Sarah Palin and her North Korean Allies

This is just kinda pathetic

… but it’s not like it’s uncommon for me to be asked, when I travel in the West and people ask where I live, whether I mean North Korea or South. Not that I would think any of the people who ask me this ought to be running a country, and Palin clearly shouldn’t be (even considered for it) either.

But there’s a reason she got as far as candidate for VP, and the reason is that there are tons of people just as uninformed, uninterested, and ignorant as she is. If there weren’t vast crowds of Americans who have no clue in which of the two Koreas their nation’s troops are station–or whatever else you might want to deem common knowledge in a supposedly educated society–Palin might not look so “normal” to so many.

6 thoughts on “Sarah Palin and her North Korean Allies

  1. I would be terrified if she became president and am already concerned that she has the influence she does. However, I’ve made many verbal slips of my own. Counting this as one of the many reasons to be concerned about Palin is reasonable, but assigning it more value than her other errors probably is not.

    Gord, I linked to my general blog here, but to one where I investigated creativity when I last commented. I hope that’s cool.

  2. You seem to forget that most Americans only hear about one Korea on an on-going basis, and it isn’t the one south of the 38th parallel. And, when they do hear of the South it is usually without the precursor word, “South,” that would actually help differentiate between the two in the minds of ordinary, non world traveling Americans.

    South Koreans also refer to the South simply as “Korea” (seemingly forgetting that there is a North, with the misnomer democratic in its title, Korea that exists as well) and do not realize that the vast majority of Americans haven’t heard of their 5000 year-old history or four glorious seasons, but they hear about the “little dud” up north quite often which in turn gives all of “Korea” a bad name.

    You’ve been here a long time and have come to accept that this is the way that “Koreans” (in the South) talk, but if someone walked up to you on the street back in your younger days in Canada, before you ever made it to this peninsula, and said that they were “€œKorean,”€ which Korea would pop into your head first?

    Like the old adage goes, “€œThe squeaky wheel gets the grease”€ or near daily page one coverage in the press.

  3. Hey,

    Ooops, this comment was for Surprisesaplenty:

    Well, I certainly am counting it among endless examples, and whether or not it’s a slip–I’m inclined to think it isn’t, due to ignorance she’s displayed before, but it doesn’t matter–I was trying to point out that tons and tons of people are just as ignorant. Because, tell me you haven’t been asked by people back home, during visits, “Wow, Korea? North or South?”

    I don’t quite get what you mean about linking your blog here, but whatever you’ve done doesn’t distress me. I didn’t see the link, though; where’s the link?

  4. John,

    Oh, I’m not forgetting that most Americans only hear about one Korea in the news. I knew that. That, too, is part of the reason for the ignorance. But it’s not an excuse for it.

    And yeah, I was never really taught geography in any systematic way. There are lots of countries I had to learn the location of, and I’m shaky on a few. But what I’m saying is, that is a problem.

    The South’s insistence on calling itself simply “Korea” is part of the problem, but a smaller part. And actually, I haven’t accepted it: I suspect that South Koreans would be better off linguistically (and politically) accepting North Korea as a separate country and moving on from all that.

    And to be clear, the problem I see is primarily educational. People don’t learn geography, people don’t learn where the countries of the world are, and this in turn fosters a kind of naive ignorance about all those other places on the world map (or globe).

    For all the (significant) problems in the educational system my father went through, people actually learned geography because it was believed that a grown-up citizen ought to know where all the countries in the world are, in order to understand world events. (Well, and events in the British Empire, but nonetheless, as a British friend said to me in my travels in Australia earlier this year, “Unlike Americans, we actually do take an interest in world events.”)

  5. “Unlike Americans, we actually do take an interest in world events.” Of course, this is what your British friend would say. The Empire used to rule half the world including their former American colonies.

    Interestingly, my Canadian First Nations friend said (after I asked him why he has never been south, east, or west of Edmonton in his fifty-odd years), “What’s the use. People are pretty much the same everywhere. They take all they can while screwing you over with a smile on their faces as they do it.”€ He was telling me this as we were watching new arrivals pouring into Ft. McMurray from the Eastern Provinces and B.C. hoping for some of those high paying oil sands jobs as we were enjoying a rare afternoon/weekend off, and we had the chance to head to Calgary for a couple of days. The funny thing is that most of these newly arrived non-Albertan Canadians couldn’t find Fort Chipewyan or Fort MacKay on a map of their own country while in the same province at the time. We ended up making a bit of extra money that day running some of them up to Ft. Mac and sending the others to the local airfield to fly into Ft. Chip. Some of the French speaking Canadians actually thought they could drive there in the summer time. I would have loved to have seen them try that.

    It is a shame that more people don’t know geography, but it’s a bigger shame that more people aren’t familiar with their own country’s geography and problems first and foremost. A couple of years ago, the U.S. public was nearly duped by a pretty face from Alaska because they knew absolutely nothing about her. Fast forward to this year, and her handpicked Senate candidate was royally trounced by a write-in candidate on her home turf. Now, even her new TV program is going belly up in the ratings. Come Presidential election time in the U.S., the Republican candidates you will be hearing about will be Rick, Bobby, and Jeb, and all three are actually solid choices, but those U.S. citizens in the far-flung states of Rhode Island, Hawaii, Vermont, and California might not be happy with them because the U.S. is so big and spread out that it’s hard to know everything about your own state much less the fifty others and now toss on top of all that 200 or more other countries of the world (Are Taiwan, South Ossetia, and Transnistria really countries?) and all their individual states, provinces, and territories. Did you know that Mexico has 31 states and 1 federal district?

    Right now, I’m just hoping that the state of Texas, or at least my county in the state, will discontinue the teaching of cursive in the elementary classroom. There are much more important things for kids to learn in this “day and age”than a quickly dying art form, geography being just one of growing countless number as science/technology continue expanding exponentially with no end in sight.

  6. John,

    Yeah, I thought I kind of highlighted that British interest in world events was linked to its imperial history… but you know, I have been struck by a similar interest in world events among the literate in most places outside of North America where I’ve visited.

    Your Canadian First Nations friend is speaking from long experience, but I’m not so sure people are all like that. I think a lot of people are, and they are moreso when their society dictates that selfishness is the rational, sensible way to go. Not to romanticize the past, but I have seen people of older generations be, materially, insanely generous by today’s standards.

    I agree that it’s sad more people don’t know the geography near them, though, you know, there are tons of little towns I’d have to search for on a map of Saskatchewan. (And I don’t know the finer geography of Kyeongsangdo like I do Jeolla-buk-do.) However, I think knowing basically where countries are, and just a smidge of history, is important. I don’t think knowing the finer points of geography everywhere is so important… knowing Mexico has a lot of states, and being aware of, say, problems in Chiapas, would be general knowledge. Knowing the locations of each state would not be, for a non-Mexican citizen.

    One thing I found surprising about my dad’s education was that he dealt well with changes in the world map. He did sometimes refer to Malawi as Nyasaland, when discussing pre-independence days, but he was right in step with the best of them when it came to knowing the names of the states Yugoslavia had split into… something I struggled with even though I was in high school when the split happened… or, rather, I’d say, because I was in high school when it happened, and the split was barely discussed.

    I agree about cursive. Frankly, I though the writing was on the wall by the time I was in middle school and was messing with computers… though the net only got big when I got to university. I sure regretted complying with my elementary school teacher’s “extra homework” that was designed to help me master cursive. What an incredible waste of my time. There are much more important things for kids to learn, yes. A hearty yes, that is!

    It is a shame that more people don’t know geography, but it’s a bigger shame that more people aren’t familiar with their own country’s geography and problems first and foremost. A couple of years ago, the U.S. public was nearly duped by a pretty face from Alaska because they knew absolutely nothing about her. Fast forward to this year, and her handpicked Senate candidate was royally trounced by a write-in candidate on her home turf. Now, even her new TV program is going belly up in the ratings. Come Presidential election time in the U.S., the Republican candidates you will be hearing about will be Rick, Bobby, and Jeb, and all three are actually solid choices, but those U.S. citizens in the far-flung states of Rhode Island, Hawaii, Vermont, and California might not be happy with them because the U.S. is so big and spread out that it’s hard to know everything about your own state much less the fifty others and now toss on top of all that 200 or more other countries of the world (Are Taiwan, South Ossetia, and Transnistria really countries?) and all their individual states, provinces, and territories. Did you know that Mexico has 31 states and 1 federal district?
    Right now, I’m just hoping that the state of Texas, or at least my county in the state, will discontinue the teaching of cursive in the elementary classroom. There are much more important things for kids to learn in this “day and age”than a quickly dying art form, geography being just one of growing countless number as science/technology continue expanding exponentially with no end in sight.

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