Dwayne Monroe says:
>I won't even go into South Korea's Left.
JG replies:
Do, please do. I could research this on my own but you're a perspicacious fella and I'm interested in your insights. My shredded memory is whispering to me that about 10 years ago it looked like the independent labor movement and radical environmental critics of South Korean GDP'ism were on the verge of forming a red-green bloc with tantalizing possibilities, the crisis of 97-98 opening a breach. Now after the inking of the US-S Korean FTA and the latest election it seems that "neo-liberalism" (sic, I'm not sure I find that a useful concept anymore) is in the ascendant. What happened, did five years of fuzzy wuzzy Third Wayism under Roh Moo-hyun co-opt and fatally weaken the reds and greens? In Summer 2004 I attended an academic conference in Seoul populated by vaguely progressive types and almost all the presentations were peppered with civil society and NGO mush-talk. I got a sinking feeling...
While we're on the topic, nothing to me signifies the dyad of enchanting prospects and mundane realities in S Korea like taking a trans-Pacific KAL flight. En route you get to watch amazing cinema on your personal video screen by auteurs like Lee Chang-dong (Oasis, Miryang) but once you disembark in Incheon international you're confronted with dispiriting luxury boutique mania (which of course afflicts all the metropoles of Northeast Asia).
Speaking as someone who has spent considerable time in Northeast Asia these last, oh, six-and-a-half years, but who speaks none of the languages fluently and is more or less unfamiliar with all of the cultures (as opposed to the political economies), I'll toss in a garden variety "insight" (if it can be called that) I stumbled upon recently: in no other region on planet earth does one encounter existing side by side multiple polities that have continuously been around for millenia. Hence, in Northeast Asia moreso than anywhere else does nationalism (yes, a modern construct, but still...) possess a material basis, rather than being a mere "imagined community." Then overlaid on top of this pervasive and deeply felt nationalism is its putative opposite -- the juggernaut of pseudo-cosmopolitan consumer culture, so potent in Northeast Asia that it puts to the lie to stupid and provincial US lefties who still think there is something exceptionally grotesque about US consumer culture. It makes for a real mindfrick!
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