Caveat: “Do you like dolphins?” – Castro Comes Clean

There has been an interesting series of articles / interviews with Fidel Castro, by Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic.  Among other thoughts:  Ahmadinejad needs to mellow out, and Cuba's communist model has failed.

My favorite part of Goldberg's interview experience – a glimpse of banal humanity behind the old dictator: 

"Do you like dolphins?" Fidel asked me.

"I like dolphins a lot," I said. 

I've always had a deep fascination for the "repentant dictator."  Perhaps this grew out of my time in Chile, and the weirdly dysfunctional relationship that the people of that country had with their erstwhile savior and/or tormentor, Pinochet.  Yesterday, I blog-mentioned Chun Doo-hwan, who was dictator of South Korea in the 1980's.  What would it be like to talk to him, now, about what Korea is like, now?  I would be fascinated.

Caveat: About 23 Years

I have been reading (re-reading?) parts of Michael Breen's "The Koreans."  Living here, day-to-day, it's easy to forget that South Korean democracy (such as it is) is about 23 years old.  That 's not very old.  The dictator Chun Doo-hwan only allowed for direct presidential elections in 1987, and those elections were flawed because the state-run media (and the state pork machine) helped ensure that his hand-chosen successor, Roh Tae-woo, would be elected (although the opposition didn't help itself by splitting the opposition vote). 

So in fact, although the constitutional changes 23 years ago could be said to represent the beginning of South Korean democracy, in fact, the first "normal" presidential elections weren't held until 1992.  South Korean democracy is still imperfect – but I view North American democracy as rather imperfect, too.  Still, those traditions, at least, have many generations of consistency and relatively smooth alternations of power.  South Korea is still quite fragile, I think.

It's interesting to realize that for anyone in South Korea who is approaching middle-age, these events were formative experiences of their youth and college years.  Most of us English-speaking foreigners who work and live in Korea these days are teachers.  Consider the fact that all of those cryptic, middle-aged teachers and administrators you work with have vivid memories of riots, police repression, surreptitious jailings and beatings, disappearances.  Your vice principal may have been throwing flaming molotov cocktails, while in university, at his principal, who was a youthful riot-police captain, ordering his men to shoot tear gas and beat the students with clubs.  Or vice-versa.  Perhaps some of the puzzling things we see Koreans doing could be better understood if we take these things into account.

Caveat: The Wilderness Downtown

"The Wilderness Downtown" is an experimental music "video" written using HTML5 by googloids.  It's pretty cool – you need Chrome to view it.  You put in your home address, and it uses footage from Google Earth and Street View to incorporate your actual house into the video, dynamically.  I can't decide if this is creepy or awesome.  Call it crawesome.

I put in my childhood home, in Arcata, and saw the very recognizable dead-end street with Peggy and Latif's cars in the driveway (Peggy and Latif being the current residents of the house where I grew up).  And there were some animated trees marching up 11th street.  Very strange.

The music is by Arcade Fire.  Not too bad.  The technical implementation of the video – which calls up large numbers of windows in a rather random way – is deficient in that it fails to deal very well with the small, non-standard-size screen of my Asus netbook computer.  The windows all hide each other and you can't see more than half of the ones it calls up.  The code would have to somehow do better at reading the display size and used scaled-down, lower resolution windows depending on what it found, maybe.

Caveat: How to get out of South Korea

Actually, as is often the case, the caveat above is a bit misleading.  I've been thinking about Afghanistan, after reading some fragments of blog posts that included a discussion of the issues entitled:  "How to get out of Afghanistan."  And I immediately thought about South Korea. 

Now that our (by "our" I mean US) significant military presence in South Korea is in its 60th year, why does no one take seriously the idea that we need to "get out" of South Korea?  Because the mission is viewed as a "success" – we have a long-standing, almost unquestionable partnership with the South Koreans. 

So why is the only way to conceptualize "success" in Afghanistan couched in terms of "getting out"?  I think a real, genuine geopolitical success could just as easily be conceptualized as getting to the point where conditions "on the ground" for US troops in Afghanistan are just as boring and routine as the conditions for US troops in South Korea. 

I'm not saying that's the only option.  But I think people who insist that "leaving Afghanistan" is the only possible way to be successful are deeply misunderstanding what the role of "enlightened military superpower" is supposed to be.  Not that I agree with the idea that the US must necessarily be an enlightened military superpower – but you can't have it both ways:  choosing to operate on those terms in a place like South Korea, because it's convenient and relatively painless, and then failing to operate on those same terms in a place like Afghanistan, because it's painful and inconvenient.

It seems consistency is important not just in parenting and teaching children, but in geopolitics, too.

Caveat: Somewhere Else, It’s Fall

Not here.  Hot and muggy, per usual, when it's not actually raining.  But on Minnesota Public Radio, I hear that it's 57 degrees F on the State Fairgrounds in Saint Paul, at 4 in the afternoon.   I love how fall comes so early in Minnesota.  It's possibly the single thing I miss most about "home."

Here in Korea… summer-like weather will persist well into October, although Koreans will obstinately call it fall.  Seasons are defined solely by the calendar, here, and not by actual experiential conditions.  And, in general, I would say weather in Korea is more predictable on a calendar basis than in the midwest of US.

Caveat: It’s really cute

What do you suppose that above quote is referring to?  A coworker said "it's really cute."  What was she talking about?  Lo and behold:  she was referring to the way that  I sound when I try to speak Korean.  This is so much more positive and pleasant than the occasional mockings and put-downs that I have to tolerate in my efforts to learn the language.

I won't go so far as to read anything into it except just that it probably does sound quite novel and entertaining to hear a foreigner trying to speak the language – it's something even more rare, in most Koreans' day-to-day experiences, than hearing English or seeing foreigners at all.   In any event, the semantic range of "cute" (귀엽다) is much wider in Korean, and generally speaking less ironic and/or flirtatious in the way it's deployed by adults.

Anyway, a little bit of positive (or at least non-negative) feedback can go a long way, in my soul (or whatever it is that I have that passes for a soul).  I'm feeling pretty happy about my language-learning efforts, for once.

We'll see how things go, over the weekend – I'm committed to spending the whole weekend with Mr Kim, in a little odyssey to Ulsan.  I may not be updating my blog until Monday morning.

Caveat: Phone Phun

OK, I got a new phone.  My colleague Haewon helped me with translating what the guy in the phone store needed to say to me.  I'm still trying to figure out how to use it.  If you have interacted with me on the phone in the past, please, please call or text me, because I've lost all my numbers from my old phone – it died a terrible and tragic death.  And next week was its 3rd birthday!  Happy birthday, old phone!  Sorry you've left us.

Caveat: Typhoon Kompasu

I get a lot of little notes and messages about the typhoon.  "Are you OK?"  I'm fine.  

Typhoon.  Sounds exotic and dangerous.  Really, just a hurricane, but rebranded for Asian audiences.  Both are names for a big, windy rain storms, which are primarily dangerous if you like hanging out or living near large bodies of water. 

Last night, I didn't sleep well, though.  The wind was causing the doors in my building to go "clank clank" as they fought against their latches in the rapidly shifting air pressure.  The building isn't tightly sealed enough to prevent this. 

Lots of wind and heavy rain.  It's annoying, if it happens to be when I need to walk between my apartment and the bus terminal – that's a 20 minute walk, and there really is no alternative – I suppose I could get a taxi, but getting a taxi when it's raining hard is not an effective use of time, since that's the idea many, many other people have too.

So, I get wet.  An umbrella is useless, when it's raining sideways and the water on the sidewalk is ankle-deep.  This happened yesterday, walking home from work.  During the rainy season, I carry plastic bags in my backpack, and use them to seal all the things I'm carrying inside the bag in rainproof containers.

But is the storm dangerous?  Do I feel at risk.  Not really.  It's got the same feel as an intense California winter storm.  Wind.  Rain.  But risk of life and limb?  No.  There may be flooding.  Korea has had bad floods, sometimes – the hazards of being a country made up entirely of mountains and river valleys between them.  But my apartment, and my place of work, are on high ground.

Caveat: 14..14…14…

I was walking past the mental hospital the other day, and a group of patients were outside in an enclosed yard, shouting, '13….13….13'

The fence was too high to see over, but I saw a little gap in the planks and so I looked through, to see what was going on.. Some dude poked me in the eye with a stick.

Then they all started shouting '14….14….14'…

Back to Top