Tag: politics

Politics and The Hunger Games

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I haven’t read The Hunger Games or the other books in the series, in part because I hadn’t caught much buzz but also just because I’ve been busy with other things. (The first book has been on my shelf about a year, as have many other books.) But I hadn’t heard much of the buzz, like I said, but it seemed like a potentially interesting North American, SFnal treatment of the Japanese film Battle Royale, so I thought we might as well give it a shot. When I heard there was a movie coming out — which was not long before it did come out, by …

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The Pangborn Defence by Norm Sibum

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Norm Sibum -- The Pangborn Defence

I first read Norm Sibum on the recommendation of a man I studied poetry with in graduate school, the notorious and controversial Montréal writer David Solway, who in turn provides the first blurb on the back of The Pangborn Defence. He writes: The fare Sibum provides covers the four spiritual food groups — humor, seriousness, discipline, humility — and is therefore wholesome and nutritive. Knowing David, these words could as easily have been either criticism or praise — or even both — though I think in this case it is the latter. What I’ve read of Sibum’s work in the …

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I’m the Dojisa of Kyeonggi-do! (Stoop Before Me, Mere Civilian!)

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Caveat: I’m not fluent in Korean. I got help with this, but there may be small errors. And now, another edition of Korean politicians making asses of themselves, and embarrassing their nation! When I first arrived in Korea, I was cautioned to remember that here, in the case of an emergency, one does not dial 911, but rather 119. (Which is how it is in a lot of other countries, so I’ll resist the urge to make a joke that it is simply “backwards” to us North Americans — like so many other things in Korea.) However, things have changed. …

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Is it Too Much to Ask For…

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… that, despite the nonexistence of an afterlife, despite all odds, somewhere out there a bunch of recently-departed souls are caught in a lineup, the processing of the world’s dead being backlogged, and Christopher Hitchens has just looked back and noticed that, lo and behold, amid many bedraggled, starved people stands the ghost of Kim Jong Il, in full North Korean military-leisure suit regalia, and that Hitchens turns around and strides up to him confidently, and bitchslaps the unliving crap out of Kim until his ghostly body collapses in the pile of useless feces that the man always truly was? …

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Movetoamend

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I’ve been thinking a lot of these things since the early 90s: I’m obviously not the only one. This is salutary. I think there needs to be more than just this. I think we need to rein in corporations to the point where they’re in service to human beings. I think it should be illegal to run a company where a percentage share of the profit, and of the responsibility, goes to every employee. Maybe not a huge percentage, but a percentage. We like the idea of democracy: it’s time to apply it to corporate structure, too — that is, …

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A Society Without Debate

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UPDATE (25 Nov. 2011): So, I got some of my facts wrong. I first heard the news about the FTA vote verbally, in the form of a couple of rants about how it went down. When I read the article, the wording was such that it didn’t contradict what I’d been led to believe had happened. So read the following with a grain of salt, and see the comments — especially that by Charles — afterwards. I’m going to leave the post as is, as a reminder to me to get the facts straight before I go off on my …

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Wonder Indeed…

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Miss Jiwaku was once offered a job to travel to Indonesia, accompanying K-pop groups like Wonder Girls and translating for them. She was not, I must note, impressed with the fact she would be traveling with a pop group she considers a blight on Korea’s international reputation; for her, it was about getting paid a decent wage for honest work. Unfortunately, the organization offering the job — a Korean TV network tasked with making Korea look nice and plain and innocuous abroad, in English — did not offer her a decent wage. The wage was, well, laughable. One imagines maybe …

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What I Learned From the Edward S. Curtis Showing at the Sejong Center

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So, look. I’m, like, bright enough to know that colonization sucks. It’s bad. It can be (and has been) a force for great evil and pain in the lives of untold millions. But the way we talk about this, and think about this, can be a strange thing. Last night, Miss Jiwaku and I went to see a display of Edward Curtis photographs. If you don’t know who Curtis is, well, he was a photographer who made a compendium of images of Native Americans living in what he called a “primitive” state — that is, those who has not yet …

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Subverting Democracy, One Vote at a Time

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UPDATE (26 AUG 2011): So, the referendum failed due to low turnout. Er, hooray for talking people out of exercising their right to vote? Sigh. Well, at least the mayor resigned. Off, not doubt, to his fortified castle in Kangwon Province, to begin a long training session of necromantic rituals in preparation for the 2016 Presidential elections… ORIGINAL POST: There’s a referendum tomorrow, regarding with the lunches of schoolchildren should be subsidized by the government. This is an issue that has been building up, with the standard rhetoric on both sides: Right Wing: If we feed all the kids in …

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The Don’t Talk About History Law

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It’s really hard to talk about Langston Hughes in the context of the Harlem Renaissance without touching on not only his interest in the Soviets and their system, but also touching on why a number of African-American intellectuals (Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and many others) were drawn to “revolutionary” ideas, and to Communist ideology — after all, after hundreds of years of things not getting too much better, of pretty constant material, cultural, and social oppression and marginalization, I think it’s not hard to see why some African-Americans would have felt that a sudden, forceful reorganization of society would be the …

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