JEJU-DO—Coincident with the US beef kerfuffle sizzling in South Korean politics right now, I’ve been learning a lot about barbecue, through marathon grill-out sessions with my American friend Mark, his trusty portable Weber and his copy of grill maestro Stephen Raichlen’s fat BBQ bible, How to Grill.

According to Raichlen, when cooking beef, the ideal setup is to have a so-called “three-zone fire”—a situation in which the charcoal is distributed such that one area of the grill is super hot (for searing), one medium hot (for through cooking) and one cool (for when you need to save the meat from immolation). What can now be confidently called the political crisis in South Korea, spurred by US beef imports, has put SK’s president-for-now Lee Myung-bak squarely over the hot zone of the metaphorical grill, and the question now is how long he can burn before he has to jump off completely.

Lee’s main problem is that the cool zone is currently occupied by hundreds of thousands of protesters hungry for his downfall. Last week, as many as 700,000 people gathered in Seoul to express their continuing discontent with Lee’s decision to stand firm on resuming beef imports from the US. If you think George W. Bush has seen some rough times in office, consider Lee, who managed barely five months in office before clocking an approval rating below 20 percent. Congrats, big guy. The heat has intensified this month, with the nation recognizing a series of significant and sensitive anniversaries connected to the issue.

The first and most important is the anniversary of South Korea’s pro-democracy movement, which in 1987 basically dragged the country out of decades of military rule into the era of free elections. Back then, the villain was Chun Doo-hwan, the army general who seized power in 1979, in what was at the time termed “a coup in all but name” by American government officials. (This according to Don Oberdorfer’s excellent book, The Two Koreas, which I recommend to anyone with an interest in Korean history.) Chun’s eight years in office saw the country grow economically but remain mired in the political fog of dictatorship, and produced one of the most tragic episodes of SK’s postwar history: the Gwangju massacre of 1980, in which a standoff between protesters and military special forces escalated into violence that saw the city of Gwangju cut off and at least 240 civilians killed. (The number quoted by Gwangju residents is purportedly much higher). In June, 1987, with the Seoul Olympics approaching—an event of huge importance to Korea at the time, just as the Beijing Games are for China—opponents of the Chun regime saw a meaty opportunity to air their grievances in full view of the world.

The resultant protests, which culminated in around 1.8 million people taking to the streets on June 26 of that year, forced Chun to admit his rule was untenable without the use of suppressive force. He subsequently stepped aside, thereby allowing South Korea’s first democratic elections to take place (conveniently, his old military buddy, Roh Tae-woo, walked away with the vote). The movement is widely recognized as a founding moment in modern South Korean history, and it’s not surprising that its aromas are wafting up amid the civil discontent currently searing the same Seoul streets. The second significant anniversary, which fell on June 13, is of a 2002 incident that also sparked anti-American protests in the South Korean capital: the accidental killing of two Korean schoolgirls by a US military vehicle. Reports in the Korean (and international) media have protesters linking that event with the current fuss, recalling that the fallout from the girls’ deaths gave then-presidential hopeful Roh Moo-hyun a platform on which to campaign in the name of tougher relations with Washington—contrasted with Lee, who is now being accused by many of being the White House’s lapdog. (Some protesters have even equated him with the infamous politician Lee Wan-yong, who signed the paper turning Korea into a Japanese colony—a move that resulted in decades of brutal colonial rule.)

Several commenters have suggested that, in my previous post, I failed to cut to the bone of the beef matter by not explicitly declaring the public health issue surrounding mad cow disease to be a sham, a farce, an offence to science. Although somewhat surprised at the criticism—since that’s what I was getting at by examining the deeper issues of anti-Americanism and chronic distrust of leaders—I can see the point; I didn’t go much below the crust of specious claims about a possible health catastrophe, largely because I figure most people outside of Korea already believe that mad cow is not a major threat to any country’s survival. That said, I can’t claim total innocence—I’ve had my bit of fun with the beef scare. A recent classroom assignment called on my students to make posters, and when they all shouted that they wanted to make propaganda posters denouncing US beef—“Crazy cow! Crazy cow!”—I didn’t object, because I thought the results would be amusing. And they were (see below), although the lesson was not without its frustrations. I learned, for example, that “know your enemy” isn’t a guiding philosophy for hysterical eleven-year-olds, with whom I had a ferocious argument in trying to convince them that the American flag was not, in fact, red, white, blue and yellow (and argument, you may note, that I lost).

My bit of classroom mischief aside, it’s worth pointing out that, given the current situation, telling a huge mass of people who are out to have your head marinated in American blood and branded with crosshatch grillmarks, “You know, you guys are being really fuckin’ stupid,” isn’t exactly what I’d call a savvy or useful political manoeuvre. But the health issue, and particularly how it connects to anti-Americanism, does warrant a closer look. As an astute friend of mine pointed out, even though plenty of people are aware of the absurdity of the public health argument, it hasn’t stopped the media from latching onto it, or the government from embracing it.

The reasons for this go all the way down to the worldwide perception of the United States, and the States’ perception of the rest of the world. Of the things that makes a first-world country, perceived freedom from scary communicable diseases is paramount: America is not just America the Beautiful and America the Free, but America the Clean. Although the US is doing a fine job of developing new, fundamentally American diseases, no one dies from malaria in Kansas, no one has SARS in Mississippi, and the demon chickens scourging the world with H5N1 have thus far been resolutely turned away at US customs. Trade embargo based on unsafe goods has often been a North American luxury. The mad cow “scare” is one of the few chances the rest of the world has had to wave a red flag at the US—to call out the world’s global autoclave for harboring infection within its airtight borders. This applies to both common citizens, who love nothing better than to point out America’s shortcomings (just ask a Canadian), and to politicians, for whom the spectre of the Crazy Cow is one of the few points of power they hold against the world’s political and economic goliath.

Even for a government like Lee’s, which is seeking stronger ties with Washington and sees the KORUS deal as a policy coup, it’s always good to have some way to say, “Whoa, hold up—is that shit under your fingernails? Gross! We’re friends and all, but you should probably get that cleaned up before we shake hands.” Free trade with the United States has often seen the advantage tip in Washington’s favour—see the softwood lumber dispute—and it’s natural for a government to seize on any bargaining chip they can find in trying to strike a balance between economic interests, political strategy, domestic popularity, and simple pride. For Lee, however, the game might be up—or rather, his time in the Blue House over(and)done. He can’t pull the beef deal off the table, but he’s fast becoming the most unpopular Korean politician since Chun Doo-hwan. He’s already at risk of losing his entire cabinet, all of whom have offered to resign in an attempt to try and calm the flames of public discontent. And now, in addition to the beef debacle, he’s got to deal with an unrelated nationwide truckers’ strike (which probably deserves its own post, but I can’t think of enough stupid truck metaphors to make it fly).

His best bet now is probably what this article calls “vigil fatigue”—people getting tired of protesting, thinking how much less stressful it would be to go out and have some galbi and a few bottles of soju, or to drag the little Weber out to the beach for a cookout, and letting the slow digestion of political passion take care of the problem. But in a country in which, just over twenty years ago, protest was successful in bringing about a monumental, historic shift in national politics, it’s just as likely that protesters will keep the coals burning until Lee drips through the grate to his political demise. And will that be such a tragedy? Some will say yes—that it’s regrettable for a man who was elected by a majority to be forced from office over a scientific misunderstanding, or for a president with an economic focus to be denied the opportunity to follow one of his major policy promises through free trade with the globe’s economic overlord. Me? I say no, not a tragedy, and not just because I think Lee looked ridiculous throwing the Korean “I heart you” gesture during his campaign.

Whether or not you agree with the anger of the Korean citizenry (and it’s not just the people on the streets of Seoul who are pissed), there’s something to be said for the feisty democratic spirit on display. These days, North American democracies don’t have much to do with the old “by the people, for the people” adage. As Mark Slouka points out in the latest issue of Harper’s, “[Americans] seem to believe that the issue of governance is beyond [their] provenance.” He laments the culture of subjection and loyalty that demands one treat the country’s democratically elected leader not just with respect, but with reverence, and the ways in which the President has morphed into a king whose job is not to listen to concerns, but to receive supplicants: “Consider the extent to which [the President] is scripted, buffered, coddled,” Slouka writes, “the extent to which his audiences are screened to assure that they consist of cheerleaders whose ‘questions’ are nothing more than praise shaped in the form of a question, or who don’t even both with the interrogative form and, like one woman at a Bush ‘rally,’ walk up to the microphone and say things like ‘my heroes have always been cowboys,’ then sit down to thunderous applause.”

I might also call attention to the Harper government’s similar fondness for distance from the plebeian masses, for treating questions from the media as irritations, for slipping controversial amendments that push their own social ideology into budgets intended to outline the country’s financial plans. The anger marbling the current South Korean political landscape is, if nothing else, a refreshing reminder of what democracy is supposed to allow the people to do.

Whether or not you agree with their reasoning, if a majority of South Korean voters are steamed enough at Lee Myung-bak to demand his resignation—if they feel that he is threatening their safety, or their livelihood, or their democratic rights—their opinion should be respected. That’s democracy—at least much moreso than the opposite scenario, in which a country’s leader, bent on branding the nation with his vision at all costs, disregards the voice of the citizenry, acts as if his decisions are beyond public reproach, and deigns to tell people that their fears will only be considered valid if they happen to match the administration’s foreign policy agenda. Whether it’s bad meat or bad trade, or bad vibes towards America or the president that have South Koreans in a snit, it’s nice to see people asserting their right to claim the government as their own, not ceding the idea that it belongs to the official they chose to represent them, and doing what they feel is necessary to bring about change they want—scraping, as it were, the grime from the political grill.

If protest still had that kind of power in North America, and especially the United States, my guess is that the last seven or eight years would have been a rather different cut of history. In closing, I make a sincere promise to you not to follow up this post with one called “To Beef or Not to Beef,” and to generally avoid all meat-related language from here on in. In fact, it’s a promise I’ll steak my reputation on. If I renege, I fully expect to be lambasted by my readers—or at least be given a good solid ribbing.

Tags: beef, international, korea

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Posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 10:27 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.