Category: Personal

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[one more thought]

Topic: Korea

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.

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[the nature of democracy]

Topic: Korea
[Note: I’ll try to get a report as soon as possible from my friend Graeme on the ground in South Korea. In the meantime, here’s something to chew on.]Here in America, we take it for granted that philosophy and ideology are a part of politics. We expect our political parties to represent a set of ideas and to stick to them over time. In discussions of present-day party maneuvering, we refer back to FDR and JFK, to Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower and Nixon and Reagan. Of course each party has shifted dramatically on some issues — the Democrats used to be the party of segregation, while the Republicans were so opposed to states’ rights that they fought America’s bloodiest war over it — but we have enough political tradition that we can talk meaningfully about what each party represents.

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.

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[olympic torque]

 Topic: Around Town

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.

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[the blame game]

Topic: Foreign Affairs
After a morning spent blaming the Basque separatist group ETA for the horrific coordinated bombings in Madrid, the Spanish are now reconsidering the possibility that it was Muslim terrorists after finding a van full of detonators and the Koran outside Madrid.

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.

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[lungs]

Slate is running a diary this week by Rosemary Quigley, a bioethicist who has cystic fibrosis and recently underwent a double lung transplant. It brought to mind the experience of blogger ramerk, who was a close friend of my wife’s during high school (and who helped make the beautiful paper cranes for our wedding, which you can see in the wedding section of this website). Like Quigley, ramerk recently found herself with a new set of lungs, and her journal has chronicled both her increasing physical abilities and the personal adjustments they have required. (Go here for ramerk’s first post-operative reports.)

ramerk is also the author of Monkey of the Damned, a delightfully weird little comic strip.

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[cookin’ with nanta]

The Korean show Cookin’, also known as Nanta, has arrived in New York City for an open-ended run. We saw this in Seoul and had a blast. Here’s the writeup from AOL CityGuide New York:

If the Food Network’s ‘Iron Chef’ show married Broadway’s ‘Stomp’, this would be their wacky offspring. Direct from Seoul, South Korea to the Minetta Lane Theatre comes an hour of gustatory excitement called ‘Cookin’.’ Four chefs are given a simple mission by a frenzied maitre d’: Prepare an entire feast (and a wedding banquet, no less) in only one hour, all while accompanied by strains of jazz, rock and Korean music. That’s a 60-minute non-stop music-and-food extravaganza as these kitchen masters use up nearly every single utensil in search of the perfect rhythm and combine cooking and traditional Korean Samulnori drumming. At the end of the show, they will have managed to prepare a meal of dumplings, soup and stir-fry, but it’s the process that makes this worth watching. Knives pound on the chopping block, broomsticks metamorphose into fighting tools, plates soar and fruit turn into madcap projectiles and juggling props. Best of all, some fortunate audience members will have the opportunity to taste the results; a lucky pair will even be in on the act, starring as the bride and groom, Ms. Lee and Mr. Kim.

As the white guy in the audience, I got picked to be Mr. Kim, and I married a sweet young Korean woman whose name I never got. But I still have a picture of myself in the silly hat the Cookin’ people strapped to my head.

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[why i live in new york city]

In the warmth on Saturday, Jenny and I went for a long walk through Prospect Park. On our way we were passed by a Haitian protest supporting Aristide and denouncing American and French intervention.

The next day, I went to a John Edwards rally at Long Island University. On a stage full of soldiers, black people and Chassidim, he gave exactly the same stump speech he always gives, except he said he was glad to be at LIU and welcomed all the Deaniacs to his camp. I could hardly see him — the stage was actually lower than the gallery where we all crowded around — and the whole thing had the surreal atmosphere of being inside of a giant infomercial. Which is, more or less, my problem with Edwards: like a good infomercialist, he has one pretty good speech that he performs pretty well. And that’s it.

Probably the best thing about the whole event was waiting on line next to a Trinidadian woman who wandered up, asked what we were lined up for, asked if it was free, and declared, “Well, I’m stayin’ then.” She shared her views on all the candidates. She liked “that little guy from Ohio,” and she didn’t like Kerry, and she thought Edwards was okay, but she was going to vote for Sharpton on Tuesday because “He brings them to the table,” and without him, she said, the candidates would never have talked about Haiti or about black people. She has a point. Then she started in about her great dream of one day visiting Czechoslovakia (never mind that it doesn’t exist anymore). She’d heard Prague was beautiful, and that was where she wanted to go.

After the Edwards rally, I met Jenny at Satalla in Manhattan to hear Huun-Huur-Tu, the throat-singing quartet from Tuva, a small republic within the Russian Federation somewhere off near Mongolia. Playing soulful folk songs that are all about horses, they create fascinating harmonic overtones in their throats — something roughly like a Tibetan monk’s growl, or perhaps an astonishingly lovely burp, that manages to ascend into the higher registers and make melodies there that dance over the earthy strains of their bowed and plucked instruments. If they come to your town, go hear them; recordings don’t do the music justice.