- This is what it’s like to be black in America, isn’t it? What it has always been like, at least since it stopped being worse. What it was like after Charleston, or after the church bombings during the civil rights movement. Or after the murders in Jeffersontown, which we mustn’t overlook. Except African-Americans live in the country that perpetrated their Holocaust, a country where denial of that Holocaust is still mainstream.
- Trump’s response that it would have been better had there been an armed guard is, yes, absurd in the light of the four police officers who were wounded. But the madness of this idea goes so much deeper. Should any group that gathers to pray also arm itself? Who will pay for the armed guards, and what should happen to religious gatherings too poor to afford armed guards? Are minorities to blame if they don’t arm themselves against racist violence? Is the government so weak and inept that minorities must arm themselves for a race war? Would Trump and his supporters really feel better if mosques started stockpiling weapons?
- Once again, an AR-15 is the tool of a terrorist massacre in America. Colt makes them. No one is talking about Colt. Colt is not a dirty word, but it should be. Colt should be held accountable. Its leaders and employees should be made uncomfortable all the time everywhere. It should be untenable for them to continue to do what they do.
- The reason we can do nothing about Saudi Arabia’s murder and dismemberment (hopefully in that order) of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is the reason we can do nothing about mass murders committed with American guns. Weapons sales always come first.
Responding to Hate with Charity
I woke up this morning, far away in Korea, to horrifying news of anti-Semitic terrorism back home.
I haven’t yet got much to say about what happened, but I felt the need to respond to hate with tzedakah (charity). There’s little else I can do right now. In multiples of chai, I donated to these organizations:
Tree of Life * Or L’Simcha
This is the synagogue whose congregants were murdered.
HIAS
“Welcome the stranger. Protect the refugee.” This is the organization whose mission of kindness drove the murderer to his vicious act. Anyone who knows our history as a people understands that we have been refugees, time and again. As the Torah says:
And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.
ADL
The Anti-Defamation League continues to fight anti-Semitism in America and around the world.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
Murder requires tools. CSGV is working to end the cycle of gun violence that grips America.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
The president has openly encouraged political violence, and his party has done nothing to stop him. The murders in Pittsburgh and the mailing of bombs to prominent democrats, including one to George Soros, a favorite target of anti-Semitic conspiracists, are of a piece. America’s anti-racist majority needs the political power the vulnerable instead of inciting violence against them.
Edit (October 29, 2018)
As we learn more, I found out there were two other congregations praying at the synagogue at the time of the attack. I’ve donated to both.
Strategic Angles
Screens in the Samsung cafeteria are showing the Trump and Kim Show and Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner. I’m not sure which dystopian vision of Pacific Rim globalization is weirder. Maybe it’s best to focus on the pocketless billiards on the screen in between? Oh, wait, a person in a giant cat head is cleaning the billiards table now. Never mind.
It’s an odd day, lacking the solemnity and gravitas of Kim’s first meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in because nothing Trump does has solemnity or gravitas. The results, after all the pageantry and tears, were more or less what I expected: a vaguely worded agreement reaffirming commitment to peace and denuclearization, with plans for more negotiation down the line.
Peace games
Trump followed up the summit by declaring that the US would stop its war games on the Korean Peninsula, which has led some commentators to claim that the US gave up something while getting nothing. In the most literal terms, that’s true, if you focus only on the summit and not on what led to it or how it was reported in North Korea.
Taking a slightly wider view, North Korea prepared for the summit by dismantling some nuclear facilities to demonstrate its readiness for real denuclearization. How valuable the facilities really were is debatable, but these are at least irreversible steps, unlike Trump’s decision to suspend the war games. And ending the expensive, provocative war games is probably something the US should have done long ago, but the US felt constrained because it felt like a gift to North Korea, and there was never an occasion for giving them a gift until now. I’m not concerned that the joint US-ROK military command will forget how to invade North Korea for lack of practice. Meanwhile, the economic sanctions are still in place, and so are America’s troops in South Korea.
The view from the north
North Korean reporting on the summit also matters.
When I first lived in South Korea, in the era of the Sunshine Policy, the english-language Arirang network had a show called Peninsulascope that did soft news about North Korea, looking for areas of commonality and progress. They would end each episode with a North Korean cartoon. I remember there was one about a family of squirrels who live near a fox. When a flood comes, the fox offers to save them; the squirrels hesitate, afraid of the fox, but at last they accept the offer, and the fox does indeed rescue them — only to eat them later. The moral of the story is that you can never trust your enemies because they will never, ever change.
The fox is America. This is how North Koreans are taught to see us: as devious and bestial in our very natures. And now Kim Jong-un has sat down with the king of the foxes and cut some kind of a deal.
I think of that cartoon whenever I hear someone saying this summit is boosting Kim’s legitimacy. In some hypothetical, domino theoryish way, the summit’s acknowledgement that Kim is the leader of a nuclear North Korea — which is true, by the way — may be giving some other dictator ideas. Domestically, though, it’s not that simple.
Kim has been preparing his people for a shift. Showing Kim talking to the enemy, and showing Kim admiring Singapore’s shiny prosperity, is something new. It’s something of a gamble, even if Kim’s position is for now secure. What might have been seen as capitulation or even treason — seen that way not just by the people, who don’t matter, but by the generals and politburo members, who do — has to be seen instead as a bold path forward. Kim needs to make it clear to his domestic audience that he’s not surrendering. I’m not sure how easy that is.
In taking these risks, Kim seems to be demonstrating his desire for something genuinely new. And really, for all that Trump and Moon can set timetables and fiddle with the requirements, it’s up to Kim whether he wants to denuclearize and cut a new path.
We shall see.
Opening Closed Doors
f(x)’s androgynous rapper/singer Amber Liu has a new mixtape, and it’s a doozy.
The mixtape starts with Get Over It, a jab at the music industry that’s also a plea for freedom of expression, to the point that Amber whips a paper bag off her head. Closed Doors is the first of four love songs, all ungendered (pronouns are “you,” “me,” “we”), and the refrain is “Nobody has to know what’s behind these closed doors.” On Right Now, Amber duets with a male singer (her vocal coach), and an actress plays his love interest, rather than Amber herself. Lifeline features a moving pas de deux featuring two men. For the Three Million Years video, Amber wears a rainbow peace sign pin in the video.
In a Billboard interview about the mixtape, Jeff Benjamin does all he can to get Amber to bite on the obvious question. He asks what “Closed Doors” is about, and Amber says it’s about respecting her privacy. He asks if there were any rumors that got to her, and she deflects it by saying she didn’t like it when the press reported her family was rich. He asks a couple of questions about her love life, and she gives meticulously ungendered answers. He even implies that one lovesong might be about her and a bandmate. She talks a lot about LGBTQ representation and is very supportive throughout the interview. Some of her best friends are gay.
Now, Amber Liu’s orientation, and her public discussion of it, are her business. I have no idea whether she’s actually queer or not. Maybe she’s straight but feels that’s not anyone’s business either. Who knows? But it sure feels like Amber is pounding on the closet doors from the inside.
It would be a huge deal to have a kpop star as big as Amber come out as gay or bi. For now, though, enjoy the music, the ambiguity, and Amber’s strong statements in support of the LGBTQ community.
Everybody Plays Games
“Everybody plays games.” That’s what Trump had to say after his sudden cancelation of his summit with Kim Jong-un, and then his intimations a day later that maybe the summit will go ahead after all.
This is not how diplomacy is usually done. Diplomacy is statecraft and it’s stately, building from the ground up, with lots of lower-level officials hammering out agreements over time. That kind of diplomacy can be effective, and it has the advantage of bringing thought and expertise to complex processes. But it hasn’t ever really worked with North Korea.
Instead, Trump is playing games. As a mode of running a presidency, it’s terrible. Playing games with immigration has been a disaster on too many levels to mention. Playing games with Iran — a country capable of the usual sort of patient, step-by-step diplomacy — also seems pretty dumb. Playing games with China on trade is like trying to play badminton with a grizzly bear. Playing games with Amazon and the Post Office is just batshit.
But with North Korea? Maybe games are where it’s at.
Games countries play
North Korea has a style unlike any other country’s. Negotiations even with very difficult counterparts like Cuba or Iraq never veered quite so schizophrenically from protestations of eternal friendship to foaming rants full of schoolyard insults. North Korea’s version of good cop-bad cop is Andy Taylor and Stacey Koon. In this case, after some admittedly unhelpful and possibly stupid and threatening comments from Vice President Mike Pence, North Korea failed to show up for a planning meeting and called the vice president stupid, along with some other amped up rhetoric.
The usual response, when North Korea throws one of these tantrums, is to backpedal, play it down, and coax North Korea back to the negotiating table like parents trying to keep their two-year-old from embarrassing them at a fancy restaurant. Trump tried something different. Before the tantrum even reached full crazy, he threw his own little narcissistic tantrum, backing out of the summit with a weirdly personal letter full of regret and disappointment.
Not only that, but Trump backed out after North Korea blew up its own nuclear test facility. You can argue that the facility was in bad shape anyway, but still, the timing was striking and devious. If this is where the diplomatic train stops, then the US got the destruction of North Korea’s only nuclear test facility, and North Korea got nothing. No cash, no lifted sanctions, no security guarantees, no future cancelation of US-ROK joint military exercises. Nothing.
Crazytown diplomacy
The Trump cancelation sent everyone scrambling. Moon Jae-in and Shinzo Abe were embarrassed and confused. China was probably both confused and relieved, if concerned that we’re going back to nuclear brinksmanship on their border. North Korea probably looked around and remembered that China is their only reliable ally.
If this were normal diplomacy, all of that would be very, very bad. But this is not normal diplomacy. This is Trump crazytown diplomacy. With Trump, everything is always contingent and always personal. North Korea made a conciliatory statement — a sign that Trump’s tantrum-for-tantrum approach might actually be an effective way of talking to North Korea — and now Trump is talking about reinstating the summit. So who knows?
The thing is, crazytown diplomacy might be the right tool for North Korea. Trump isn’t good at being president, or even at running a real business, but he’s good at sucking people into his orbit and using his B-list charisma to create buddies and sycophants. One of the only things we actually know about Kim Jong-un personally is that he has a taste for B-list charisma. It’s bizarre to consider that Trump’s Rodmanesque qualities just might win the day here.
Of course, any actual agreement will require the more ordinary diplomatic processes of working out details, resolving ongoing dispute, managing inspection schedules, and all that messy stuff that bores Trump. And at any point, North Korea could go back to the tantrum tactics. But they may be learning that Trump will tantrum right back. Mafia-style emotional overreaction might actually be a useful way of disciplining North Korea.
Can Trump do anything good?
Before you dismiss all this as my naivete (or, worse, before you decide I think Trump is wonderful and have finally come around to understanding his genius), take a moment to remember that bad people do good things. Nixon expanded the Vietnam War and engaged in petty theft against his political enemies, but he also restored relations with China. Stalin was a horrific murderer who led the Soviet Union in destroying Hitler’s armies. Keanu Reeves was actually pretty convincing in River’s Edge.
It’s also worth remembering how bad the previous Republican presidency was. Trump’s style is horrifying, and he has done much harm by appointing incompetent, corrupt people at every level of the federal government, as well as by doing outright bad things. But by this far into the Bush administration, we’d suffered the worst terrorist attack in American history, instituted torture and kidnapping as national policy, lost track of Osama Bin Laden, started a disastrous war in the wrong country (we’re still feeling the effects of that failure), and even took time to destroy the career or CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Trump needs to be understood in this context. His fuckups are real and serious, but don’t let the style make them seem worse than they are — or, rather, don’t let the style make you forget what we endured from our bobblehead president. The outrage of the moment — and Trump is good at producing outrage — can make the present seem worse, and the past seem better, than they actually are.
All of which is to say that before you denounce the pullout from the summit as yet another example of Trump’s dangerous fecklessness (which it also is), check to see whether you’re just denouncing it because it’s Trump and it’s crazy and he’s awful. Because in this one case, Trump’s crazy awfulness might work.
Or not. Who knows? Crazy is crazy. But on North Korea at least, a little crazy might be called for.
The Korean Situation
I’m scared. I’ll admit it.
I don’t think anything is about to happen, and I have reasons for that. South Korea is going about its business as if everything is normal, because what the hell else can we do? But it’s unnerving to have talk of fire and fury directed at the place you live. I’ve started thinking about what I’d do if I had to leave.
Setting aside the rhetoric, though, it doesn’t appear that either the United States or North Korea is preparing for an actual war. The US has sent some planes our way, but that’s about it. No carrier group, no calling up of reservists like before the Gulf War and the Iraq War, no massive movement of troops or materiel. Soldiers in Korea and Guam are still in their barracks. (For what it’s worth, moving any great number of troops into South Korea would require at least the tacit approval of the government here, which has a pretty serious stake in not getting its country destroyed.)
On the North Korean side, I haven’t seen any reports of big troop movements: no tanks massing by the DMZ, no large-scale mustering, no panic in Pyongyang.
The biggest sign to look for — and there’s no hint of it — is a move to begin evacuating American citizens. There are well over a hundred thousand of us here, including diplomats and their families, and the US is likely to want to move us out of the way before doing anything big. So for the moment, at least, nothing big seems to be planned.
But it’s the small and unplanned that scares me. A planned large-scale war is something Trump’s generals are very unlikely to encourage, but I worry that our president might order a missile strike on impulse, without waiting for our military to be ready for North Korea’s response. What that response would be, we can’t know. It could be anything from total silence to a strike at Guam to a massive bombardment of Seoul.
I don’t think any of this is likely, mind you. But it’s not pleasant to consider the odds, or to keep hoping that something serious happens somewhere else in the world to distract the president. I hope this passes soon, and we can all move on with our lives.
How to Respond to Hate
A couple of weeks ago, my sister and her husband, Shoshana and Ari Simones, came home from vacation to find a swastika and “JEW” spray-painted on their mailbox and on the fence beside their home.
This is in Phoenix, Arizona. This is in 2017.
This is a symbol that represents a policy of extermination of Jews through mass murder. It’s not nice to discover that someone who knows where you live wants to see you killed.
“We’re not afraid, we’re not ashamed”
A first instinct is to want to make it disappear as quickly as possible. A kind neighbor covered it with paper, and after calling the police, even tried to get it cleaned up before my sister and her husband got home. Although it’s probably good that she didn’t.
With great bravery, strength, tact and intelligence, my sister and brother-in-law decided to leave up the graffiti and go public.
With help from the Arizona Anti-Defamation League, Shoshana and Ari began talking to the press — AZ Central, ABC 15, Fox 10, 12 News, and more — making sure that the coverage always noted this was not an isolated incident, but part of a spike in anti-Semitic acts in Phoenix this year. Eventually the story went national, reaching the USA Today. “We’re not afraid,” my sister said, again and again. “We’re not ashamed. We’re proud Jews.”
The response from the community, at every level, was a rebuke to those who would intimidate and threaten Jews or other minorities. From the very beginning, to their credit, the Phoenix Police Department took the incident seriously, referring it to their special bias crimes unit, and the FBI stepped in as well. And the mayor of Phoenix, Greg Stanton, gave Shoshana and Ari a call to express his support. At a more local level, neighbors sent flowers, came by to ask if there was anything they could do, sent notes of support. Strangers became friends.
“I definitely smile when I see it”
Of course, my sister and brother-in-law weren’t going to leave up a symbol of hate forever. But rather than cover it up as if nothing had happened, they decided to throw a party, inviting the community to come and repaint their mailbox with messages of love and inclusion.
From a symbol of hate, Shoshana and Ari brought the community together and created a symbol of joy. “I definitely smile when I see it,” my sister told AZ Central.
It’s notable that in the middle of all this, after Shoshana and Ari said they’d leave up the word “JEW” and write “PROUD” above it, someone — presumably the perpetrator — came in the middle of the night and covered over the graffiti with what appeared to be the same black spray paint that had been used in the first place.
It’s impossible to know why. Perhaps the perpetrator felt ashamed. Maybe it was a local kid whose parents got mad and made him cover it up. Or maybe the perpetrator was angry that his act, far from creating the intended fear and intimidation, was turning into a rallying point of support for Jews.
My friend Alena Tansey works for USAID, has been stationed in conflict and post-conflict regions like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, and studied genocide prevention at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. I talked to her about what happened, and she said that the best response to hate crimes isn’t to ignore them, and it’s not to be shocked, either. Instead, it’s best to acknowledge that these things happen, see any larger pattern that they might be part of, and then do whatever possible to empower the victims and disempower the perpetrators.
Which is exactly what Shoshana and Ari had done, and I couldn’t be prouder.
Do a mitzvah
Shoshana and Ari also made a request of the community. The “entrance fee” for their party was one good deed, or mitzvah, as we say in Hebrew. They asked people to join them in spreading light. So if you’re horrified by the act of hate that started this whole thing, please take one conscious action to bring positivity into the world. I’d be delighted if you could share it with me here.
For me, here in Korea, my good deed was to stand up and be counted at the Seoul LGBT Pride festival this weekend (I’ll have more to say about that soon). Like Jews, LGBT people are often the targets of hate, and the thousands of angry protesters outside Seoul Pride were intimidating, to be sure. But there was joy and celebration in the face of it. Despite the pouring rain, tens of thousands of people came to express themselves and their support for a more inclusive society at the largest LGBT event in Korea’s history.
There is no way to prevent every last incident of hate. The real danger, though, is not in these acts of hate themselves, but in the silence that too often surrounds them. We must stand up as individuals and communities to counter fear with love.
Imaginary Lines
Much of what we think of as the real world is actually collective dreaming. Money, laws, social mores, nation states don’t exist in any absolute sense; they’re not real the way rocks and trees and gravity are real. They’re shared agreements that could evaporate in an instant, and sometimes do.
Confronted by a national border, we are suddenly reminded how arbitrary our shared agreements are: the money in my pocket can be exchanged for goods on this side of the imaginary line, but not that side; I can relax here in the shade of this tree, but if I try to rest in the shade of that tree over there, armed men will stop me unless I go through a particular ritual involving specially prepared documents.
The DMZ — the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea — is an especially arbitrary border, the result of hasty decisions at the close of World War II and a military stalemate in 1953. It’s also the site of a bitter struggle between competing collective dreams, where each side has been preparing for 64 years for the other side to wake up and adopt the worldview of its opponent.
Dorasan Station
A full-day tour of the DMZ begins at Dorasan Station, the northernmost point on the South Korean railway system and a monument to a South Korean dream of unification. The fully functional station has been used exactly once, for a test run into North Korea during a thaw in relations. It sits waiting for the moment when rail service to points north becomes possible. You have to buy a ticket to go to the platform. On the way in, I noticed a South Korean tap his paper ticket to the top of the turnstile, the way you do with your digital transit card in an operational South Korean train station. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens here.
The Third Tunnel
For all that borders and nation states are imaginary, certain things are all too real: the landmines that make the DMZ impassable, and the tunnels the North Koreans dug at various points in attempts to infiltrate into South Korea. We visited the Third Tunnel because it’s the closest to Panmunjom. Surreally, you enter the tunnel in a little open train that feels like a kiddie ride at an amusement park.
Like everything else along the DMZ, the tunnels are the subject of a propaganda war. The North Koreans first claimed they had nothing to do with the tunnel — discovered by the South Koreans in 1978 because of underground explosions — then later claimed it was a coal mining operation, though the walls are obviously granite and the odds of finding coal in such a location are exactly zero.
Outside the tunnel, big letters spelling out DMZ are a kitschy place to take a photo, while a statue of young people pushing a divided world back together unfortunately made me think of Humpty Dumpty.
In a small garden at the edge of the compound, you could hear music drifting in on the breeze: South Korean propaganda being blasted at the North. This audio war, in which the North and South played music and taunting messages at ever increasing volume, had fallen into an armistice during the period of the Sunshine Policy, but the South started it up again a couple of years ago in response to some North Korean provocation or other, and now any North or South Koreans close enough to the border are subject to the whimsical musical choices of whatever South Korean colonel is in charge. On this particular day, I caught a bit of an old pop tune from 1994. (Thank you, Shazam.)
Looking down
From the tunnel, you continue on to Dorasan Observatory, where you can finally peer down on North Korea itself and see its enormous flagpole — once the highest in the world — which was built to overtop a South Korean flagpole. There’s a village down there that US officials say is empty and always has been: a Potemkin village that would be more laughable if we hadn’t just visited South Korea’s Potemkin train station. And you can see out to Kaesong, the industrial complex that was once the site of South Korean businesses operating in North Korea but is now shuttered.
There’s a line of mounted binoculars at Dorasan Observatory, and for 500 won you can take a closer look at the mysterious country beyond. I managed to catch sight of some fieldworkers — most clad in white, a few on the edges in gray, maybe supervisors or guards or who knows what. There was a frisson to seeing actual North Koreans, like spotting a rare animal on safari, and also a kind of sickening feeling about such voyeurism. It’s true that I’ve taken photos of poor peasant farmers in Laos and Myanmar without feeling particularly weird about it, but at least those folks could engage with me if they had wanted to. I was looking down on North Koreans who had no way of looking back.
Human beings
A DMZ tour isn’t really about North Koreans as human beings. At no point did any of our tour guides, South Korean or American, mention North Korea’s awful human rights record or the recurring famines that continue to torment the North Korean people. One way the DMZ works as an imaginary space is by turning North Koreans from individuals into representatives of their state: Bob the soldier, or tiny little dots in the distance seen from Dorasan, or anonymous tunnel diggers. But I know about all these things. I have friends who grew up on the other side of that border, and I know some of the hardships they endured, some of the traumas they still carry with them.
Perhaps that’s why the most affecting moment of the tour, for me, was a brief stopover after lunch, at a kitschy little tourist trap in Paju, close to the border. There we saw the Bridge of No Return, where prisoners of war were exchanged and had the option of choosing one or the other Korea to stay in. To consider the bridge was to think about the individuals crossing it, the reasons they had for choosing one side or the other and the sacrifices this must have entailed. We also learned about a shrine where people with North Korean roots come to do ancestor worship on the major Korean festivals, when all the other Koreans are heading to their hometowns. The thought of those people cut off from their roots was ineffably sad, and it made me think of the Book of Lamentations and the suffering of Jews in exile who could no longer reach their beloved Jerusalem.
Panmunjom
The highlight of the tour was our visit to the Panmunjom Truce Village. South Koreans aren’t allowed to join this part of the tour, and it’s frankly weird that anyone else can go there. We switched from our tour bus to a different bus, leaving our bags behind, and now we were under the care of a young American infantryman with a pistol prominently at his side.
The truce village itself isn’t much to look at, just some military buildings and some sheds in the middle, but everything is formal and tense. First we were given an introductory slideshow, narrated by our American soldier. We learned about the incident in which North Koreans hacked to death with axes two Americans who were trying to cut down a tree that blocked their view. We learned of a firefight that broke out in the 1980s when a Soviet journalist bolted for the South Korean side. We learned that the North Koreans never give the South Koreans or the US any information about what they plan to do, but that the South Koreans announce the day’s schedule and activities through a bullhorn each day to try to minimize the chances of any incidents.
Then, as we marched out into the open, we were told not to stop for anything, not even to tie our shoes, and not to try to signal to the North Koreans in any way. We stood outside for a bit, gazing across at a lone North Korean soldier standing in front of their rather formal building. The Americans call him Bob because he likes to bob in and out of the columns when the tourists come. South Korean soldiers stood around here and there, facing both north and south, motionless and intense in their taekwondo stances. (Their shifts are three-and-a-half hours.)
Finally we had our turn to go inside the conference room. The American cheerfully said, “You’re in North Korea! You’re in North Korea!” as people began crossing the dividing line at the center of the room. Also in North Korea were two more of those motionless North Korean guards, there to prevent anyone from doing anything interesting. We stayed there for a few minutes, then filed out again.
Self-defense
Once we’d departed the truce village, I asked the American soldier about his life in Korea. He’s never been able to go down to Seoul, but sometimes he goes drinking in the nearest South Korean village. (Villagers near the border get free land and exemptions from taxes and military service, but you have to have North Korean roots to get the deal, and you also have to be back in your village before dark each night.)
He also said that being a tour guide made him the laughingstock of the infantry. “I got buddies who’re going to Syria, to Iraq, to Afghanistan,” he said. “At least they can defend themselves.” Then he paused. “I probably shouldn’t say anything.”
I wondered what he meant by that. Are American troops at the DMZ supposed to retreat or surrender if fighting breaks out? Maybe. I think the US would rather lose a few soldiers as prisoners and have time to negotiate or calculate a response rather than have an escalating military engagement in which North Korean soldiers are killed or wounded. This is probably not much fun for the US troops involved to contemplate, but it makes sense.
Back to our reality
And then, with one final visit to a gift shop, our tour came to an end. You can buy I Heart DMZ merchandize, which has a certain absurdist charm. I bought an armband like the ones the South Korean soldiers wear.
Then we rode the bus back down to Seoul, and my friends and I headed for Hongdae and its Saturday Night crowds. We ate barbecue and bingsu, watched buskers, bought some swanky new clothes at Aland. Some rampant capitalist indulgence felt good after a day spent contemplating one of the least compelling alternatives ever devised. But it also felt a little less real, a little more imaginary than usual.
Minister Kang
When I was a speechwriter for the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations, from 2004 to 2008, Kang Kyung-hwa — Moon Jae-in’s appointee for Foreign Minister — impressed me before I was even hired.
I was interviewed for the job by a panel of five diplomats. At first I was asked the usual stuff: my background, how I heard about the job. Then the questions turned political, which probably shouldn’t have surprised me but did. “What do you think,” one of the men asked me, “about the United States response to 9/11 and the War on Terror?”
I gave what I thought was a diplomatic answer, saying that I appreciated South Korea’s participation in the Coalition of the Willing, and also that I had differences with the Bush administration, but that I didn’t want to criticize my government too strongly.
That’s when Kang Kyung-hwa spoke up. “But isn’t that the beauty of America?” she asked, smiling. “That you can criticize your government?”
The question cut through my bullshit. Somehow she invited criticism of the United States by praising it, and she made it clear that my evasions weren’t good enough. I responded, after maybe a bit more hedging, with something much closer to the truth.
I came to admire Kang for her strength, intelligence, and ability to cut through people’s preset defenses to get to what matters. During my years at the Mission, she had a significant role in the rapid passage of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, transformative global legislation that Koreans should be proud to have played a part in. Since then, she’s done human rights work at the United Nations.
Human Rights, in diplomacy terms, is considered a soft issue, along with social and cultural affairs. When I was at the Korean Mission, it was always women who had the soft-issue portfolios, while the men handled the so-called hard issues: defense, security. Foreign ministers usually come from the hard-issue side. In choosing Kang, Moon Jae-in is doing more than just selecting a woman. First, he’s selecting an extraordinary woman; second, he’s signalling that issues of human rights and culture will play a central role in his administration’s domestic and foreign affairs.
When I worked with her, Kang Kyung-hwa’s title was Minister. I hope that she’s confirmed quickly, taking on that title again in a much higher-ranking role.
The Korea Situation
Here on the Korean Peninsula, something big is happening and everyone knows it. What was once a stable regime now has an uncertain future. You see signs of the political changes everywhere.
Literal signs.
I’m talking, of course, about the South Korean election, which is the most significant thing happening here, at least from the perspective of most South Koreans. There are election signs everywhere!
Why, what you you thinking?
Nothing has changed
I’m aware that for better or worse (mostly worse), I’m the Korea expert for a lot of people I know. My credentials extend as far as a couple semesters of politics courses focused on the region plus a few years in a minor role in the South Korean government a decade ago, plus I read things and I live here. So read on with that in mind.
So yeah, the North Korea nuclear thing.
North Korea has nukes and has had them for a while. North Korea has missiles and has had them for a while. North Korea is developing longer-range missiles and has been developing them for a while. There’s nothing happening this week that’s substantively different from what was happening six weeks ago when no one was talking about North Korea. North Korea has had the ability to nuke Tokyo for maybe a decade, and we’ve lived with it, just as we live with Pakistan having both nuclear weapons and a very serious Islamist insurgent problem.
Tensions are high, but the US is going to great lengths to signal that we’re not going to war. The secretary of state and vice president assured South Korea that the US wouldn’t launch an attack without Seoul’s approval, which is not likely to be forthcoming. There’s zero panic in South Korea, and no real reported panic in North Korea either.
We’ve been here before. We’ll probably be here again. As it goes on, ignore right-wing cranks who insist that this is the red-line moment and that the situation demands action now. Ignore left-wing cranks who insist that this is all American provocation and North Korea is just misunderstood. None of that is true. North Korea’s regime is brutal and murderous, with a horrific human rights record. They just killed a guy in a Malaysian airport. They’re not nice. They’re also not nuking anyone next week. And the best solution to the situation is not outright war, just as you don’t resolve a hostage situation by blowing up the whole neighborhood (well, maybe Russia does).
So take a deep breath. If you’re American, calm down and keep protesting the president for the actual awful things he’s doing. If you’re South Korean, make sure to vote in the upcoming election. And if you’re president of a nearby country, please see if you can avoid starting a war.