What do the recent developments between North Korea, the US, and China mean for peace (and peace of mind) in South Korea?

What do the recent developments between North Korea, the US, and China mean for peace (and peace of mind) in South Korea?

The ouster of former-president Park Geun Hye on March 10, 2017 was the biggest political event in South Korea in decades. It symbolized the collective power of the People overcoming an elitist regime steeped in corruption that seemed to consider self-dealing an inherent privilege of ruling class.

Now that Park is gone, the geopolitical winds have shifted. There is no longer a true president in the Republic of Korea. The anti-corruption zeitgeist is still palpable, but without a strong villain, the story just isn’t as compelling to most citizens. In the interim, former Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn has become acting president, and the vote to elect a new president takes place on May 9. But the recent disconcerting exchange between North Korea, the US, and China show signs of potentially eclipsing this important event—or at least stealing its thunder. 

​

The presidential power vacuum

For historical and practical reasons, the role of president in Korea is full of import and meaning, especially on a foreign policy level. But now there is a vacuum of power since this role is not legitimately filled. To those in Western hierarchical systems of governance, this may seem strange. But recall that even Park’s deputy prime minister couldn’t make an executive decision while Park was undergoing surgery during the “seven missing hours” of the fateful Sewol Ferry incident. In Korea (North and South), the President is more than just another elected official—he or she is the de facto captain in the country’s ship of destiny.

The question on many people’s minds in the past few days is how this lack of leadership will affect the relationship between South Korean officials and North Korea’s Kim regime. A cacophony of voices prevails: many are focused on the domestic political issues at hand, while others are looking outside of South Korea’s borders and seeing imminent threats that, although omnipresent for many years, seem to have sharped and intensified with a wild-card adversary like US President Donald Trump in the White House. As someone who views employing diplomatic channels as an aberration of normal executive action, Trump’s unpredictable war-path approach has at the very least but many leaders around the world on edge. 

Escalating tensions

As a result, many living in the ROK—Koreans and foreigners alike—have begun to wonder what the near future holds, especially if Trump and Kim Jeong-euncontinue their sabre-rattling and military escalations. In response to news of Pyongyang’s planning of a sixth nuclear missile test, Trump has recently deployed an aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, and a retinue of warships to the South Pacific, where they recently conducted exercises with the South Korean Navy.

On the Northern Front (then again, maybe we shouldn’t be calling it that just yet), China has recently deployed 150,000 troops to the China-North Korea border, and Chinese central government officials in Beijing have suspended all imports on North Korean coal, a big blow to the resource-poor nation where coal comprises 40% of its exports. Whether this is the result of a bilateral effort to convince Kim Jong Eun to halt further nuclear tests or the beginning of escalating tensions between two world powers, no one seems to be exactly clear. Either way, realpolitik and the elitist fog of war are being used to full effect in this recent regional run-up to…let's wait and see what exactly it is.  

“Meh. This happens every year.”

Perhaps the most common response to these developments on social media by foreigners who have lived in South Korea for many years is that of cool complacency. For expats who have lived in this country for many years, the war-hungry rhetoric of the Kims (Kim Jong-il and now Kim Jeong-eun), worthy of a Game of Thrones parody, is a much-ado-about-nothing, perennial occurrence, as predictable as the April cherry blossoms. In the minds of many who live here, the attention this issue receives year after year in the West is curious, since it is such an afterthought here in Seoul, which lies some fortykilometres from the DMZ.

However, we ought to remind ourselves that in history, past events are not full-proof predictors of future occurrences, at least in the short-term. In the long run, there will always be conflicts between states for economic, political, and hegemonic purposes.  But then, every major historical event is inherently singular. No one sees it coming until it happens. Determining who is the aggressor and who is the victim—and which media players are beating the war drums to drum up ratings—is an important albeit exhausting exercise. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that there is a lot of blame to go around on this issue—and a lot of valid opinions. 

The effect on our psyche

Since perception is reality, we need to ask what the general perception about this state of affairs is and how it affects the common person living under the shadow of potential conflict. We have seen enough devastating military conflict in the rest of the world in the past few years that it has become part of our collective imaginations—a not-so-distant phantasm that grows more real with every move of the chess piece. 

What effect these events have on the psyche of those living in Northeast Asia, and especially in Seoul, Pyongyang’s closest likely urban target, remains to be seen. No one living here wants to take part in the “experiment” of thermonuclear war, or war of any kind for that matter, and thus heated opinions on the matter are ultimately justifiable. 

So what do you think? What effects will these recent geopolitical developments in and around the Peninsula have on your life if you live in Korea? And if you are planning to visit in the near future, does this have any effect on your travel arrangements? 

Since all opinions are useful at this [perennial] time of uncertainty, go ahead and tell us your thoughts.

I am just going to post everything ...

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The 80 books I read this year

Night Shift—Stephen King
Interview with the Vampire—Ann Rice
A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess
A Brief History of Time—Stephen Hawking
The Golden Compass—Phillip Pullman
Pride and Prejudice—Jane Austen
Fight Club—Chuck Palahniuk
Molecular Mechanisms of Learning—Frank Lee
The Selfish Gene—Richard Dawkins
The Mist—Stephen King
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy—Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—Douglas Adams Death in Venice—Thomas Mann
A Scanner Darkly—Philip K. Dick
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—Hunter S Thompson
Kafka on the Shore—Haruki Murakami
Superfreakonomics--Levitt and Dubner
Things Fall Apart—Chinua Achebe
Lies My Teacher Told Me—James Loewen
Their Eyes Were Watching God—Zora Neil Hurston
The Subtle Knife—Phillip Pullman
The Country Doctor—Balzac
The Amber Spyglass—Phillip Pullman
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—Mark Twain
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep—Phil Dick
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Ken Kesey
Greed--Chris Ryan
American Psycho—Bret Easton Ellis
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly—Jean-Dominique Bauby
Creativity—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Narcissus and Goldmund—Herman Hesse
Brave New World—Aldous Huxley
US Constitution—various
The Culture Code—Clotaire Rapailles
The world according to Garp—John Irving
To the Lighthouse—Virginia Woolf
Carrie—Stephen King
1984—George Orwell
Gertrude and Claudius—John Updike
The Old Man and the Sea—Ernest Hemingway
Cannery Row—John Steinbeck
God is Not Great—Chris Hitchens
Tess of the D'Urbervilles—Thomas Hardy
Turnips on the Ceiling—Janis Renner Domer
The Sun Also Rises—Ernest Hemingway
Empire of the Ants—Bernard Werber
The Stranger—Albert Camus
The Handmaid's Tale—Margaret Atwood
Hard Times—Charles Dickens
Boomerang:Travels in the New Third world—Michael Lewis
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—Haruki Murakami
Life, the Universe and Everything—Douglas Adams
So long and Thanks for all the Fish--Douglas Adams
Breakfast of Champions—Kurt Vonnegut
Mostly Harmless—Douglas Adams
The Hunger Games—Suzanne Collins
The Red Pony—John Steinbeck
Something Wicked This Way Comes—Ray Bradbury
Thinner—Steven King
Please Look After Mom—Kyung Sook Shin
I’m a Stanger Here Myself—Bill Bryson
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close—Jonathan Safran Foer
Sense and Sensibility—Jane Austen
Breakfast at Tiffany's—Truman Capote
Dress Your Kids in Corduroy and Denim—David Sedaris
Push—Sapphire
The Hot Kid—Elmore Leonard
23 things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism—Jang Ha Joon
In Cold Blood—Truman Capote
The Art of Travel—Alain de Botton
Fatherhood—Bill Cosby
After Dark—Haruki Murakami
Into the Wild—Jon Krakauer
The Mother Tongue—Bill Bryson
Candide--Voltaire
The Big Sleep--Raymond Chandler
Macbeth—Shakespeare
Cause of Death—Patricia Cornwell
Naked Lunch—William S. Burroughs
Of Mice and Men—John Steinbeck

So I haven’t written a blog in….a really long time. And I realize that it might be a bit tacky to start with a list of things I’ve done—overweening pride and all that. But because I made it such a top priority of my year to read a whole buncha books, more than I had ever read in one year, I think that I deserve this moment in the sun; not to gloat or carry on, but to record for posterity what can be accomplished with just a little tenacity, time-management and resolve. Now if only I could apply these virtues to my writing, studying, working, money-saving…

The book goal this year was 100—a nice fat, solid number. And, I thought, achievable. It works out to about a book every three and a half days (a book every 3.65 days to be exact). Despite my busy lifestyle during weeks and weekends, I figured I could accomplish this by sheer will. And I set a sub-goal this year of not reading anything too fluffy. This could mean anything under 100 pages and/or anything cartoonish. I broke this rule once with the U.S. Constitution, which was surprisingly short, and suspiciously simple to understand. However, every other book I read was either a novel (heavy or light) or a serious work of academic study or popular science, economics, sociology, or history.

Because I don’t want to spend three weeks writing blurbs about the books I read, I’m just gonna make the list and write one sentence (or a few) about each book, plus a couple adjectives describing my overall feelings about it—sorta like a qualitative review (better than stars!). Hope I can be an inspiration to all the kiddies (and grown-ups) out there who say they have no time to read.

Without further ado, here is the list in chronological order of the eighty (…not 100) books that I managed to read between October 1, 2011 and October 1, 2012.

Night Shift—Stephen King; -A collection of King’s short stories from his early years, including one about killer mice in a basement, a club that murders you if you don’t quit smoking, and the classic Children of the Corn. Development in progress, predictable at times, imaginative

Interview with the Vampire—Ann Rice; -Lonely, depressed vampire with morals mopes around European cities at night for centuries trying to find meaning in his existence, dwelling on past loves and tragedies. Depressing and dark and sensual.

A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess; -A strange language of slang carries a not-too-distant-future world into existence, chronicling the very bad deeds of teenagers and showing society’s vain attempts to curb their adolescent lusts. Electric and terrifying and abstractly satirical.

A Brief History of Time—Stephen Hawking; -Everything you wanted to know about black holes and special relativity but didn’t know how or whom to ask. Dense material made comprehensible.

The Golden Compass—Phillip Pullman; -First of three in a fantasy trilogy about a special girl destined to unite the many worlds in the universe who learns about the schism between the knowledge extant in the world and the orthodox institutions which shield people from this knowledge. Impressive in scope and detail; a million miles better than the movie.

Pride and Prejudice—Jane Austen; -Edwardian Period realist romance novel in which a prudent young lady watches her silly sisters find suitable men as she herself takes her time, until one day she meets a man who, because of her prejudice, she thinks to be haughty and terrible, but who is actually filled with the most sublime character and love for her. Romantic and very civil

Fight Club—Chuck Palahniuk; -A surrealistic satire about men finding physical escape in a world that wants them to be less than men—to be boring and tidy and responsible—and ultimately the limits of this escape that are possible before anarchy and other kinds of oppressive structures arise. Brutal, terse, funny, often truthful

Molecular Mechanisms of Learning—Frank Lee; -An academic paper (doctoral thesis maybe) on dendrites, axons and synapses concluding that learning is a special and traceable kind of synaptic sequence…I don’t think I was supposed to read this.

The Selfish Gene—Richard Dawkins; -Landmark popular biology book that argues against group theories of evolution (“survival of the species”) in favor of the gene theory of evolution (“survival of the gene”) and how the individual (human, fly, tree, etc) is basically a gene machine—a housing built for the sole purpose of passing along genes. Compelling, awesome, changed how I view the motives of all behavior of all living organisms

The Mist—Stephen King; -A long, scary short-story about a mysterious fog that rolls over a New England town, killing everything in its path with alien tentacle creatures; most of the story takes place in a grocery store. Weird, early King

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy—Douglas Adams; -First in a series: A sci-fi compendium of the universe with quasi-plots and dozens of quirky, imaginative characters that interact in impossible ways over eons of time and across millions of galaxies. Futurama, Star Wars, later Star Trek franchises, MST3K, Red Dwarf—ALL are deeply indebted to these books.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—Douglas Adams; -Second in the Hitchhiker’s Guide (HHGTTG) series—as weird as the first but we come to know more about Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, as well as more auxiliary characters. Better plot than the first, and more science and sci-fi

Death in Venice—Thomas Mann; --An Austrian man is vacationing in Venice and experiences strange, existentialist bouts of ennui and sexual attraction just as a strange sickness is rolling through and killing hundreds people. Kind of like Camus’s The Plague or Sartre’s Nausea but with less philosophical overtones and more artful prose

A Scanner Darkly—Philip K. Dick; -A sort-of science fiction novel about a narcotics cop in the future who, like all narcs, must hide himself in a scrambling suit to avoid being identified and who, like many other narcs, becomes addicted to the substance he is charged with eradicating, leading to deep paranoia and questions about who he can trust, what ethical path he is taking, and who he really is. Suspenseful, humane, wonderfully unique in idea and development

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—Hunter S Thompson; -Journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney drive through the Nevada desert towards Las Vegas to cover a dune-buggy race and also to get incredibly fucked-up and lose sense of reality while causing all kinds of mayhem which they should feel ashamed about but about which they are unaware or so intoxicated that questions of guilt, blame, morality, and rectitude don’t even enter into the equation. What happened? Where am I? Who has my ether bottle?

Kafka on the Shore—Murakami Haruki; -Young Kafuka leaves his loathsome father’s house in Tokyo and heads south for some purpose unknown to him, having strange dreams and hearing news that his father was meanwhile murdered; later he finds his long-lost mother and sleeps with her, a cat-heart-eating villain is killed by a simpleton vagrant, and Kafuka wanders off into the mountain mists of another time. What the fuck, Murakami? Dreamlike, surreal, delicious, mind-altering

Superfreakonomics--Levitt and Dubner; -Like Freakonomics, pop economics book full of amazing counterintuitive or unrelated economic and sociological relationships, such as the advent of cars saving lives and the environment by ending the use of horses in towns, and many, many more. Surprising, fun, some claims seem superficial or dubiously researched

Things Fall Apart—Chinua Achebe; -Realist fiction novel about coming of age in a tiny central African village—traditions, beliefs, superstitions, daily life and death—in the years and months before it is “discovered” by missionaries and other white Europeans. Plaintive, beautifully written, and devastating in its simple truths of history

Lies My Teacher Told Me—James Loewen; -Anti-revisionist revisionist American History book that takes a closer look at events from American History as portrayed in high school textbooks—from Columbus to Thanksgiving to the Constitution to the Civil War, all through the Civil Rights movement—and concludes that history is being whitewashed for students, that kids are being sold a sterile, cartoonish, untrue, ultra-patriotic pack of lies that they leave school believing is “the story of America”, when in fact it could be taught truthfully and therefore be much more interesting to our students. Compelling, important, anti-mythology/pro-truth kind of book

Their Eyes Were Watching God—Zora Neil Hurston; -Novel set in 1920’s Florida about a strong, resolute, optimistic woman finding her way through life’s struggles and triumphs; a larger metaphor for the struggles of black people in America and a microcosm of rural black life. Excellent story and characters, beautiful writing, one of the best early 20th century novels

The Subtle Knife—Phillip Pullman; -Book two of His Dark Materials trilogy (after Golden Compass): Takes place both in our world and in the parallel fantasy world when a boy discovers a portal between the two worlds and ventures back and forth hoping to discover answers to the nature of existence and the fabric of the world—also, more about this mysterious substance known as “dust”. Complex, swerving, highly imaginative, better than the first book

The Country Doctor—Balzac; -A French Post-Napoleonic short novel dealing with the cross-country roving of a general, who stumbles upon a small town where a benevolent doctor lives and is respected by all the members of the town for his ceaseless dedication to their lives and sufferings. Servility before nobility—the prose is really nice but the story is a bit bucolic, even by centuries-old standards for novels.

The Amber Spyglass—Phillip Pullman; --The third novel in His Dark Materials trilogy: The fantasy series culminates when the worlds of the two children are breached by dark forces and must therefore be sewn up eternally so that no more “dust” can escape and let evil into the universe. A kind of entropy if applied to morality and metaphysical beings. More epic, fantastical, and philosophical than the first two.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—Mark Twain; -Huckleberry Finn’s more sophisticated younger friend, whose hijinks are no less ornery or spectacular than Huck's, including witnessing a murder, getting trapped in a cave for days and being presumed dead, and finding a massive treasure. Mark Twain—master writer of detail, of childhood, and of satire dealing with peoples and societies at large.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—Philip K. Dick; -The book on which the film “Blade Runner” was based, it is a futuristic thriller about androids who don’t know they are androids and the society that is hell bent on destroying them because of their “otherness”. Anticipates robot literature, movies and media to come and offers moral questions regarding the bounds of consciousness, agency and civil rights.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Ken Kesey; -When Randle Patrick McMurphy enters the mental health ward of the hospital in lieu of serving a prison sentence (which he managed by malingering insanity) he shakes everything up, from the other patients (inmates) to Big Nurse Ratched to the head of the hospital; he is a force for inspiration in the face of a futile, vegetative existence in the hospital and unfortunately his wild nature proves to be his tragic undoing. The prose and strength of characters in this narrative blew me away; it’s certainly one of the best-written novels from the last 75 years.

Greed--Chris Ryan; -Action and adventure from some of England and Ireland’s finest as they try and hijack a terrorist ship while stealing all of its loot for a payoff. Little do they know the terrorists have allies and plans for vengeance. Macho, action-packed, typical for this sort of book.

American Psycho—Bret Easton Ellis; -The day-to-day diary of one Patrick Bateman—Wall Street wolf by day, hunter, killer, and expert narcissist by night. A relentless internal monologue of detail—either about brands and fashion or murder, rape and mutilation—carries this exquisitely disturbing novel about a high-society psychopath living in the fast times of the 1980’s. Exhilarating, exhausting, mind-numbingly violent, crazy.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly—Jean-Dominique Bauby; -Autobiographical account of a successful middle-aged magazine editor trapped in his own body after a stroke, with only the ability to wriggle a pinky finger and move his eyes. The meaning of life is reinvented, reevaluated entirely in this man’s voice, a vibrant mind locked inside a useless human shell. Touching, empathetic.

Creativity—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; -A professor of sociology chooses a handful of the most creative people from all domains, based on several strict criteria (such as the impact on domain, the depth of work, and the consistency of their productivity) and analyzes them, addressing in the process many intriguing questions: What makes creative people special? Why aren’t more of us creative? Is it possible to become a creative person? Why does creating make us so happy? Huge in scope, heavy on anecdotal evidence, inspiring for those of us who want to be more creative.

Narcissus and Goldmund—Herman Hesse; -Set in medieval Europe, A yin-yang dynamic between two cloistered monks causes their paths to diverge drastically, one remaining in the fold and steeped in scholasticism, the other discovering himself and life through countless adventures and interactions with the sinful outside world. When they reconvene they are that much more bonded for their different ways of being in the world. Warm and flowing, moral without moralizing, Hesse always reads like a classical fable.

Brave New World—Aldous Huxley; -In a dystopian future world where history is bunk, sex and drugs are for children, and intellectualism is the dirtiest of ideas, a Shakespeare-quoting Savage is introduced from the outer-world to illumine the horrific juxtaposition of art and a society built on pleasure and convenience. Prescient, genius depictions of a future that is very much now; among the greatest literature with social commentary.

US Constitution—various; -Including the Bill of Rights and ratified amendments until 2000. Concise and well-conceived, though it’s obvious why constitutional challenges occur so frequently—it is a LIVING document after, all.

The Culture Code—Clotaire Rapailles; -According to this French sociologist, there is a key to every culture lurking behind the conceptions cultures have of themselves which is often counterintuitive, but which, if turned the right way, can unlock all kinds of id-type truths about what makes people in that culture tick—and also how to target advertizing to those various peoples. Interesting in a Freakonomics sort of way; a bit reductionist and generalizing but still quite fun to wonder at.

The World According to Garp—John Irving; -Bildungsroman of the famed, if not prolific, fictional novelist T.S. Garp and his wacky Forrest Gump-esque interactions with the world. A beautiful, stretching, tragic, inconceivably executed kind of biography of a fictional person done in a humanistic and humoristic fashion that ONLY John Irving could pull off. I really love this book.

To the Lighthouse—Virginia Woolf; -A detailed telling of the week on holiday when the kids wanted to go up to the lighthouse but something kept delaying them—feuds, weather, ambivalent feelings about the past and current moods regarding the future. This is Modernism in vanguard form and feels a bit to me like a Matisse painting: it sounds interesting in theory and lacks substance up close. Focused, slow, repetitive, theme-driven, unbearably boring.

Carrie—Stephen King; -The horrific story of a girl coming of age, only to find that she’s a freak of nature with telekinetic superpowers and a murderous vendetta against practically everyone in her small town who has scorned and mocked her for years and years, including her mother, teachers and classmates. Reads like a Playboy short-story; dark and frank, but the writing not as strong as King’s later stuff.

1984—George Orwell; -The classic dystopian novel whose title is shorthand for “totalitarian state”, it is as bleak a look into the future of human society as can be, with everything painted in grey—citizens, streets, buildings, gin—but the Party Propaganda, imagined in vivid and unfading red and white and black; it is a society in which there is no hope for thriving, if thriving means thinking, wondering, knowing about the world and having the ability to change the future. Immortal work about language, power, and ideology and their tendency to dominate the human will to freedom.

Gertrude and Claudius—John Updike; -A novel about Hamlet’s parents, taken from the Shakespearean characters and extended into a delightful drama about two lovers—a queen and her champion—who ultimately conspire to murder the king and rule Denmark together, with disastrous consequences, of course. Rich period language, emphasis on character motivations, refreshing concept for a novel, really very well constructed.

The Old Man and the Sea—Ernest Hemingway; -The parable of an old man catching a fish alone for hours that is as succinct and fable-like as it has always been depicted. What Hemingway does remarkably well is to delve into the soul of the character so that we are really there with him, inside of him, living this experience and feeling his elation, exhaustion, and finally his dismay over nature’s cruelty. Clear, strong, vivid, true.

Cannery Row—John Steinbeck; -Amazing short novel about the goings on in Monterrey, California in the first few decades of the 20th century; includes the travails of a gang of drunken roustabouts, the attempts of the town intellectual to deal with these men who also happen to be his “friends”, and the lives of various other town residents which compose this fictional place. Characters are so well portrayed that one suspects Steinbeck knew them personally—this book feels like the work of a 20th century Mark Twain. Sublime vignettes, slightly tragic, subtly critical of American capitalist values, fun as hell to read.

God is Not Great—Christopher Hitchens; -A tireless tract about why we shouldn’t believe in god (or gods), argued from every angle: moral, logical, scientific, pragmatic. Hitchens is the master of acerbic language and saves his best material for the big guy in the sky, who, after this depiction and that of his followers in this book, should by all rights be on trial for crimes against humanity right now. Pugilistic, hilarious, righteous, awesome (talking about the book here, not God).

Tess of the D'Urbervilles—Thomas Hardy; -The saga of a poor and beautiful farm girl who discovers she is of noble blood, which begins her downfall from innocence into obscure wandering, laboring, and further poverty, where she finds that one sin of indiscretion begets a lifetime of suffering and tragedy in Victorian Industrial England’s priggish, unforgiving society. Bleak, tragic, realistic motivations for action

Turnips on the Ceiling—Janis Renner Domer; -A memoir of a Southern schoolgirl dealing with a troubled household, an alcoholic father, and an interesting yet rocky adolescence as she discovers her own voice on her way to becoming the first female college scholarship winner in her county; told in short anecdotes. Revealing yet reserved, beautiful vignettes, candid about details but not such a view into the mind of the author

The Sun Also Rises—Ernest Hemingway; -A semi-autobiographical story of an impotent American WWI veteran lazing around in Paris with intellectual friends, when the call of adventures in Spain moves him to partake in the five-day San Fermin bullfighting festival in Pamplona—everyone gets drunk, goes fishing, makes and breaks friendships, and learns that the immediate effects of superficially imbibing another culture are a hangover and a lovely kind of cross-cultural misunderstanding. Quick, strong writing (Hemingway, after all) in this exhilarating story of a broken spirit on a spiritual journey with other broken spirits.

Empire of the Ants—Bernard Werber; -“What Richard Adams did for rabbits in Watership Down, Werber does for ants.” This quote sums up the anthropomorphological account of two rogue ants as they attempt to discover what has been destroying their colony; it leads them to quite astounding discoveries. An awesome mystery/fantasy/adventure/science novel about ants written by an entomologist!

The Stranger—Albert Camus; -A existentialist or absurdist primer in the form of a novel, it is the story of an Algerian man named Mersault who wanders through life not really paying much attention to the moral significance of his actions but who finally pays the ultimate price when he kills an Arab man on the beach and is condemned to death mostly by the preponderance of evidence at his trial against the goodness of his character. Stark, dry as the Algerian landscape, full of meaning about the morality of our actions and what it means to be “good” or “bad”.

The Handmaid's Tale—Margaret Atwood; -Dystopian novel set in a world where women have been reduced to vessels for bearing children or living in aristocratic luxury, similar to castes in India. Many religious and feminist overtones, haunting, 1984-esque.

Hard Times—Charles Dickens; -Dickens’ novel about social hypocrisy of the upper classes in their view towards the working classes; it is a tragedy told in classic Dickensian form and with similar coincidences, but it is much shorter than most of his other works. Captivating characters, humorous, bleak and satirical.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World—Michael Lewis; -An economic writer travels to Iceland, Greece, Ireland and Germany after the 2008 global financial meltdown to discover what these economies created a situation that allowed them to fall so far and how they are acting to remediate their bleak circumstances. Often generalizing culture and characterizing peoples, feels like “European Stereotypes for Americans 101: Economics Edition”, humorous yet moderately informative.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—Haruki Murakami; -A wind-up bird noise, the mystery of a missing cat, deep and empty wells, obscure female odd-job detectives, somnambulant episodes of murder, a baseball bat, torture and human-skinning, rape and desire, precocious nymphet neighbors. Murakami is weird and so so awesome, maybe my favorite writer still writing today.

Life, the Universe and Everything—Douglas Adams; -More space wackiness from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the continuing saga of Zaphod Beeblebrox, a major character from the first two books. Here we meet some more characters, attend some ridiculously impossible space parties, and hope that the Vogons still aren’t on our tail. More convoluted and less interesting than the first two.

So Long and Thanks for all the Fish--Douglas Adams; -The fourth installment of HHGTHG, the only one with a really coherent plot, were Arthur Dent falls in love with an Earth girl named Fenchurch and we learn that the previously-destroyed Earth has now been restored by the superior dolphin species as part of their “Save the Humans” campaign. Truly different and yet vastly touching, Arthur is finally rounded out as a character.

Breakfast of Champions—Kurt Vonnegut; -The story of "two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast”, chronicles the unlikely crossing of paths of Dwayne Hoover, a used car deal, and Kilgore Trout, an obscure science fiction writer. The crossing ends in a psychotic break, in a murder, but mostly in a twisted social satire of basically everything spewing from society’s faucet-head. Weird, cartoon illustrations, astute satire, barebones truth of human nature

Mostly Harmless—Douglas Adams; -The fifth and final installment in the HHGTTG series, in which we are finally led to the question of the answer to the meaning of life (which is “42”), the Vogon’s take over the HHGTTG headquarters in order to destroy Earth, and Arthur is united with his teenage daughter of whose existence he was unaware. The best book in the series in terms of plot, dialogue and themes.

The Hunger Games—Suzanne Collins; -A post-civil war world (country?) is divided into districts from one to twelve, each poorer then the last, from which each year two contestants under the age of eighteen must battle to the death in a giant artificial landscape rigged with boobytraps all for the sake of entertainment and allegiance to the capital they are beholden to. Social commentary, Pyongyang meets Survivor meets The Beach; teen lit.

The Red Pony—John Steinbeck; -Young ranch-boy Jody Tiflin has one big dream, to have a pony of his own and raise it; but he is forced to bow to the cruel forces of nature when his pony falls sick and must be put down. Lots of other touching stories of the hardened residents of the California mountains. Picturesque, plaintive, Steinbeck is a master of close prose.

Something Wicked This Way Comes—Ray Bradbury; -A macabre carnival comes to a small Midwestern town and something about it is amiss—all of the carnies are centenarians and seem to have some slightly evil designs for the townsfolk. Reads like Poe in the 1950’s, dark and slightly hokey for a horror story.

Thinner—Steven King; -A man’s involvement in a vehicular homicide leads him to be the victim of a gypsy curse, one that fates him to waste away to nothing no matter what he eats; it is the man’s coming to terms with his actions and attempts to track down the man, apologize, and undo the cure. Interestingly thrilling, fast-paced, tight sort of naturalistic horror novel.

Please Look After Mom—Kyung Sook Shin; -An elderly senile Korean woman from the countryside gets separated from her husband in a busy Seoul subway station and a family tries in vain to find her; a heart-wrenchingly emotional story about what mothers do and how we often overlook their alternate roles as human beings. Really, really, really, really sad and beautifully crafted.

I’m a Stanger Here Myself—Bill Bryson; -Bill Bryson moves back to the United States after twenty years in England; here he remarks on all of the peculiarities of living in the U.S. (and in a small New England town in particular) as if he were some sort of Rip Van Winkle of the 20th century. Hilariously perceptive and witty and more than a little critical.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close—Jonathan Safran Foer; -A few years after the horrors of 9/11, a boy who lost his father in the attacks finds a key that, he thinks, may be a clue to understanding something important about his father. In search of the answer to his riddle he discovers more about coping with loss, about humanity, and about the kinds of people that exist in the world and in a strange, wondrous place like NYC. Reflective, philosophical, often bewilderingly with its POV from a precocious, logical, imaginative, distracted little boy

Sense and Sensibility—Jane Austen; -Austen’s first novel, it is the story of sisters with different personalities searching for different kinds of men and the men who would obscure their actions and intentions with brusque replies and beguiling formalities. Good introduction to Austen, but with its meandering and tedious plot lines, it is not nearly as good as Pride and Prejudice.

Breakfast at Tiffany's—Truman Capote; -Holly Golightly is a young Manhattan socialite, but she can also be as vexing as she is dazzling, and her escapades with men, with neighbors, with cats, with ex-husband, and with the law—all told through the eyes of one of her brief-but-affected confidantes, a man she calls “Fred”—come together to form one of the most interesting characters in any short story, and one of the most incredibly crafted short stories of the last hundred years. Capote is breathtakingly skilled at capturing personality and creating life-like dialogue between these personalities—so life-like it looms larger than life. SOOOO much better than the fluffy Audrey Hepburn movie.

Dress Your Kids in Corduroy and Denim—David Sedaris; -Another David Sedaris treasure, this one focuses on his family (as do so many of his books) including stories about each of his many siblings and his parents, and gives a better view on the twisted childhood that formed the character of this wry, legendary comedic essayist. Poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, satirical, twisted

Push—Sapphire; -A haunting diary--two years in the life of one Precious Jones, black teenager, mother, rape and incest survivor, dyslexic student, and finally HIV carrier. It is told in her voice, urban and uneducated, raw and unedited, and one gets a sense of the festering, horrible realities that befall people who have fallen through the cracks in our Western societies. Though the character is a walking billboard for every kind of advocacy program imaginable, her voice is so strong and pure that you cannot help but believe in her and root for her to get through this hell and find a better place. Harsh, impassioned, depressing and yet uplifting

The Hot Kid—Elmore Leonard; -A true-crime/Western/action novel set in the early 20th century, there are bank-robbers, robber-barrens, barren Oklahoma oil fields, and fields of opportunity for one hot young US Marshall on the trail of several wanted criminals and only he, the Hot Kid, can stop them. Fun, fast, typical kind of Western but without excessive gun-slinging and killing.

23 things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism—Jang Ha Joon; -A bullet-pointed follow-up to “Bad Samaritans”, Ha spends twenty-three chapters demolishing the free-market theories of Milton Friedman and co. It’s not anti-capitalist, but it is pro-regulation, pro-protectionism, and pro-historical accuracy when addressing the successes and failures of the marketplace and the demonized (in American politics) yet positively essential facets of a planned economy. Ha argues that all successful economies are socialized and that free markets are a fiction and a bad fiction at that. Easy to understand, fun, pugilistic but truthful

In Cold Blood—Truman Capote; -The legendary true-crime account of the Holcomb, Kansas family who was killed in their own home in the autumn of 1959, Capote lived amongst the townspeople for four years documenting every conceivable detail of the crime and even constructing biographies of every person directly or indirectly involved in the case. What he creates is as real as it gets (though some of it has allegedly been fictionalized)—a psychological peek into wanton murderers’ lives; into the destructive force of violent death on small-town America; into the symbolic loss of innocence that separated the complacent 50’s from the turbulent 60’s. An awesome, gripping account

The Art of Travel—Alain de Botton; -A handbook on how to enhance the experience of travel by looking at it in different ways—what is the purpose of travel? What do we want from it? What destinations should we choose? Does travel really make us understand anything more? A richly intellectual book with lots of references to fin de siècle essayists and Romantic period adventurers; perfect for the literary person and the person who wants to know why they should love to travel so much as they do.

Fatherhood—Bill Cosby; -A jaunty romp into the joys and miseries of parenthood—as seen through the eyes of daddy—told by one of America’s foremost trusted moral comedic voices. Using a somewhat hokey style that is very 1980’s, it lacks serious substance but will make a man think twice (or three or ten times) before purposefully procreating. Brisk, lighthearted, anecdotal

After Dark—Haruki Murakami; -Set in the heart of Tokyo and starting in a Denny’s restaurant, the action takes place over the course of one night. Mari, a 19-year old student, meets all kinds of people—a beaten prostitute, a trombone player, and a sadistic computer expert who is being hunted by the beaten lady’s pimp. It is still dreamlike Murakami, but with a real-time timeline and more concrete action. Abstract and yet vivid, feels a bit incomplete, like a strange early morning after doing cocaine all night

Into the Wild—Jon Krakauer; -The long-form biography of one Christopher McCandless, an elite athlete and promising student who, on the incredible strength of his convictions, releases himself from mainstream society by taking an unregistered car around America and finally going on a solo journey into the heart of the Alaskan wilderness, where he finally succumbs to the nature he celebrated with such ecstasy in life. An amazing picture of a misunderstood person, Krakauer draws so much more out of this story than just a lesson, a narrative, or a biography. He moves back the lens and looks at society, at the human tendency to conquer and explore, and at our ambivalence to either go to back to a natural state or barricade ourselves away from nature entirely. Intense, detailed, elucidating, incredibly written

The Mother Tongue—Bill Bryson; -“English and How it Got that Way” says the subheading for this book, which is at once a cherry-picked etymology of English and a celebration of the mish-mash of languages that we give a single name to. He covers linguistic history, dialects, “proper” English, swearing, language games, proper names, and other areas while making it all seem so graspable in its infinite detail. Many have disputed some of Bryson’s generalizations, but it seems that the gist is intact: English is a cool and weird world language. Interesting (perhaps) for intellectuals and laymen alike

Candide—Voltaire; -A satire wrapped in a crazy and tragic worldwide adventure, Voltaire tells the story of an optimist moving through a world of horror like he is a character from a Norse saga, and his sharp observations about life as it was in the 18th century are still as useful today perhaps as they were back then. Humanity is consistently brutal and charming. Timeless and intelligent

The Big Sleep--Raymond Chandler; -A great hard-boiled mystery by one of the very first noire mystery writers, it oozes coolness from its Los Angeles pores like a gin and soda left on the backroom credenza at an illegal poker club. So many great one-liners and similes here, it is a book that spawned a thousand Hollywood private dicks. Cool, emotionless, intriguing plot
Macbeth—Shakespeare; -Shakespeare’s shortest play is perhaps also his easiest to understand in terms of character motivations and human folly. Something wicked this way comes… Medieval, psychological, bloody, to the point (for a Shakespeare play)

Cause of Death—Patricia Cornwell; -A crime/mystery novel set in the Chesapeake Bay area of the U.S., this is the case of the poisoned diver, the seemingly accidental death that hides a gigantic and quickly unfolding conspiracy which, with the tenacious work of forensic detective Kay Scarpetta, links a local religious cult with a nuclear terrorist threat, and blah blah blah. This starts out interesting and just goes off the rails into silly absurdity. What the hell is local a forensic scientist doing working for the Pentagon and flying to Europe to fight terrorists?!

Naked Lunch—William S. Burroughs; -In this nightmarish account of an international heroin addict, reality and fantasy are constantly blurred. Imagine if James Joyce were on acid instead of alcohol, and also if he were a voracious nymphomaniac with lurid visions of bondage and sexual mutilation—you would then have Naked Lunch. It is a testament to the power of incredible prose to seep through the roughest of subjects and narratives and even to shed light on these subjects in previously unimagined ways—illumination of reality is the idea behind the title itself. The structure of the plot and literary forms—non-linear, abstract, surreal, absurd—helped to create a whole new school of thought on what a novel should be. Twisted, gorgeous depictions, sadistic scenes, raw

Of Mice and Men—John Steinbeck ; -George and Lenny, clever and thick, complex and simple, guilty and innocent. There are many layers of archetypes that could be applied to the itinerant ranch hands who are the central characters in this short book, but basically Lenny’s actions and his death seem to tell a story of the cruelty, the unfairness of life. This book is a microcosm of all of Steinbeck’s works and demonstrate his ability to capture life as both real and affected, and he often digs up the moral truths that lie behind the apparently amoral happenings in his novels. It’s not a moralizing lesson, not a fable, but perhaps an enigmatic parable disguised as simply another harsh slice of life.


Thanks for checking out my book list. My goal for next year still stands at one hundred books, but I will go easier on myself and also try to read much longer books I’ve been longing to get to, counting one with over 600 pages as two. Again, it is arbitrary, but having some sort of reading goal has really helped me, a quite lazy and unorganized person, stick with a schedule and get a LOT of good reading done. Best of luck to you all on your own reading goals!

At the Fish Market

The warm afternoon sun beamed through the flaps of the colored tarps and splashed on plastic stalls of the Guemyang fish market. Basketfuls of silvery eel were laid out side by side with fading grey mackerel, the blue-orange shells of mud crabs and tanks of shellfish of every imaginable sort, alive in the salty brine, bubbling and turgid to mimic the sea. Everywhere in the air hung that aggressive harbor smell, marine life rotting in the humid July air like ephemeral flesh pockets held up to a light bulb. It reeked and it stunk and it brought the customers from miles, come to fill their baskets with the bounty of the little estuary,

Among the market-goers Mrs. Shin sauntered about with her green tote bag. She had been intent on finding the most perfect cuttlefish to make for her husband and children for dinner that night. It wasn’t the right time of year for that particular catch—there would be no variety and even the most meager size would be too expensive, she knew. But it was the her eldest son’s sixteenth birthday and she knew a delicious recipe for ojingeo soondae, a most exquisite amalgam of seared mollusk stuffed with rice and vegetables, brought together with just a dash of koju pepper powder for color and spice. It wasn’t a popular dish in Gongju, the city in which the Shin family lived, but her son Hyun Bin had taken an especial liking to it during their family vacation to the East Sea two years prior. Mrs. Shin loved her family beyond measure and wanted only the best for everyone. Since it was her job as a housewife to ensure domestic tranquility, making a rare dish was not beyond her duty or her bounds of devotion as a mother.

Mrs. Shin made her way from the crab section to the sea squirts, rounding the corner stall and avoiding a motorbike that was careening through the crowd and splashing puddles of brackish water in the market alleys. She heard three ajummas in a row holler at passersby to come into their little restaurant hovels, surly female fishmongers vying for customers like in times past. They each gave her a searching look as she walked by and rained down offers upon her.

“Yasot mari man won imnida! Yasot mari! Masheet nungot—hong ah, choh gea, kohdung ah! Chinjja mashida!” Some held the tempting fish by the tails in their pink gloved-hands while others merely gesticulated to the bounty swimming to and fro in the tanks in front of their shops. Scallops, mussels, mackerel, skates and ugly flattened flounder. “Really delicious,” the women screamed over and over. “If six isn’t enough, let’s say eight for 10,000 Won?”

Among the usual din of the fish market, a child or a sophisticated urbanite might lose his bearings, bewildered by the rough smells and sounds and attitude of such a place. But for Mrs. Shin this was as much a routine place as was her kitchen, the small apartment building she lived in, and the cracked and winding alleyways that brought her home from her daily shopping, which were filled with noisy schoolchildren and delivery bikes in the late afternoon hours.

But today could not be counted among those routine days. Aside from the out of season cuttlefish, this mission bore a deeper difficulty. She had received by phone that afternoon the news of her mother’s passing. It was the kindly middle-aged neighbor man who had found her when she failed to answer the knocking on her door. They had been almost friends, as close as Koreans of separate generations can come to being friends. Mrs. Shin had dropped her cell phone on the floor of the supermarket when he had told her.

The call had come two hours ago. Now every step she took was like a meditation in the woods, her mind outside her body and her heart refusing her eyes any assistance. What was most troubling wasn’t the death itself. Her mother was an elderly woman. It was the lonely state of her life during her final years and the fact that Mrs. Shin had not been to Jeolla Province to visit her in quite some time, home duties and care for her live-in mother-in-law taking every grain of her energy. She wasn’t even sure her mother knew Hyun Bin was taking the entrance examinations this year. A profound shame and sadness filled her at this thought.

In a numbed state she paced up and down the market stalls, seeing and yet failing to comprehend what it was she was doing here. The urban chaos raged on everywhere around her and yet she was serene in her stupefaction. Alone in a little garden patch, a dolmen high in the summer mists of the Jiri mountains, perhaps she was visiting her father or grandparents or the whole panoply of dead relatives who had preceded her in life and in death. And now she was with her mother, accompanying her, holding her frail and withered frame ever so gently, a guide to the place they had come so many times together in years passed to reflect and to pay their familial respects. Her mother used to let her pick azaleas from the park and put them on her father’s grave when she was a child. Now it was alone she would return down the mountain, leaving the last of her forebears behind beneath the cold country soil.

With a jolt of her head Mrs. Shin shook herself and found she had been staring for some time at a purplish-white specimen, tentacles wrapped around its body like manacles, a tube of muscle with flaps and spots decorating its smooth skin. It was the object she had come for, her happy afternoon goal before receiving the phone call. The cuttlefish lay alongside a small group of its own kind like twin corpses dressed for burial. As she had suspected, they were small. Too small and too few to feed her family of four.

She gave the man at the stall the three-thousand Won for three fish and started back towards the bus stop. After the work of the day and under the cloud of her mother’s death she had decided to go straight home and not finish her dinner shopping. She had made it to sea snails, vegetables, and the three cuttlefish. Her husband would be disappointed. But perhaps, she thought, he will understand after all. And she smiled a little.

Just a Fluke?: Republican and religious opposition to women’s reproductive healthcare laws

The waves of ire are still rolling in over American radio shock-jock Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Georgetown Law School student Sandra Fluke. For three straight days on his show he unleashed a diatribe defiling her name by mixing it with vernacular gems like “whore”, “slut”, “prostitute”, and statements like “she’s having so much sex she’s going broke.” This was all one man’s supposed “opinion” voiced in response to Fluke’s attempt to speak about women’s access to healthcare-provided contraception in a special legislative panel before the House of Representatives. The panel was comprised of all men, most having an affiliation with religious organizations—bishops, imams and the like. She was denied permission to speak on this panel, prompting several Democratic members of the House to walk out in protest during the discussion.

The fact that Sandra Fluke’s testimony didn’t contain anything about her personal need for contraceptives, but was rather a story about a friend of hers whose health insurance didn’t provide the birth-control pills that would have saved her from the disastrous effects of a hormone-related disorder, is interesting but not essential. Also, the fact that Rush Limbaugh, as Rachel Maddow and others pointed out, seemingly doesn’t understand how hormonal birth control works (he seemed to be under the impression that a woman takes a pill EVERY TIME she has sex, which explains to some degree his exasperation that she was running out so quickly) isn’t quite the main problem here either.

The religious institutions who are standing up in opposition to measures which force them to pay for their employees to get contraception through their insurance argue that this is a violation of the rights of religious conscience, of the rights for religious bodies to abstain (so to speak) from going against their own moral teachings. How they have decided which biblical laws to follow and which to ignore is another matter. But the argument is thus: The State cannot impose upon them any requirements which are not in accordance with their morality.

Now before we go any further, let’s just make sure we are on the same page; these are churches we are talking about. They get several allowances from the government, most famous among these being the right to pay zero taxes. However, religious organizations play a huge role in funding and mobilizing political movements and weighing in on hot-button issues. In many cases they go so far as to pour church coffers into one side or the other of a political battle, as many Christian churches did during the Proposition 8 referendum in California which abolished gay marriage.

But that same allowance of not paying any taxes comes with a catch—churches are not to be actively influential in politics. However, it seems that these days this is the primary function of religious organizations. They act as God’s lobbying firm, reaching across all borders to spread theology (and dollars) and concentrate the religious-minded into a single- and simple-minded army of values voters. These pious zombies have in fact congregated in such numbers in one party, the GOP, that some scholars such as Howard Fineman have even suggested that the current Republican Party is the first Religious Party in America.

There is common ground between the religious faithful and the economic libertarian factions in America—they don’t want the fruits of their labors to fund the welfare of others. It’s a classic “what’s mine is mine” mentality. The religious argument is thus: “Our morality forbids us to use condoms and birth-control. Therefore the government is coercing us and infringing on our morals by forcing us to provide contraception for our employees. This is unconstitutional and immoral.”

The economic libertarian argument is more familiar: “The money I make is mine and I don’t want to spend taxes on helping someone with life choices I didn’t sign off on.”

Both of these arguments concern the legality of forced participation. Of course, we are forced to pay taxes of all kinds all the time to fund things we didn’t PERSONALLY sign off on or condone. This is a basic aspect of a representative government. But the heat of the argument has been cranked up (at least recently) on the issue of women’s reproductive health. For the Church it is as if this return to the womb is a never-ending saga; and seeing sexuality as sinful and bad is a theme in American history and in our social makeup that just won’t die.

To me at least it seems strange how little respect the churches have for the vaunted notion of freewill, which is what makes sin possible in the first place. The rule of Law in the U.S. can decree any number of things, horrible or wonderful or banal. The Church will always exist in this sphere of worldliness and both influence it and be influenced by its goings on. In some ways there is an implicit cooperation with any and all laws that exist in the secular society surrounding it. For example, if Congress wages a very unjust war, the congregation will almost certainly (unless they are Quakers or Jains) be made up by people who in some way support the war by tax dollars or even by soldiers who will go to fight and kill innocents in that war. Is this war a direct moral imposition on the Church? If so, then EVERYTHING must be considered as such. However, the members of the churches will acknowledge that they have the freewill to participate directly or not to. That is, they can CHOOSE to go to war or object to it; choose to help politicians who sponsored the war or protest against them, etc. Freewill is at the heart of a moral decision, at least theologically, according to Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. Can’t they apply this distinction to the contraception issue as well? Even if churches are forced to provide their employees with insurance covering birth control pills (I know, it’s SUCH an immoral idea, right?) the women with coverage don’t HAVE to use the pills if they see it as sinful. The temptations of the world abound. Jesus talked about rich and selfish people not getting into heaven, but I don’t see Christians burning money and raging on soapboxes against wealth disparity.

Religious factions seem to be vying to have more public power, to return America to some bygone days where Christianity was the law of the land, even though such a time never existed in American history. At the same time they want exemption from following the laws. In essence, they only want to follow the laws that are Christian, that have been created by them in their image. It is the same as asking for a parallel system of laws, similar to some European societies that tolerate Sharia Law alongside Common Law and Parliamentary Law.

It becomes a huge matter of sovereignty though when crucial issues such as women’s reproductive health are at stake. Who has to follow the rules and who gets to make up their own? And to return to the connection between the “don’t tread on me” libertarians and the “lead us not into temptation” religious folks, the common denominator is about excluding their respective groups from participation in the experiment of social togetherness.

Lest it seem that this essay is a call for everyone to cover everyone else for all their problems, I want to end with some questions and not a call to action. I believe that questions of entitlement programs, welfare, healthcare, wealth disparity, fairness, independence, and the like are all issues that exist for a reason. People do disagree on them vehemently. I DO wish that we could embrace or at least look to other economic models such as those in Canada and Europe regarding government programs. But I will save those arguments for another time. The issues are complex and bear analyzing—to be sure, there are also enormous problems that can arise out of a rampant welfare state.

But the hot-button issue I started with was with Rush Limbaugh, who figures squarely into the “don’t tread on me” camp. Aside from his hateful, intimidating misogynistic language (which though it shouldn’t be ignored doesn’t in itself provide the other side with valid REASONS to put across-the-board coverage of contraception into insurance plans) his ignorance about healthcare and women’s health highlights the more general issue an issue of providing services to people in our society who aren’t like us and whose needs are hard for us to see as worthy of our tax dollars.

Here are some questions and thoughts that come to my mind:

- Regarding socialized medicine and other government initiatives, is it the principle of the thing or the pragmatic value of the policy that’s more important? If offering contraceptives turns out to save our economy money and help fix some aspects of our healthcare system, are the moral objectives valid? Does the end justify the means?

-Rush Limbaugh later compared his buying contraceptives for women to buying running shoes for aspiring athletes. Is this an absurd comparison? Where does entitlement stop and personal obligation begin?

-Do women need to be included among the panel of religious leaders discussing religious objections to birth control? Do these leaders have some kind of authority over what IS religious, or rather just what their particular dogma says about religious precepts?

-Are the extreme conservatives like Rick Santorum straight up crazy when it comes to their views about abortion and contraception?

-Do you think “life begins at conception”? If so, does this necessarily impact laws about abortion? If a fetus is a “life” then isn’t aborting even a rape baby a form of murder? (This is the logical extension that has led Santorum to his outrageous conclusions.)

-Is it part of the definition of a “good society” to create better social welfare laws? Or is society better served by enforcing laws and letting markets be? Can you see any detriments to welfare policies? Examples of systemic welfare state failures? Examples of truly free market societies?

-Are all of these issues moot because the Federal Reserve and a small handful of elite world tycoons control the apparatuses of power and pull the puppet strings to control every negative aspect of domestic and foreign policy we see around us? *painful grimace*

Please weigh in with any thoughts.

Pinnacle Land

Last weekend Kyeol and I took a bus trip to Asan, a medium-sized city two hours south of Seoul. It is touted as the hot springs region of western Korea. We enjoyed spending a few hours at a giant Korean-style spa with the usual warehouse landscape of wading pools and hot-tubs, plus a pretty impressive outdoor circulating track pool that jettisons you along at a relaxing current. It was February and still cold in South Korea, so swimming in warm water with our heads and sometimes torsos exposed to the freezing air makes the spa experience something to remember.

Asan is quite small and so the tourism industry employs a popular trick: making every nominally interesting attraction seem like a destination worth traveling hours to see. In the city brochure were pictures and blurbs about a park around a small manmade lake, a few temples, and some art statues scattered around town. There was also a spot for Pinnacle Land (피니클랜드), a local theme park in the countryside boasting flower gardens and topiaries and dozens upon dozens of white-painted cement statues of cherubic boys and girls frozen nakedly in summertime poses of dancing and jubilation. Not to mention chickens and sheep and rabbits, and even a wedding hall. However, as I mentioned before, it was February. Therefore, the big event at Pinnacle Land was…sledding.

As we got off the bus in what appeared to be rural Indiana, I couldn’t help but notice that, aside from the cow farms, the refurbishing business with a yard full of rusted metal, and some massive steel manufacturing plants far off in the flat fields, there didn’t seem to be any attractions out here. It was just before ten in the morning, and Kyeol assured me that the place opened at ten and yes, it would be open in the winter. (According to the brochure the sledding event ended the next day.)

We walked up a dirt road and saw in the distance a stony peak rising above some nondescript patterns on the hillside. This must be the pinnacle in Pinnacle Land, I reasoned. We paid the 5,000 Won entrance fee and kept walking. I admit that my skepticism was high, but not as high as my pity for the people working at this ghost-town resort. There were literally zero customers and about ten staff members that we could see. When we walked into the café to order breakfast, they saw us and scurried quickly to take our orders, a sure sign that they weren’t expecting anyone. The emptiness presented a good opportunity to tell Kyeol about the scene in the National Lampoon’s “Vacation” when the Griswold family, exhausted and downhearted after crossing the whole country, finally pull into the empty parking lot at Wally World, only to find a cartoon moose stupidly repeating its recorded message that “Wally World is closed for the season”.

My first surprise, however, was at the design and the food inside the main building. There were flowers everywhere, a reflecting pond in front, and even birdsong echoing from the tiny exotic birds in a big cage. We had a pork tenderloin (똔카스) that was quite good with an interesting, crispy breading. (The tenderloins aren’t usually anything to write a home, or to blog, about.) Through the café windows we noticed the handful of visitors that had arrived and were walking up the path with inner tubes to take down the tiny sledding hill.

We spent about an hour going up and down the dirty snowhill in our tubes, feeling like kids with our cold cheeks and wet asses. We decided to explore the rest of the modest park. In Korea, in the thick of the winter, it seems that Christmas is still THE guiding symbol, as Halloween is representative of all autumn, starting from late August until mid-November. A giant Santa Claus statue greeted us on the main path. There were banners draped on poles streaked with winter dirt that proclaimed “Merry Christmas!” It was quaint and added to my allowance of pity for the place,

It was while walking on the brick and stone paths that wind up the sides of the hill that we noticed the absence of the flowers. On brown and dead stems and leafless trunks hung tags with colorful pictures of lilacs and forsythias, violets and roses. I felt like a person wearing sunglasses in an art gallery, taking off my brownly tinted view of the surrounding nature and realizing the potential beauty of the place in the warm and sunny seasons. Immediately the park transformed itself for me. Instead of statues and promenades and sculptures ruling over dry plant corpses, I imagined a verdant wall of ivy and trees, a jungle of colorful flowers from which peaked out pieces of human-made art, limbs of bronze and silver turbines spinning in the warm wind. The place became beautiful for its possibility to contain life.

From the top of the hill, the peaked Pinnacle, we could see the whole park. We looked even further down onto thousands of acres of flat, brown farmland. This farmland might also be green in summer. But the loving care that had gone into this mountain—the landscaping, the earth-pushing, the installation of giant metal wind-sculptures and tunnels of foliage and park benches and water gardens atop this quaint and lovely garden park—the splendid hybrid of nature and artistic functionality must be more beautiful than the well-tilled crop field that showed its beauty only in its yield.

This park snuck up on me in the way that many public spaces do in Korea. They are generally not grand, not so grand as those found in grander countries like China, Germany or the United States. Nor are they as pure and harmonious as the rock gardens and works of nature-bound architecture one sees everywhere in Japan. An “attraction” in Korea often seems to mean “a place where everyone goes to visit”, at least once. Sometimes they are heavily populated theme parks like LotteWorld or Everland. Other places, like the picturesque Nami Island in Chuncheon or even the countless small cafes tucked into side streets of large cities, offer a more personal view of what a public space should be.

For Westerners some spaces in Korea may seem a bit farcical, laughable in their attempted recreation of Western themes, foods, customs, expressions and pastimes. We see it as a superficial (and often strangely conceived) attempt at our culture. And sometimes we can see these cultural spaces as only a half-hearted attempt at entertainment. A space strikes us as inauthentic because it lacks many of the qualities we are used to in “the real thing” back home. Extra-curricular activities, “Fusion food” restaurants, playgrounds, parks, “live cafes”, beer hofs. These are a few of the things I’ve found in Korea that I admit to not finding fully convincing, as imitating another way of life that fails to capture its essence.

But on so many occasions I have been misled by absurd expectations. If the context is entirely different, how can I expect the presentation to be “right”? What seems important is that a space or activity achieve its goal of providing a diversion, a unique vantage, an escape into nature or into another culture—however self-deluding that “escape” may be. In our own cultures we find cultural pastiches all the time—Chinese restaurants in America, Karaoke in England, feng shui in our living rooms—but we rarely fault them for being less than authentic. We enjoy them for what they give us in our own delineated cultural context.

And what is even more important, it seems to me, is to recognize the gesture being made. At Pinnacle Land I found my initial pity being transformed into one of endearment and sentimentality. On reflecting about the work that so many hands put into this project; on seeing the fun that can be had on a slightly sloping piece of mountain in the middle of a boring countryside; on flying down the ice hill with my girlfriend again and again, and again and again, like small children from any culture, racing to the top just to go down again, I started not only to see the charm in such a place but to actually feel real joy in throwing myself fully into the modest activity the space provided.

When a space is faithfully created with passion and love, and when this space is used and enjoyed by even a small number of people, any space can provide an authentic experience.