I say that in the deepest irony. The “pepper spraying cop” of the recent UC Davis incident has gone memic, with a tumblr dedicated to photoshopping him into just about everything imaginable, most images full of obscure cultural references and cruel satire. My personal favorite was his elevation to a new, 2011 version of Lady Liberty – see below.
It’s interesting watching all this from abroad – it gives some distance, some cultural perspective. It’s not like South Korea doesn’t have its own pepper spraying cops (or the rough equivalents) – in fact, I would almost say that it was South Korea that perfected the difficult arts of both public rioting and of the police repression of said rioting – these American occupiers and their pepper-spraying cop friends could learn a lot from a careful study of the last two decades of Korean history – they are rank amateurs in comparison.
Nevertheless (or perhaps, because of this), there is something disturbing, depressing, and, yes, ironic that South Korea seems so… settled and calm, these days, while other parts of world, including places not so far from where I was born and raised (such as UC Davis) are undergoing these social upheavals. I tend to want to start studying gini coefficients, and suchlike.
From a broad economic and/or politico-historical perspective, let’s just say… mistakes may have been made. I’m feeling depressed about the future of my passport-issuing polity (because I don’t like saying the word “nation” with a possessive pronoun like “my”).
