All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Quality time-wasters from Daniel Kleinfeld:
ANYANG, SOUTH KOREA — Gidday,
I wouldn’t discount the likelihood of a lot of sucking going on.
The president has been on the slide for awhile. He was elected in a major demographic split: anti-commie, pro-American, conservative old fogies voted for his opponent … a former Supreme Court judge who had a penchant for sentencing liberals to death. His support was from not-so-anti-commie, decidedly anti-American, “liberal” young fogies. He was also elected on an anti-big-business, anti-corruption ticket. He vowed to never visit the United States.
An albatross around his neck was that he was the candidate of Kim Dae Jung’s “party” despite not being Kim’s chosen heir … he defeated that bozo in the primaries. Thus his support base, the Millennium Democratic Party (already mired in Kim’s “getting Hyundai to buy him a Nobel Prize by bribing North Korea” problem) were not fully behind him.
Roh’s presidency has been racked by corruption (enter the typical loser brother of the president who dogs leaders all over the world), problems over campaign finance, problems over restructuring banks and majors corps and general problems over the economy. The fact that North Korea sank one of our naval vessels didn’t help. Oh, and they are racing ahead to build nukes … which many South Koreans don’t mind as they look forward to using them against Japan … and if the opportunity arises, America.
The “moment of clarity” for the opposition … which consists of the president’s own party and the party of his foe from the last election (strange but true) was the pres. commenting on the parliamentary elections due next month. While the pres. is dependent on the support of parliament … he must be seen to be above it … and is constitutionally barred from supporting any group in elections.
He refused to apologize … I think he actually wanted to be impeached when he realized how unpopular such a move would be among the electorate. I think he decided to call his opponents’ bluff so that they would shoot themselves in the foot in the election next month.
The highlight for me was the “sleepover” by the president’s supporters, surrounding the speaker’s podium in parliament in an attempt to block access to the gavel until 72 hours had passed from the introduction of the bill of impeachment … when it would lapse. Sort of a human wall of filibustering.
At 4 am on Friday, opposition members burst into the parliamentary chamber and attacked the sleeping pro-government members, one of whom ran, semi-clad, with the gavel, pursued by other parliamentarians. It sounded like something from Benny Hill.
I’m off into town now … I’ll let you know if anything of interest is happening there.
-Graeme
How many of us will soon forget what happened yesterday in Spain? Yet how many of us still remember what happened ten days ago in Iraq?
Because the Iraqis remain strangers to us, it’s easier to overlook their loss, or to see it as part of a long pattern of violence to which they must have become accustomed by now. Or as William Westmoreland put it, “Orientals don’t mourn their dead like Americans.”
But I don’t believe that.
The suffering of each death and each wound is real. The pain and loss of the families is real. That Iraq has seen so much carnage is only evidence of how great their suffering has been and continues to be.
*
The UK Guardian has a useful, if depressing, roundup of recent major terror attacks. Some of them took place before we captured Saddam, some of them afterward.
Do you feel safer now?
When looking at pictures of the South Korean impeachment, one could be forgiven for thinking that the parliament has gone collectively insane, or at least that all decorum has given way to outright violent struggle.
I’m not there and I can’t be sure, but my instinct tells me that’s not the case.
Koreans, in my experience, are experts at almost coming to blows. Time and again I saw it: a burst of screaming and lapel-grabbing and chaos on the street, two men with fists cocked and murder in their eyes, or else a couple of old-lady vegetable sellers chasing each other in circles and shrieking. For a long time I expected every such outburst to lead to violence; but the violence never came, or at least nothing more serious than a bit of rough shaking. After a while I began to see these conflicts as a kind of street theater, a fascinating area of social exchange in which agression is released in pantomime. (It reminded me of stories I’d read about Native American tribes who would go to “war” with each other by riding out and tapping each other with sticks.)
This is not to belittle the Koreans, who are entirely capable of genuine, serious violence. But in trying to figure out what’s going on, it’s important to recognize just what it means when an MP throws a piece of furniture.
For the world’s youngest democracies — especially those created outside the mainstream of European political thought — the purpose of political parties is much murkier. In some countries they represent regions and ethnic groups; in others, they don’t represent much of anything. Which is why, for all the sturm und drang over the impeachment of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, no one is discussing the goals of either Roh’s Uri Party or the Grand National Party that impeached him.
South Korea has been a democracy for less than two decades. In that brief time, its political parties have not gelled into genuine representatives of ideological blocks within the electorate. What you have instead is a fairly naked struggle to gain and keep power.
Our instinct is to fault the Koreans for the lack of ideological content in their politics. But in my experience, South Korea is constantly being faulted by outsiders for all kinds of things, and somehow they’ve been muddling through. In this case, it occurs to me that without all the trappings of ideology that keep us strapped to our respective parties here in the U.S., South Koreans are free to vote for the leaders who lead best (or at least for the leaders who seem least corrupt and lead least badly). As long as the South Korean newspapers maintain the right to criticize the government — and this right is not to be taken for granted — perhaps the South Koreans will be better off with parties that eschew ideology in favor of competing platforms of pragmatism.
The city today revealed the five finalist designs for the 2012 Olympic Village; if we host the big event, one of these (or something based on one of these, then beaten to a pulp by arguing developers) will be built on the waterfront in Queens, then turned into housing for 18,000 folks.
The designs raise some important questions about the future of New York.
Design 1: Will all new buildings in New York be torqued? Or will it only be the initial designs, followed by militant untorquing by greedy developers who want to build buildings that actually work?
Design 2: Is that supposed to spell something?
Design 3: Is that some kind of memorial for every plane that’s ever left a Queens airport and then crashed? It looks like a bunch of jetliner tailfins sticking up out of the beach — very Planet of the Apes, if a tad macabre.
Design 4: Ghost trees! Ghost joggers! Ghost cyclist! Is the idea that no matter what you do, Queens will end up with 1960s-style concrete bunker-buildings and vast depopulated spaces made all the lonelier by the swirling Key Food bags?
Design 5: If you answer questions correctly, do you get to collect these towers and put them into a giant pie and win the biggest game of Trivial Pursuit ever? Or are they just a bunch of ominous towers arranged in a pattern that specifically ignores everything we’ve learned about urban planning in the last 50 years? While Lower Manhattan is putting back the streets it ripped out back in the ’60s, Queens will be building itself some kind of windswept Brasilia-esque wasteland? If this design wins, expect to see residents dying of exposure on the long journey to the nearest bodega.
Obviously these attacks have shaken Spain, and so one hesitates to fault them too much for a hasty rush to judgment in the moments after. But it brings back unpleasant memories of the reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing, when police started detaining Muslims in droves because, hey, who else does that sort of thing?
In moments of crisis, we are especially vulnerable to our deepest fears and prejudices. In this country, that has often led to embarrassing bouts of racism — not just the post-Oklahoma roundup, but lynchings of blacks, Jews and gays, not to mention the internment of Japanese during World War II. In Spain, the natural instinct when something blows up is to blame ETA.
The trouble in this case is not that ETA will be unfairly accused. ETA is already a terrorist group with much blood on its hands, and if this attack leads to ETA’s demise, so much the better for the world. The danger, however, is that the Spanish will go after the familiar demon of ETA instead of pursuing their new and shadowy enemies, who may be much harder to find. It strikes me that this is exactly what America did by going to war against Saddam Hussein. And as long as we are distracted by old enemies, the latest (and deadliest) murderers remain at large.
Topic: Link
The Bush-Cheney campaign has come up with an ingenious toy: you can now create your own Bush-Cheney poster, complete with personalized slogan [via Wonkette]. Sure, it’s censored, but that just means you have to be creative.
Please send your best slogans to betweenthelines@pobox.com.
[update]
The Bushies have taken down the poster generator, but not before it created much chaos. Wonkette has the full story.