So, the revanchist Globally Dynamic and Xenophobic Cosmopolis had a little border skirmish with their annoying revanchist neighbor, the Insanely Autarkic Hermit Kingdom, involving artillery and machine guns. Oh… some 50 km northwest of Ilsan. Two very different brothers, squabbling in the back seat of the car, over where the dividing line lies.
Is it scarier than living in Los Angeles? Not really.
I was reading the Economist, yesterday. Apparently, Tsutomu Yamaguchi died. He was one of the very few "double survivors" of the US's atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 — meaning, he survived Hiroshima, and then, 4 days later, survived Nagasaki. What I was struck by were some bits of his poetry, quoted in the magazine:
Carbonised bodies face-down in the nuclear wasteland
all the Buddhas died,
and never heard what killed them.
It's been 20 years since Pinochet yielded power in Chile, and the vaguely leftist Concertacion has won every presidential election since. I say "vaguely" leftist because, for all their rhetoric, they did not significantly challenge the status quo as established during the dictorship: Chile retained a neo-liberal economy. Nevertheless, I was impressed with how the Concertacion, over the years, managed better than most Latin American countries to hang on to a commitment to some kind of social safety net, how they refused to privatize the state-owned copper industry (which is Chile's international income cash cow), and invested, at least a little, in education.
When I studied there in 1994, the dictatorship was still fresh in people's minds, and yet Pinochet could have received 40% of the vote in an open election — which is to say, he was still popular on the right. Much has changed since then, including the revelations of his financial corruption. Watching Chilean politics from afar, I was often concerned that the Concertacion was turning Chile into one of those "single-party democracies" a la Mexico under the PRI or Japan under the Liberal Democrats. So in some ways, I find Piñera's election reassuring — it means there's some kind of real alternation of power going on.
Chile is very interesting, to me. Aside from having studied there, it's clearly a unique and interesting country from a socioeconomic perspective, over the last 30 years. It has leaped from middling status among Latin American countries to the very top in economic terms: they are the wealthiest country south of the US border in GDP terms, now (except maybe Costa Rica?), and recently joined the OECD, a distinction they share only with Mexico (which joined more because of its proximity to the US and sheer size more than because they really deserved to as a "developed" nation, kind of the way Turkey was allowed to join).
Anyway, I doubt (hope not) Piñera will be changing the social contract significantly. The outgoing president, Bachellet, has implemented some promising reforms in education and civil liberties, helping to cement the Concertacion's "clean-up" of the dregs of the Pinochet era.
Someday, I need to go back. Congratulations, Chile, on a successful, peaceful alternation of power.
My friend Gerry (of Teulon, Manitoba), whom I visited today, is an astronomer and "space geek." The very moment I pulled into his driveway, he accosted me and pointed upward and said, "there goes the International Space Station, just in time to see it!"
Sure enough, the glowing object was passing directly overhead, zooming along. To my uninformed eyes, if I'd seen it without that introduction, I'd have thought it was just some airplane.
Anyway, a little bit later we were talking about the ISS because it showed up in the news on the television that we were sitting and watching, in his living room. And he was complaining about NASA's shortsightedness in wanting to end the program and shut it down. He was talking about the Russians having showed interest in taking it over and continuing to maintain it, if the US gave it up, and he explained the Russian perspective memorably, saying, "… but the ashtrays aren't even full, yet!" That sounded so stereotypically Russian, and it made me laugh very hard, conjuring up the image of a bunch of Russian cosmonauts sneaking cigaratte breaks on the space station when those uppity Americans finally weren't around.
Hmmm, aside from the fire and health hazard, are there other possible issues with smoking in space?
["back-post": posted 2009-11-20]
I crossed the border into Canada, today. Barely.
I spent two hours being intensively interviewed by a Canadian border official. It turned out that they had decided I was an “immigration risk.” Yes, that was the term used.
I was meticulously honest about my life. I prefer to operate that way, with officialdom. But I could offer “no fixed US address,” I had a passport full of exotic stamps, no “proof of current employment,” a truck full of “junk” (things I’ve been carrying around with me to sort through along with some books I collected in Arcata), and, probably most alarmingly, a bumper sticker reading “migration is a human right” (yes, I really believe this, and I’ve written about it before in my blog).
The potentially offending sentiment:
I really didn’t think about these things. I’ve entered Canada so many times, in life, and they’ve almost always hassled me about one thing or another (always very politely, as that’s the Canadian way), but in the past it was always because they were worried about drugs or some kind of customs-related thing. Or who knows.
In fact, I’ve probably crossed at the I-29/MB75 crossing at least six times. And I’ve done my recent travels in Asia and to Australia last year utterly effortlessly, when it came to border crossings. Japan to Korea by boat was easier than England to France – they asked me no questions, despite the fact that I’d prepared a complicated explanation for returning as a tourist only 10 days after the expiration of my work visa, which I was worried would raise alarm bells.
Well, so… anyway. The Canadians didn’t want me to immigrate. The man was very nice, but very firm, and I was deferential and scrupulously honest. He wrote it all down – I’m thinking of going back and offering him a job as my ghost writer for my autobiography, because he really got quite detailed. “You have to see it from my point of view,” he said, and I nodded sagely.
I offered to go online and show them receipts from my storage unit in Minneapolis, the ticket back to Korea that I’d recently paid for, this blog, even, where they could spend time reading about my vacillations about future plans over the past year or so, but could clearly discover that immigrating to Canada was NOT one of the many options I’d been contemplating.
But they strongly resisted the idea that I lived my life “online,” and they couldn’t seem to understand that I didn’t carry paper copies of these things. I finally sighed, and said, “well, I guess it’s not that important to visit my friend in Winnipeg, it was a kind of spontaneous, impulsive decision, anyway. How about I just turn around and go back into the US?”
The friendly Canadian went off to have a “little meeting” with some of his coworkers, or supervisor, or something. Or maybe he googled me – that’s what I would have done, maybe. To try to check me out.
I sat and pondered what would end up happening if I turned around and then had to pass through US border controls. The US people are always hard-asses anyway, and much less polite than the Canadians, and I began to visualize trying to explain to them that the Canadians had rejected me. That would, of course, set off alarm bells with the Americans. I started developing a little scenario where I lived out some weeks or months in my little truck, parked in the no-man’s land between the Canadian and US border control stations on the Manitoba / North Dakota border, because neither country would let me in.
And then the big, burly, boy-scout-freckled Canadian waved me over and said, very seriously, “we’ve decided we trust you. I’m giving you a one month visa.” And he stamped my passport. And then proceeded to try to convince me to stay more than just one night in Winnipeg, which is what I’d told him my plans were, because, after all, he said, “there’s a lot of fun things to do in Winnipeg.” Really. He said this.
And then, like a latter-day Colombo (70’s TV police drama), he held up a finger and said, “Just one more question.”
I smiled, “Sure, anything.”
“Why was it, again, that you said you had all this stuff in your truck?”
Here we go again, I thought. I began to give, with more detail than before, the story of how I had landed at Minneapolis, and preliminary to driving to California, I had collected some boxes of stuff to “sort through” on my travels. He said OK, but nodded skeptically.
I shook his hand, went back out to my truck, and drove away from the setting prairie sun, toward Winnipeg.
My friend Gerry said that, on the contrary, it wasn’t the bumper sticker that freaked them out; it was the laundry basket! “People don’t travel with laundry baskets. Only people who are moving carry laundry baskets.” Hmm… is this a Canadian proverb?
See video embedded below: take some geeks, a lot of hardware and software and do some crazy coding. Mix that together with some quadriplegics who got attitude. And go out "tagging" on the 10 freeway. As I understand it, it's a sort of "virtual tagging" that doesn't involve real paint, but I'm unclear as to whether the images are projected onto the real objects in real time (i.e. using something like an lcd projector of the sort ubiquitous now in business meetings for showing powerpoint presentations), or whether it's a matter of manipulating the video signal of the scene/surface in question after the fact. Either way, it's a strange, unique, entertaining way to spend a lot of money and time. The video is on a site called vimeo.com. I like the content on the site, but the streaming rate, at least from where I sit currently in South Korea, is horrendously terrible.
SE2 EP4 – Eyewriter Tempt LA from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
The Obama administration has proven disappointing in lots of ways, so far, although it's early to pass judgement. But one thing I'm surprised about is how stymied they seem over the Guantanamo issue. There was a proposal by someone named GUÉNAËL METTRAUX in a recent New York Times that seemed like a plausible and workable solution to the dilemma created by Bush et al.
In a side note… I may have to stop reading the New York Times online… more and more, I'm getting "you have to pay for this section" or "you have to be registered for this section" notifications. It's annoying. I quit reading the Washington Post for a similar reason. Everyone says… well, papers have to support themselves. True. But sitting in South Korea, it's not necessarily convenient to have some kind of online subscription to a website, given unreliable access issues (due to being inside Korea's weird, unpredictable national firewall, and having a crappy DSL provider, among other things). So I just shop around for what's convenient, I guess.
My contract at LBridge ends in just over two weeks. There are ways in which I'm looking forward to moving on from some of the more frustrating aspects of my job, but the truth of the matter is that I'm very much not looking forward to leaving Korea. I've been in Korea for almost two years, and I've never once felt homesick for my home country. I have felt homesick for some certain geographical or meteorological things: a California fog or a Minnesota blizzard or Lake Superior or the Chicago skyline. I have felt homesick for friends and family, sometimes. But my country, despite the election of Obama with is mandate for "change," seems downright nuts.
Perhaps I spend too much time viewing my home country through the lens of Jon Stewart: this recent episode underscores so many of the aspects of life in America that seem truly messed up. I particularly enjoyed (maybe in an embarrassing schadenfreude way) the following exchange:
"I want my America back!" — Crazy lady in a townhall meeting about healthcare
"She wants her America back? Go tell that to the Indians." — Larry Wilmore
I know for absolute certainty that South Korea is no less messed up, in its own special ways… but living here as an alien, I don't have to worry about it so much. I don't have to feel responsible. I can look around and say, "Very interesting. I'm sure glad this isn't my country."
Oh dear, oh dear… have I become (resumed being? never gave up being?) one of those America-hating liberals? I feel like a caricature.
Regardless, I'm kind of dreading my return to America. Are things as bad there as my limited view seems to indicate? Is there really that much acrimony, anger, and division? Is the economy really that bad? Have I been living in a fortuitous bubble?
I guess Starbucks corporation, having made its name synonymous with brand ubiquity, is going to be experimenting with running locations under alternate brands (see this article in the Seattle Times). Call them "stealthbucks." They're trying to have it both ways: mega brand identity for mass consumers seeking sameness and comfort, but also the rebellious consumers who want locality and uniqueness. Can it work? What other companies have successfully operated this way? Is this a genuinely new corporate branding strategy? There have been many cases of companies maintaining different brands for different demographics, but the idea of creating one-off brands for individual locations… that seems very subversive.
Headline from a Korean news website, an article about how the word “Obama” becomes a synonym for a certain type of “coolness” in the U.S. The phrase above translates, roughly, “being like Obama = being cool.” Note the Korean verb for “being cool” is /kulhada/ [literally “to do cool“], borrowed directly from English.
I've seen two news items that seem to me to be defining moments in the open-source software industry. First, Microsoft is apparently contibuting to the Linux kernal, obviously therefore conforming with the GPL. Everyone loves the irony, but my only thought is that it signals Microsoft's undeniable adaptability. They may suck at the internet, but they're still kings in the world of actual, meaningful giant software projects (hey, even kings can sometimes still make dogs like Vista, but they've made plenty of products I definitely respect, most notably SQL Server and the .NET framework). The other item that I thought was mildly interesting was that Red Hat, the biggest Linux distribution company out there, has now been added to the S&P500. I wish I hadn't sold my stock.
I had kind of a bad day yesterday, as sometimes happens when I have one of my "one-day weekends" (the result of working Saturdays). I don't know why that makes me particularly blue, but it does. I didn't accomplish any of the things on the "to do" list. I read some books, surfed the internet, watched part of a movie (and didn't like it enough to even finish it). I took a long walk.
I was listening to NPR (streaming KCRW of Santa Monica) and I heard a reporter talking about working in Somalia. Explaining that it was MUCH more dangerous than Iraq, because in Iraq, there's an occupying army trying to control things, and offering places to take refuge from the danger. No such refuges in Somalia. Lack of functioning government, and all that.
I didn't catch his name, and I can't confirm what he said. But it was terribly funny, in a gallows sort of way. He offered an anecdote about landing at the Mogadishu airport, where he was given an "entry form" or something like that to fill out. The form only had a few questions: Name? Date of Birth? Nationality? Caliber of Weapon?
Hahaha. "Caliber of weapon?" It reads like something straight out of a vaguely Heinleinian future-libertarian utopia. But we all know that Somalia is not particularly utopian. I grow more cynical about the possible advantages of libertarianism as I get older.
There is an amazing underground railroad that exists, right now. It moves North Koreans through China, and thence to the "outside world": mostly to South Korea. The politics of it is driven, like America's underground railroad of the second quarter of the 19th century, most often by people of faith. That makes for complicated motives, and ones that I sometimes disagree with. But the humanitarian aspect is undeniable. Here is a compelling video about one case study. The video is a bit melodramatic, in parts, but I think it's something people should see.
I often make light of, and even joke about, the fact that I live within "walking distance" of a "socialist workers paradise." I know that that's not the case. I am fascinated by many aspects of the North Korean polity, but I think that ultimately, from a humanitarian standpoint, it doesn't have much redeeming value.
"There is a lot of news."
I awake this morning to news that not one, but two, of the pop-culture icons of my youth had died: Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. I never idolized them, exactly. But they were ubiquitous figures in the pop-cultural landscape of the late 70's and early 80's, those so-called "formative years."
Is this what it's like, growing old? Outliving the immortals…
I was correcting student workbooks earlier today. There’s an article in the most recent newspaper (an ESL “teaching” newspaper published in Korea) that features “Barak Obama” – our belovedly misspellable future Space Emperor.
I found this picture, above, in Julie’s workbook. It’s BHO’s best picture ever! And she wrote above his misspelled name her own personal misspelled transliteration: 벼락 오버머 (byeorak obeomeo, rather than the standard translilteration, 바락 오바마). Note the little lightning bolt above the “벼락” (byeorak means lightning bolt, I think).
Relatedly relevant:
We have had "multiculturalism" as our debate topic the last few weeks. Specifically, multiculturalism as an emerging social phenomenon (very peripheral, so far) in Korea. I actually have some thoughts and observations at a fairly serious level about this idea, but I'll save that for a later, more coherent post.
For the moment, it's interesting seeing the Korean kids trying to make sense of it. One of my favorite quotes comes from Kevin, who says, "if we do the multicultural, then Korean men can be happy."
I think Kevin is referring to the fact that many Korean men, these days, have been in essence "importing" brides from Southeast Asian countries – enough so that it's becoming a "problem" the government has been trying to address. But the way Kevin writes about it makes it sound like it's some kind of weird dance.
"Hey, everybody! Let's do the multicultural!"
I like this concept I discovered recently. Not sure what to do with it, though. Adhocracy. Is it even possible, without dissolving into Somalia-like chaos? Why have I become so sceptical of libertarian and anarchist modes of social existence, lately? Too long living in Confucian, hierarchical, neofascist Asia?
GM declared bankruptcy, and the Dow soared. What does that mean? At first, I thought it was because GM was removed from the Dow, but in fact, that changeover doesn't actually happen until June 8, if you read the fine print in the financial press. So Monday's soaring Dow is still home to now officially mostly worthless GM stock.
I guess the traditional analysis would be that the market had already "priced" the GM bankruptcy, and therefore it didn't really impact the Dow's reaction to other news and issues. It's also indicative of the extent to which cars, and heavy industrial production in general, are no longer core to the US and/or global economies. In the Dow, GM is being replaced by Cisco. Tech conglomerates are the new blue-chips.
One article I read was quoting criticisms of the US government's managing of the auto industry's collapse, including, specifically, a complaint that the government was "giving" Chrysler to a foreign auto company (Fiat) rather than merging it with GM. The reason why Chrysler cannot be merged with GM is because of union resistance: a merged 2-out-of-big-3 would introduce economies of scale that would result in further plant closures and layoffs, which the UAW obviously cannot favor. I agree with that. But on the other hand, I think merging Chrysler with Fiat is possibly smart for a reason that wasn't mentioned: European automakers have a better chance at navigating the US's new "socialist" regulatory and government-owned and union-owned industrial landscape… they've been doing it successfully in Europe for decades, right? What we're seeing, in other words, is a Europeanization of the US auto industry.
According to various news sources (e.g. The Korea Herald, The Australian), South Korea's response yesterday to the North Korean nuclear test has been to finally get around to joining the US's "Proliferation Security Initiative."
This was particularly interesting to me, because of an incident in one of my most advanced debate classes about a month ago. We have these "newspapers" (they have current events packaged for ESL learners, produced by a domestic Korean publishing house) that always have a current debate topic in their pages. I really like pulling our in-class debate topics from these newspapers, because they are always topics that are immediately relevant to South Koreans, being policy issues that are under discussion by the government. I can urge the kids to consider that they are learning not just English, but something along the lines of a South Korean civics class. This provides at least some of them with some additional motivation, and because the topics are prominent in the South Korean media, it also makes them easy to research, even if they are often conceptually quite difficult.
Last month, the newspaper had as its debate topic the question as to whether South Korea should fully join the US's Proliferation Security Initiative. I didn't know much about it, and I didn't put too much time into researching it, myself. I read the article, gave it some thought, and it seemed like a pretty uncontroversial thing, to me. I understood South Korea's ambivalence, about it, however, given the always fraught nature of its relationship with its northern neighbor — North Korea had basically said that it would view South Korea joining this treaty as a "declaration of war." Huh… right.
I tend to avoid stating my personal opinion on these debate topics until after the debate is finished, so as not to bias the students' take on them. But I'd formed in my mind that joining PSI would probably be OK. Until Sally's discussion of it.
Sally is a sharp sixth grader. A bit of a prodigy, in some ways, excellent with these civics and social studies type concepts. I have joked that she's going to be a lawyer, some day. Anyway, we were beginning our discussion of this Proliferation Security Initiative, and she begins, quite simply: "I read about it, and I think it's illegal." My jaw dropped open. "Uh… That's not what the newspaper said," I was thinking to myself.
But she went on to explain that it involved arbitrary search and seizure in international waters, and that it basically boiled down to a form of international racial profiling of ships-at-sea. Not using this kind of vocabulary — she's not THAT good — but she did a perfectly adequate job of making these ideas clear using simpler vocabulary. And I was just stunned, even recognizing that she was probably basing this on something she'd found on a Korean opinion website of some kind. Because here was a 6th grader, lecturing me on international law. She'd managed to internalize the arguments, and it was clearly not just parroting but that she understood the significance of them. I was so impressed.
Sure enough, when you look at Wikipedia on the topic of PSI, you find that it was another one of those dubious cowboy-internationalist undertakings of John Bolton, former UN Ambassador under President Bush. Given that pedigree, how could it NOT be illegal? I bonked my forehead and went "d'oh!" And, because of Sally, I changed my mind about South Korea joining the Proliferation Security Initiative.
Now, it becomes moot (note to self: now is the time to explain the meaning of the word "moot" to Sally's class — we can revisit PSI for 5 minutes in light of the news). South Korea has gone and jumped into it, anyway, in reaction to the North's intemperance. Ah, well…
Our future Space Emperor, BHO, is clearly not afraid to disappoint his fans. Whether this represents cynicism or realpolitik, I find hard to judge. I really, really enjoyed Maureen Dowd’s recent mocking of the situation vis-a-vis Cheney: “Dick twinkles. ‘Yes, we can.'”
In other news, I collected all my retired (read, broken) plastic alligators and brought them to class today, because this is the last week of the Spring term. Here is a picture after the Eldorado2 kids had arranged them.
Notes for Korean
So many people commit suicide in Korea. They have a very high rate. And famous people keep setting the example. Today, it was the humuliated and profoundly unsuccessful former president, 노무현. I'm of the personal opinion that he was at least somewhat better than the current president… that's largely due to ideological issues. That there was corruption and gross incompetence in Roh's administration is undeniable. But he entered politics as a human rights lawyer and activist, and I really feel that his intentions were genuine. Somehow, I'm inclined to "read" his suicide as a confirmation of that. Truly corrupt people (compunctionless types) feel no shame. And no shame means no suicide. The truly corrupt go and lurk in a fog of false righteousness. But suicide is easy to "romanticize." It can be manipulative, too. So… who knows.
He threw himself off a cliff near his home village. He left a note — no ambiguity. He'd been in the midst of being investigated (or prosecuted?) for corruption charges. I guess he just didn't want to deal with it anymore.
I've been contemplating Oracle's proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems. As an erstwhile programmer, I'm concerned about Oracle's ability to be faithful to Sun's many relatively "open" software infrastructure undertakings: the Java programming language, OpenOffice, and, most importantly, MySQL, which has been a direct competitor of Oracle's core database products.
I don't trust Oracle to stay committed to any of these product lines. The best case scenario would involve them spinning them off, somehow, but if I'm guessing correctly, it was for these "periferal" lines-of-business that Oracle decided to take on Sun in the first place — the hardware line that most analysts view as the central part of Sun's business is both shrinking, and uninteresting to Larry Ellison's empire-building schemes.
As a shareholder (I own a tiny number of shares in each company), I'm more sanguine. It means I don't have to fear a bankruptcy by Sun (which seemed possible, especially after the failed IBM bid), and I can therefore recover at least some of my invested value in that company. And Oracle has a good record of profitably absorbing other businesses.
Oracle will struggle more with Sun than many of its previous acquisitions, due not least to that hardware business, but I expect there's a very good chance they will figure out how to make money from the whole deal, eventually. Oracle is stunningly good at manipulating their long-term revenue streams and cross-selling products.
After all, it was my experience as an IT worker of a major Oracle customer that convinced me they were a good stock to own – those people sell some of the most well-marketed vaporware in the world of ERP applications. And I don't really mean vaporware negatively – all major ERP systems are basically vaporware at the moment of sale: those kinds of million-dollar sales are little more than a handshake that says, "we will build what you need."
South Korea is definitely struggling a little bit. But not a day goes by when I don't see some news item that seems to indicate that, at least so far, they're weathering things pretty well here, compared to many places. Of course, many "developing" countries seem to be handling this thing better than the "developed" ones, which lends some credence to my periodic casual assertion that despite its apparent prosperity, its membership in the OECD, etc., South Korea is still, at heart, a developing country.
The evidence today was more direct, if entirely subjective. I've been doing a lot of random-bus-riding. Well, not entirely random. But bravely just getting on buses to see where they take me. Today I ended up in Yeongdeungpo on a #9706, and then after walking around some, I took a subway to Gangnam. And there, lo and behold, there was a new Starbucks opening up, near the Nonhyeon subway station. Here I thought Starbucks was closing hundreds (even thousands) of stores, worldwide, to try to survive the recession. But not in Gangnam. Brand new Starbucks… only blocks away from two other Starbucks I've been to. I mean… as a shareholder, I have to go, don't I? Hah. Well, anyway. New Starbucks.
I studied Korean for a while, and then I read the most recent copy of the Economist and finally took yet another random bus back home. I had to stand the whole trip, which made me remember traveling in Mexico, where I remember at least once standing for an eight hour bus trip from DF to Morelia.
I spent 20 minutes last night explaining the debate topic to my Eldorado 1 class. I knew the topic was a bit over their heads, but I had no idea by just how much.
The topic is whether or not South Korea should join the US in a "proliferation security initiative" – basically, should South Korea join other nations in working hard to prevent the nuclear proliferation problem. But it's a sensitive issue, here, since North Korea is the number one offender on the nuclear proliferation front, at the moment. And the South has ambivalences about its other neighbors, too: China is increasingly public about its military (including nuclear) capacity, and Japan is NEVER to be trusted in its non-proliferation commitments (for obvious historical reasons, from the Korean perspective).
The consequence is that while many South Koreans clearly want to side with the US in the non-proliferation movement, there are just as many that would like to simply ignore the situation, either because they don't want to offend the North for fear of antagonizing it (typically, those on the left), or because they would like to see the South developing (perhaps secretly) their own nuclear deterrent (typically, those on the right).
Anyway, I spent lots of time drawing maps and diagrams on the board, and explaining in as simple vocabulary as I could muster, the situation regarding nuclear proliferation. And then, as the bell rang, my student Ann timidly raised her hand, and said, "Teacher… which Korea?" I said that I didn't understand. She elaborated, "Here, Ilsan. Which Korea – North, South?"
"This is South Korea," I said, bemused. Her face brightened. "Oh, thank you. Good night." Oops! Sometimes you need to make sure basic concepts are clear.
In other news… my web-access problems at home are getting progressively more annoying. I couldn't get into facebook, last night. And unlike with my blog host, I was unable to "sneak" in using a proxy. I may be better off trying to freeload wifi off my neighbors, and not pay the $25 a month to SK Broadband. I certainly would never dream of trying to interact with customer service in Korean. I remember vividly my shock and dismay when I realized that the person at the customer service call center at my DSL provider in the US didn't know what a Domain Name Server was. Nothing is more depressing than trying to explain technical stuff to the technical helpdesk people. And to try to do so across a severe language barrier might just cause my brain to self-destruct.
In the latest Atlantic magazine, Hua Hsu replies to letters critiquing his article "The End of White America," which I mentioned once before. And there is one thing that he says that bothers me (and he may have said something similar in his article, but at the time it didn't stick with me): "I am reminded of the commentary about Barack Obama's skill (and more important, success) at 'playing white.'"
This statement of Hsu's bothers me because in my opinion it underscores the problem with so much analysis of race, everywhere in the world: it conflates the issues of physiognomy on the one hand and cultural background on the other. You see, Barack Obama is not, in fact, skilled at "playing white," as Hsu says. Culturally, Barack Obama is white. He was raised by a white mother (and her white parents, his grandparents) in the multiethnic but mostly culturally "white" enclaves of Honolulu. It doesn't require any skill on his part to "play white," because it's what comes naturally to him. Being white is Obama's birthright. If anything, Obama's skill is in "playing black," given that he had very little exposure to black culture during his childhood and adolescence (whether we're speaking of blackness of the American, slave-descended variety or of the African immigrant variety).
So I read in Newsweek an editorial by Jacob Weisberg, entitled "What else are we wrong about?" The observation that caught my eye: "Homeownership encourages longer commutes. And at least one study says it makes you fat and unhappy."
I've had less-than-glowing sociological intuitions about America's homeownership-as-secular-religion for some time. And the recent subprime mortgage crisis points up some of the instabilities, although it mostly seems the blame lies with exploitative financiers. The point is, a homeownership "religion" can can be exploitative. At the least, it becomes a form of social control: keep your citizens in sufficient debt that they can't challenge the underpinnings of the economic system.
But as I reflected on the homeownership question, this morning, I had a curious new insight. One of the sociological factors that seems to drive US homeownership trends is the "problem of public education." Which is to say, families in search of "better schools" search out "good school districts" which are inevitably "farther out" – leading to overleveraged mortgages and longer commutes, etc., etc. Look at the recent immense movement of lower-middle-class and working-class hispanics into California's Inland Empire, to get away from the "city problems" and "city schools," among other things.
All of which means that, at least indirectly, the US "public education problem" could be viewed as a root cause (I said a root cause, not the root cause) of things as diverse as the current global financial crisis (via the subprime mortgage problem) and global warming (via the excessively long, automobile-dependent commuting pattern of American workers).
Maybe that's just my biases at work. I really believe that the single thing that needs to be "fixed" about the American polity is the education system.
Pirates are all over the news. On the one hand, Obama is facing off against pirates, not far off the coast of his father's homeland. See this somewhat silly article in Mother Jones. On the other hand, the Swedes have convicted the leaders of The Pirate Bay (a torrenting website that I have confessed to using on occasion) of copyright infringement, unexpectedly granting a huge boost to a Swedish Piratpartiet (really!), propelling them past even the Greens, at least temporarily, in the polls. And meanwhile, Lars Ulrich (of the rock band Metallica, notorious for having essentially sued his own fans for piracy in the past) has now announced that he's siding with Trent Reznor and Radiohead and believes major record labels are no longer necessary.
So… which pirates are the real pirates? What does all this mean? What ties them together? I would speculate, for both best and worst, that there's a sort of libertarian ideal that provides the linkages. It was the example of Somalia that has caused me, in recent years, to reconsider my own libertarianism. And it is movements like Sweden's Piratpartiet that make me think libertarianism still has something to offer, ideologically. I'm offering no answers… just meditating on things.
So, I saw a graph somewhere recently that showed how all the world's stockmarkets have gone down, everywhere. And I began to ponder how much the cumulative global market capitalization of all companies had gone down. And after some googling, I found a figure for global "wealth evaporation" that documented $40 trillion and hinted at $70 trillion, in a blog called My Budget 360.
Gone. Disappeared.
Interesting.
"Back in the early stages of the financial crisis, wags joked that our trade with China had turned out to be fair and balanced after all: They sold us poison toys and tainted seafood; we sold them fraudulent securities." So says Paul Krugman, in an editorial in the New York Times, April 2, 2009. And he goes on, very interestingly. Imagine having so much of some thing that you effectively can't sell it — because to do so would drive down the price and turn your remaining holdings of that thing into a net loss. That sums up China's relationship with the U.S. dollar, in particular, that form of the dollar known as U.S. Treasuries.
So all the doom and gloom about China taking over the world economy is much exaggerated, but that doesn't mean the U.S. (or Japanese or European) position is any safer. It's ALL messed up, everywhere. I had a negative income last year, at least on paper. I have arranged my life in such a way that that is not a tragedy for me — it hardly affects my decisions or lifestyle at all. Nevertheless, it's annoying and painful in an abstract sort of way.
Hahaha. Anna sent this cartoon to me. She said in class today, “I think maybe you don’t like our president Lee Myeong-bak very much.” I answered, “He’s Korea’s George Bush.” From there, each listener or reader may draw his or her own conclusions.
The last syllable in the cartoon has been changed from his name (-bak) to (-bap) which is how Koreans write Spongebob’s last syllable, too. Not only that, but -bap means “rice,” as in my latest favorite dish, 해신볶음밥 (haeshinbokkeumbap = spicy seafood fried rice).
GM stock dropped 25% on Monday, as the Space Emperor (or his staff) forced Wagoner out of the CEO slot. Things are looking grimmer than ever for America's Detroit. But meanwhile, I also read this bit of news about a Netherlands-based company that seems to have elected to call itself "Detroit Electric" unironically. They're going to be contracting with the normally Detroitesque (meaning perennially loss-making) Malaysian state-owned carmaker Proton to make all-electric cars for the EU and eventually US markets.
Wouldn't it be weird and historically ironic if, ultimately, the name "Detroit" became associated not with America's failed car industry but rather a future-oriented European company manufacturing cars in Southeast Asia? Can you imagine, say, 30 years from now, people saying "Detroit" and forgetting that it used to be a major American city noted for automobiles, and referring instead to the latest model from the Dutch-Malaysian enterprise?
I had this weird dream the other day, right as I was waking up. The dream had this unidentified guru-like person, who was advising me to practice “Juche” as a means to personal growth and salvation. He was pointing to a page with the Chinese characters for it (see title-line).
But then Ken interrupted (Ken is the archetype interrupter, in Jared’s dreamland), and I lost dream-traction… vaguely.
“Juche” (주체) is the Korean name for the official ideology of North Korea, as formulated by Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il. It’s 2 parts Stalinism, 2 parts fascism, 1 part maoism, and 1 part feudalism. Well, that’s my own take on it.
Kim’s folly. Literally, it means something like “corism,” as in, “the ideology of core” or “ideology of the main subject.” But generally it’s translated as “self-reliance,” as it is strongly autarkic in character.
Interestingly, when I looked in the naver.com dictionary, I discovered that 주체 can also mean “indigestion caused by drinking” and also “a burden.” Nice bit of homonymy. Courtesy naver.com:
주체(主體) the subject;the main body;【중심】the core;the nucleus;『법』 the main constituent
주체(酒滯) indigestion from[caused by] drinking
주체 a burden;a bother;a handful ―하다 cope with[take care of] one´s burden
It was strange that it was the Chinese hanja that were in the dream, since North Korea no longer uses Chinese characters – their banning was, in fact, part of the culturally self-reliant practice of Juche, as it was developed in the 60’s in reaction to the Sino-Soviet split.
Speaking of weapons of mass destruction (we were speaking of weapons of mass destruction?), check out this “fake 404” from the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It made me laugh.
Other notes from studying Korean:
시(時) o´clock;time;hour (I recognized the hanja for this on a sign, recently. It was a cool feeling.)
