Scribblings of the Metropolitician

Bomb English #16 - Mad about Mad Cow!

In this 16th episode of Bomb English, Jennifer and Michael talk about mad cow madness. Have we eaten too much American beef? Are we crazy? Or are we just the only ones remaining calm? Wait -- did they say they ate American beef? Run! Run!

Let's Make a Point...

As someone always up for making creative points, would anyone with artistic skills like to assist in making a satirical cartoon illustrating the folly of making racism-tinged generalizations? Here's one that comes from a Korean blogger (HT to the Marmot):

I wrote a comment on his blog asking how Koreans would feel if American newspapers and bloggers started making cartoons based on sweeping generalizations of certain minority groups appearing in the news, as in the Koreans such as Cho Seung-hui or more recently, Choi Kang-hyuk.

A cartoon of say, a sweat-drenched, crazed Korean man clutching a knife dripping with blood in one hand, and a Tech-9mm in the other one outta do it. It would go in a mock post, and the point will be made that this is a shoe-on-the-other-foot kind of thought experiment, and not our actual opinion.

Of course, certain netizens would try to lie and say that we really believed in this, but those idiots would just spread the word, while hopefully the Korean press would get ahold of it. Who knows? The worst that'll happen is that it'll go unnoticed. The best is that it would be.

I'd do the illustration myself, but I can't draw to save my life. Anyone care to collaborate and make a point with me? Rather than phone calls that go unreturned, or online petitions/protests that go unnoticed, let's get creative.

And turnabout is always fair play, especially when the other guy is even more sensitive than you are to low blows. Playing to the Korean sense of national pride and "image" just might be an effective strategy in this case, methinks.

Bomb English #15 - Being a Lesbian in Korea

In our 15th episode, Jennifer and Michael talk with a Korean lesbian who tells us what many people want to ask, but never get the chance. "Are there REALLY gay people in Korea?!"

For those of you who don't know, our Bomb English project is going pretty well, where we provide good conversational English content along with a transcript for free. We keep it frank, honest, and real as can be. No Arirang, EBS English here -- recommend it to your Korean friends for their intermediate/advanced study, and listen in yourselves as native speakers, since we treat the topics as real topics and not just awkward, superficial conversations about things we don't care about.

This is real English, with Korean content. So there's something for everyone.

Check us out!

You Know, Maybe Government Suits Should Read the Expat Blogs...

Guess what? What many foreigners have been saying for a long time would happen HAS! While the Seoul Metropolitan Government wastes time asking western foreigners whether or not they like the toilets and tries to encourage tourism in Korea by just saying the country is now "sparkling!" foreign investment in Korea has been falling faster than a crackhead's mean body weight.

Any and all foreigners who've been in the middle of Roh Moo Hyeon's anti-American, anti-foreign, kneejerk nationalism has wondered how Korea would ever become the "hub of Asia" if any foreign firm who makes money here is constantly vilified beyond reasonableness, even as actual North Korean propaganda is allowed to be taught to schoolchildren by members of the Korean Teachers' Union, and the media continues to set up foreigners as the ultimate scapegoat for everything they can't now blame Lee Myung Bak for.

We've been saying it for years now.

If you're going to make Korea a place where it sucks to live, not to mention invest and make money, do you think anyone but the craziest or most committed are going to stay? Especially with the open and welcoming arms of China right next door? The first thing that Korean slogan and campaign planners need to figure out is that Korean automatically being the hub of anything was only a truism before there was international plane travel. Because now, people can fly OVER Korea without going THROUGH it.

I hate to say "I told you so." (Well, actually, I don't.) But "I told you so." And so did any other foreigner who's been here a long time and has been constantly shaking their head as Korea continued to embarrassingly piss yet another dream of being a "hub" down the proverbial drain.

And in this particular case, there's no one to blame other than -- wait for it -- the usual suspects: a formerly anti-American government and a continually anti-foreigner news media.

[Go read more here!]

Congratulations! This time, there's no one to blame but Korea itself! And with the hysterics over the KORUS FTA, wow -- for better or worse, Korea sure knows how to create a hospitable atmosphere for making agreements and then having the population go absolutely berzerk over it for the most irrational of reasons.

The Logic of Illogic

Needless to say, I couldn't find any answers to the question of where the "94% of Koreans more genetically susceptible to mad cow disease" claim came from, so I did my own research, since not knowing such things bothers me. Here's the answer, in terms of where this flimsy set of ideas is coming from. The article on "kuru" on eMedicine.com, which was reprinted from WebMD.com, and was written by:

Paul A Janson, MD, Instructor, Tufts University School of Medicine; Director, EMT/RN Consultants; Consulting Staff, Department of Emergency Medicine, Lawrence General Hospital

Along with coauthors:

Rachel H Chung, MD, Consulting Staff, Department of Family Practice, North Clinic, North Memorial Hospital; Mary Buechler, MD, Per Diem Staff, Department of Emergency Medicine, Caritas Holy Family Medical Center; Stuart H Cohen, MD, Director of Infection Control and Epidemiology, Associate Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, University of California at Davis School of Medicine

Here's the excerpt of this article, last updated on October 15, 2005:

"Prions are thought to be both the infectious agent and the cause of spongiform encephalopathy in animals and humans. The prion is a naturally occurring protein (termed prion protein [PrP]) found in the CNS and elsewhere.

In the alpha-helical configuration, PrP usually is sensitive to protease degradation and is termed PrP-sen. Disease results when the PrP is reconfigured into the beta-sheet configuration, which is resistant to protease degradation. This configuration is termed PrP-res. The PrP-res proteins are resistant not only to protease degradation but also to radiation, heat, and most other processes that destroy proteins. Neither the transmissible agent nor the disease-producing agent contains any DNA or RNA. Because they are naturally occurring proteins, immunologic response to the infection is absent.

The prion of kuru is infectious orally and is capable of transmission to nonhuman primates by this route and by direct introduction into various tissues. Scrapie may be transmitted to sheep from pastures that have previously been grazed by scrapie-infected sheep and have remained unused for as many as 30 years, demonstrating the extreme resistance of prions to degradation. CJD also has been transmitted iatrogenically by transplanted tissue such as dura mater grafts. Potential transmission via the blood supply has been suggested but never demonstrated.

Prions are capable of replicating themselves in organisms; or, more correctly, prions are capable of changing the existing PrP-sen to PrP-res. This change takes place particularly in the CNS. Resistance to degradation is the probable source of disease because prions accumulate within the CNS, causing amyloid collections and resulting in neurologic symptoms and the spongiform appearance on pathologic examination. Hence, the term spongiform encephalopathy is applied to this group of diseases.

The name prion has only recently gained wide acceptance, replacing previously used terms such as slow virus, infectious proteins, infectious amyloids, and crystal protein. Mice that lack the gene responsible for PrP cannot be infected with the agent causing spongiform encephalopathy. The lack of this protein has no apparent effect, except an alteration in the circadian rhythm of these mice. They have a normal life span. For this reason, the PrP has been proposed to be a redundant protein.

The PRNP gene has recently been identified as altering the susceptibility to prion infection. The gene has a polymorphism at site 129 for either methionine or valine and has been noted as showing a strong increase in susceptibility to kuru if methionine is present on both genes (M/M). All cases of vCJD in the United Kingdom have occurred in people of the M/M genotype as well.

The pathologic similarity between the spongiform encephalopathies and other degenerative brain diseases, such as Alzheimer disease, is the subject of speculation at this point."

OK, now that's something I can work with. The problem is, it still doesn't lead us to the conclusion that Korea and Koreans are somehow more susceptible to getting mad cow disease, even if it is established that the M/M genotype is expressed in 94% of the Korean population and only 38% of the American population. [And where did these numbers come from?]

The main problem is still the same: preventing tainted meat from reaching the population. If tainted meat hit the shelves of American grocery stores, it doesn't mean only 38% of the population would get it, nor does it mean that 94% of the Korean population would get it.

Neither population would find such a figure acceptable. The fact remains that one has to be exposed to said tainted meat, and a single case of vCJV in the United States in 2003 doesn't establish American meat as any worse than say, E. coli infections in Korean beef, which actually HAVE killed people, and have killed many more people in Korea than any cases of "mad cow" in the US. If there's something more logical to crow about, it's E. coli infections that have forced mass recalls of American beef -- not mad cow disease.

In the end, this is about fear-mongering and existing anti-American sentiment. The question isn't supposed "susceptibility" but whether or not mad cow disease is in the meat of that country. I'm still waiting -- for the over one million Americans of Korean descent (myself included) who've been eating American beef since they were born, how many cases of mad cow disease were there? Was that single case back in 2003 with a Korean American?

Where's the logic, people? It's about the absence or presence of contaminated beef -- not genes.

Some people automatically say "you're just defending America because you're American." That's fucking stupid, if you read this blog (which takes aspects of US society to task every bit as much as I do for South Korea), and my main argument is that if you want to protest the KORUS FTA, do it.

The Korean beef industry wants to protect its market, Korean farmers don't want the FTA bringing in American-grown rice, Korean car manufacturers don't want Ford, Chrysler, and GM selling its cars without the tariffs that have kept them out by keeping their prices double those of domestic cars. Fine. That's all economics, interests, perfectly reasonable arguments, whichever side of them you fall on.

But this fear-mongering about the certainty of death if American beef imports begin again is illogical: even assuming a 94% distribution of the M/M genotype (versus a supposed 38% prevalence in the US) doesn't mean 94% of the Korean population is going to get mad cow disease. In the end, one still has to demonstrate that American beef is particularly dangerous vis a vis "mad cow disease" actually being present, which so far, hasn't been demonstrated. Otherwise, I would have stopped eating American beef a long time ago.

American or not, I'm not stupid enough to eat infected beef. So I would appreciate it if Koreans dropped that line of argument. If and when it is demonstrated that American beef is unsafe, I'll stop eating it. And so should Koreans struggle to keep it out. Until that day, I'll still be getting my occasional beef fix at the local Burger King.

And so will most Koreans, after this all blows over. Illogical and extreme gesticulations and much ado about nothing are usually followed by completely forgetting about the issue.

Because Koreans are just almost even more "mad" about "cow" than Americans, what with the allegiance to foreign fast food chains such as Burger King and McDonald's. I predict a slight drop in sales in both establishments right after American beef comes in, followed by complete amnesia and business-as-usual two weeks later.

Such is the way of things in Korea, and why this whole thing amounts to a whole bunch of silliness. If people were really so worried about their health, they wouldn't eat beef AT ALL, since my vegetarian friends, plus the American book Fast Food Nation, illustrates just how unhealthy the beef industry is in general. Yet, I'm a carnivore. Can't help it.

Alternatively, if Koreans were so concerned about random and inexplicable death, they would also wear their seat belts. But generally, not only don't they, all my friends outright refuse to buckle up in the rear seats.

Pass the steak, please.

Mad About Mad Cow Disease in Korea

I'm going to say this in unequivocal terms, so this can draw the attention of as many people as possible: anyone who believes the scare about getting "mad cow disease" from eating American beef is stupid. [See English link to Chosun.com editorial here, and Korean link here]

Now, that being said, let me also say that it's not quite their fault, since the amount of irresponsible reporting on the part of the media (PD 수첩), the lack of media literacy on the Korean public in general, the lack of general critical thinking skills that go with a tendency to believe anything on television or printed in a newspaper, combined with the tendency to not go against what the crowd, one's 선배, teacher, or group of friends think -- these all combine to make it pretty easy to spread a bunch of bullshit that people will tend to believe, the facts be damned.

The same thing happened in 2002, with the protests about the two middle school girls killed by an armored vehicle. Falsehoods presented as facts by an irresponsible Korean news media included:

1) the US Army refusing to offer compensation (from the beginning, the US military claimed responsibility and paid compensation according to the SOFA agreement and at a level decided according to Korean law -- the SOFA merely specified the percentage to be paid by the US), the members of the

2) the soldiers involved not only showed no remorse but laughed and joked at the crime scene and afterwards (no evidence for this was offered, but was widely reported from hearsay, even as the images from the service held by soldiers in 21D were widely available, which was attended by top brass, and the soldiers donated $22,000 of their own money to the families that was collected the very next day after the incident) -- none of this was reported

3) the US military and US government refused to apologize for the incident (in fact, written apologies from the US military commander to the President of the United States were reprinted and linked, in both Korean and English, on the US Embassy web site after having been sent to the appropriate parties)

4) the use of dubious "experts" who never visited the scene nor had access to the bodies, who said that the two girls were clearly "murdered" on purpose as the tank had rolled back and forth over their bodies several times (in fact, the tank had rolled over them, and backed up once they did, which is more in line with common sense than a "murder" case, which always needs a motive -- even the Korean imagination's most evil of evil American GI's isn't going to just run over two middle school girls for fun)

In the end, the backdrop for this incident was an already-extant, extreme amount of anti-American sentiment, which was cleverly used by radical activists to excite the Korean masses. Even I, as one who never hesitates to criticize American government or society, was taken in by it; but upon further review and after finding out that half the story I was being told was simply not true, by any stretch of interpretation or the imagination, I simply dismissed the story for what it was: effective baiting of a gullible Korean public more than willing, at the time, to express its anti-American sentiment. The fact that most of what the public was mad about was either patently untrue or an extreme distortion of the facts wasn't even an "inconvenient truth." In fact, at the time, one didn't dare have another point of view.

Here we go again. It's the same thing, enabled by similar dubious claims -- according to PD 수첩, Koreans are 94% more disposed to developing a disease to which no humans have demonstrated any resistance, and is a disease that scientists are not even fully clear as to how it works?

This is about as believable as the idiotic doctors who say that an elderly man has died because a fan was left on, letting the assumption bar any other investigation into the logical conclusion that it was age-induced heart failure, a sudden stroke, or some other thing that generally kills people who are 79 years old. This is simply stupid. I can shoot down any idiotic explanations for fan death than any quack doctor simply because I've had an education that has taught me basic logical and critical thinking skills, and I have a decent understanding of what is scientifically sound, and what is mere uninformed idiocy. I've already talked about it before, and I'll challenge any idiot who still claims "fan death" is a fact.

Anyone who believes in said myth is, in fact, stupid and is in need of correction, either in terms of basic logic (countless people sleep in front of fans in closed spaces and do not, in fact, die) or basic science education (the oxygen content of air does not, in fact, change if the air happens to be moving, and no, your body temperature cannot fall low enough to kill you because your body sweats to allow excess heat to be taken away by evaporation, which it doesn't do when you are no longer hot, and there is nothing about moving air in itself that actively reduces temperature, anyway-- the temperature of the air might your body to lose heat by induction, which would kill you if you were exposed at 20 degrees Fahrenheit, but not the 90-degree heat that usually causes people to use a fan in the first place. In fact, if one is worried about dying, one SHOULD use a fan to help your body keep body temperature DOWN by passing air over all the sweat causing one's kids to stick to the sheets.

One can't call me an "elitist" for having had access to the same basic science information that every Korean kid is exposed to. I took Basic Chemistry (not advanced) and got a B, and didn't do any better in Physics. I nearly failed Geometry and never got to Calculus in high school. I don't do numbers, and am pretty much a dunce in that respect. But I learned enough about how the world works to distinguish science fact from the science fiction of things to come, as well as from myth, magic, and other forms of apparent mystery. The fact that many Koreans cannot is not my fault, and I haven't received any additional messages about the world -- Koreans generally have been exposed to more math and science than I ever had, and I went to pretty good schools in the US.

Yet, many people here -- even the highly educated -- still believe in "fan death," that blood types are linked to personality traits (a myth ironically started by a racist Japanese anthropologist trying to prove the superiority of mainland Japanese over the "inferior" Ainu -- since I am always one to try and be specific about claims rather than offer ambiguous references, that would Takeji Furukawa's series of papers called "The Study of Temperament Through Blood Type"), that kimchi can prevent SARS, or even the old doozy that Koreans are "racially pure", which defies Korea's own historical logic as should be dictated by all the nations and tribes that ran back and forth across the peninsula.

Basically, a lot of Koreans believe in a lot of stupid bullshit spread by irresponsible authorities, and this is enabled by having been trained to unequivocally believe in what one is told. That is a pretty defensible claim, but I'll spare you the thousands of concrete complaints about the problems of the Korean education system, authoritarian socialization, or the lingering effects of having lived under direct colonial occupation, neo-colonial administration, or direct dictatorship, none of which are very conducive to encouraging liberal pedagogy.

Another claim that is more of an opinionated observation is that many Koreans seem to have trouble discerning between logic and emotion when it comes to issues related to the nation. I've been in so many arguments in which a Korean is forced to admit that my observation is correct but they simply don't like the fact that a foreigner has noticed it or is making the comment, and I often squash the argument by simply pointing that out; alternatively, I simply make an equally harsh criticism of the United States, and the person sees I do not "hate" Korea, but am just a critical thinker. But I rarely talk about any issue with a Korean unless I have specific examples, statistics, and references -- there is no benefit of the doubt given to a reasonable explication of reasonable claims when it comes to Korea. One has to have serious ammunition when it comes to pointing out even the painfully obvious in Korea, especially when people are on about something.

Whether it's Ohno (why vilify the athlete simply doing what athletes do, which is try to win, as opposed to the referee?), the US military's dumping of harmful chemicals into the Han River (which is bad, but is a tiny fraction of what Korean companies continue to dump into the river, as highlighted in far less publicized media stories), two middle school girls killed in a vehicular accident (but lack of seatbelts or respect for pedestrians means that Korea is the most dangerous place in the world in terms of traffic deaths, and many of the factors that led to the girls' deaths, like the lack of a sidewalk or a divider on a highway regularly traveled by pedestrians, or the fact they were listening to an MP3 player while walking, remain unaddressed) -- people are not only not thinking critically or looking very deeply, there's another factor here, which is the big, fat, pink-and-blue striped elephant in the room:

Anti-American sentiment runs at such a fever pitch here that people are willing to believe any bad news about anything having to do with the United States, to the point of believing flimsy "scientific" claims and not dealing with the fact that American beef has not been proven to be much less safe than any other country's beef, not to mention Korea's own problems with E. coli or the recent Cheil Jedang food poisoning scandal.

It boils down to the KORUS FTA and whether or not one wants cheap American beef flooding the markets here. That issue, being dealt with directly, would be a fair one. Don't want to open the markets? Want to protect the domestic beef industry? Think America's FTA is negative for Korea? Fine. That's legitimate. I don't happen to agree, but I understand the arguments on the other side.

But this fear-mongering and nationalism-baiting isn't a healthy mode for Korean society, and it's even more frightening to see that teachers (well, members of the Korean Teachers' Union, which is little more than a propaganda machine for far left interests) here are telling their students that eating American beef is tantamount to a death sentence. Last week, half of my school, at the urging of certain teachers, told kids to attend the rally "if they wanted to fight for their life" and other such nonsense. To their credit, the principal and most of the teachers forbade students from leaving the grounds, and several stood guard at the gates to make sure no kids were sneaking out.

I myself forbade a student from skipping class to go, but held a discussion about why the claims were ridiculous, and why I felt that an anti-FTA rally was no place for a high school girl. Yes, the candlelight vigil was peaceful, but that was a first when it came to anti-FTA or anti-US beef rallies, and I didn't think that human feces-throwing, epithet yelling, riot police attacking protesters would provide any "education experience" for impressionable 10th-graders. It's sad to think that Korean teachers, knowing how intellectually vulnerable Korean students are, would urge them to go. It's not surprising, mind you -- just sad.

I actually had students thinking that using menstrual pads would lead to mad cow disease (I'll have to get back to you on that one, since the logic was such a stretch that the strings of "evidence" has broken down in my mind), or who actually made the mental jump to a sincere belief that they would immediately die upon eating US beef. This isn't responsible "teaching" if your students are literally scared to death -- I got a text message urging me not to go to 7/11, TGI Friday, and Lotte Mart because I would get mad cow disease, since they use American beef.

None of this is commensurate with any actual dangers posed by American beef, although it might be in relation to the danger of eating ANY kind of beef, but that's a different story, and I've already decided why I can't be a vegetarian, even though I know I should:

I like beef. "It's what's for dinner."

What About the Children?

Here's an old post I actually forgot to publish, which I discovered while preparing a post on the US beef issue. It was originally saved on 12/25/06 at 4:33 PM, which is more of a note for me than anything useful to you. But enjoy the post, and hopefully it will provide you with more ammunition to convince your Korean friends to use their seatbelts. Basically, my logic is this -- if you're not using your seatbelt in Korea, you might as well enjoy your life more and stop using condoms, since your likelihood of being killed or seriously injured in a car here is probably higher than you being "killed or seriously injured" by having sex here.

If you're gonna live by a roll of the dice, that is. You gonna use that seatbelt now?

-----------

I want to start off this post by saying that I wear my seatbelt.

Well, as much as I can, considering the fact that many taxi drivers stuff the rear seatbelt locks down under the seat, or actually take the latch by force and place it above the plastic guard, where it sits, unable to be drawn down to the seatbelt lock, useless.

Half the time I do use the seatbelt, the taxi driver laughs and says, "You don't need to do that in the back." Oh, really?

"This is Michael. Today, he's going to hit his girlfriend so hard,
she's going to end up with permanent brain damage."

When I bring up the fact that I, as a 113 kg man, would become a human missile and likely kill whomever is in the front seats, or actually that anyone not strapped down in a serious accident would become like a billiard ball, careening all throughout the car, severely injuring or killing whomever he or she hit, I am suddenly the 분위기 킬러. But I'd rather be a mood killer than an actual one.

Did you ever think that by not using a seatbelt, it's not actually you you're killing, but the other people in the car, perhaps even someone you love? In an accident, there's no front or back seat – it's just whatever isn't strapped down. Killing someone else is a pretty tall price to pay for you being lazy. Pretty selfish, huh?

Korea is #1 among OECD countries (hat tip to Fence Rider, whom I saw come in through my server logs) in not only traffic accidents, but in fatalities from traffic accident fatalities. I've been saying this since 1994, when this fact was also true, and Korean people generally thought I was making that up. But it's been true for a long time, but surprisingly, public awareness of the consequences of simple things such as not wearing seat belts in the most dangerous country in the world to drive in, simply hasn't changed much.

Now, this statistic means that there aren't just more little fender-benders that artificially boost the statistics, as Koreans who hear me say this like to counter (albeit with no information or context other than simply not wanting to believe the statistic), but that those accidents also produce the most number of deaths out of all OECD countries surveyed.

Simply put, the statistics back up what simple observation and common sense should have already told you – Koreans taken as a whole routinely ignore traffic laws, city governments haven't done enough to protect pedestrians from motor vehicles and guarantee their safety, and public awareness about the importance of such things as wearing your seat belts, observing traffic signals, or yielding to pedestrians is abysmal.

And instead of turning into a nationalist feeding frenzy over who gets to roast the USFK – the death of the two middle school girls and the public reaction to it are a prime example of why all countries in the world (yes, including South Korea) try members of their own militaries internally and why diplomats enjoy immunity while working in host nations – what should have happened was a conversation over the fact that 490 children died from traffic accidents in 1999. Do the math – that's 1.3 kids per day.

Put into the math of reality, that's 13 kids every 10 days, or about 9 kids per week.

"Under what circumstances do people die from traffic mishaps? Listen to a representative from the Korean government give the number one reason:

'South Koreans jaywalk more than other OECD members, as the nation has insufficient facilities to prevent people from jaywalking and secure their safety, such as median strips or guardrails,' Lee pointed out.

'In advanced countries, the number of collisions between vehicles is larger than that of accidents between vehicles and pedestrians. But in Korea, about 40.2 percent of the total accidents were cases of vehicles hitting pedestrians,' Lee Eui-yong, an employee of the authority, said."

Simply put, there aren't enough sidewalks, guardrails, and ways to ensure pedestrian safety on the roads.

So, whatever one's political agenda, the reality of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of those two middle school girls is the same reality that results in the unfortunate death of 9 children per week, and even more adults. What is striking about the 2002 accident is how everyday and normal it is for children to die of traffic accidents – the only reason the nation shouts the names of those two unfortunate victims is because they became the center of a political firestorm.

If you saw the road where there accident took place, you would gasp. It's what would be considered in the United States a "state route," technically a highway. There is no sidewalk, and the road curves up around a bend where the girls were killed, so visibility is even further reduced.

The point is that no pedestrians should be walking there, and I think that perhaps military or large vehicles shouldn't be driving there if pedestrians are, in reality there. The way I saw it, and the way I heard it described from people who've actually seen the details of the case as well as the accident site itself, it was an accident waiting to happen. Well, more accurately, as in many places in Korea, it's many accidents happening all the time.

In the call for those two soldiers heads (whom I feel were guilty of no murder, but rather a traffic accident due to no demonstrated negligence), in the call for amending the SOFA, in the call for the removal of the US military from the Korean peninsula, in invoking the materially irrelevant cases of actual military crimes committed by US personnel here or in other places in the world, what has remained completely and utterly unchanged were – drum roll, please:

The actual circumstances that led to those middle school girls' deaths.

Simply put, if there had been a sidewalk there, those girls would still be alive today.

What makes this ironic and unfortunate for the Korean peninsula is the fact that children are getting run over daily here, and nothing is being done to change the circumstances that lead to the high number of children being killed here. That road remains as is, unchanged, for all the many who yelled Miseon and Hyosun's names and were apparently shocked at their deaths.

What is sickening to me – an American, yes, but a man who started out his experience in the Korean countryside teaching in a middle school for two years – is that the nation wasn't protesting or even apparently angry (aside from people from the local community near where the two girls died) when the two girls actually died; it was only when the politicized trial and its outcome was an apparent insult to the nation that it became an issue.

For a clear thinker, and for those interested in justice and solutions – not scapegoats and emotional salves – the entire thing was a farce.

Proof of that was an American jeep being driven while on official duty killed an ajumma in another traffic accident sometime in November, when the protests were rising into a fever pitch. Why didn't the Korean media report it? Why don't Koreans still not know about that to this day?

The driver was a KATUSA, a Korean national.

Had that driver happened to have been an American soldier, same accident, same victim? It would have been a further media frenzy. In the end, people were concerned about politics, not the actual lives of anyone involved.

I'm not speaking as a nationalist, as an American, as George Bush's appointed representative – which unfortunately, many Korean folks assume me to be if I speak outside of the "conventional wisdom" around this incident. For you see, if there is anything remarkable about this case, it is how unremarkable it is, at how predictable and preventable their deaths were, and how sad and telling it is that nothing has changed.

Instead of placing the heads of two scapegoats on the chopping block because of Korea's changing set of relations with the United States vis a vis Korea's increasing sense of national pride and desire to be independent its former "big brother" – which is really what that incident was all about – if people in this country, foreign or non, care about the lives of others in relation to their cars, they would stop killing children and other pedestrians in small strokes.

If Korean nationalists really care about the lives of those two middle school girls – and the 9 more children who die every week in this country, but for whom the drivers don't happen to be American soldiers – then they would buckle their seat belts, stop at crosswalks, and slow the heck down in school zones.

Yes, school children die in other countries because of traffic accidents, too. But in a country that has national protests that allegedly concern themselves with the deaths of just two of them, but then doesn't do anything to actually change the material circumstances of their deaths while a nationalist witch hunt is led in their names, and where the traffic accident and traffic accident death rates are the highest in the developed world – this indignation and anger seem a little misplaced.

In the end, American armored cars aren't killing the majority of children every year in Korea. Bad drivers and lack or proper city planning do. Nationalists and others who want to save Korean children – let's do this for the children, let's make a new resolution for the new year:

• Stop at all traffic signals.
• Stop at all crosswalks.
• Obey the speed limit on roads with pedestrians.
• Don't assume that pedestrians will yield because you honk your horn. They might not have heard you. (The two middle school girls were listening to an MP3 player when they were hit, which is another convenient fact omitted from Korean media reports, because it was an inconvenient fact).
• Stop cursing because you're late and realize you are driving a multi-ton, potential instrument of death. Your car is not a toy.
• Use your seat belts.
• Taxi drivers, stop disabling the rear seat belts. You actually want to prevent me from choosing not to die?

This will do more to save Korean children and pedestrians than any other measure. Changing the SOFA or putting two American soldiers 1) would not have brought the two girls back, not 2) would it have prevented any further people from dying on that road.

Installing a guard rail and sidewalk would have and will do both.

So everyone who was angry, upset, or shivered in the cold during a candlelight vigil in 2002/2003 – you're going to follow all the above rules, right?

For the sake of the children?

My Sentiments Exactly

Just a response to a really interesting and honest post from The Joshing Gnome, whom I introduce for the first time here. Read it, then read my comment, which I reprint in post form here, since even my comments tend to be post-length. Yeah, I know. I know.

They're definitely acting out. In the classic sense. I used to work with kids like that at the alternative school, where they turn around suprisingly fast, relatively. Basically, they just have to be shown, for the first time, a responsible envrionment with adults in which the adults are not constantly scolding them and telling them they "can't" or "you're nothing" or some other form of constant negative.

You hear it enough, well, it becomes true. And in my experience at the school, a lot of these girls are sexually abused, either by an older male relative or a stepdad. Or they simply go in this extreme direction as a way of rebelling -- and given the ease in which you can mix burgeoning sexual curiosity with making a buck, say on the internet, well...

You see how this goes. In an a way, I see it as Korean society being so rigid in terms of the lives of kids, it's easier to rebel in prescribed ways. Curse, litter, date. Voila! Now, you're a "bad kid" beyond hope! Now, you can look forward to being summarily kciked out of your school (as several of my kids had been, in middle school) and effectively ostracized and stigmatized by your elders. Turn your increased anger into increased efforts to lash out at this process. Rinse and repeat.

Basically, our alternative school (which uses media to give kids something useful and later, marketable, to focus on and learn) had real counselors, with real backgrounds in social work (not homeroom teachers with a certificate) being extremely patient with the kids, until they realized that the adults were not going to yell at them and call them names, let alone hit them or worse. Some kids turn around; some don't.

One girl with whom I recently worked was a girl sorta like that. She chewed gum, thought she had sass, was loud, and cursed too much. And that was IN class. I could easily see her with her friends on the subway, egging each other on.

But she took a love for photography for some reason, and she had an eye. Who knew? Well, that's the point of the alternative school. For one kid, it might be photo; another video; another, tweaking pics in Photoshop; for another, 3-D animation.

She was taking really bizarrely wonderful pics with her digital camera, and she was starting to get really possessive about using MY camera. Although handing this bouncy and too-carefree kid my camera and lens made me uncomfortable at first, she did treat the camera far differently than anything else, especially anyone else's. She was ginger with it, and took time to take her bizarro-angle pictures with my wider lens.

She wasn't from a poor family, but from an average family that simply had been having trouble handling her. They bought her a camera, the same DSLR model I had, which I receommended she get now used, instead of the sparkly, newer-version of the same. She took too it, and is a photo nut last I checked (haven't taught this semester).

These kids can be helped far more easily than say, kids who are stuck in a subculture of drugs, gangs, guns, and other kinds of structural violence you see in the US. These kids just need to be provided an alternative path, instead of the "conform or die" path offered them in Korea. Unfortunately, the SSRO.net school I worked at serves about 10-15 kids at a time. That's all they can handle, really.

I'm glad you were able to see things from a broader perspective than the "punk kids! get off my lawwwwn!" many tend to see them from. And maybe someday, some of ya'll would like to volunteer at a school like SSRO.net? Guarantee it'll be rewarding, albeit sometimes frustrating. Caveat: the more Korean you know, the better. Not for the adults, but for the kids, who generally have no English, given that most of them aren't exactly the Korean wunderkind you hear about in the NYT. Anyway, whatever -- I'm sure that the help would be appreciated, especially from foreigners...expensive foreigners.

Although it would be likely not actually resulting in the kid learning any English on a real permanent level, anyone teaching English there would be vastly appreciated. It would be a madhouse trying to keep the kids focused, but you'd have fun and actually get to know the kinda kids Joe talked about in the subway. And you wouldn't be speaking all that much English, anyway. It'd be just sort of another "teaser" for the one kid who might latch onto it, or have the experience with a foreigner spark another mental connection or jumpstart an interest. Media activities IN English would also be fun...

"Boomtown Beijing"

My friend Siok Siok Tan from my undergrad alma mater is screening her independent documentary film "Boomtown Beijing" on April 20 in Beijing, in which she tracks the hopes and dreams of individuals in Beijing as the city gears up for the Olympics.

Here's a blurb from The Hollywood Reporter:

The 70-minute film tells the story of three different Beijing residents working to make their personal Olympic dreams come true: an 11-year-old boy wants to beat the odds to become an Olympics torch-bearer; a street sweeper dreams of staging his own mass Olympics countdown performance; and an aging, blind athlete makes one last stab at a Paralympics medal before he retires from competition.

"The film is an attempt to depict the Beijing Olympics on a human scale," Tan told The Hollywood Reporter. "It looks at everyday life in Beijing and the dreams and aspirations of ordinary Beijing residents the summer before the Olympics come to town."

"I also wanted to see if I could find a middle ground between the polarized perspectives of East and West, a point of view that would be engaging to audiences around the world," she adds.

I like that sentiment. Here's the trailer:

When I see it, I can't help but think of a similar film that might have been shot right before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, in terms of the "dreaming" about personal and national futures that the Olympics promised; even the controversy over human rights vs. the progressive change that a huge, international event such as an Olympic games might bring is a major common element.

I know the documentary film "Sanggyedong Olympics" dealt with one aspect of this tension, but in a much more sharply critical and heavy way. It was, in the end, a very different kind of film. I wonder if there are any other similar works that might be a good companion piece to perhaps be shown with "Boomtown Beijing"? I'd be up for helping out with a screening! Somehow, I think the Korean audience should be able to connect with this film in a much more direct way than in other countries, where recent Olympic games were not veritable defining moments in terms of history, as well as both personal and national pride.

This Just Takes the Cake

OK -- I just about popped a gasket when I saw this. The important points (where they chopped together "negative" things she said) are where she jokingly said the facilities in Russia were old and the bathrooms smelled, but then she went on to say how not upgrading keeps things safe, how that's different from the accidents that happen at NASA, which always upgrades with fancy and expensive, new equipment, and how much she respects those who went up and died before her is a point she emphasizes in two videos, if memory serves. And it's also about two years ago and before she was chosen as the final candidate. Before even that, they take a snippet where she said that she'd buy her mom a house if she got rich and famous, but that was 2 summers ago, and she also happened to say she'd give to science programs and help fund one at KAIST as an example to other Koreans of how to use that power. But that's not what you get in the video. And that's just where they abused MY footage. They've got more.

[If you can't see the video, click here to the direct link.]

OK, I'm not sure how the Korean law applies here to attacking a person and what defines the Korean equivalent of "defamation", I can't be the one who would sue them for that, even if that's possible. But I could get them for copyright violations. As far as I understand copyright law, you can excerpt segments for educational purposes as well as for critique, but my understanding is that you still have to attribute. Hmm. I'm foggy on this, and any help would be appreciated.

As for the legitimate suggestion that I should just let things like this pass, I'd suggest you do a Naver search for 이소연 (Yi Soyeon) and look at what comes up in the video section. It's ridiculous. Or, you could check out the "Anti-Yi Soyeon Cafe" on Daum.

Link here.

It's amazing how much energy certain Koreans are putting into thinking about the monetary value of the space program all of a sudden, or are so eager to believe the ridiculous assertions that people are putting up. And now, they're even blaming Soyeon for the stupid questions SHE'S being asked by reporters, for example, how much she has swollen or gained 5cm in height. Those were stupid "issues" brought up by the idiotic Korean press corps, and now she's being attacked as if she was speaking out of vanity.

Here's the article that will be up on Ohmynews.com either today or tomorrow, as it's getting translated. I think it says what I need to say, although my English version is a bit rough. They edited my repeated points down a bit. Hence, the advantage of having an editor.

I'll link to the Ohmynews story here when it goes up. My goal here is to get the other angle on the Soyeon-attacks out there -- that it's totally misplaced, dishonest, and just vicious -- and look at the other issues that I think are mixed in here: how Soyeon's trip is actually stepping all over some very touchy Korean hotspots, as she violates certain rules of her gender, age, status, and even region, her being from Kwangju.

This, on top of the intense levels of intense jealousy that one often sees displayed whenever someone receives something more than the rest of the group (I think it's important that she won a spot in an open contest, rather than come out of the Air Force as a test pilot or something equally elitist). I think a lot of things are coming together in and around Soyeon that would make for some very interesting international press treatment.

----------

Wow. As the maker of the "UCC" interviews of Yi Soyeon that have been going around the Korean Internet, I am a bit shocked and disappointed to see some people twisting Soyeon's frank and honest words made in a Shinchon coffee shop in 2006, before the marketing term "UCC" was even invented in Korea. Made by a foreigner (me), for a foreign audience (such shows are called "podcasts" in the US), she was far, far from being an "우주인." She was just my friend who had done well in this interesting contest, since she had made it to the final 30 in Korea's Astronaut program.

Who could imagine where she would be 2 years later? At the time, I was interviewing interesting people in Seoul, and I had found her insider experience with this program interesting. If she made it to the final 2, it would be so great that it would be nearly unimaginable -- I just thought it was really cool to have made it as far as she had. And she herself said so. She was humble, and was so surprised and happy to have made it that far. She talked about her dreams, why she became interested in science, and how the process was affecting her life. And as she progressed through the process, of course we made another video, after she had made the final 10, and what was interesting to notice was how quickly she was maturing, how well she was growing into the role of great responsibility that was now becoming all the more real.

By the third video, shot after she had made it to the final two, she had become much more serious about her role, because now, it had now become her reality. She would go through the training, and it was just as likely as not that she would go into space. I never interviewed her after the final decision was made, since I never had the chance and now, this was SBS's territory; I just found it poignant and fascinating to watch an everyday person grow into a public figure before one's eyes.

But that's not how certain Korean netizens took it. Partially based on sloppy journalism as found in the in the Donga.com article called "우주인 이소연의 솔직한 지구인 이야기", her words were misquoted, twisted, and taken completely out of context to a point that even I had never even imagined. The DongA.com article merely misquoted her, emphasized certain aspects of what she had jokingly said in 2006 with the headline “돈 벌어 엄마한테 아파트 선물”, and did so did so without properly attributing the source of the video, which was readily available, so that people could judge for themselves. To just read the DongA.com article or the words of some Korean netizens after that, Soyeon had joined the space program to get rich. Or perhaps it was to promote this "UCC" -- a concept that did not even exist in Korea at that time (remember that the large media companies started pushing this marketing term around Auhust 2006) Or perhaps she was going to space just to promote my web site, which Soyeon also jokingly said she would support? But if you watch the interview from the beginning, you would know she didn't even know about which site that was.

Firstly, it's amazing to see how little respect major UCC media companies and Korean bloggers have for copyright and intellectual property. Instead of taking my video and cutting into chunks that totally eliminate the context of much of what Soyeon actually said and how she said it, people should have just left the intact video as it was, so people could at least see for themselves. And I think, "Why cut out parts, especially when the other parts make the point you're trying to prove silly?" My point is, anyone presenting an excerpt from this video is suspicious. Simply watching the video, knowing when it was shot and why, you can see that the assertions being made by certain netizens are patently ridiculous. I shouldn't need to convince you. Just watch the video from beginning to end.

Then, you would have seen that any comments about "what would you do if you make it?" were no more real to her than if I asked any of you "What would you do if you became President?" when you were a child, but then upon becoming an adult, it really happens. I'm sure if one does become president, one's choices and sense of responsibility would be far more serious than when you were just an everyday person. And this is just what Soyeon was when she sat down with me for a cup of coffee that day in Shinchon in 2006.

If people didn't cut the video up into little pieces, you would see that this was a conversation between a FORIEGNER and her; you should also notice that the entire video was subtitled -- it's made for FOREIGN audiences, made BY a FOREIGNER. No one was interested in "UCC" in Korea at the time. No one was interested in Soyeon, either. In fact, most Koreans weren't even really interested in their own space program. But a few foreigners like myself found it interesting, and I decided to record her experiences in it. So the stupid conversations about "how will this look overseas?" are simply just that -- stupid. That firrst video was up on YouTube for about a year-and-a-half, and making very positive impressions about Soyeon as well as Korea far, far before the Korean audience learned about it, or cared.

Perhaps this is telling: I put it on MNCast and Daum, and there was nearly no reaction. No one cared, and I didn't expect them to. Almost no one watched it.

And the reaction on YouTube? Overwhelmingly positive. People remarked about what a great sense of humor she has, how humble she is, how intelligent her answers are, and how mature she seemed -- even from the beginning, far before she was actually chosen. The fact that she was a woman was a sign to most foreigners that Korean society was becoming more liberal and fair towards women, and even after the other candidate was initially chosen to go to space, all the foreigners I knew were rooting for Soyeon. Especially Americans, we like the underdog. Before Soyeon had even arrived in Russia, I had learned from the blogging community and people linking to my site that the NASA astronauts and people from other space programs had already seen Soyeon through the videos even before they had met her.

What continues to both surprise and disappoint me is that Koreans are still so worried about "what foreigners will think" and still so steeped in 사대주의 that people wring their hands over a few words spoken in passing well before the fact, despite the fact that Soyeon has shown nothing but respect for the people who have come before her at Soyuz, whom she mentions as having died so she can go into space safely, who have developed technology that she has dedicated her life to helping develop back in her home country.

Yet, context doesn't matter when you can simply attack someone out of spite or jealousy, right?

It seems to me that Korea is still so caught up in the psychological scars of bitterness over 사대주의, the national humiliation of having loss its sovereignty, the destruction and horrors of the Pacific and Korean Wars, followed by loss of freedom under dictatorship, rapid development and urbanization, along with the social problems created cutthroat competition for scarce resources, which has manifested in the education system, women feeling the social pressure to define their self-worth primarily through their appearance, and the drive to be first, first, first no matter what the cost, as we saw in the cases of the Sampung Department Store, Seongsu Bridge, Taegu gas explosion, or finally in the case of Hwang Woo-seok.

But in the case of the typical "national hero", he was from the establishment, old, and a man. He "deserved" his fame, right? He fits the image of the national hero. It doesn't matter that he violated ethical protocols to do it. Who cares where the eggs come from, right? When it comes to the nation, it's still "하면 된다" right? And when he's a Seoul National University scientist, an older man with connections, and wearing a white coat, he is names "hero" before the ink even dries on the textbooks. And then "Korea" embarrasses itself.

[Source]

There's a huge unspoken message behind the attacks on Soyeon, and how my videos are being used (stupidly, I think, but they are, nevertheless). It bothers a lot of people that she got into space through a process that had been open to anyone, and that she won it fair and square. It bothers a lot of people that she's a woman. It bothers a lot of people that she's a YOUNG woman. And for certain people, the only place for a young woman is in high heels and behind a cake of makeup, shaking their shoulders and calling them "오빠!" These are the people who seem to be the most offended by Soyeon's mere existence.

For Soyeon, I'm glad she wasn't chosen initially, and it was Ko San's own mistakes that got him disqualified. If she had been the first choice, I think the netizens would have been even worse: "Woman are too powerful" or "She was just chosen for PR because she was a woman!" Ridiculous, in a society that treats men like veritable kings, and a woman I know with a Ph.D. in the sciences was told by her mother-in-law to not work because it "would make her husband look bad." For certain people in Korea, for whom it is still the Joseon Era, Soyeon's success is very, very offensive, indeed.

If people are really concerned, as some say they are, with Korea's national image, then they would stop behaving as they are, for the obvious reasons that they are. It is absolutely shocking to see how eagerly and viciously so many of her fellow Koreans try to tear her down.

When YouTube came to Korea and opened its site, you know what appeared for the first time on Soyeon's videos? Statements appeared for the FIRST time attacking this nanotechnology engineer going up into space for "being too fat" or "having a big head" or just for the apparent crime of being a woman. You know what was the real "나라 망신?" It wasn't Yi Soyeon, but the negative and vicious words of her fellow Koreans, made in front of beweildered foreigners on YouTube. And I sometimes can't keep up with the 악풀, since I delete them. I wonder what the foreigners think of that?

The problem isn't really anything Soyeon said -- it is really the fact that no matter what, so many of her fellow Koreans (especially men) are eager to attack her, eager to tear her down. The content isn't important; vicious netizens would have found something. I think Yi Soyeon represents some very sensitive points in Korean modern society, and is the point at which public notions about ability, fairness, and relative success converge with older notions of traditional related to age, gender, scholastic background, and yes, even regionalism. In short, Soyeon is young, female, outspoken, and obviously articulate about expressing herself frankly. Honestly speaking, how are such women generally regarded in Korean society?

Are Americans perfect? Nope. But I think we have a sense of fairness about the people who become figures of public ridicule. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, or any popular entertainers who make their own scandals, Americans tend to criticize, too. But do we attack Condoleeza Rice because of the gap between her teeth? She has one, you know. It's very apparent.

[Source]

But is that important to her job, though?

When Sally Ride became America's first woman into space, I can't remember -- and I can't even imagine -- people talking about how she needs to be prettier, or "fix her face" or "she should get rid of her freckles" or something like that. Yet, the Korean media asks the dumbest questions possible on the short and expensive time communicating in space. When I heard about this question, "Which star would you most like to travel to space with?" I just shook my head in embarrassment. This is the level of the broadcast media? Korea should be thankful that Soyeon handled such an obviously stupid question politely when she replied that she would rather take someone qualified to perform experiments with.

[Source]

Korea and the Koreans who live here always seem so concerned with becoming "globalized" or "international" or the "hub" of something. But it takes more than just words and the simple desire to be something in order to make it so. It takes a real change in attitude, a fundamental change in the way of thinking -- not just installing more western-style toilets or sweating bullets worrying about speaking a few words of English to a foreign customer.

What is really embarrassing to the nation? What should Koreans really be thinking about? It's the fact that there is such a strong desire to cut a figure like Yi Soyeon down because she's a woman, or young, or doesn't look like she's had thousands of dollars of plastic surgery. Or insipid questions such as the one noted above, asked in her ISS interview. Is the problem really that Soyeon doesn't take her ROLE seriously, or that really, even the broadcast media sponsoring her doesn't take HER seriously?

[The note at the top of this actual resume reads, "Too old."]

So what is really ironic is watching Soyeon's fellow Koreans abusing her in public on YouTube, while foreigners scratch their heads. These comments call her ugly, fat, a "disgrace to the nation." Yet, our impressions of Soyeon are fine. They are great, actually! In fact, they've been great for nearly TWO YEARS. The only thing that is sad is watching Koreans tear each other down for nothing. This is the only country I know of where netizens drive their stars to suicide. Several times over, in fact.

What is driving this incident isn't anything Soyeon said, but the sheer, pathological desire of certain netizens who have already decided to hate her for no real good reason, other than petty jealousy and traditional prejudices. Really, only in a culture such as this can the old maxim hold true: "If a cousin buys some new land, my stomach hurts."

Now, this is being played out on a national scale, since this was an open competition, and technically, any Korean was eligible. Now, old social prejudices related to age, gender, and region have mixed with new ones related to the hyper-commercialization of nearly everything in Korean society, including the commodification and over-sexualization of female bodies that was embarrassingly pointed out having the South Korean president make his appearance at the space launch ceremony surrounded by young women in tiny skirts, who asked all the questions.

[source]

Is everything in South Korea made more palatable by extremely young women in miniskirts? From a new bakery opening in the neighborhood, the girl selling toothpaste in the grocery store, all the way into space, apparently, a lot of South Koreans seem to think so. Frankly, I think Korea's first astronaut would have gotten less flak if she simply was another plastic surgery toothpick with a magic perm, rather than a nanotech engineer from KAIST with a Ph.D.

[Source]

What is even sadder than a cynical statement like this is the fact that I actually believe it to be true, given a lot of the comments I've read about her, which reveals the deep-seated prejudices and bitter jealousies that many South Koreans seem so eager and willing to display whenever they get the chance. To me, many South Koreans need to think about whether they want to live in the past, along with all the scars and wounds that it has produced, or a future without such petty jealousies and horrible rancor against anyone who seems to be getting ahead of oneself in the hyper-competitive rat race of Korean life.

Until then, the horrible words many South Koreans aim in Soyeon's direction will continue to bewilder many foreigners who see nothing but a spectacular candidate and a great representative for the Korean nation. It's too bad that today's reality is, at least on the global level and Korea's international image, the worst enemies of Koreans are Koreans themselves.