Category: Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I wasn't really intending to post more on this topic, but this video at BBC is absolutely the point I was trying to make in my previous post. Watch it (please), and marvel: despite North Korea's rhetoric, 30 minutes north of where I live people are still commuting back and forth across the NK border. That's the kind of war anyone can live with, and I'm inclined to agree with the reporter's citation: unless and until this border crossing closes, I'm going to take the bellicose rhetoric with a few grains of salt.

I coined the word “ajummocracy” a while back in this blog. I think today is a good day to return to it – because now South Korea has an ajumma for president – although Park Geun-hye breaks the stereotype in many ways: most importantly, she breaks the stereotype by becoming president, rather than just running things behind the scenes.

I was confident enough in my prediction that she would win to have published that prediction. My prediction was based mostly on following the news, and the atmospherics of my classroom discussions of politics with my middle-school students. I find the electoral map exactly matches the prediction I had made in my own brain, too – not that anyone cares. I think the electoral map is very interesting – I’ve written about that before too.

I want to be clear that I didn’t “support” Park, however. Most of my coworkers are either disturbingly apolitical (“what, me vote?”) or else vocally liberal (and therefore they voted for the opposition, Moon Jae-in). Several of them were rivetted by following the election returns on their web-browsers last night, and they were moaning and crying and gnashing their teeth. “Korean people are so stupid,” one of them remarked. Another said, “There are too many old people voting.” As you can see by these remarks, Korean electoral politics aren’t that different from in US: people get very partisan, and the tropes are similar.

I don’t really think it’s my place to say which candidate I personally prefer – it’s not my country. But I will say I think each of the candidates offered some important things. Park’s election is ground-breaking in so many ways: she’s a woman, she’s the daughter of an asssassinated dictator, she’s a leader of a conservative party but she’s made several quite progressive proposals, she’s unmarried – this last may be more surprising than the fact that she’s a woman.

So in February, Park will return to the Blue House – the home where she grew up in the 1960’s and 70’s. Can you imagine entering the presidential mansion, as president, and recognizing and remembering a closet where you may have played hide and seek when you were 9 years old? That seems novelistic, to me – psychologically interesting.

I’ll be intrigued to see how this plays out. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed – I almost always am, in politics.

I watched the last of the Korean presidential debates. I understood almost zero of what the heck they were talking about. Yet I watched it, nevertheless, because politics is interesting to me even when I don’t understand it. Because I’m weird.

I remember a lot was made of analyzing the body language of Obamney during the US presidential debates, and at the time, I thought, that’s dumb – there are more important things in a debate. I still think it’s dumb for serious political analysis to talk about those things, but in watching this Korean debate, I nevertheless basically did more of that than any actual content analysis, given how poor my Korean listening skills really are. Seriously – when I all I understand are the conjunctions and transition words, the debate is a sort of kabuki where I’m looking for nonverbal signals.

Here’s one thought – Moon (the male, leftistish candidate) needs to get the stick out of his butt. He’s about as charismatic as Michael Dukakis. Uh oh. Did I just say that? Park (the female, rightistish candidate) is much more personable. She will win. Admittedly, I’m bringing other information to the table – not least, the informal polls I periodically conduct in my middle-school classes. Over the years, these have proved remarkably representative of Korean public opinion. I’m not sure of the sociological reasons why tiny samples of Korean middle-schoolers in above-average-income suburbs of Seoul accurately reflect Korean public opinion, I’m just sayin’.

I think winter has arrived. I checked my friendly local news website (naver.com) for the weather. Here’s the five-day forecast.

So. Winter.

Yesterday, walking around, I saw banners strung across Juyeop plaza, for the upcoming presidential election (December 19). The two main-party candidates are on the two banners: top is Park Geun-hye (conservative) and below is Moon Jae-in (liberal). The daughter of the dictator versus the former student activist (who was once jailed and barred from politics for his activism). I think either candidate would be a milestone for Korea, and both have their merits. But I predict Park will win.

Let’s see how it plays out.

According to an article in the Korean Herald, South Korea posted its first-ever "cultural trade surplus." This is a very interesting perspective. It's interesting to think about. It's interesting that Koreans are interested in it. They take the idea of being successful cultrual imperialists quite seriously, as a component of their "arrival" in the world as a "developed" country.

The idea, basically: Korea now exports more cultural stuff (books, movies, music, etc.) than it imports, on a dollar-value basis. There aren't many countries that do this – the US is the juggernaut, of course; there's probably some others: France, I suspect, and Japan, and Italy. I'd bet on maybe Egypt, actually, and maybe Brazil. But these are just guesses. Completely wild guesses. I'm too lazy to research it. But it's interesting, anyway.