- So, I woke up in the morning, and Park Won-soon was still the mayor-elect. Check that—he’s already showing up for work, so he’s just the mayor, period. Took the subway into work, too.
- Basically, nobody under 50 voted for Na Kyung-won. A look at the electoral map also reveals that only four districts voted for Na—the three Gangnam districts of Seocho-gu, Gangnam-gu and Songpa-gu, along with Yongsan-gu.
- With 10 years of GNP rule in Seoul broken, expect some changes in the way the city is run. Now, as somebody who thinks the quality of life in Seoul has improved quite significantly over the last 10 years, I’m not sure if this is a good thing. That said, if you thought some of the 전시행정 projects were wasteful, you’ve got cause to celebrate…perhaps. Among the things that will likely get shitcanned are:
- The reconstruction of the Yanghwa Bridge. Would have been nicer if the project had been stopped before 31.8 billion won of the 41.5 billion won project had been spent.
- The “Hangang Renaissance” in general. Personally, I think reintegrating the river into public life is a good thing and would markedly improve the quality of life, even if some of the projects associated with the Hangang Renaissance, like the planned opera house complex on Nudeulseom, were clearly unnecessary.
- He might drop the plan to build a canal linking the West Sea and the Hangang River, too. Again, with the Gyeongin Ara Waterway almost completed—test cruises will begin two days from now—I don’t quite know what he plans to do with the big, water-filled ditches in the ground.
- Basically, look for a lot of civil engineering projects to stop. Instead, the money will be used to, in the words of the Kyunghyang Shinmun (link to come later), “substantively improve” the quality of life of Seoul residents. Most notably, we can expect the free school lunch program to go into effect immediately, and look for more aggressive welfare initiatives from the city.
- Just as a closing editorial comment, I think Park might be fine as mayor—no, I don’t like his politics, and I’m certainly distrustful of the people with whom he has associated—but assuming he focuses on running the city rather than fighting with Cheong Wa Dae or taking up national issues like US beef, the KORUS FTA, USFK and North Korea policy, etc., the change might do the city some good. At any rate, when you screw the pooch as badly as former mayor Oh Se-hoon did—frankly, the most mind-boggingly stupid own goal I’ve seen in my time following Korean politics—the GNP needed to pay a price. And it did. Big time.
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That is, if you think moving hordes of “civil society” activists on to the govt
payrolltit, a la DJ and the Great Pretender Roh, constitutes improving the livelihood of the peopleAnd given the salutary distrust for the people Park has associated with and on whom perforce he will have to depend to run things, i.e, Chung Dumb Young, et al., how likely is that really?
An academic tidbit:
The 58th Kyujanggak colloquium will take place next Thursday Nov. 3, at 12:30. The speaker will be Stephen Epstein (Victoria Univ. of Wellington), and the topic of his presentation
“Daughter of the Wind: The Travel Writing of Han Bi-ya”
Venue: Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies (building 103. Seoul National University), seminar room (ground floor)
ABSTRACT
This paper considers the early works of travel writer Han Bi-ya as a set of texts that provide valuable insight into Korean society in the final years of the twentieth century. Writing under the nickname “daugher of the wind” (baram ui ttal), Han first caught the attention of the South Korean public in in the mid-1990s, and her best-selling books combined exuberant accounts of backpacking around the globe with engaging reflections inspired by her travel experience. Most importantly here, her four-volume opus Baram ui ttal: georeoseo jigu sebakwiban (Daughter of the Wind: Three and a Half Times Around the World on Foot) articulate a discourse of knowledge about the world and Korea’s evolving place within it. In her writings Han established a persona that, in capturing the imagination of many, has led to her status as both an important role model and a leading female public intellectual in Korea. As this paper argues, however, although Han broke ground in both her methods of acquiring and disseminating knowledge and her frequently fresh viewpoint, she maintains continuity with nationalist Korean discourse. Indeed, her regular emphasis upon her subjectivity as a Korean woman reflects both a productive tension and growing complimentarity between cosmopolitan outlook and nationalist sentiment, a phenomenon that has been salient throughout Korean society in recent years.
It is quite interesting to watch the electorate of the Republic of Korea careen ever more rapidly toward the social-welfare state model, the hallmark characteristics of which Korea heretofore has not had all that much, at the very moment that the social-welfare state model is proving itself to be an albatross around the necks of the “advanced economies”.
The only way a person could watch the current troubles in the advanced economies and say I’d like some of that! is if he had been rendered insensate by years of socialist indoctrination. Nice work, Korean Teachers’ Union.
One assumes “substantively improv[ing]” the quality of life of Seoul residents includes continued support for that splendid publication: Seoul Magazine. You can’t eat them for lunch, but they are free.
Well, they’re not free, actually, although obviously, you can get a limited number of copies for free at locations throughout the city. Thanks for the “splendid” part, though—our production and design teams work hard on it.
You sure it’s the “welfare state model” that’s the problem, or the unprecedented levels of wealth concentration in the hands of a tiny minority? (Personally, I think it’s a combination of both, but what do I know?)
Anyway, it’s all pretty predictable stuff from your end, I must say.
What I don’t understand (and I’ve really, really tried), is how wealthy people (you know, the Gangnam GNP base and the self-professed rich foreign lawyer-types) can muster so much outrage at the idea that poor 7 and 8-year-olds are getting free lunch – worth a whopping $1 a day!
The lunches deal will cost 90 million a year more than the alternative proposal (from an annual budget of 20 billion). Small change, in other words, unless you’re a penny-pinching Scrooge who can’t stand the idea of a child from a poor family getting a ladle of soup and a cup of rice a day.
Personally, I think it’s a very good day for the ROK – shows that young Koreans have compassion for their fellow citizens and aren’t all shallow, greedy, mean, selfish cunts.
It shows.
I intend to send a strongly worded letter to Mayor Park in favor of full subsidization. The English language educational demands of the people require no less.
Hojo, I believe the GNP wanted to provide free lunches to low-income families. Am I wrong about this? (I happen to in favour of free lunches to all children, btw, even if I really don’t like the looks of Park).
@Brendan Carr: No, It looks like the Western model where two moderate parties tangle for a handful of voters on the margins, but don’t substantively steer away from a pro-market ideology.
Yu Bum Suk, my understanding is that about 11 percent of Seoul kids already get free lunches, the issue was whether or not to universalize as you support. GNP and Oh had various proposals, in the end they fought like crazy to limit freebies to low-income, phased in gradually rather than all at once.
Nope, you’re right, but I bet you double-checked when you read that the GNP wanted to give poor kids free lunch. I know I did.
Anyway, free lunches for all kids at elementary school makes a lot of sense to me. Poor kids get fed, which I think is important, and rich parents save themselves the time and effort of preparing food as well. School cafeterias are efficient, both in terms of time and effort, and also in terms of money.
Lunches at school, yes
Free lunches for the poor, yes
but how does it make sense that we should have to pay for rich parent’s kids lunches too!!
On the perils of “re-tweeting” someone else tweets during the recent election.
While I don’t mind the attacks on 이효리, what’s with the attacks on 조수빈? I think 방통심의위 needs to investigate.
I thought it was pretty well accepted that the Northern European countries have the healthiest, happiest people. Are they social-welfare states?
Call me cynical but I’d like to see that guy take the subway when the cameras aren’t rolling.
Granfalloon @ #14
You must be living in a cave. Haven’t you heard? North Koreans are the healthiest, happiest people on earth.
IMe, I meant among the mongrel races. Of course, the pure lineage of North Korea is superior to all.
The main argument between the GNP and the others regarding the issue on free lunch, is that GNP wanted to provide lunch to poor kids only, and the others wanted to provide lunch to all kids.
Those wanting to provide lunch to all kids say that providing lunch for only poor kids will create disharmony between kids, since if a kid gets a free lunch, those who don’t may make fun of the kid for being poor. The kid will fill embarrassed, as if receiving free lunch feels as admiting that his/her family is, in fact, poor.
And I kind of agree with this. I don’t want any kind of social classification built among children. They are too young and too innocent to face those things, which they WILL eventually face as they grow up. I just hope that this comes after they are mature enough to live with it.
Ooops. a big misspelling there. “The kid will fill embarrassed” should be “The kid will feel embarrassed”
Here.
This is a strawman argument. Opposition to universal free lunch does not equate to opposition to subsidies to the truly needy, and in fact the GNP had supported free lunch for the poor.
However, there is indeed a limit to what government can do. You say, It’s only “90 million” (presumably you’re talking US Dollars) out of a budget of “20 billion” — i.e., additional spending of about one half of 1%, and it’s For The Children™ so heartless opponents should have a cup of STFU.
But the problem is, one half of 1% is not actually an insignificant amount in a budgetary discussion, especially not when the Seoul Metropolitan Government already runs a substantial deficit.
Let’s say that 20% of children are too poor to afford school lunch, 80% are not. And you’ve posited that the purpose of the free lunch program is to make sure kids from poor families get “a ladle of soup and a cup of rice a day”. Contrary to your strawman assertion, there is no disagreement about the worthiness of that objective.
Where we disagree is whether it is fiscally prudent for a government which already operates in the red to spend an additional four times the cost of feeding poor kids on feeding middle-class and wealthy kids, in order that poor kids are not stigmatized. The Ministry of Happiness and Self-Esteem says yes, but I don’t think the government ought to be trying to make people better.
In related news, the Occupy Wall Street fleabaggers — despite their communitarian rhetoric blaming “the rich” for not doing enough for “the poor”, demanding seizure of my stuff for their objectives, just like you — have drawn a line between their noble selves and the wretched refuse normally on the streets:
Ace of Spades HQ addresses this quite predictable hypocrisy quite nicely:
Speak for yourselves. I’m happy to pay my taxes in order to see that the denizens of Kangnam no longer have the burden of paying for lunch for their precious and plump Chul-soos.
#19: Comparisons to “Animal Farm” are even funnier.
As someone who lives near one of the renovated han river areas, I gotta say they are pretty nice. I guess some people miss the old random mom and pop shacks that were every where, but the new areas with pools, playgrounds, art buildings, reasonable bathrooms, various sports courts, ample open fields, flower gardens and fountains, it makes for a very nice time.
This “stigma” issue ober the free lunches is bull, it is perfectly easy to set up a system where nobody need know whicj kiddy gets his lunch token for free and which paid for it. its hardly rocket science….
and i am speaking for myself when i say, why should i pay for rich chulsoos lunch …..
#24 re: pools along the Han
Are you talking about those pools where chicks lie around in their stringy bikinis and bake in the sun all day during summer? Now that’s tax wons well spent!
Arghaeri @25: Amen. I’ve been wondering the same thing ever since this story hit the news over a year ago. Two decades ago, the school cafeterias in my town in the USA had a computerized payment system where the students swiped a lunch card (which us parents would prepay periodically). It is a no-brainer to extend that system to solve the issue of “feeling shame” for getting free lunches. That it wasn’t suggested and implemented without any fuss tells me all this fighting over school lunches is a distraction – from what, I don’t know.
The rich kids will just bring their own lunches. Agreed there’s no logic to this debate. The “feeling shame” argument appears to have been imported from the US (or elsewhere), where people are still using it to sell the lunch card systems for millions of dollars.
When I was a kid we just had paper punch cards that did the same thing. Some were probably paid for by the government; we never noticed.
Maybe Oh Se-hoon was simply on a doomed quest to get some common sense out of the teachers’ union.
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