McCain’s generation

Watching a CNN special on John McCain yesterday I was reminded of my grandfather and a conversation I had with him shortly before he passed away. He had been trying to read Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, but ultimately gave it up because, as he said, “it wasn’t for his generation.”

Seeing friends, acquaintances, and fellow soldiers recall the young McCain, I couldn’t help but think of my grandpa, an East Coaster who for decades ran a successful business on Wall Street, a Renaissance man of the Twentieth Century. He just couldn’t (or wouldn’t) wrap his head around a book sub-titled A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, about a new global era and how it came to be.

My grandfather taught me a great deal. He had deeply ingrained values that made him a respected and admired person in whatever circles he found himself in, and I take those lessons to heart. But he was also a man of his time, and though he tried to blend into this new century, his spirit was forever a part of the past. 

No doubt McCain was a valorous soldier and an honorable man, but he is a man of another era, like my grandfather shaped by a world that in many ways is far different than the one towards which we are now heading.

Only in America

Yesterday as people in my office in downtown Seoul gathered around the TV to watch Obama deliver his speech in Denver, a colleague from Sudan turned to me and said, a smile playing on the corners of his mouth, “who would ever have suspected that 49 years ago an African man in Kenya would father the next president of the United States. Only in America.”

Korea’s emotional logic

   

Performer

There’s a communication barrier separating Koreans and Westerners that goes well beyond language. It’s a gulf that lies at the core of how we view the world, and often prevents any kind of mutual understanding. For the majority of us Westerners logic forms the basis of our understanding. If it doesn’t stand up to reason than it’s hard to justify. In Korea, as the recent beef protests have shown, emotion stands in logic’s place.

Headlines

A quick tour of headlines from the Korean press:

Obama calls for closer ties with S. Korea…
The Korea Herald
I’m assuming not through an FTA agreement.

Related story: North Korea endorses Obama

 In Mongolia, sex tourism leads to anti-Korean sentiment
The Hankyoreh
The South Korean embassy in Mongolia said, “Sex tourism is undermining the image of South Korea and its people.”

NK killing called intentional
The Daily NK
North Korea’s handling of the shooting of a SK tourist is leading some to suspect intentional provocation.

Japanese Condom Ad Falls Victim to Dokdo Dispute
The Korea Times
They even give the size of the… ads.

US beef and Obama’s religion

Obama on the current New Yorker

The current cover of the New Yorker depicts Senator Obama draped in bin-Ladenesque robes, bumping fists with his wife, an afro-centric Michelle, M-16 strapped across her back. In the fireplace burns an American flag, the image of what a ridiculously large percentage of Americans believe will happen should Obama win the White House.

According to CNN, the internet plays a large roll in helping to generate these rumors, which feed on existing fears and ignorance. With this in mind, it helps shed light on how Koreans whole-heartedly accepted rumors over the dangers of US beef, rumors that helped spark nationwide protests. 

Those protests received widespread criticism, dismissing the protesters as gullible, uneducated, or plain stupid. Yet the same forces that convince Americans that Obama is a Muslim are to blame in Korea. Irresponsible media and a flourishing trade in idiocy over the internet. 

From this side of the Pacific, what the New Yorker cover shows is that, on both sides there are plenty of people willing to believe the wildest things. Korea and the US are not that different after all.

Related story

Commemorating the 4th

Below is part of the text and a link to the accompanying video by some talented friends back home in San Francisco who write and produce for New America Media. Very relevant for the 4th. Take a look:

Strength, Resilience and Tradition

Just outside a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, a young man with a troubled past returns home to reconnect with ancient family and tribal values.

WHITE HORSE, N.M. – They live in two tumbledown shacks without basic plumbing or telephone service; barn fowl and dogs wander the yard strewn with broken-down cars and old furniture. None of the six adults in the family has a steady job, and the whole family often depends on $637 a month in government assistance. Two children take a daily dose of medicine for epilepsy and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Sometimes, with no money left, they go days without food.

The life of 19-year-old Roderick Thomas and his extended Navajo family of 12 in White Horse, New Mexico—a wide-open and desolate town about 250 miles northwest of Albuquerque—is plagued with unemployment, poverty and disease, problems many American Indians on and off of reservations experience.

But these miseries fail to break them. As brutal winds and a blazing sun form deserts and rocks into eloquent shapes, the harsh conditions of their lives have forced them to cling more fiercely to their family and culture, proving the resilience of both.