The Enduring Loon Endures

I've written here before of Huh Kyung-Young, far and away the most, um, interesiting politician in South Korea. As a recap, though, here is the opening sentence from a Joong-Ang Daily feature on him from early 2008: "Huh Kyung-young, who claims he has an IQ of 430, supernatural powers and is perfectly sane, ran in the presidential election last month, his third unsuccessful bid to get into the Blue House."

Always pushing those outer limits of that sanity, however, Huh has now embarked upon a career as a rap singer and dancer. If there wasn't video, I wouldn't have believed it either, so thank the good lord for Naver Video (skip to about 1:00 for singing and dancing). Don't worry that it's in Korean; the language of oddities such as this is universal.

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The Untold Riches of a Pooter

Been a long time, eh?

Between coursework, research and running the day-to-day affairs of Djibouti, I've had no spare time to fulfill my daily, monthly or, hell, even annual quotas at this once-esteemed institution. And what's more, I have recently stumbled into a new business endeavor that has in recent weeks taken up almost twenty minutes of my time.

Being the only American at KDI, I have by default become the exclusive importer of an item known as "The Pooter" (see video above), created by a fellow from California named Jack Vale. Think of it as the next generation of the Whoopee Cushion, the best friend a ten year-old boy ever had...until now. The Pooter - and please pardon the pun and cliche - blows the Whoopee Cushion away.

As readers of this site will know (if any readers remain), I have a fascination with trifles - that is, the seemingly worthless crap on which people choose to spend their time and hard-earned money. As I wrote last year about Bumper Nuts, you can tell a lot about a society by its toys and knick-knacks. So say what you will about financial crises and the purported shrinking of the American middle class,¹ but any country that can afford to produce and consume Pooters and Bumper Nuts is wealthy beyond the dreams of past generations. Even Kubla Khan, in his stately pleasure dome, didn't have such things - and it wasn't because he didn't see the humor in them. Everyone, in my experience, thinks flatulence and scrotums are funny.

We take for granted that nearly everyone in the United States, at all income levels, is wealthy enough to outsource their laundry to a machine and food production to ConAgra, and now we as a society have become so rich that we don't even have to break our own wind anymore.



Notes______________

¹ And anyway, writes George Will: "Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 -- because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled, from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. 'So,' Rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder.'"

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More Proxy Posting

Being short on time these days (as if you hadn't noticed), I've sunk to allowing others to do my posting for me. Fortunately, those others happen to be, as in my previous post, PJ O'Rourke and, in this case, George Will.

The following is Will's talk at the presentation of the 2006 Friedman Prize (named in honor of Milton), given every two years by the Cato Institute.

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Return, With PJ

I know, I know: this post spells the end of the longest hiatus in the otherwise storied history of this particular outpost. And I promise I'll be better at this posting thing from here on out. Wait, no, I don't promise any such thing, but I will try.

For now, though, PJ O'Rourke - one of my personal heroes - seems to be as a good a way to return to posting as any. Here he is recently at the Australian National Press Club:

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The Defense of the Indefensible

Bloggingheads posted a fascinating conversation (see video above) over the weekend between Mark Leon Goldberg of UN Dispatch and Kevin Jon Heller of Opinio Juris. Heller, an American law professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, is currently involved as an advisor to the defense of Radovan Karadžić, the accused Bosnian Serb war criminal, in Karadžić's trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. For those of you not old enough to remember the 1990s, Karadžić is allegedly the man behind the massacre at Srebrenica in 2005, in which 7,500 men and boys from the area were killed.

Not surprisingly, Heller has come in for some criticism for his decision to be involved in any way whatsoever with the defense of a man like Karadžić (who, like Slobodan Milošević, is representing himself). Heller, however, answers his critics by saying that part of what defines liberal, democratic cultures is the belief that even an accused monster deserves a fair trial. As brutal and despised as Saddam Hussein was, his trial and subsequent execution at the hands of a jeering lynch mob did not sit well with people around the world who value a judicial system based on law rather than revenge. Having said this, though, Heller, citing his Jewish heritage as a conflict of interest, goes on to say that he would not have represented Adolph Hitler had the Führer not offed himself in the waning days of World War II.

And how, you're no doubt wondering, does any of this relate to Korea?

Let's say North Korean leader Kim Jong-il somehow finds himself in a jail cell at the International Criminal Court in The Hague later this year. And imagine that you're a criminal defense attorney. Would you represent him?

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Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Trifles

Perhaps the greatest evidence of the economic prosperity enjoyed in Korea is the ability of the country's citizens to pursue the most puzzling and seemingly pointless pursuits. As evidence, I offer the case of Kim Sun-Ok, a South Korean housewife who recently broke the world record for marathon singing by belting out tunes for more than 76 hours straight at a local karaoke bar. Via Perth Now and the AFP:

She started singing at 11.14am local time on Thursday and sang a total of 1,283 tunes before she gave up at 3.21pm on Saturday following her family's appeal for her to quit for the sake of her health, it said.

Under Guinness World Record regulations, she was given 30-second breaks between songs and five-minute breaks every hour. She was also barred from singing any song she had already sung less than four hours earlier.

I emphasize that Ms. Kim is a homemaker in a country where women traditionally performed the great bulk of housework - cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and everything in between and on the edges. In the past, if a woman worked before marriage, she would typically quit that job after the nuptuals and stay at home to raise the kids and keep the homefront in order, a full-time job and then some that had her working long hours.

Slowly, though, as the world and then Korea became more prosperous, the formerly backbreaking routine of a housewife (doing laundry by hand, for instance) gave way to an "outsourced" life: the laundry to a machine, for example, or the food prep to restaurants and department stores. Add to this a declining birthrate that has also returned a fair chunk of time to your average ajumma's day and what Korean cities are left with is roving packs of bored, middle-aged women, always on the prowl for some way to fill their time.

All of which has given Korea's housewives the time and energy to head down to the noraebang and act the diva for 76 hours without stopping. Show me the Korean housewife of 30 years ago who had the time for such shenanigans.

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Networked Minutiae

I was born in 1979, which puts me in the final generation to remember what life was like before the internet and cell phones and the other assorted technology that has made our lives so much easier and more interesting. Hell, our family even owned a black-and-white television. As a result, I often feel that I appreciate the wonders of our modern world more than, say, folks who were born after about 1985 and who thus never had to learn how to use a library card catalogue or miss a phone call because the only phone they had was mounted on the wall in their kitchen.

The flipside of having a toe-tip in ancient times, however, is that I am simply unable to see the attraction in many of the latest applications of all this new technology. As this site attests, I appreciate the impact - both potential and realized - of blogs, and photo sites like Flickr are truly a marvel. But I have yet to see a good explanation for the popularity of Twitter, and while in theory I see the attraction of Facebook, I find that I can't read the status updates of more than two friends without wanting to yell, "who the hell cares how many songs you just loaded onto your iPod or what color of socks you're wearing?"

If these social networking sites allow us to be more connected than ever before, they also remind me of why, in the past, I resisted being more connected than I already was: online, just as much as offline, the minutiae of other people's lives is boring and I take offense when they imply, via their Facebook status updates, that I might be interested. My life may not be a thrillride but it's not so bad that I have to care about what you're drinking right now.

These sites do, however, show just how slick a lot of people are at marketing, particularly at marketing themselves. With a site like Facebook, a person can portray himself exactly as he wishes to be seen: no dandruff, no dirty dishes in the sink, no smut under the mattress, no penis stuck in the bathtub drain again. One thing’s for sure, though: Facebook doesn’t make a loser any less pathetic, as evidenced by all the invitations I initially got from the same people to join “Siamese Zombie” groups.

What’s most amazing to me is that a concept as simple as Facebook could be so goddamned successful, or that they could actually charge money for some of things on offer, such as JPG images of a jalapeno pepper for $1 that you can then give to your friend (this - not surprisingly - seems to have disappeared). I’m forever surprised at what people will pay for, and even more at the fact that I couldn’t have thought of charging them for it before someone else did.

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Back to Basics

Today's issue of the IHT has a fascinating article by Su-hyun Lee on the adjustment of North Korean defectors to life in South Korea. After years of peddling their "North Korea as Communist Shangri-la" myth, the regime conceded some time ago that, yes, South Koreans have the better standard of living of the two countries, a level of prosperity they have attained by selling their souls to imperialistic occupiers from the United States. A lot of defectors, then, arrive in South Korea expecting that their lives will be a featherbed of delights, only to be sorely disappointed:

After she defected here from North Korea in 2006, Ahn Mi Ock was shocked to learn that most South Koreans lived in small apartments and had to struggle to buy one.

Ahn, 44, had fully expected that once in the South she would enjoy the same luxurious lifestyle portrayed in the television dramas she had watched on smuggled DVDs. It had not occurred to her that the fashionably dressed characters sipping Champagne in the gardens of stylishly furnished houses were not, well, average South Koreans.

For my part, I've long been fascinated by the exposure of North Korean defectors to the outside world and to a semblance of reality. Due to the regime's near-monopoly on information in North Korea, many citizens have never heard of, much less used, basic ideas and technologies that we take for granted every day. When they arrive in South Korea, defectors generally spend three months in a government-run "reeducation" center - ideological detox, if you will - in an attempt to gain a basic understanding of how a market functions and how to conduct one's daily life in such a system. Three months, though, is scarcely time enough to learn the things that the rest of us have absorbed for our entire lives. To that end, other programs have been established:

To alleviate their confusion, a Newspaper in Education program to encourage young people to read was introduced a year ago at Setnet High School, an alternative school for North Korean defectors. There, they can ask an instructor to explain concepts they encounter in newspaper pages.

"What is business and sales?" asked Park Jeong Hyang, 18, during a Setnet class.

"Amateur? Is that something to do with sports?" asked Mah Gwang Hyuck, 23.

"Can you explain what marketing is again?" asked Kim Su Ryun, 18.

Where to begin?

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