대프리카

Any spring semester in South Korea where the great and holy Dude In Charge Of Turning On The Campus-Wide Air-Conditioning gets in done in mid-May rather than mid-June is a good one.

And yes, I'm complaining about Korea again.  But you should know I live in the hottest city in the country.  "Dae-pu-ri-ka" or "대프리카" is a portmanteau of "Daegu" and "Africa," as in, Daegu is as hot as Africa in the summer.

And while it hasn't hit 90 yet (give it a week), the terrible humidity is already creeping in.  Everything from clothing to bed-sheets is just slightly damp all the time, and older Korean buildings aren't that great when it comes to proper air ventilation.

Living the dream, as always.

This, A Million Times Over

Paul Waldman gets it:

"We see this again and again: Democrats bend over backward to show conservative white voters respect, only to see some remark taken out of context and their entire agenda characterized as stealing from hard-working white people to give undeserved benefits to shiftless minorities. And then pundits demand, 'Why aren’t you showing those whites more respect?'

So when we say that, what exactly are we asking Democrats to do? It can only be one of two things. Either Democrats are supposed to abandon their values and change their policies, despite the fact that many of those policies provide enormous help to the very people who say Democrats look down on them, or they’re supposed to take symbolic steps to demonstrate their respect, which always fail anyway. How many times have we seen Democrats try to show respect by going to a NASCAR event or on a hunting trip, only to be mocked for their insincerity?

In the world Republicans have constructed, a Democrat who wants to give you health care and a higher wage is disrespectful, while a Republican who opposes those things but engages in a vigorous round of campaign race-baiting is respectful. The person who’s holding you back isn’t the politician who just voted to give a trillion-dollar tax break to the wealthy and corporations, it’s an East Coast college professor who said something condescending on Twitter.

So what are Democrats to do? The answer is simple: This is a game they cannot win, so they have to stop playing. Know at the outset that no matter what you say or do, Republicans will cry that you’re disrespecting good heartland voters. There is no bit of PR razzle-dazzle that will stop them. Remember that white Republicans are not going to vote for you anyway, and their votes are no more valuable or virtuous than the votes of any other American. Don’t try to come up with photo ops showing you genuflecting before the totems of the white working class, because that won’t work. Advocate for what you believe in, and explain why it actually helps people.

Finally — and this is critical — never stop telling voters how Republicans are screwing them over. The two successful Democratic presidents of recent years were both called liberal elitists, and they countered by relentlessly hammering the GOP over its advocacy for the wealthy. And it worked."

Sorry for the over-long quotation, but this is the clearest statement yet of why some Democrats are flailing in the Trump era.  They're trying to play a game they literally cannot win, ever.

There's no reason not to try and win over Trump voters, but in the limited-resource world of politics it's a Mug's Game.  We win by sticking with a solid message (increase the minimum wage, some form of universal health care, fight global warming, restore seriousness to our foreign policy) and never by compromising.

There's just so much awfulness in world right now that it's nice to see such a clear and powerful statement of principle of how to move forward from Cheeto Hitler.

And it's definitely not going to be easy.

Consistency

The Sea and Cake, "Any Day"

Almost a quarter of a century and 11 albums in, these guys have never made a bad move.

Kim Jong-un Is Going To Drink Trump's Milkshake

There's a lot to say about what's going on between Cheeto Hitler and Kim Jong-un right now, with a face-to-face meeting set for next month, but I'll simply throw out this thought: trading three hostages for a summit that basically legitimizes Kim's rule and North Korea as a global force to be reckoned with was not a Nobel Prize-level act of statesmanship.

It was the definition of a sucker bet.

"on being a super-mom"

While #MeToo has made its ways to the shores of a culturally conservative South Korea, change for most women, and especially working mothers, is very slow to come:

"A major problem is that home often becomes as demanding as work. 

'I feel like I have two jobs,' said Nam Yun-ju, aged 38. 'There are so many small and detailed things that a mom needs to take care of, even while she’s working, and it takes up so much energy and time. From changing the filters at home, or paying the insurance, I’m the one that has to communicate with the outside world. Even when the daycare tutor uploads a picture of my child online, I’m always the one writing comments.'

According to Lee Ye-jin, 38, the social standards of an ideal mother are too high for women to bear, leading them to feel guilty if they don’t meet expectations. 'There’s too much pressure on being a super-mom, probably because of portrayals of mothers in the media where mothers do work and childcare without any trouble. At the same time, everyone’s telling me that a child needs a mother’s care. Even when I get to do something away from the child, I’m stuck with a sense of guilt,' said Lee.

'I have no idea why elementary schools call in the students’ mothers to volunteer at the school cafeteria or at the crosswalk in front of the school,' said Ms. Jeong, aged 37. 'The [mothers] have regular gatherings at the kids’ cafe, and it’s awkward for me not to go. But the funny thing is, there are no fathers at those meetings.'"

When a major holiday comes up in South Korea I rarely ask my adult female students what their plans are, because nine times out of ten they'll mention the drudgery of having to prepare for, cook meals, and clean constantly for at least three days in a row.

New books!

Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest and Death’s End

Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach

Hari Kunzru, White Tears

 Lynne Murphy, The Prodigal Tongue – The Love-Hate Relationship Between British & American English

As always, life in Korea is made much easier and enjoyable thanks to Seoul's What The Book? store and their free delivery service.

2018

America 2018: porn stars are more vital to our democracy than "serious" journalists are

— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) May 3, 2018

"I skipped a rock and it fell to the bottom"

Beach House, "Black Car"

When I came to South Korea one thing I hated was that if a national holiday fell on a Saturday or Sunday, it wasn't moved to the adjacent Friday or Monday.  (Hence the yearly ritual of looking at the calendar for a new year and deciding whether it was "good" or "bad" for vacation days.)

This is changing though.  Saturday is Children's Day, and it got moved to Monday of next week.  And Tuesday next week is my college's Founder's Day, a two-day holiday.

So heeyah for unexpected five-day weekends but, because Korea, I would have actually planned a trip somewhere nice if I'd known before a few days ago that the schedule was getting scrambled up.

As it stands, I'll probably go to another Samsung Lions ball game, eat a lot of Indian food downtown, and get started on book two of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy.

Meanwhile, here's some new Beach House.  It's predictably sublime.

"small mutton"

A very brief and cool overview of vegetarian "fake meats," why they originate in China, and why they aren't nearly as popular in Japan and India:

"While mock meat has a place in some temple kitchens, much of the cooking consists of vegetables, rice, and plant-based proteins that have not been purposely twisted to resemble meats. This is especially true in Japan, where Buddhist law prohibited the consumption of four-legged animals throughout the empire for centuries, eventually doing away with the edict in the 19th century. Due to a lack of appetite for meat, Japanese people never tried to imitate it with other substances, says Akiko Katayama, a food consultant and host of the Japan Eats podcast. Similarly, in the heavily vegetarian country of India, you won’t find traditional mock meats for the same reason. 'For many Indian vegetarians, I don’t think a meat substitute would even register since meat was never a reference point to begin with,' says Chitra Agrawal, the author of the vegetarian Indian cookbook Vibrant India.

However, in China, the origins of both tofu and wheat gluten are somewhat linked to their use as meat replacements. In Mandarin, mianjin, or wheat gluten, means literally 'wheat meat' (George Ohsawa, the founder of the macrobiotic diet, coined the term 'seitan' for the same food in 1961). And tofu, a food that dates back to prehistoric times in China, was popularly known as 'small mutton' in the 10th century, according to records. Although they need not only to be enjoyed as meat analogs, they have been used as such for centuries. There is mention of seitan textured to emulate goose in the classic Chinese cookery book Recipes From the Sui Garden by the Qing Dynasty Chinese poet Yuan Mei. And the Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West references wheat gluten several times, including a scene in which demons attempt to serve a monk a meal of human flesh and brains fried to resemble wheat gluten—that is, meat masquerading as mock meats."

The author concludes that if we always approach these foods as "substitutes" we'll never learn to appreciate their own culinary virtues.

"What Kim Jong Un Wants From Trump"

To say the least, things are moving quickly on the Korean peninsula.  Professor Van Jackson has the best English-language take I've come across so far:

"With a firmer grip on the regime and a strengthened nuclear strike capability, all this diplomacy moves Kim closer to his remaining goals of prioritizing the economy and elevating North Korea’s international standing as a nuclear state. The fact of hosting friendly meetings with foreign delegations and presenting them with memorabilia commemorating the recent success in 'perfecting the national nuclear forces' is a nuclear status fait accompli. And even if North Korea can’t rejoin the international community in full because of continuing human rights abuses and opaque economic practices, going on the diplomatic offensive is a smart way of discouraging the international community—and especially China—from stringently implementing an increasingly suffocating international sanctions regime. Diplomacy is a low-cost means of getting sanctions relief, which will help improve the North Korean standard of living. At the same time, an extended process of reconciliation with South Korea holds out the promise of much needed economic investment and assistance. Already there’s talk of an energy corridor running from Russia, through North Korea, down to the South. That all this encourages greater friction in the U.S.-South Korea alliance and mutes the preventive war narrative that was building last year in Washington is simply a bonus.

Kim’s playing a multi-level game. Thinking in terms of Kim having a singular or primary motivation oversimplifies the reality that diplomacy done right can do many things at once—for example, nudge the United States out of the picture while presenting North Korea to the world as a 'peaceful' nuclear state that doesn’t deserve to be under such stringent sanctions. Kim’s diplomacy encourages a public narrative of rapprochement with both the South and the United States, which in turn helps bring all of his goals closer to reality. North Korea does not necessarily need to abandon any of its nuclear weapons for all of this to happen."

The fact that Trump is probably going to meet with Kim in three to four weeks is already a major win for the North Korean regime.  Xi and Macron and Saudi Arabia simply put on meaningless banquets and parades and promptly got exactly what they wanted from Trump.

Guess what?  Nobody does meaningless banquets and parades like North Korea!  It's pretty much their thing.

Anybody's guess is as good as anybody's at this point, but my feeling is that Trump's desire for a "big win" regarding North Korea means he'll take an empty promise of the North de-nuking itself and run for the cameras claiming the Nobel Prize.  (No, this is not an exaggeration.)  Kim Jong-un will (rightfully) claim that North Korea is now an international player and should be treated as such, human rights be damned.  South Korea will, under a liberal, pro-diplomacy president in Moon Jae-in, be happy to move towards further reconciliation with the North as businesses and markets in Seoul can stabilize and go back to "business as usual."

And frankly, given how close to war we came in 2017, that's an imperfect but pretty much O.K. outcome for now.

Minor Predictive Tweet

pretty sure Kanye is running in 2020 or 2024. as a Republican.

— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) May 2, 2018