Scribblings of the Metropolitician

A Sad Day Has Come

This is the last time I will post here. My time as the "Metropolitician" is up.

I've realized a lot of things over the last week or so, since falling for a certain young lady of a more conservative persuasion, who has quite literally rocked my world. I realize that a lot of the liberal ideas I had formerly and formally adhered to were largely misconstrued notions I had held, distortions of ideological ramifications that simply had no precedence in either established fact, dilapidated fiction, or even (and not either) the demonstrated dialectics of most people's dystopic desires.

In short, a new kind of love has made me into a harder, more turgid man.

No longer will I carry the torch for a a deluded liberalism, nor be the voice for lefty illiberality. What I truly hanker for is a haughty helping of a hunk of cheese that isn't defined in terms of a mere neo-Freudian kitsch, but the kind of cheese one can count on, like money in the bank; indeed, one needs sustenance so solid and reliable one can literally stick it in a pipe and smoke it.

So I can no longer continue to write here, after having fallen for someone like the one who has learned to call me "oppa." Such is an experience I never thought I could have had, either as a black man, or a Star Trek fan, and her highly-developed sense of what I have previously called here mere "fetishized femininity" has caused in me an emotional rise that is quite epic in its tense and torpedo-like tautology. Indeed, they didn't call Moby a "Dick" for nothing, as they say. Unlike the proverbial Ahab, my little lady has actually caught her whale.

When wondering why I have decided to forgo any further forays into formalism and endorse not Barack "Aladdin" Obama, but rather John McCain, the answer becomes perfectly obvious, does it not?

When you ask yourselves these questions, as you struggle for the answers, yet still can't bring yourself to face the truth, realize that Tom Cruise once said, quite poignantly, that the "truth could not be handled" and that in a similar situation, Al Pacino pointed a finger and said that the entire Supreme Court was indeed, very much "out of order."

In the same way, I was once out of love, and was so lost without her, but believe you me -- I now realize that it's hip to be square. Or did not Huey Lewis not give you that news?

So, it is with heavy hands that I make my last entry here, since the Metropolitician that was me has completely and totally ceased to be he.

For Pak Geun-hye's youngest daughter knows how to hit me where it counts, and to not just do that to me once, but likes to hit me, baby one more time, all the time, if you catch my meaning, number one Negaroni! See, I don't shrink away from saying, loudly and proudly, what needs to be said. And if you didn't get it from the passage above, you need a double dose of dis doubletalk. April mothafuckin' fool's, bitches!

Word to your mother, yo!

New Comment Policy, Safer Environment

In light of the recent slew of purely rude comments that detract from my desire to blog, I'm finally implementing a new comment policy: authentication is now on.

I should have done this a long time ago, but then, trolls were few and occasional. Now, I am deleting idiotic and irritating comments about my intelligence, or ones that link my writing to bodily functions and four letter words, and other general notes of ill will on a daily basis. It's really disheartening, and no matter how much people say "just ignore the trolls", the irritation adds up, and the viciousness does translate into discouragement eventually.

So, all this means, dear regular commenter, is that you have to make an account, once only, like you have to on any Wordpress blog; the only difference (and advantage!) is that this account is good for ANY Typepad site, as opposed to only this one. For example, if you are a regular commenter on say, the Marmot's Hole, you have an account with that site only; with us, it's the same thing, except that your account is good with Metropolitician and any other site running on Typepad. And if you already have a Typepad account, you're good to go.

This new way of doing things will hopefully benefit my regular readers with minimal irritation (just register once!) and maximally discourage the invisible trollers who lurk about this little drinking hole, biting those who drink from it with impunity. So it's no wonder that even with open commenting on, the vast majority of commenters are one-timers who don't know how nasty it can get, or the intrepid few regulars who will say what they want, regardless of whatever trolls there are. Hopefully, this policy will make it safer for friendly lurkers to come on out, nix the spam problem, and encourage a more honest discussion in which people have to actually be responsible for what they say, to the extent that it is linked to at least a working email address. Effectively, we've fenced in our water hole and simply required that you record your ID at the door; but once you've done that and you're a regular, you just have to nod at the bouncer -- he already knows you.

"Aaaaaaahhhhhh."

So, if you want to actually comment on something constructively, then do so. You don't have to agree with me, or even like me. But you do have to actually be saying something besides "I hate this blog and its writer." And if you violate any of the following rules, I will zap your comment and ban you, which means your authenticated ID will now be useless, at least for this blog. Here are the conditions under which I will likely zap you:

- If you make ad hominem attacks against me (although I'll probably let it stay, for the record) or another commenter (unacceptable)

- If your overall level of snark (acceptable) turns into being downright rude (unacceptable)

- If you have nothing constructive to say besides how much you hate this blog, its writer, another person, or group of people. This is troll territory, and I am the arbiter of whether or not you are trolling. This isn't the New York Times, it's a blog. And even the NYT will delete abusive comments.

To use another metaphor, remember that this is a cocktail party, and everyone here is a guest, and I'm hosting. If a guest starts getting frisky, irritating or harrassing the other guests, or even starts slapping and hitting them, they get thrown out. Act a fool, you're going out on the street. And if the host is neglectful, people will start not coming to the party.

This host is ready to start cleaning house, and the first step is get rid of the few idiots who ruin it for everyone else by killing the mood. For my far more numerous and regular readers, I encourage you to please go through the registration process by commenting on this post, and thereafter enjoy an even EASIER commenting process, since you'll no longer have to fill in the Name/Email/URL form every time you put up a comment.

And a final message to the trolls -- I could never understand why you keep coming back to a place that you yourself declare beneath your intelligence or dignity; why would you keep coming back to a place like this? If one doesn't like seeing men making out, don't go to a gay bar. If one doesn't like black people, one avoids soul food restaurants. Hate animals? Don't go to the zoo every Sunday. Yet, these people seem to just love to go to places where they dislike the people and just aren't wanted.

I never understood such people, but these pathologically abnormal types seem to congregate around my blog -- with the fundamental flaw in their psyche being that they actually think they're normal. Well, I'm no longer going to enable their anti-social tendencies, like the psycho who goes to a Latvian community event and starts harassing the patrons with how lame Latvian food is and how much s/he hate Latvians.

As a host, I've been neglecting my responsibilities for far too long, under the naive belief that a completely open system means a more actually open environment. On the Internet, quite the opposite is true, since one has to put up a few barriers and gates in order to create safe spaces.

And now, welcome to a new kind of party, where even the trolls might be forced to act civil!

Am I Being Blocked?

Some readers still report being unable to get into my site from work, at home, or both.

Anyone else still have problems? One reader reports she was able to get in briefly in September, but then things stopped again.

If you have anything that might be of use towards finding out what's going on, please write to the comments.

Thanks!

Death Proof Time Change!!!

Big Alert!

They movie theater decided to change the day and time at – appropriately enough – the very last minute! I'm irritated, but whatcha gonna do?

Same Bat-place, completely different Bat-time: Saturday, 8:10 PM.

Comments to this post are closed, since this is only an announcement. All replies or cancellations – and continued signups – to the original post.

Thanks, Guys!

Seems like a few people were checking around and went through the trouble to figure out why they weren't able to get into my blog, a problem I'd been hearing about for a couple weeks, but just couldn't really explain: all my bills paid up, *I* could access the site (so it wasn't like a government clampdown on blogs.com), etc.

Looks like a lot of people have access again?

Thanks for the help guys, since I was starting to feel a bit helpless on this one...

Transformers Post Updated With Pics

Just a note to anyone who missed it. Scroll down or click here.

Final Major Post: Media Links

I'm all posted out on this; I feel I've said pretty much what I need to say, laid it all out on the blog. I am glad to have started this conversation, and I look forward to engaging you in the comments section to the previous posts related to the issue of this terrible incident.

I'll use this blog entry to follow the conversation to its conclusion, as this blog or this writer appears in mainstream media. Sort of an index of the end of the conversation, if you will.

I'm going to split this post, which I normally don't do, because the list might get long and annoying. Feel free to look at it if you'd like.

Who Is This Guy?

Before I continue with posting, I thought it would be a good idea to let many of the new readers to this blog, coming in from various sources, who I am. That I am an American of Korean and African-American descent who has lived in South Korea for a little more than seven years over the past 12, when I first came to Korea on a Fulbright in 1994 and lived in the countryside for 2 years, where I learned Korean and got an interest in the Korean education system and the construction of identity, which I started exploring as a doctoral student in UC Berkeley's Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies.

So to all you commenters who chalked me up to being a maladjusted white English teacher from the Republican party with an axe to grind about how much I hate Korea but stay for lack of better options – sorry, wrong on all counts. You can read about what I do here, and you'll just have to take me at my word that my reason for living in this country is not simply to grind my big axe hatred for this country, or to bag as many Korean girls as possible. For a fat brown man who likes to speak Korean as much as possible, I'm just about as far away as you can get from the white, English-teaching expat who likes to seduce apparently hapless Korean women looking for their Brad Pitt fantasy. Unless I'm totally out of it and Korean girls have developed a hankering for the light-skinned, nerdy Forest Whitaker-type with a hint of Hawaiian on it, that is. Maybe I'm missing the boat.

Anyway.

I do Ethnic Studies, and the theories I've learned, history I've explored, and the arguments I tend to make can be applied to any country. No place is free of social problems, and no place is perfect. But my research interests are in Korea; I have photo, video, and other media projects in Korea; and I would like to sometime soon like to actually finish my dissertation and get my Ph.D. while in Korea.

And one thing that you'll notice is that my written work can be sharp, sarcastic, light-hearted, haughty, self-important, and elitist. Guilty as charged, although usually not all of those things at the same time. But I take my words seriously, and I try to write as smarty-pants and in-depth as I can; one of the reasons I started this blog was to keep my academic teeth and higher writing skills sharp, which is often tough to do when you spend most of your time speaking not-your-native language (Korean, in my case) and even when you do speak English, it's mostly with non-native speakers. And since I often have to hold my tongue amongst Korean company, it's also a necessary outlet.

So a lot of stuff comes off critical, wordy, and lengthy. But it's just the mode of the blog. You might notice that the audio and video work I do on Korea (audio and video podcasts in the left menu) are far more general, non-academic, and nearly completely free of moral indignation.

And for those who like to throw flames, I'll just say that I don't erase comments unless they are abusive; I welcome disagreement but don't hold my tongue; and I'd love to see some of my regular detractors' ideas laid out all over the Internet, free for the easy attack.

I don't consider thinking aloud and reconsidering my words "backtracking" or being self-contradictory, and I'll engage arguments worth engaging, or that I have time to. I don't know everything, but I have a lot of informed opinions; and for those of you with identity politics axes to grind, just try to leave it at the door and engage the argument, not your issues projected onto things you just think I'm saying.

I know it takes a lot to read these posts, but again – no one's twisting anyone's arms, right? I simply ask that if you want to have a real conversation, then listen to my side of it properly by reading why I wrote, and reading a bit around the site, listening and watching some of the podcasts, and not just labeling based on skimming through a single post that you didn't even bother to finish.

That's all I ask.

Of Vulgar Pride and Moral Cowardice

I just got this gem in my email box, with the lovely subject line, "u racist":

i understand the reason for your blogs, and everything, but you're generalizing against the whole race. Why target the specific country "South Korea"??, why not care about the country you live in now, instead of a place thousands of miles away. Your listing many of the problems, and negative things in South Korea, but its not such a bad place. You make it sound like all koreans are so bad. "You shouldn't air our dirty laundry", You make it sound like every single korean is saying, "our country is bad ,but don't tell everyone. And finally, "...What is the point in making blogs such as this??. Granted I have never lived in Korea, but is the situation that hopeless and hostile as you have proposed. After reading your blog I have a distinct fear of being followed, attacked maliciously stared at or even arrested on sight from reading your views of Korea. I need to know this before I step on a plane and travel there. If the feeling of isolation will be that great why would anyone bother to even travel there. There surely must be something of beauty in Korea. someone commented this on your blog. This is waht you have done. You gave South Korea a bad name. You made people scared to go to the country. Why?? Why?? It is a peacful place to live in, a place without all the" bomb iraq, send more troops to iraq, stop the war". And i understand that you have been educated in high institutions and all that stuff, knowing all that history, culture stuff but it really doesn't matter. I surely can't make you stop your actions for it is your right, but just think about what you are doing. Your making Americans oppose South Korea, and its people. Asians are already weak victims in America, so why make them hate them more. I am a South Korean, and i understand what it's like. I understand the things that the government has done wrong, but you have no reason to just make south korea look bad it self. Please be careful when you say about korea, Many aspects of Korea, I am proud of and really enjoy, while you don't understand it, and just talk trash about it. Thank You For reading this

And here was my pretty irritated response. This whole "Why do you hate Korea" schtick is getting old:

I have lived in Korea for 7 years total, off and on, from 1994. I live here now.

If you READ what I say, instead of what you think I say, you'll know I don't generalize to all Koreans, and this is a blog about academic social critique in a mostly casual way.

Most of my blogs use evidence and examples, and most of what I talk about is being talked about in Korean newspapers and television and is considered a social problem by Koreans, too.

The main difference is – I'm not Korean. So I must "hate" Korea, right?

But since this is one of the only sources in English that engages in social commentary, I guess I have to take responsibility for people's views? If they want to believe the thousands of pounds of publicity and media published by Korean tourism agencies, the books, etc, they can. The vast majority of the stuff about Korea is overwhelmingly positive, to a fault.

But I'm an academic. I'm a scholar who specializes in Korean Studies, has learned the language, and places my ass where my mouth is – I live and work and pay taxes and contribute to society here in South Korea. So you know where you can stick your silly accusations of "racism." I report and comment on society as I see it – I don't work for the Ministry of Tourism, so I could give a flying fuck what conclusions people draw, as long as I am fairly conveying what I have seen in its appropriate context.

You want flowers and puppy dogs? Then go somewhere else.

I "don't understand" Korea? And you said you've NEVER LIVED HERE?! I've lived here for seven years. I worked my ass off to pay my dues, learn the language and culture, and have rolled up my sleeves and pitched in to make this a better place. What right do you have, as a person who's never lived here, to just shut my mouth? To tell me to retain silence? Because your name is "Oh" and you have Korean "blood?" Because you are embarrassed that sometimes Korean people can do bad things?

How selfish and petty of you. You sit in your comfortable place somewhere not in Korea and criticize my blog as hurting Korea because it's offensive to your rosy notion of Korea and Asia that's a function of YOUR ethnic pride and identity in ANOTHER COUNTRY? Oh – you certainly are doing a lot to help. Too bad that it is not really concern for KOREA, but more motivated out of personal pride and your fanciful notion of the place, a place you yourself say you have never lived.

How DARE you excoriate me for what I say? If not only because you have little way to actually fairly judge the validity of my points because you yourself say you haven't lived here, your ASS isn't here, tied up with the fate of other Koreans in this place, working together to make it a little bit better. You imply concern out of an AFFECTIVE commitment to Korean pride, but it is little more than an AFFECTED commitment that is based more on your own sense of ethnic pride in a completely different cultural and social context than any Korean living on the peninsula gives a flying fuck about.

Whatever. That's about the dumbest statement out of the several contained in your inane email.

YOU TELL ME WHERE I GENERALIZE ABOUT THE WHOLE RACE, based on some racist or essentialist assumptions. I don't ramble on about how Koreans can't do this, or the "Korean mind" can't understand that, or engage in facile pseudo-cultural arguments that assail Korean people, mores, or values.

I talk about social structure and learned behavior and the specific problems of this society based on this country's particular history. I take a good, hard look at this society and base my critiques on pretty universally accepted notions of fairness, democracy, human rights, and social justice. Koreans arguably take pride in being treated as a modern, rational, and developed society – in fact, newspapers and the person on the street bristle whenever the country is treated as anything but, and rightly so – but when I engage in social critique based on these assumptions, I am "racist?"

It would be "racist" to treat these things around me as quaint idiosyncrasies of an undeveloped, immature people and simply shrug my shoulders and say to myself, "What do you expect? They're Korean."

But I have higher expectations. People accuse me of being a cultural imperialist, or ethnocentric; but these same people – do they sit in bars and restaurants and converse, argue, yell, laugh, debate some more, and finally learn from one another – IN KOREAN? Do you?

The fact that I talk with folks, I hash out my ideas, that I am brave enough to do have these conversations with Korean folks in Korean, means that I have a right to have a voice and an opinion, too. And for as much lip service as you give about wanting to defend Korea or whatever – what have you done? Have you paid your dues? Do you even talk to real Korean folks in their own language about these things?

This blog is the result of thousands of conversations and having gone back and forth with Korean folks, living and working in Korean society, about putting my ass on the line to back up my moral and ethical beliefs. So I quit a lucrative teaching position because they were a bunch of unethical assholes who were forcing me to make choices that I felt would no longer allow me to function as a moral person, to maintain my self respect. Would I be a cultural imperialist for doing that? Or like you, should I have just kept the job, ignored the people certain policies were hurting, and actually participated in the immorality?

You would have shrugged your shoulders and said, "Oh, well. It's Korea." Right? Or excoriated anyone who spoke out about it?

You're so stupid that you don't even realize that amount of LOVE it takes to tenaciously try to change the world you occupy, to leave it a better place. You're so stupid that you don't realize that all of the social issues I am so angry about has emotional relevance to me because they materially affect people I know, I teach, I work with, I share this earth with.

And YOU DARE accuse me of racism? How DARE YOU?

You don't even realize the amount social good that can come from social work, criticism, taking the harder path.

Who is responsible for "giving a bad name" – the people who commit immoral acts, or the people who resist and report them? And exposing them makes them more difficult to carry out.

You are the person who blames the victim for reporting the rape because it shames the family, because it makes others look bad. You are the person who tells the students to keep quiet about the bribery scandals because the "school's name" would suffer. You are the person who attacks the whistleblower and ignores the problems. You just want to kill the messenger and close your eyes to reality because it embarrasses YOU?!

You, sir, are a moral coward.

The simple-minded, knee-jerk responses of people who are more concerned for Korea's "image" (their image, actually) that the actual welfare of Korean people irk me not just because the entire perceived slight is so obviously selfish, but also because the people who take the most offense tend to be the ones who don't even live here, or they once did and left.

In my flurry of keyboard rage, I kind of misunderstood the boldface quotation and thought the writer was saying he hadn't lived in South Korea. Brainfart. But the point is that this is just the kind of moral cowardice that, yes, in my country, enabled practices such as Jim Crow laws and lynching, which got my people hung from trees.

Yes, it was the Cold War and civil rights movement protest pictures of police officers hosing down non-violent protesters and one image of a young boy being viciously attacked by a police dog were showing up on the front pages of Pravda and across the Soviet Union. Yes, they were destroying the image of the United States. They were traitors.

No, the police weren't the ones embarrassing the nation. Or the Ku Klux Klan, which was murdering civil rights workers. Or the terrorists who murdered Medgar Evers on his front lawn, or the cowards who bombed four little girls into oblivion in a black church.

Yes, the people committing the immoral acts were not morally culpable. It's those who report them, right?

Where does the moral burden lie if there are embarrassingly unethical or even inhumane aspects of a society? On those who commit the acts, or those who report and resist them?

So – to paraphrase Janet Jackson – what have you done for Korea lately?

Coward.

Pretty Much My Sentiments In a Nutshell

To save myself carpal tunnel syndrome, I'd like to respond to some of the recent threads I've had about the war in Iraq, its results, criticism of the president and his policies, civil liberties and the supposed bias of the "liberal media" (which lay down in front of Bush for a year-and-a-half after 9/11 and irresponsibly gave him carte blanche because of fear of the accusation of being "un-American") using the poetry of another:

And all these debates needed a bit of humor anyway. I feel myself getting so deadly heavy and serious on the site these days, as my previous piece on that really bad review of 300 should make clear, or the several before that.

Still, I gotta try to flex the academic muscles a bit, lest they get rusty, which I think they have already become. But it took me around 3 hours to write that post, and it was good review and good exercising of the gray matter. I know it must have been a bitch to read, but if any of you are on the same program as me (trying to do something with the brain), then you might be of the mind to slog through it.

And if anyone's wondering – no, I am not so sanctimonious and snarky in person – I just like to be on the blog, in written form, where I think everyone has a higher responsibility to be careful with words and back what you say, because you have more time to think. And I frankly don't think there are enough sanctimonious and snarky people writing and blogging away on this side of the fence, so I kind of feel like someone should.

And if I can keep my higher English skills in practice while doing it (the raison d'être of this blog), so much the better.