Tag: politics

Would Your Dad Make a Good Superintendent of Education?

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What do you do when your father is running for the position of Superintendent of Education in Seoul?  That depends: was he a deadbeat dad who never supported your education, who in fact cut you off as a child after he divorced your mom, never called, never emailed, never had anything to do with you at all–not a single email, not a single phone call? Or was he an inspiring example to you, difficult at times to live with but someone who instilled you with good values and taught by example what dedication means? Either way, you share your opinion …

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The Really Intractable Thing: North Korea, Climate Change, and Why We’re Failing

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Over at The Week, a depressing piece on the horrors up North, titled “North Korea isn’t Nazi Germany — in some ways, it’s worse”: Unless North Korea invades or bombs another country, or China gives up its patronage of the Hermit Kingdom, it’s hard to see much concrete coming out of the report. Paul Whitefield at the Los Angeles Times remembers the post-Holocaust slogan, “Never Again,” then throws up his hands in resignation: So what should the world do? What can the world do? Must we accept that in North Korea, basic freedoms — even such a simple thing as the right not …

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On Trust

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I just made my first real, serious edit to Wikipedia. I’d been reading about Yu Gwan-sun the other day, so I couldn’t help but notice something interesting mentioned in he book I’m reading now, Donald Clark’s history of foreigners in Korea from 1900-1950. In passing, Jeanette Walter is mentioned, and if that doesn’t mean much to you, that’s not surprise. But if you do know who Yu Gwan-sun is, then you will realize the significance of the woman’s testimony: Walter was one of the missionaries working at Ewha University who (reportedly) pressured the Japanese into giving back Yu’s body, and …

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The Gay Marriage-Pocalypse

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This year, I’ve had two random people on Facebook who’d friended me for completely random reasons–one, a fellow saxophonist in Korea, and the other an Ezra Pound enthusiast in Indiana–completely lose their marbles on my Facebook Wall, after I posted something in support of marriage equality. The arguments are almost always the same: somehow my unapologetic atheism indicts my position; somehow they think I must be gay (presumably, because what heterosexual could support homosexual marriage? Ahem…); somehow gay marriage not being procreative is the problem, but not the only one (just one in a bag of trick arguments they pull …

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The Mathematics of Happiness

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Over on Huffington Post, a recent piece got a lot of attention–at least, if the number of times it came up on my Facebook feed is any indication. The piece, originally posted at wait but why, titled “Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy,” analyzes a very simple idea: The members of Generation Y (defined as people born anytime from the 1970s to the 1990s)–or at least a subset of them–are not happy. Why? They’re “GYPSYs”: Generation Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies. They are “a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special …

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Jim Henson Called It, I Swear He Did…

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The Muppets have been on my mind, ever since Mrs. Jiwaku started working on a painting which is, essentially, a mash-up of the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink with Jim Henson’s Muppet characters. And you’ll probably be wondering what The Muppets have to do with bigotry, though I swear, if you stick with it, it’ll make sense. (And no, I’m not talking about the recent Muppet movie and racial coding of characters. I’m talking about Jim Henson as a political subversive, something I talked about in my classes, but am pretty sure I haven’t posted about here before.)

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About that MBC Parody Video

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A good long time ago, James at The Grand Narrative urged me to write about the things I discuss below. I thought it was a good idea, but relented at first, thinking that maybe I might get fired the way Gerry Bevers was for posting about Dokdo. Then I got busy, and stayed busy. Then I left Korea. And here we are. But this video came up again, where I live now, as part of a discussion about sexism and racism in Korea, and I realized that I’d never gotten around to it, and that I should. Because I learned …

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Celebrity Suicides, Netizen Trolling, and the “Success” of the Real Name System

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In 2006, when I moved from where I used to live to the place I live now, I changed jobs, and suddenly I was able to understand what my students were trying to say about current events in classes. I taught a lot of conversational English and composition-type courses at the time, which meant I began to pick up on news and online memes in Korean society, because students would be repeating claims, arguments, and points almost verbatim. One of the earliest of these memes that I encountered was related to the “Real-Name System,” a then-proposed (and since-implemented) method for …

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What is Food To Us?

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Regarding whether New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg is in the right or the wrong in his bid to legislate about what size of soft drinks can be sold in the city, the discussion seems kind  of misguided in my opinion. It seems, in fact, misguided on both sides of the argument. Those who are up in arms for this “infringement of freedom” have some nerve: after all, why complain when sugar is added to an already long list of controlled substances? In America, people cannot ingest marijuana, cocaine, heroin, or a host of other chemicals legally. If a society has …

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In Times of Upheaval

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Interesting details gleaned from Tania: Memories of a Lost World by Tania Alexander (daughter of the infamous Moura Budberg, about whom I have posted before, many times, all the way back to 2006, as part of a story I am once again about to begin revising, after finishing a draft in 2010): during World War I, what was Russian high society doing? There were no official parties or embassy balls for the duration of the war, but right up to the  October 1917 Revolution it was possible to maintain the outward appearances of social life, and restaurants and gypsy taverns …

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