‘Flood the Zone with Shit and Howling’. Lessons from North Korea
Sometimes, I’m grateful to North Korea for helping me to see more clearly what’s happening in the world more generally. In this case, their ‘noise-bombing’ and balloon sending has helped me understand President Trump.
Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War?
I borrow today’s post title from a scary recent article (January 11th) by North Korea experts Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker on the respected website 38 North. In the first paragraph the authors write:: ‘The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950. That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war. We do not know when or how Kim plans to pull the trigger, but the danger is already far beyond the routine warnings in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang’s “provocations.” In other words, we do not see the war preparation themes in North Korean media appearing since the beginning of last year as typical bluster from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.’
The end of the year (or one of them)
Some thoughts on the end of the (or a) year in South Korea, and the bizarre calendar adopted by my neighbors north of the DMZ.
Decay
The picture above was snapped recently while out walking the dog. What you see is a detail of a metal signboard that has been corroded and invaded by ivy tendrils. How long has it undergone this attrition? Difficult to say, but probably not that long. But the only reason it’s there is because it belongs to an abandoned property, and no one has gotten round to removing it. One reason I took the photograph is because It’s unusual to find such beautifully worn surfaces here in South Korea. Everything looks new, that is, without history. Why is this? This questions is especially interesting for me because I really find that such surfaces carrying the random textures of time very poignant and aesthetically pleasing. Koreans, on the whole, don’t seem to have an aesthetic sensibility attuned to enjoying such time-textured surfaces. Why?
Mimicking America
Today is Halloween, and here in South Korea young people will be celebrating. But why?
MBTI. Some more thoughts
Some more thoughts on the MBTI craze in Korea, and its relationship to modernization in general.
Korea goes crazy for MBTI
Last week in class, one of my students mentioned how Koreans her age (the so-called MZ Generation) are seriously into MBTI – the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality assessment test. As I soon discovered on trawling the Internet, MBTI is practically an obsession amongst the young here in Korea. Why?
