Not at all Gay!But I'm a dick.
Decry The Imperialist Dead Cow Invasion!In any case, there were candles, several drunk ajeoshis who we stayed far away from, and as at any mad-cow rally, people dressed up as cows, dancing. It was unclear to this waeguk if the cows were intended to be mad ones from the US, or noble Korean cows defending the Land of the Morning Lunacy. Several folks tried to talk to us, but we just smiled and avoided eye-contact. Adam, who is far braver than I, wanted to follow the mob if it marched downtown (as one particularly loaded ajeoshi seemed to be counseling). I was content to snap my photos and lurk off into the night.
Discretion being the better part of valor at that point, and besides I had walked quite a great
deal that day an was looking forward to soaking my liver in a tub of soju my feet in a tub of water. So I snapped one last photo of the "Mad Cow Protest" Mascot...That would be the google-eyed cow. I have no idea what the flower is about, perhaps a vague swipe at stinking hippies, and the mouse is completely incomprehensible to me.All in all a grand day.
Sunday was about taking the OAF to UAM and a gnarly hike in the hills (parts of the trail had ropes strung up on the side of the trail, primarily for people heading downhill). The hike out culminated at a particularly wonderful Korea tradition – the health-club on the hill.
Then down to a lovely barbecue (with $44 bucks worth of Korean Beef, which would barely feed two people – I can see why they want to protect their monopoly!) and off to the land of nod.
Walking somewhere downtown, some evening, probably covered in puke and swigging soju, I was wise enough Not to get something to eat at the illy-named "Gag Hof."
15 comments:
You are a jewel of western integrity. Drink more soju for your continued mental health. ^^;
-A Korean protester with nefarious intent and a candle
Entirely OT, but too good not to share.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=10562#comments
yer sis
Deep-down, the protest is not really about American beef or even America, but a passing Way-gook like you doesn't really care I guess.
Have a nice time in Korea but try not to drink too much soju! It's bad for your mental health.
p.s. By the way, the mouse/rat symbolizes Lee Myung-bak. He's nicknamed so.
Hi,
I'm a Korean-American from Connecticut who came across your blog. I completely do not understand the rationale of this mad cow protest? What the &*^%&^??
Can you help me understand the lunacy??
큰자지: Thanks for clearing up the mouse for me. I had no idea and this was the first time I had been up-close-and-personal enough to see it. But the protests are very much about the US (among other major things, of course) in my opinion. That and a remarkably quick turn on Bak. This kind of thing happened around Apollo Ohho (sp?), the IMF, and the couple in the subway station in 2002 and a variety of other events. Korea is ready to be pissed off at the US in very short order.
Which leads me to my short answer for the Conneticutian...
1) Anti-US sentiment. Korea is quite sensibly paranoid about any foreign government. There is an old saying that when whales fight, shrimp are crushed. This saying is partially a reflection of Korea's history with bigger foreign powers including Japan, China, the Mongolians, and now the US. And, to put it bluntly, whatever else the U.S. is in Korea, it is an occupying power. That's just not gonna make you popular.
2) Bak has moved to far too fast. This was his style while he was the mayor of Seoul, but it doesn't as president. Some of his moves the constitution of his cabinet and his proposal to build a cross-country channel come immediately to mind, have been blunt and unpopular. One of those stupid moves was to try to push an "all-English" in the schools proposal which thoroughly pissed off the teacher's union. This is actually quite important to what happened on the streets, as the initial protests were largely school students who had been rounded up by their teachers. And Bak was initially completely inflexible and thus "grew" the problem.
3) South Koreans are xenophobic; "homogenous" or "inward-looking" if you prefer. This relates to the intimacy orientation of the culture (this is partly based on Confucianism, partly based on history). BTW - I should note that the "integrity" in the Western half of the intimacy/integrity model means something more like "integral" than filled with integrity (in the Jimmy Stewart sense ;-).
4) Schools have partially failed Korea. Koreans are aware this and the newspapers are filled with articles about "what is to be done?" Ironically, while the US is moving towards a more test-based educational system, Korea is trying to move to a more inquiry-based one.
But today, schools focus very intently on tests (e.g. the TOEIC) and getting into colleges and not so much on critical thinking. The fact that not one Korean American has EVER come down with mad cow means nothing here and in fact the argument, while still including mad-cow, has now moved on to "cultural sensitivity" and "meat dumping" (the incorrect belief that the US plans to sell beef to Korea that it does not sell in the US).
Add all this up and you had something waiting to happen - it just required an excuse. Korean beef farmers were happy to produce this excuse since they have a very happy little fixed market here. Korean beef is incredibly expensive and importation of US beef threatens that. The beef farmers are unhappy enough that Australian beef was let in and weren't about to lose their semi-monopoly without fighting.
Beef farmers started throwing shit around (literally - there are pictures of this), the teacher's union saw a way to take the starch out of Bak, the students saw a way to get out of school, and the lack of critical thinking allowed the use of amazingly dull arguments (and sometimes outright lies, like the one passed around on email about the high-school student whose brain turned to "sponge" after she ate US beef - US beef you can't get in Korea, but that kind of fact is ignored). Add existing anti US sentiment that is always available to conjure up, toss in a pinch of Bak trying to stonewall the whole thing, and there you have it.
If Korea would dedicate 1/10th of its concern about imaginary threats like Mad Cow to the real threats to its citizens (The Joogang Ilbo had a great article about the increase in car fatalities among those under 14 years old) a lot of good could be done. But for the moment, this concern tends to erupt around trumped up and inconsequential themes and critical thought is rarely directed at the assumptions which underly these eruptions.
PS.. welcome to any new readers this post brought. Who knew? And my soju consumption isn't high enough to create worry yet. I drink far less in Korea than I did in the States. As a bonus, Korean food is extremely healthy. I might just make it to that 50th birthday (in US years)!
rwellor/
You gave an interesting mixture of facts and opinions above. It is far better than your derogatory post. I hope you try harder next time and tone down go-to-hell-I'm an expat-so-I-can-piss-in-the-pond attitude. Personally, it is irritating as hell----not the content, mind you, but the superficiality of it all. You don't read Hangul, not even phonetically, do you?
Korean-American from Connecticut/
Try googling with "dandlelight vigil Korea" and "mad cow Korea." Compare the results and you will get a nicely balanced view. ;-)
Candlelight Vigilante:
Nah, I can read Hangul phonetically and I take weekly lessons in the language - I just 'mastered' the numbers and have moved on to travel and food stuff. Really just survival stuff at this point, but I hope to eventually be able to read and write.
If you've read previous posts on my blog you probably noted that I am interested in Korean literature (so far translations and "my" author Kim Yong-ik). Add to that my best friend and his family speak Korean and I pretty much have to try to learn it. ;-)
I'm interested in what you think is wrong with my analysis on the page or in comments. I try to not be one of those "throw up tariffs against Samsung and let Korea starve" or "Withdraw the troops and let a) China, or b) North Korea" invade" type of folks - they're the equivalent of mad-cow protestors in my book.
The Mad Cow thing though, seems entirely contrived and the kind of silliness that makes Korea seem, well, silly when the news gets overseas.
http://blog.ohmynews.com/heifetz725/216658
http://media.daum.net/foreign/englishnews/view.html?cateid=1047&newsid=20080611210010948&cp=mk
Just wondering neutrally how you would respond to the links above.
Hansen is pretty much right, as far as he goes. Prion's aren't destroyed by cooking, 30 months is an arbitrary number, and US cows aren't tested enough. The thing is that none of this is particularlly germane to the threat of Mad Cow disease.
As to Prion's that's been suspected for some time, and no one argues, any longer, that cooking is protection. So that's a straw man.
Rhe 30 month number is the number we use in the US for our own citizens (per the USDA). That's where it came from. If this is a gigantic issue for Koreans (even though no Korean in the US has ever caught Mad-Cow) I'd say it's worth renegotiation just because it does look bad to have one export standard for Korea and a different one for Japan. I'm not sure why Korea agreed to that in the first place.
US cows aren't tested enough, but my understanding is the testing is more stringent in the US than Koreans do on their own beef. So if that were actually an issue, you'd think Korea would be testing its own cows. The Marmot's hole has long discussions on this.
But given all the things that could use some fixing, it is absurd to me that there is all this fuss over something that still, still, has apparently never killed a Korean. Someone should look at cigarettes, or taxi drivers. ;-)
I may get to that other link, but for now I have to run and teach my class.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/13krugman.html
I don't agree with everything he says above, but at least he got most of the facts right. You should read newspapers instead of blog comments.
Expatsbane
Expatsbane,
Thanks for leaving a name to respond to! I hate the Anonymice.
Too bad about the ad-hominem that I don't read newspapers. Ah well, the Mad-Cow folks are all about emotion and not fact.
Krugman is right in all things of fact. There is no question that the beef industry in the US is, like any industry, not to be trusted. And that the Bush administration has given control over to the corporations.
How is this unlike the beef industry in Korea. Which essentially has no testing? And since anyone who dies of Mad-Cow disease in Korea is probably listed as a victim of fan death, we have no statistics on that.
The fact is that there are NO (that would be "zero") documented Mad Cow deaths of Koreans, anywhere in the world. Particularly not in the US where most beef is from the US. Mad Cow disease does not threaten Korea like cigarette smoking does, or taxi drivers. That's a statistical fact.
This is a made up controversy. It is for political reasons and the US is just an easy target. Weak minds follow.
"Vershbow should brush up on his math."
http://news.empas.com/issue/show.tsp/3883/20080616n16909
(in Korean)
I don't think interpreting the above article or asking a Korean friend to translate it for you is really beyond your not inconsiderable meantal prowess If it is, stew.
"meantal prowess"? Is that like, smart but cruel?
I'm afraid I don't get the specific reference to the ambassador and your last sentence needs a bit of re-writing. Back to the Hagwon with you.
PS I'm guessing you're in 5th grade or so, judging by the 'cleverness' of your 'name.'
Thought 'stew in your own juice' is too much (I'm not trying to discredit you or ad hominemize you or anything; I just gave you an article to think over), so I sort of shortened my sentence and hoped you'd get it. Btw. the technique is called "시적 여운" in Korean. ;-)
>PS I'm guessing you're in 5th grade or so, judging by the 'cleverness' of your 'name.'
Nah. High School 2nd grade. And this cool Hagwon teacher in Bucheon impressed me so much with his mental prowess so I try to emulate him. I guess you'd heartily approve. :D
http://pds8.egloos.com/pds/200804/26/65/b0044165_481203173f53b.jpg
큰....
Heh, fair enough. So I should take back that 5th grade crack I made. And I do.
I think that if you read the rest of my blog you'll find I'm not one of those relentlessly negative posters who moved to Korea even though they (came to) hate it. I like Korea and plan to stay another year. Particularly, I think the literature is unexplored by the English-speaking word and that's a shame.
I also understand that the Mad Cow thing is about more than cows or anti-americanism, but to the extent that it still is about mad cows it is plainly silly.
I understand the anti-americanism. Or I should say, anti-US sentiment. The US is the empire and has been since post WWII. As a US citizen who has reaped all the economic benefits of that I can't honestly get bent out of shape when other countries get pissed off.
And Korea's history lends itself to this kind of narrative. Lots of splitting and invasion in that history. And the US has troops stationed here. That's never going to bring much love.
My big problem is the 'beef' one and what I think it represents. It's a silly thing to get pissed off about. No Korean has ever died of Mad Cow disease, the mm allele thing (as far as it leads to Mad Cow susceptibility) has been dismissed by the Korean doctor who discovered the allele, and Korean beef is too expensive. :-)
Mad Cow was a pretext for political action and this leads to the thing that concerns me. When the Korean public lines up together it absolutely stops accepting input (did you follow the Colbert vs. Rain fake catfight?).
I'd tie this to the general education system in Korea - it is still largely Confucian, with the non-scientific and 'respectful to elders' aspects which that implies. This results in a lack of critical thinking and social pressure not to break with mainstream 'thinking'.
Some out and name the real issues. Lee has been far too abrupt and the population has responded to it. The US is big brother with tanks. Korea is still developing its current political and social systems. But please stop pretending to believe that US beef is a real threat to anything but Korean beef farmers.
I'm not so concerned, as some expats are, about the so-called "mob rule" on the streets of Korea. I think South Korea is working its way to a political system that is 'democratic' and serves South Korea appropriately. It was not so many years ago that South Korea still had a dictator and only slightly longer since it had fully colonial rule. In between there was a country-wrecking war.
The US had some rather odd struggles on its way to democracy and, to top that off, seems to be veering away from democracy as it develops. So none of that bothers me.
But when the Korean press prints things that are simple not true (30 month old beef is not eaten in the US, Koreans are uniquely susceptible to Mad Cow disease, heck, toss fan death in there) and the people eat it up without dissent?
That gives me the willies.
And the netizens only make it more ridiculous when they flash impossible rumors around the net.
The US (as a whole) has bought some pretty stupid lies in the last 10 years, but at least there was dissent. I just see a different mechanism working in Korea.
At least for now.
Change the school system and watch all the rest of it change.
whew!
That should have been a post..
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