The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
June 4, 2000

In every sector of the society, there are the good people who help their neighbors, work to improve their environment, and lead their ignorant fellas to the enlightened future.
On the other hand, there are also the bad people who exploit, steal, cheat, betray, torture, and even massacre their own countrymen for the sake of their own greedy happiness.
On top of the good and the bad, there are the ugly people who attach themselves on the back of both good and bad like parasites and thrive on as if they are the guiding light for the future.

In the political sphere of the South Korean society, none of the political leaders since 1945 could be termed as the good people, and instead, it would not be an over-blown statement that they all belong to the category of the bad people.
Recently, there have been the new breed of the amorphous group who self-claimed and self-appointed themselves as the voice of the voiceless and helpless, and they were straddling high on the white horses armed with the hypocritical megaphone: the so-called civic leaders.

The self-anointed civic leaders have prospered and founded firmly as the do-good people in the corrupt atmosphere of the South Korean society, and they have yielded the enormous powers of the prosecutor, the judge and the juror at the kangaroo court during last April parliamentary election with the covert blessing of the Machiavellian incumbent president.
They were reckless and arrogant in judging, convicting, and sentencing the politicians as the bad, the corrupt, and the unworthy.
They were bold and cunning in manipulating, sloganeering, and engineering the gullible people into the false image that they are the answer to rectify the venal and unjust status in quo.
They have joined the membership of the Ugly Korean Club.

The South Koreans have bought the civic leader’s megaphones lock, stock, and barrel, and mandated them electing as their representatives in the parliament.
And voila! As soon as the civil activists of erstwhile professors, intellectuals, and college graduates were put on the political pedestals, they immediately became analogous to the bad people that they condemned in the summary execution and shamelessly behaved in the same manner as in wining, dining, fucking, and horse-trading as all South Korean politicians have engaged.

They have received the money from the incumbent government and colluded with the cabal of bureaucrats to join the ruling party.
They stood in front of the memorial tower of the deceased who had perished for the democracy and cried uncontrollably under the sun, and they fondled and grabbed the buttocks of the young bar girls in the room salon when they were under the moon.
One of them, who was the nominee of 99 men Korean women wish to meet, was charged with the sexual assault that he tried to rape 18-year-old girl at the hotel, and the 40-ish culprit blatantly excused himself that he thought the girl was his wife.

A gang of the hypocrites self-named themselves “386” generation to maximize and romanticize their status void of filthy, contaminated, corrupt, venal, and traditional characters.
The group’s title,“386”, solicits the curiosity of why not, “638”,”683”, “863”, “836” or “368” and of why authoritatively “386”…according to the media report, 3 represents their age bracket of 30ish, 8 calls for the year of 1980s when they have attended the universities, and finally 6 emphasizes their youngness that they were born in the 1960s.
It sounds and smells as pure “Korean-ish” as the pungent kimchi smell replete with garlic that the number “386” makes the rebounding rhythms reflected against the concrete wall in the huge vacant auditorium…that is, it does not mean anything but the cheap symbolism and political sloganeering.

One of the South Korean symbolism has manifested in the form of Korean-Number-Oneism not only for the domestic consumption to satisfy their illusory chutzpah but in the global theater when they went to live in abroad or to take the pleasure or business trip.
In the streets of Seoul during the lunch hour, it is the common practice of the college-educated salarymen that they walk down, after lunch with toothpick in their mouths and hands in their trouser pockets, the narrow downtown sidewalks four or five in a bundle keeping abreast, occupying the entire street, and refusing to yield oncoming traffic of their fellow citizens.
They suffer from the malady of Number One for themselves.

In North America, most of the South Korean immigrants live in the closed colonies of the ethnic community where they remain to be seen as perpetual foreigners, and the more they are successful to make money, the more they look down on other minorities especially black and Hispanic people who categorize the South Korean bodega and deli owners as blood suckers as Jews, with illusion that they are Number One and so are not affected by racism.
They appear to hate the Japanese people viciously, because they are not able to obtain “the honorary white” status that was universally given by the whites.

There has been a flood of the episodes about the beatings and humiliating insults on the South Korean travelers by the Southeast Asians who were badly treated during their stay in the South.
The South Korean symbolism has produced the Number One Pariah State in Asia.
In China, there has been a series of kidnapping and extortion of the South Korean businessmen who reside or travel in the mainland by the gangs of Korean-Chinese, and a few of them were murdered by the disgruntled workers who were mistreated in South Korea, ridiculing the begging victims that: “Are we the same Koreans, blood-related brothers?”
The South Korean government does not treat their compatriots in China as same manner as the ones in North America.

In the Philippines, the South Korean tourists were beaten by the young Filipinos who were not paid in 3-D work when they arrived in Manila airport and their plea for help in the police station was met by another beatings from the policemen who were angered by the stories of the mistreatment.
In Vietnam, The South Korean businessmen who manage in the Nike shoe factory as the factotum are so infamous with infringing the worker’s right that they are not safe walking in the street during the night.
The best seller book in Malaysia in 1996 was titled, “Koreans, Sons of Bitches”.
The South Koreans as the new kids on the block have replaced the ugliness of Japanese and Americans with arrogant and childish Number One Korean-ism.