucks and nihilistic, suicidal Chinese food delivery scooter-boys as they went? What were they thinking?

I’ll get to the answer of that by the end of this post, I swear to you. But first, I want to take a little side trip, and then a much bigger interstellar voyage, with you.

Paul Park's Celestis. Despite the surname, Paul is not a Korean-American. Click the image to see an interview with him.

First, the side-trip: anyone who’s studying the Korean fascination with/adoption of foreign culture, cargo-cults of consumption and self-modification (James, I’m sure you count in that group) would probably enjoy the novel I’m reading now. It’s a book called Celestis, by Paul Park. It’s unfortunately out of print — one of the best SF books of the year it came out, nominated for a Nebula Award for that year, but out of print! However, it’s easy to get second-hand from various shops like Abebooks. Paul was a teacher of mine at the Clarion West workshop, and he is a brilliant teacher — he ran an amazing first week — but he’s also a brilliant writer. This novel is basically art, as well as excruciatingly engrossing, and painful, and beautiful, and lots of things are just very alien. Heck, if you don’t believe me, check out the blurbs by people like John Crowley and Kim Stanley Robinson on the cover, and Terry Bisson and Michael Swanwick inside. Oh, yeah, right, you can’t since the book is on my desk.

Well, here’s the back matter — the summary of the book on the back cover:

Paul Park has written an extraordinary, challenging, and disturbing novel about a human colony on a distant alien world, the planet Celestis. The native humanoid population is subjugated by the human colonists, but many of the Aboriginals undergo medical procedures involving surgery and drugs to make them look and think more like humans. As support from home wanes, the “improved” Aboriginals launch a rebellion against the colonists. Simon, a political functionary from Earth, and Katherine, the altered daughter of a successful native merchant, are taken hostage by the rebels. Simon falls in love with Katherine, but, cut off from a supply of the medication she needs to maintain her humanlike state, her suppressed alien nature begins to reemerge. As she discovers her true self, hidden vistas of expanded alien perception are revealed in a stunning exploration of the limits of humanity.

At the beginning of the novel, the (already humanoid) aliens are taking handfuls of pills daily so that they can look and think like earthlings. They have things like plastic jawbones inserted into their faces in order to have a more human appearance, so that humans can stand to sit an talk to them. At one point, one of the aliens — Katherine, still in her quasi-human state — muses on how the two greatest gifts humanity has given Celestis are European classical music and Christianity (well, it is a British/American space colony; Simon is a British man of, I believe, Indian background), and yet the human colonists themselves don’t appreciate either very much at all. Here is a moment that just screams with how I think a lot of Westerners feel when they encounter those things that strike them as “alien” in Korea. Simon and his driver have stopped by the side of the road after hitting a dog, and a native (alien) approaches them, on pages 31-32:

He was less than five feet tall. Smaller than Simon’s driver, and different, too. Aboriginal servants in Shreveport and the Territory usually underwent some surgery, paid for by their families or their employers, to make their faces tolerable. Something to give expression to their blank features. Just pieces of plastic bone under the skin, hints of brow lines and noses and cheekbones and chins, and they would learn to move them in vague approximations of smiles and frowns. Otherwise communication was too difficult, to disconcerting.

But this man on the railroad track was untouched, raw. He stood hunched over, his back and shoulders round, his arms long, his hands practically fingerless–thick and clumsy. Yet he was the shape of a human being, and for that reason he was difficult, almost painful, to look at closely. Simon’s eyes seemed to want to change him, to fill in details, stretch him up straight, straighten his limbs, put his small bald head into proportion. Automatically they did so, and it was only through a conscious effort of will that Simon could look at him clearly, examine him as the man came closer, for he was approaching on his short legswith graceful, mincing steps. His face was meaningless, that’s all–pale and unformed, full of small wrinkles and ridges that went nowhere and made no pattern. And in the middle of it a lipless hole. A toothless mouth, and above it, two amber eyes.

There seemed nothing threatening about him. He was not strong or fast. His movements seemed tentative, unsure. Yet Simon stepped backward along the railway track and put his hand up as the Aboriginal got close, as if to ward off an attack.

Two holes near the juncture of its neck: its ears. It clamped its padded palms over them and squatted down, and turned away its faceback toward the town. Was it responding to him? Or perhaps to something else…

There’s a lot to unpack there, about Simon’s eyes wanting to reformulate the alien, change it into proportions that Simon’s mind expects and wants. That puts me in mind of something Sonagi mentioned recently as part of this larger discussion, about the confirmation bias — people seeing what they expect, and discarding contrary evidence without even noticing it.

Korean sing Baek Ji Young, before and after shots. Plastic surgery fueling a comeback attempt.

And, too, the practice among the Aboriginals of altering their bodies to be more similar to the human colonists — plastic surgery, it deserves pointing out. Especially the focus on facial structures, on acceptability to humans, but also on how their own standards get warped. (They think in terms of the “beauty” of a humanized alien, their aesthetics are shaped by their own acceptance of — or, in the rebels’ case, their anxious refusal to accept — the aesthetics of their human conquerors. The use of drugs — medication — to essentially humanize their thought processes is very interesting, not because I find it particularly believable in a literal sense, but because of how fascinating it is in the sense of what it opens up once you remove those drugs from the picture. Foreign media being, really, the cultural equivalent of such drugs, in terms of their impact on cultures.

Which is to say, as you walk down the street and look at young Koreans, and think about how much of their mannerisms, styles, and appearance are cribbed from someone else’s youth culture, and then try to imagine what they would be wearing and stylizing themselves like — if styling their hair and clothes at all, or even walking down the street together — it’s kind of mind-blowing. Take one deeply transformative and “normalizing” (to us) force out of the equation, and things get very weird.

(But then, that’s true of most cultures in the world… what would young Saskatonians, or Moscovites, or Ivioriens, be wearing in 2008 if America had magically disappeared off the face of the earth in 1908? What music would they be singing? I’ve long been researching and thinking about an alternate history in a world where Europe and the European presence abroad sort of imploded about a hundred and fifty years ago. A sort of Rudyard Kipling’s-worst-nightmare scenario. It’s very hard work figuring out stuff like clothing and fashion and language and so on.)

I do think, though, that there’s been some change in the rate and acceptance of biomodification between women of this generation:

Some ajummas in Iksan, on Wonkwang campus during the spring blooms outings everyone made in 2003.

… and this generation:

Barmaids at a place in Iksan called Zen Bar, back in 2002. I learned a bunch of words from the taller one, who was very chatty.

… and I’m not just saying that because those older women look like older women, either.

(Though, riffing on the Paul Park book, can you imagine what would happen if suddenly Korean wives and girlfriends of foreigners across the country suddenly metamorphosed into country ajummas, like, overnight? No more English, no more T-shirts with funny, cute slogans, suddenly wearing a visor-brimmed hat and being very picky about the cooking? I imagine a mass exodus would ensue in Korea!)

I think a great deal of this would be applicable to a different discussion — one that in this comment on an earlier post in this series, Sonagi has reminded me of, and which I’d long considered writing as a kind of Korean-expat reworking of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks — exploring identities and relationships between natives and foreigners in Korea collectively. This, too, is probably an important part of the dynamic being discussed. But even leaving that aside, we can run with the difficulty just in seeing things as they are that Simon encounters.

To explore that a little more, I’d like to use a rather different, although related, science-fiction metaphor.

Let’s imagine there are two basically agrarian nations — we’ll call them the Colombs and the Josaan, living on a planet full of almost nothing but peasant farmers and a little cottage industry here and there — weavers, midwives, apothecaries, physicians, scholars, but no engineers, no manufacture. The planet is relatively mineral-poor enough that the locals can’t build things from iron, there’s no petroleum in the ground even if they thought up what to do with it, but they do okay with bone and wood and coal and whatever. They’re hanging around, farming, having the odd peasant revolt, dealing with life under the rule of some monarch or other, and then, suddenly, one day, the motherships appear in the sky. The peasants in both nations basically freak out, and finally, the king in one nation — it happens to be the Colombs — strikes up a kind of friendship with the aliens.The aliens tell him about, you know, space, planets, and so on. They tell him, “Hey, guess what! There’s this planet out there, called Planet Modernity, that’s massive, it’s full of resources, it’s a funky place! You and your people would be really happy there! Y’all should get on over there!”

So the king says, “Okay, but how?”And the aliens like him so much, they gift him with a generation-ship big enough to hold his whole nation. They say, “Well, the ship kinda runs like this, and you need to do that to keep it going, and by the way, you’re going to be long dead when this ship arrives, but in the long run, man, things are gonna be excellent for your people.” So the king announces to his people, hey, folks, we’re on our way. Pack up whatever you’re unwilling to give up, because we’re never coming back!” and then the Colombs all pile into the ship with their assorted goats and chicken-like creatures, and they take off. The king wonders about whether to bring along the Josaan, too — they’re not natural enemies or anything — but the ship is a little crowded as it is, so in the end, they just leave the Josaan behind, except for a few brave souls who happened to be in Colomb Territory, or who were invited along, or passed themselves off just to get a glimpse of utopia, hoping they could come back someday, maybe, perhaps.

Now, the ship — which we’ll call the NCC-1492 (a few generations before the NCC-1701) — moves at a hell of a clip, it’s a significant proportion of lightspeed, but it still takes a few hundred years to get to Planet Modernity. Nobody would call it slow, at the time, but still, whole generations are going to live and die on the ship. The first generation or two are going to be scarred, of course, by the disjunction: where’s all that land to till? The good greenness? They’ll long for sunrises and sunsets that won’t ever come in their lifetimes again. Wars break out among them, mutinies and dangers and all the madness that happens in any civilization. But in time, their society will adapt — and, at a much slower rate, and painfully, but just as surely, their culture will change. It will transform over time to a culture of spacefarers, people comfortable with space, who’re hip with that.

NASA's Astronomy photo of the day for 28 June 2008: Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300. Click to see original page, and click there to see it in larger size -- in all it's wondrous, stunning glory.

Living in space is not really what humans were designed for. Hell, the shift to agrarian life was tough, but at least people could live in small groups, without too much need for specialization; they had some specialized knowledge, but it was often widely-shared, and relatively easily learned. Without huge amounts of technical knowledge upon which their very survival depended, and living in an ecosystem that they were designed to live in, life was easy. But space, space wasn’t like that. As the generations passed, one after another, they had to change themselves immensely in order to survive. They implanted machinery into their brains, interfacing directly with the ship’s systems. They specialized to a degree thatwas unimagined in their old society. The ship, along the way, experienced several disastrous, damaging incidents, some of them caused by the passengers — the inmates, they might be called, in the early years — and some of them environmental.

But in time, the people on NCC-1492 adapted themsleves to survive, and to get pretty good at surviving. They reconstructed the ship — whilst still en route –  in ways that sometimes was worse, sometimes better. They changed themselves, and sometimes they were changed by the ship itself, so that when they arrive at Planet Modernity, the Colomb no longer recognizably human, according to the standards of the old King of Colomb who started them out on this voyage. They’re like Lobsters, gooey human insides with the hard bits extruded out into exoskeletons (yeah, I’m ripping off this book by Bruce Sterling here); they’re adapted to life in space. They’ve gone and altered their DNA, and while the farmers in the other nation, back home, would probably be shocked to see what they’ve become, to these spacefarers, the definition of humanity has changed. Lobster is normal; the people they were back in the days under King Whatshisname were, well… something else.

The Colomb, in their spare time — of which there is, random emergencies and adjustments aside, a lot of — they trawl through the ship’s vast, patchy data archives of the early days, watching those… ancients doing their thing. Goats and chickens and soil. They thank heavens for arbeiter drones that take care of the agriculture now. They wouldn’t say those ancient people, who called themselves “The Colomb,”  weren’t human, but a planet of farmers is not what comes to mind when they define the word, “humanity.” Their sense of the universals have been retuned, altered, changed. In fact, two-thirds of the way out to Planet Modernity, they figure out how to digitize themselves, and start backing up their brains and bodies in case of emergency. More and more of them exist, teeming in the halls and habitable zones of the ship, ready to pour out into the world to which they’re headed.

And they’ve figured out that the way they’ve modified themselves, it’s all for the good, because Planet Modernity? It’s not a planet, actually. It’s more like a Dyson Swarm — a collection of habitats, solar energy collectors, and whatever else gets thrown into the mix, all in a jumbled mass swarming orbit around a sun, soaking up all that wonderful energy — working its way to becoming a semi-diffuse Matrioshka brain network that’s just starting to link up into a closed set of shells on one of the hottest suns yet detected in the galactic neighborhood. The aliens who sold the ancient Colomb on this Planet Modernity business did it knowing that a bunch of primitive farmers really wouldn’t understand a Dyson Swarm, let alone a Matrioshka Brain, so they them told stories of a wonderful, utopian planet where their dreams would come true. Dreams that they simply were not yet equipped to dream, but, along the way, had noticed through spectrographic readings exactly what they were headed towards, dreamed those new dreams, and — some of them a little anxiously — fell in love with the future they’d been given.

This Dyson Swarm is more orderly than the one I have in mind, which would be more like the roiling, jumbled, semi-chaotic mass of orbiting habitats described in, I think it was, Olaf Stapledon's STAR MAKER -- the novel that apparently inspired Freeman Dyson with the idea of Dyson Spheres.

Meanwhile, back on the homeworld…

Several centuries have passed, and the Josaan are, relatively speaking, at the same point that they and the Colomb were when the Colomb took off — a few more innovations, a few differences in culture, but essentially, they’re at the same basic tech-level as before. They have spread out, taken the continent that the Colomb left uninhabited, but living in what is increasingly, to many of them, looking like poverty. There is a famine underway — the third of the current King’s ruling era. Life is tough, on the homeworld, but then, it always has been.

And then, suddenly they, too, like the Colomb, are approached by aliens.

Well, actually, an alien ship — different bunch of aliens, maybe, or a different faction, it doesn’t matter –  crash-landed on their planet. It was a missionary ship, sent by aliens to convert them all to some Omega-Point worshipping cult — and a surprising number of Josaan actually converted to the cult, despite the crash-landing, and a secret slavery project was outed, proceeded anyway, but after a generation or so, the Josaan — by then a little more familiar with the alien’s tech, did something amazing and bizarre. They got one of the surviving aliens to explain how the ship worked, and guess what? This ship is a substantial improvement over the one that the Colomb used. It moves faster than light, and that means, if they leave now, the Josaan can get to Planet Modernity at just about the same time as the Colomb, give or take a few decades. The aliens who own the ship, they’re a funny bunch: some of them offer warnings about Planet Modernity — “It’s not what you think it is!” but others nod and say, “Oh, yes, there were a few Josaan who went along, they spoke highly of Planet Modernity.” They even have holos to back it up.

So after a few years of deliberation, the Josaan king and his advisors agree: let’s do it. Let’s see what Planet Modernity offers us. The Josaan repaint the new name of the ship — which is now theirs — onto the side. The Good Ship Daehan, they call it. They eagerly pile into the ship, hoping for better than what the planet offered them, and a few — the supposedly cleverest of the lot, the ones with a facility for foreign tongues — hack the controls, and get the ship flying, sort of. It swoops, it bangs into random asteroids, and a couple of break out on The Good Ship Daehan, too — the king is removed from the throne at some point, aliens take over briefly, and then the ship passes through an interstellar warzone, after which the missing king is replaced by a group of warriors led by a warrior chief — but life goes on, and the ship hurtles at breakneck speed towards Planet Modernity.

There’s a significant difference, though. The Good Ship Daehan is not a generation ship. This baby is FTL — faster than light. Once the pilot hits the button, that ship is going tostreak across space at an incredible rate, warping spacetime, shoving the gravity brane up its own wormhole and lashing itself to the retrograde wave pulse (or substitute whatever technobabble you like), so that in a couple of generations — a short forty or sixty years — this society is going to arrive at Planet Modernity. Their language will still be (essentially) the same language that was spoken when it was mostly farmers huddling with pigs and chickens in the hallways of the massive ship. The culture will not have changed significantly — except, of course, the massive shock of millions of people finding themselves in a single, densely-populated ship instead of in a network of farming villages, and that everyone will have adapted, in a hurry, to the exigencies of living on a spaceship.

And then the ship arrives. Bang: here’s Planet Modernity. And the older Josaan — many of whom remember tilling the sweet earth back on the homeworld, remember the scent of dung in the yard and the lowing of beasts in the fields, remember sunrise and sunset and having to go outdoors to take a dump — mostly go, “What? Where’s the planet?”The younglings, they’re not quite the same as the Lobsters that the Colomb became — a lot of them have experimented with brain-machine interfaces, and biomodification doesn’t freak them out, and among them is a strong, growing sense that the oldsters simply don’t get it. They aren’t even too uncomfortable with the idea of living out their days inside The Good Ship Daehan, since it’s all they’ve ever known. In fact, a few of them had spent time hanging out with the ship’s computer, and it had clued them in — as much as possible, for the children of farmers, which is much more than you might think — as to what Planet Modernity will actually look like.

The Good Ship Daehan arrives at Planet Modernity only a little while after the NCC-1492. (They might have arrived sooner, maybe even at the same time as NCC-1492, but those intergalactic wars have a way of throwing ships off the course.) Imagine their shock, though, to see what the Colomb have become. What are these Lobster things? They don’t even remember who they are — they don’t even use the word Colomb anymore! They’re so thoroughly deformed!

This, of course, is what the oldsters are thinking. The younglings are more mixed in their opinion. Some of them are horrified — even more when the first Josaan-Lobster intermarriage occurs, and when they see more and more young Josaan heading off in shuttles. Those who head out think differently, and embrace the Josaan’s adaptations to space, to Planet Modernity: they come back increasingly Lobster-like, with new languages implanted in their brains, the faintest hints of exoskeletal extrusions along their bodies. Sometimes, the adaptations are actually functional, and sometimes superficial. Trade ensues, and exchange, and soon, The Good Ship Daehan becomes a part of the networked Dyson Swarm, a network that is slowly knitting itself together into a single solid shell, a Matrioshka brain titled Planet Postmodernity. Planet Postmodernity actually exists, now, in its nonexistence — the network is there, yet it is incomplete. So everyone smiles and just calls it Planet Modernity, because as the various species living in orbit here all learned on their slower trips out, the terminology will sort itself out, given enough time.

Exoseletal enough for ya? This is, of course, a scene from Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), showing three robots and a human. Photo from 1920, ganked from Wikimedia Commons. Click to see (slightly) larger source.

Lobsters visit The Good Ship Daehan, as well — some as tourists, some on trade missions, some as missionaries, and others following their Josaan lovers back home. The Good Ship Daehan invites more Colomb — they haven’t gotten used to calling people “Lobsters” and don’t quite “get” what it means to be a Lobster, anyway — and here is what the Lobsters find: the ship is a strange combination of things that look like they’re straight out of historical media archives — stuff from the earliest vids on record, even — and things that are utterly common here in the nonplanet called — still, by all — Planet Modernity.  Pigs and chickens cluck and wallow not a kilometer from the Stringpuller Drive, and the guy whose job it is to monitor activity on the gravity brane during orbital adjustments goes home to his mom, whom he has just convinced to stop raising pigs near the habitable compound because she’s getting too frail to handle it. The Lobsters can’t believe it. The weird foods these people eat. The smell of the farm animals. The funny clothes, and tha strange combination of Planet Modernity dialect and ancient Josaan, with its odd concepts so vaguely familiar, and yet so alien.

In fact, the Josaan being such new arrivals, even though they’re essentially the same species as the Lobsters, there’s nobody more different or alien than a young Lobster and an elderly Josaan. But the younger Josaan — with time, they’re so Lobster-like you can even find a few who you’d mistake for a Lobster. You find a few who indeed are Lobsters, living on Lobster habitats. When they visit The Good Ship Daehan, the Josaan smile, recognizing the trace of Josaan heritage, and speak to them in the old tongue, and often are uncomprehended. Time passes, and the young arebusy studying the Dyson Swarm, some of them emigrating out, others focusing on how to interact with the outsiders. It becomes a craze, this sort of study, and it is only then, slowly, that people begin to realize what got jettisoned along the way. The youngest Josaan, the ones who are hip to the Lobster gospel, feel it first, as a sort of unnameable absence deep within themselves.

At the same time, there’s a growing conviction, among some of them, that Planet Modernity isn’t really about what’s outside the ship anyway; it’s a state of mind, and that some of the oldsters, for all their worship of The Omega Point — a growing faith upon the ship, supplanting the animist gods they believed in — some of these old people will never, ever reach Planet Modernity. Even so, the younger generation still remember tales of things like grassy meadows and sunrise and dancing — dancing is hard to do with no gravity — and even they can’t help but dream of a planetary existence, despite knowing what they know. But the pigs, and the chickens, and the dung scent in the air, they want none of that. That was left behind on the homeworld, and there it should stay, as far as most of the young Josaan are concerned.

And the difficulties grow, between those who will never really reach Planet Modernity, and those who are already there. But what can the young Josaan do? Jettison their parents and grandparents out into hard  vacuum? No. They live with them, they struggle, and, yes, they talk among themselves. They wonder — not eagerly, but quietly, nervously — what the ship will be like when the last person ever to touch the soil on the homeworld is gone. Even with the life-extension treatments the Lobsters have sold them, the day will come eventually.

And yes, the Josaan complain among themselves, but most Lobsters never know. The Lobsters don’t learn their language, but the wisest among them guess it, and Lobsters with Josaan lovers hear the rants from time to time: “The old categorical systems! The old tribal chiefs!” The Lobsters have their own complaints, those few who live aboard The Good Ship Daehan, but most of the complaining is, of course, among the Josaan themselves.

This little fable, I hope, tells most of what I want to say, but first, the caveats: it’s not a perfect analogy. There little of Japan, of colonialism, of significant cultural differences and how they shape the reception of techologies, and it posits the idea we’re all now at Planet Modernity, or at least, as close as we individually are going to get… when, in fact, I’m more comfortable with the idea we’re all still hurtling toward Planet Modernity, all of us still stuck in a historical backwater en route, or that least that at least this is how our grandkids will see us, when they bother to look back over their shoulders at all.There’s cutesy space travel, and all the rest, but my point here is this: The West had hundreds of years (several hundred, at least) to adjust culturally — not just socially, as in, in life circumstances, but also in terms of the structures within the culture, which change much more slowly — to the kinds of transformations it underwent becoming a modern (or postmodern) society. Korea has not. As I wrote in some comment at The Joshing Gnome:

Personally, I’m thinking cultures transition at the speed of death, meaning, much more slowly than at the pace of social change. Societies change very rapidly, but cultures never keep with this. Enter Alvin Toffler and the cheesball-brillliant Future Shock.

As The Korean noted in his post, which I explored in my last installment in this series,

A cursory look at Seoul shows a fantastically futuristic city. People carry around crazy technological gizmos. Internet works at blinding speed. Everywhere you go there are flat screen panels showing some type of moving images, just like the visions of future that we used to have through sci-fi movies of yesteryear.

One cannot help but feel a little bit like Homer Simpson as he was marveling at the dancing fountain/toilet in his hotel room in Japan: “They are YEARS ahead of us!” Upon seeing this spectacle, it is only reasonable to expect Korea to be a fully modern country, and its citizens to behave in a fully modern way.

But this outlook cannot be more misleading. And this is really the point that anyone who wishes to understand modern Korea must know – Korea has only become this way in the last 15 years. All the people who were born and raised in the pre-modern era are not only alive, but they are the people who are in their 50s and 60s, leading the whole country and educating the next generation.

And the next generation, it has to be said, is not completely on board with that. They’re in the uneasy position that the Josaan are in up there in my little fable, having arrived in orbit at Planet Modernity, and yet, er, not quite having arrived, and surrounded by people who, for all intents and purposes, are lost somewhere halfway between the homeworld and the new one.

An anecdote, and one I advise any EFL teachers who haven’t experienced, to do next time they get a chance: I asked a group of young adults to critically discuss some aspect of Korean society in their presentations one semester. The most interesting discussion of all was by a young woman who was commuting to school on the subway. She said it was about two hours on the subway each way to get to and from school, which, you know, is almost like something out of a nightmare, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, she talked about techniques for getting a seat, and then, finally, launched into a long rant about ajummas and their behaviour on the subway. This was something that got the whole class talking. Apparently, the most universal sentiment among my students in debate class that semester was that ajummas on the subway are about the most annoying people on earth. Despite occasional quips that, “Well, I’ll be an ajumma too, someday, so I’ll behave the same way when I am!” there was a strong sense that none of the women in the class actually wanted to become like that at all. The men moaned and complained about ajummas, the women did. I don’t think they would have done so, though, if an older Korean had numbered among the students. I don’t think the discussion would have come up at all, at least, not unless there was an extremely brave soul.

The title of this series is, “Who’s Complaining in Korea?” that’s my response to Roboseyo’s question about why expats complain so much online. The fact is, Koreans complain — online and offline alike — too, and one of the sad facts is that many expats here don’t seem to be aware of it. They seem to imagine that Koreans are, in general, quite happy-go-lucky with the fact that there are tons of nonfunctional systems here, that development is askew, that all kinds of annoyances surround them. Sadly, many people seem not to consider doing what The Korean invites them to do, in the title of his blog: Ask A Korean.

My experience with Lime is that, in fact, we happen to find a lot of the same things annoying. The lack of a decent political candidate in the last election; the disrepair of so many fundamental systems here; the way so many people behave inconsiderately in public — these things bug her too. They probably make me batty in a way that strikes her a bit over the top, at times, of course, because I didn’t grow up with it. But they bug her too.

There are differences in what bothers us, of course. When I walk into a bathroom where the stink is horrible, I usually walk right back out unless it’s an emergency. That’s the sort of thing Lime, and I think many Koreans, can take in stride… at least to a certain point. The inconsideration, the petty corruption that bangs you in the face time and time again, the constant interjections of a few racists, the general degree of sexism — it’s getting better, but has a long way to go — and so on bug us both, but for her, its the way things are, and you kind of just have to accept it and move on as best you can… just as I do with the bullshit that I revile in Western society.

But honestly, if you listen to Koreans, they’re all around you, and they’re complaining about all kinds of things too — many of them the very same issues you’re all worked up about, many of them with information you don’t have, or perspectives you’ve not yet encountered. Probably it helps if you speak (or read) Korean well — I’m not that good, but even I can pick out a constant, low-level degree of critical discussion, of complaint, of downright ranting sometimes.

(For example, here’s Lime criticizing the lack of what we might call an “argument culture” or “culture of discussion” or even just a “space for debate” among the protesters and how alarming it is to see authoritarian tendencies manifes. She also talks about debating with me. I’m the mackerel ["고등어"] in her post. She’s far from the only person to have observed, criticized, and attacked this aspect of the protests, either — indeed, her favorite reported in 시사인 (SisaIn) very strongly criticized it in print. But of course, we didn’t hear much about that in the English blogosphere.)

It’s a very common occurrence that Lime, arriving home from study, logs on to catch up with the news and minutes later is ranting to me about the f*cking useless cops who didn’t pursue a case against this criminal child-abducter, or about that f*cking moron gang of politicians who have gone and made Korea look backwards by feeling up statues of nude women in the States, or whatever. She’s not some raging, angry person — she’s actually very optimistic, quite positive in her thinking, but even she has muttered darkly about some future social collapse in Korea, or another economic crisis being brought on by morons in the upper echelon.

The anglophone internet, by the way, is full of rants. Definitions aside, the word brings up almost 42 million hits on Google. I don’t know how many “rants” there are on the Korean internet, of course — but I suspect they take a slightly different form given the architecture of the net in Korea. That is, they’re likely to be concentrated in comments, not in posts on websites, and, I think, they’re likely to surface as en masse criticisms of things. The upwelling of anti-Lee Myung Bak sentiment that manifested as protests here? The sudden surge in anti-Protestant sentiment during the Korean hostage crisis the other year? These, to me, are excellent examples of a kind of snowball effect that maybe doesn’t quite catch on so much in the English blogosphere — where we’re much more into writing long blog posts like this one that show our insight and individual knowledge — but a hint of which can, ironically, be glimpsed at Marmot’s Hole, in the comment sections there. Multiply that by millions, and you see what kind of complaining exists out there. But not just the irrational, kneejerk idiocies — also, the level heads, the calmer comentators, and so on.

But looking at blogs written by expats in Korea is not really the way to get your finger on the pulse of Korean society. It tells us more about the expats than Koreans — and that’s fine, for what it is, but you know, sooner or later you have people claiming absurdities as gospel truth. If indeed it can be done online — and I think online is one place where certain aspects of mass culture only emerge, though it’s not the whole picture — then it’s in the Korean-language cafés on sites like Daum and Naver, I think, where people wrangle and wrestle with one another over what bothers the, what they care about, and also the limits of what they can say and do about it in public.

The Dog Poop Girl episode?

(By the way, why does the Wikipedia article credit Anonymous — yes, the same group who protested Scientology in Guy Fawkes masks earlier this year — with outing Dog Poop Girl’s identity? Is Anonymous active in Korea? Might these be the same people who donned Fawkes masks at the Candlelight Protests — captured on video by Roboseyo here — a few weeks ago? Now that would indeed be interesting. I doubt it, but you never know…)

What foreigners see is psychotic Korean netizens acting en masse, witch-hunting someone who didn’t do something so bad as to justify having her life ruined. And in their (ostensibly) infinite wisdom, they dispense the judgement that Korean netizens are assholes and idiots and –

[... watch this massive leap in illogic...]

– that this just proves, they’ll tell you, proves, that the whole of Korean society is medieval, fascist, illogical, backwards; still capable of the most nasty, brutish groupthink.

Yeah, right.

Such claims make me want to research how much online references to words like “camel jockey” and “sand nigger” (let alone “bomb them back to the stone age”) increased in late 2001. How is it that opposition to gay marriage — the way people live in their private homes — is still a political issue in most “advanced” Western democracies? Oh, yes, Western society is also, definitely, still capable of nasty, brutish groupthink. We have medieval nuts, fascists, backwards pigs in our ranks too, over here on the Lobste-habitats. We just don’t define our whole society based on its dumbest, loudest members. Some of us, however, do indeed do this when looking at Korean society… with disconcerting regularity.

But Anglophones who look around will also see a debate about these things, online, and similarly, despite the way Koreans seem to prefer to avoid disagreement and debate online — or maybe in fact because of that, see my discussion of Lawrence Lessig’s sense of this (and the following debate in the comments section) here — there is a great deal of contentiousness in the Korean internet, and not just among cybermobs who — yes, exist, and who, yes, sometimes do outrageously attack people (sometimes including a few unfortunate foreigners).

Well, yes, and as I said above, The Good Ship Daehan’s inmates haven’t all arrived at Planet Modernity, no matter how deep in orbit they are. For that matter, nor have all of the inhabitants of the NCC-1492. In both ships, there are a saddening number of people who’re just sort of lost, somewhere along the way, mentally, but physically, they’re in orbit. And this can have catastrophic effects, in the short term, on the small scale.

I’m not saying that what happened to Bevers or Brian happened because of what they did: the reaction was over the top, the behaviour is shocking. But when a mob of frustrated, antisocial Josaan blow an unfortunate Lobster or two out of airlocks, though, that’s not really grounds to expel the whole of The Good Ship Daehan from the Dyson Swarm… especially if the Lobsters walked into discussions knowing that they were pushing the hot buttons of the very groups most likely to do so. If you don’t know that you’re risking the ire of Vank or Korean netizens when you discuss Korean politics online by now, then you’re not paying enough attention.

Yes, on the NCC-1492, we have free speech; many of us think — and our laws state — that anyone can become a Lobster and a full member of the Dysonswarm polity, Colomb or Josaan or mixed-blood or cybernetic retooled hivemind emulation upload… or member of any of thousands more species who’ve intergrated, whatever and whoever you might happen be. Yes, yes, but on The Good Ship Daehan, these people just arrived from the homeworld, and their rules arent quite ours, even if they’re, yes, part of the Dysonswarm. Their own rules say that nobody should be shoved into airlocks and vented out into space, but until recently, most Josaan never had met a Lobster, or anything else except another Josaan.

But anyway, a lot of that is tangential to my point, which is one that, now that I think of it, James at The Grand Narrative made a long time ago, in other words, though I can’t find the post where he said it, but essentially, that foreigners aren’t the only ones who are discussing the problems with the educational system here, with the police force, with politicians, with just about any topic that is annoying or concerning us expats. At least — the problems that intelligent expats with a little sympathy for Koreans, who care what the people around them are facing now and will be facing in the future.

The somewhat more inane complaints and mockery — a recent example being Seoul Podcast’s downright rude, and utterly uncreative crack in the form of a mock-ad “The Jun Ji-hyun Home for Beautiful Women with Scant T&A” — because we all have to talk about Koreans’ women’s bodies negatively, since women have such healthy body images here, don’t they! and wouldn’t it be better if they were obese like us North Americans! — probably have their parallels as well, in the rudeness of Korean websites where boys bash photos of girls. Well, there is crassness and stupidity in every society. There are jerks on The Good Ship Daehan, just as there are throughout the DysonSwarm.

But the thing that a lot of people on both sides don’t realize is that others are watching, and translating what they see — though, sadly on both sides, mostly the most sensationalist garbage.

And that, meanwhile, in relative ignorance of one another, many people of realitively good will, of concern and compassion and serious consideration, live out their lives unaware of the other, all the while talking about the problems they both see, not hearing the other discussion in the room next door.

It puts me in mind of the line from Rilke that Hugh McLennan took and named a novel after — Two Solitudes — a line that for McLennan expressed the tensions between French and English identities in the novel’s protagonist:

And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: the two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

We Lobsters (or proto-Lobsters, perhaps) will never be anything like French Canada, never so much to protect and border and greet the Josaan the way the two solitudes in Canada can — and on a human level often do — meet and nurture one another. But we could protect, and  border, and greet much more than we do now; we could connect more to that wider, more enlightened portion of Josaan society, and since it is their society, my dear Lobsters, we have nobody to blame but ourselves for not doing so, for not listening to those wiser and most thoughtful of their kind. Discomforts are inevitable, but we have only ourselves to blame for how poorly we understand that those discomforts are shared, and that bright, bright people on both sides are discussing the same things.

Shall we continue to leave their sages alone to hold court in some forgotten corner of The Good Ship Daehan? Maybe we can offer them something, maybe we cannot. I suspect that some of them have much to offer us. I suspect that, like us, they grow impatient with the mobs, the elderly folk crying out, “Let us return to the Homeworld!” I suspect the ship’s disrepair is a trial to many of them, too. We could understand more, much more. But we cannot do it from so far outside their ship.

Oh, to have language implants. Well, since those aren’t in the cards — we’re all born too soon for that — I suppose I shall have to study instead. I’m reminded of these translators in Greg Egan’s novelDiaspora who, because humans have altered themselves so much — right down to the genetic level, meaning drasic biomodification, neurological recoding, and so on — so that human languages can actually be rather significantly untranslatable between one another. There are these weird, special beings that undergo partial modification, though — shades and gradations closer to the beings they’re translator for, who therefore can straddle the barrier. Messages travel along these frail chains of communication from, say, a group of humans who have taken to the depths of the ocean, or to humans who have returned to tree-dwelling. I may not become fluent — I’m sure I won’t — but I can self-modify just enough to reach out a little better than I currently can or do.

You can do it too. Maybe not with Korea — there are millions of neglected areas of knowledge to go out, to find, to share with the world. It needn’t be the ones that excite me.

And that is a wrap for this series. Next time, I’ll be back to SF in Korea — which I’m planning to focus on a lot more, now that I have those back issues of Fantasia — as well as writing up about this year’s PiFan… especially the rather amazing movie The Housemaid by Kim Ki Young — my god, so much to say about that! — plus more on Gin Lane and Soju-ro. But blogging will be light for a while: I’m trying to get some fiction done in the next ten daysfor the write-a-thon, will be seeing a ton of movies, and I’m going to start studying Korean again. The embarrassment, and the desire to reach out and connect with the best this place has to offer, once again have ouweighed the exhaustion and accreted apathy.

And for that, Roboseyo, I am grateful. Thanks! I learned something reading others’ ideas, and thinking this all through.

Looks like he learned one of the lessons of Nineteen-Eighty-Four during his own trip to Room 101.

Here is what he had to say about it.

Oops! Some were from the Catholic “Emergency” Mass, and thus are now in this set. Some were from the last big night, July 5th, in this set. I found some pics from earlier on, too — the best guess I can make is June 11th, in this set. I added a couple to the first set also, shots which I found just now in the wrong folder.  And of all things, a shot from the trip I made to the local temple on the Buddha’s Birthday with a couple of friends. There’s a pic in there that made me think of the banner at Gusts of Popular Feeling, but it may just be a trick of the mind — not to say a Vulcan mind trick:

It's probably all in my head, but if you click through and check out the large size, you may see it too.

Not much from the evening of July 5th, I’m afraid, and they’re all a bit grainy… I was exhausted as it was — and left the camera on a very high ISO setting — and was, to be utterly frank, rather tired of the demos in general. And I’d only gone a handful of times as it was!

No, this is not Lime. Just some random Candlegirl, who also looked damned tired that night.

I did wish I had my camera on my the other night, though. Lime and I had just gone shopping in Dongdaemun for some new work clothes for her (new job!) and we saw a bedegraggled pack of diehards marching in plastic raincoats. Just about everyone had a flag of some kind, which tells you something — having a flag means you’re definitely a member of some organization or other.

All I could think was, “Man, if you do it every day, how’re you even gonna have the strength to do anything when you really need to? You’ll be going, Nah, I’m tired, I did my part, and I just wanna have a beer and watch Misuda today…’ and that’s gonna be when nationalized health insurance goes out the window. Dudes, go home!”

Lime, for her part, just shook her head at them and said, “Let’s go.”

The comment thread, and a subsequent post by Andy Jackson (and its comments), were of course filled to the brim with vitriolic snark on the recent protests, which everyone is still calling the US Beef protests, though the whole thing was a much bigger mix of issues than just beef. Though at least the first commenter on that post pointed out how poorly it reflects on so many at Marmot’s to be constantly bringing up the beef protests in relation to every damned news story they can. Oh, and of course jerks laughing at the dead lady. And foreigners so often call Koreans insensitive. There really should be an autism test for potential EFL teachers coming into Korea, I’m telling you.

Now, when I began writing this post, the main thrust of this post was to point out that, somehow, bizarrely, I was agreeing with some commenters — the ones who refrained from dragging beef or anti-Commie hysteria into the discussion, that is. I’m going to stick with that, and throw in my fifty cents of criticism at the commenters and posts at Marmot’s after.

The first thing that came up in our discussion of this news story was how Lime, rather disgustedly, brought up the behaviour of Korean tourists when they go abroad.

That is, many Korean tourists have a terrible habit of ignoring almost everything from signs to requests that they line up or not enter this or that area. If there’s a sign that says, “Keep off the Grass” and nobody else is on the grass, you can be sure that there’ll be a Korean — or, more likely, a big group of Koreans — sitting there on the grass sooner or later. In airports, the flights to Korea are the worst to board, because everyone feels like he or she has to be the very first onto the plane: many people don’t sit, they stand, en masse, in a flock, ready to cram their way forward in a teeming mass as soon as any announcement of boarding — even just First Class Only boarding — is made. Same thing goes for getting through immigration on the way out — the flight, full of Koreans, turns into a thronging mass of people trying to fight their way to the head of any line that appears before them without, by Dangun, waiting for even a moment if they can help it. Not all Koreans act this way, of course — when I flew to Beijing, a classy Seoul couple in their 50s were taken aback by the country ajeoshis who, seeing couples waiting in line at immigration side-by-side, decided to declare that there were not one, but rather two lines. I wished I had the guts to stop them as they shoved past me, and say, “No, farmer. There’s only one line, with some couples in it.” But instead, the classy couple and I stared in bemused disgust.

(I have to confess, boarding a plane back to Korea is now pretty much the low point of any holiday I take from here, simply because of the behaviour and the virally tense mood of almost everyone in the boarding lounge. The tension and anxiety in the air is thick as soybean paste, and it makes me wish flying direct to Japan, and changing planes to get to Korea, were more often an option.)

Lime’s observation on the claim made by those traveling with the woman who was shot is that, since someone got shot, this claims is exactly what we can expect them to make either way: whether or not they did receive instruction, it would not be anyway reflected in what they’re saying now, because, you see, they probably weren’t listening, or in any case, will discount what they were told because culpability now comes into it. Her point being: had they received guidance, and then one of their group went on to ignore it, they would be saying the exact same thing.

Finally, she figures that some individual stupidity factors into this. Anyone traveling to North Korea should know enough to know you do not wake up early in the morning and go off on your own into the dark. Surely this woman couldn’t have failed to see the soldiers all over the place. Surely she hadn’t forgotten that she was in North Korea. She just didn’t get it. Many commenters at Marmot’s are quite eager to lay the blame at the feet of the Korean left, but that’s intellectual laziness of the highest order. The woman can’t have been too bloody bright, but there have always been people like that. And anyway, other incidents have happened in the same place without fatalities occurring, Lime says. I have no link for this report, as I think it’s only in Korea and it was repeated to me during a conversation, but I could get it if someone wants it: not long ago, another visitor (I think some kind of official, actually) made the same mistake, was told to stop, and stopped in his tracks, hands in the air. He was interrogated for twenty minutes while his ID was confirmed, and then when it was cleared up, he was told, “You’re not supposed be here. Go back.”

The idea that North Korean leadership deliberately had a tourist shot is ridiculous, the fabrication of a moron. What do these idiots think the standing orders were? “Wait until some unthinking ajumma wanders into a military zone, and then shoot her in the back! That’ll show the flunkyist American-colonized South Koreans!” It’s about the most ridiculous notion I’ve run across in… well, okay, a day or two, but still. It’s moronic.

It also completely disregards the dilemma that was faced by the guy who pulled the trigger: shoot this person (who might be a spy, or someone trying to defect, or god knows what horrible visions they’ve filled NK soldiers’ heads with) or risk being executed or sent to the camps himself. I mean, really, realistically, what the hell was the guy supposed to do? Shoot first, and survive to ask questions later, is what any normal human being would probably choose. Especially a humanbeing who’d been through the thoroughly deformative experience of growing up under the weight of a lifetime of KimIlSung-ist and KimJongIl-ist propaganda.

Yes, it’s horrible for the woman and her family — and, yes, for the masses of people that live under the watchful gaze of the ones who give guys like this guns. But when you look at this case as a specific, individual case, what the bloody hell else was the kid going to do. Especially if the woman did ignore a command to stop, as, come on, be honest, we can all easily imagine many a line-skipping, subway-seat-nabbing, unreflective ajumma in her 50s doing: rules, for many ajummas, are niggling bothersome trivialities to be shrugged off or ignored, if indeed they ever even enter into consideration. And when you mix that kind of myopia with military guards who are paranoid-by-training and paranoid-by-culture, in a foreign country, what other result could you expect?

And the older the person, the more likely he or she is to flagrantly ignore not just basic etiquette but also common sense, and do whatever the damned hell they feel like doing. Many older Korean tourists just don’t follow the local rules. It doesn’t matter whether they’re in the Seoul subway (MOVE!), a Canadian airport (boarding by seat numbers? pbbbt!), a temple in India (what do you mean we can’t wear out high heels inside? the ground is dirty!), a traditional wrestling match in Mongolia (which my friend saw Korean tourists mocking incessantly), or a holiday resort surrounded by a heavily militarized, psychopathic dictatorship…

… though, interestingly, the only country I know from which middle-aged people would embrace holidaying in a heavily militarized, psychopathic dictatorship is, indeed, South Korea. It’s not just jeong that’s in short supply here, but also, it seems for a certain segment of the population, nunchi, at least when you use that word to mean “sense”. In that vein, Yahoo!News quotes the Chosun Ilbo as having run a piece with the following question:

“Where in the world would a soldier fire on a helpless female tourist for crossing into a restricted zone near a hotel at a tourist site?”

The answer, of course, is: Duh! North Korea, silly! Where else?

Yet another reinforcement of the observation that it’s plain stupid to be sending South Korean civilians up there.

I know, I know, one eyewitness claims that he heard two shots and a scream. Who knows if he did — see above, Lime’s comments on the mutability of claims in the face of a shocking event when culpability is in play — and even if he does indeed remember two shots, who knows whether his memory is dependable.

After all, there are  fundamental problems with our common assumption of reliability in accounts of so-called eyewitnesses. (And the witness in this case didn’t see, but rather heard, the gunshots.) Am I saying the North Korean soldier gave warning shots? No — I’m saying that we can’t really be sure he didn’t, no matter what this guy says. We especially can’t know because neither the North Korean shooter and his government, nor South Korean “eyewitnesses,” can be reasonably relied upo, because no eyewitnesses can really, reasonably be relied upon for an objective picture. The best we can do with “witnesses” is triangulate in on what probably happened. And no, my primary source for this observation is not Proust — though he did plumb the depths of that issue, didn’t he? — but rather a solid body of scientific knowledge about human memory and how much of it seems to pivot on speculative reconstruction of past events based on a scattered collection of details. You might start with How the Mind Works by Stephen Pinker, if you’re curious about, you know, the world itself, outside of the insane echo-chamber of the blogosphere.

(Nutshell: When cops ask, “What did they look like?” after a crime, one witness describes two hispanics in baseball jerseys; another describes a three black sporting gang colors; a third will describe a Harold and Kumar speeding off in a VW Bug. Eyewitnesses are notoriously useless in figuring out what the hell happened.)

Maybe she was shot twice by one soldier. Maybe by several guys at once. Or perhaps the guy’s remembering wrong. Or maybe he’s changing his story out of sympathy for the woman’s family. All of that is, anyway, speculation, and realistically, probably, speculation is all we’re gonna get. Korea’s told the South to forget about any kind of South-operated investigation up there, and even if it hadn’t, the lapse in time and the tampering with evidence would probably make it very unlikely things could be reconstructed anyhow. The tours have stopped for now, but I wager they’ll be back on again soon. And people probably won’t get the take-home message from all that, which, you know, is this:

When you go holidaying in a country run by a psychotic regime, very, very bad shit may happen to you. And if it does, don’t expect anyone there to want the situation to become clear, let alone make sure justice is served.

This is true if you go off missionizing in Afghanistan. This is true if you go traipsing around Burma. This is true anywhere seething assholes run the show, and it is definitely true in North Korea. And really, that’s all there is to it, or that’s all wecan really learn from this.

Because to imagine this is some kind of highly-orante chess move in a Communist plot against Lee Myung Bak’s government is to succumb to the same bloody idiocy, the same moronic paranoia that Park Chung Hee used to stay on top for almost two decades, that Chun Doo Hwan used to justify prolonged dictatorship and slaughter of civilians, the same over-the-top crap that people should have — and many already have — gotten over long ago. Hell, it’s the same tactic that now provides us with terror alert levels, so that, you know, we can not just be terrified when terrorists act, but also have that warm, fuzzy creeping feeling of terror all year long!

One deep tide of this lamebrained paranoia seems to come back again and again to the 2MB Protests, so: yes, some Communist sympathizers exist in South Korea. Sympathizers with the North were probably (definitely?) among those who organized the protests, sure — it’s been widely claimed, and it doesn’t surprise me, because, yes, I saw some small number of people trying to vend translations of Trotsky at the first beef protests. (The sales weren’t going so well, I hasten to add.)

But there’s a big leap from that to equating the tryhardism of a few ideologues to a massive — and somehow spookily effective — Communist plot. It’s just too paranoid, too out of touch with the concerns — realistic or not — that got huge numbers of relatively moderate participants onto the street, and out of touch with how truly out-of-organizational-control the protests really got at the height of the rallies, when masses of people were networking and self-organizing online. That is to say, at the height of the thing I don’t believe anyone was really truly in charge anymore, no matter how much credit the “organizers” wanted to take. To think that thousands of people were puppets to “string pullers” is to be wholly ignorant of autocatalysis in the way human groups behave. The masses were as controlled, in a top-down sense, as a web commentator is in control of public opinion on a popular movie, or some plotline-designer is of the proceedings in an MMORPG like World of Warcraft. That is to say, maybe a little influenced, but not dancing steps planned by someone else. If someone had been able to hypnotize the masses, the agenda would have been clearer, there would have been a real bottom line in more people’s minds — instead of a jumbled hodgepodge of fears, angers, frustrations, and contradictory claims — and probably the whole thing would have taken a very different direction. Enthusiastic amateurism, I see, but to cold professional operators.

As for this narrative of what happened at Geumgangsan, with the little information we have, it seems much more believable to me that this is a case of several familiar and downright mundane factors colliding: the routine scene of older Korean tourists ignoring the local rules and doing what they hell they want; a North Korean soldier obeying his command to keep a military zone clear of intruders. The rest is all government — and rabid amateur political nuthead — spin, and pure speculation.

And as for the accusations of communist column-writing at Hankyoreh. To be utterly sure, like all media in Korea, that newspaper is slanted. Slanted as the eaves on a han-ok house. There are obviously plenty of problems with Hankyoreh — problems that are plentiful enough in Korea to point them out all day long, if we wish to get mired in that.

But I hardly think Jackon’s post about that particular article is fair: if you go and read the article, for all the scruples and hedging you may find, it also realistically notes the North Korean version will be untrustworthy, puts responsibility on the North for making amends and taking the situation seriously… in other words, Jackson’s cherry-picking distorts a call for people to not freak out into over a story we know absolutely nothing about, into a caricature of a glassy-eyed pro-North dismissal of the issues. Say what you want about many of their pieces, say what you like about their role in the use of the beef issue to mobilize the protests, but this one article is not what it’s made out to be, and it seems pretty cheap-minded to slam a passable article because of where it’s published. There’s an expression for that: it’s called argumentum ad hominem. (But then, that’s the most common modus operandi on the comment threads there; maybe it rubs off…)

Why is Hankyoreh encouraging emotional overreactions to Lee’s government, and US beef, and not to North Korea? If a Communist agenda to deliver the South into the hands of Kim Jong Il is really the only possibility that comes to one’s mind, then one’s mind is far too narrowed and twisted, and one has crippling laucity of imagination with which to imagine the motivations of those with whom he disagrees.

But it’s funny; when you filter out all the vitriolic anti-Communist paranoia — what year is it, guys? — and the snide snipes about the recent protests, there were a few things that actually resonated sensibly with what I’d been thinking… and, talking with Lime, I found she was also thinking similar things.

But before I get to what I am thinking, allow me to throw in one caveat:

Some will read this and decide, with the same idiot-savant brilliance that makes them decide that th 2MB riots were a memetic incursion designed by Kim Jong Il, that I’m some sort of pro-North Korean, so let me clear one thing up. North Korea takes a special place on planet earth for repugnance, along with the Burmese government, the Taliban’s long, vicious abuse of Afghanistan, and a few others.

North Korea’s government is a pack of exploiting monsters, outright walking, ideology-spewing turds, and I am among those who would be happy if somehow, magically, someone found a way to teleport every last member of the North Korean government and miltary to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Hell, if I thought such teleportation devices were possible, I’d probably devote myself to researching gravity branes and tachyons and theories on how to pull off wormhole construction so as to figure out a way to build a teleporter myself, so I could use it on Kim Jong Il and the rest of his crew of feces-brained assholes, though maybe not down into th ocean, because really, such a quick end would be way too generous to those bastards. Why extinguish their lives when you could, instead, drop them one by one, unarmed, naked, into some South Korean prison on a lazy Sunday afternoon? That’d be much funnier…

(Too bad I probably wouldn’t get a patent on it, but anyway, I’d demolish it soon after. This is technology the world doesn’t need, as nice as it would be to make it to birthdays and weddings on the other side of the earth. But then, we all know how bad teleportation would be, don’t we?)

If that doesn’t clear up for you the fact that, yes, I revile the North Korean state and every last piece of subhuman scum that runs it, you’re just not effing reading closely enough. I personally hope that the tours halt more than temporarily, not only because obviously there were problems in the way they were run, but also because it’s a messy, sticky, dirty hairball of money-flow going not just into North Korean coffers, but also into South Korean companies that don’t need to stoop to profiting off disasterporn — which is what North Korea is , an abject and utter historical disaster that visitors are welcome to come and gawk at. South Korean companies can make money in hundreds of other exploitative ways, without partnering up with the dung-souled nosferatu running the North to make more.

(Which is not to say I’m against all aid… food aid, as some North Korean escapees have noted, can’t help but trickle down to the population. But pumping money into the system, that’s just… sketchy. Especially when you consider where it really goes.)

I sigh. Sometimes I wish we had more amusing news to talk about in Korea.

PS: Yeah, I’m sticking this in the protest series, as it touches on the topic. But I think it’ll be my last comment on the subject. I’ve got an article I’m about to send out, and then I’m done with this for now.