Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Coke and Korea

So let's be honest. The most annoying occurrence of my day was whatever idiot left a coke in the freezer at work overnight so it exploded all over the York Peppermint Patties. Yes, I keep Yorks in the freezer. That's the way they should be eaten. But they're very hard to get to when they're frozen to the bottom of the freezer by a sticky brown mess. And while inhibition of my snacking habits is obviously the greatest annoyance of my day, let's face it. I've pretty much covered that topic in less than a paragraph and that makes for a really lame blog posting so in an effort to be more globally interesting let's move on to something of more... um... global interest.

Korea. No not the war that was way back in the 50's though I did love watching MASH reruns with my college roommates, especially Alan Alda, but I digress. I mentioned Korea to one of my friends today and he said, "What are you, some old fart? Talk about something freakin' relevant!" or something along those lines. And while I would like to thank him for his wonderful support, I would also like to point out that Korea is new and relevant and stuff is happening there, and I learned new things about Korea just yesterday.

For instance, just yesterday North Korea announced they were cutting all ties with South Korea and no longer considered them their Korean brothers. Okay, lets get this straight. For the last sixty years you've been acting... brotherly? With the barbed wire and the guys with the guns? I don't know how your parents raised you, but mine sure didn't raise me to treat my brother like that!

So anyway, yesterday I was reading about the whole North Korea getting mad at South Korea because South Korea actually believed the international committee that studied the... No wait. This is not going in the right order. Okay, this may be a little stream of conscious, but we're going to have to go in the order I read it.

North Korea is cutting off contact with the south because South Korea set up loud speakers along the border blaring whatever kind of pro-South Korea messages they wanted to blare. They blared these messages because this international committee found that a ship that was sunk a couple of months ago was sunk by a torpedo from a North Korean submarine. And where did South Korea get the idea of setting up these speakers blaring propaganda? Why from the North Koreans of course.

In the 1950's North Korea built the "village" of Kijŏng-dong in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. They set up loud speakers in this "village" that blared pro-North Korean messages loud enough to be heard in South Korea. They blared these messages up to 20 hours a day until 2004 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijong-dong, and you can believe everything you read on the Wiki). That's right, noise pollution intentionally generated for YEARS. Now whats worse about this village? It is ostensibly a nice little farming village with an unusually prosperous educational system, hospital, and an exceptionally high number if electrically wired buildings for a small rural town in North Korea. There's only one problem here. There are no farmers. There's no glass in the windows of the buildings, and there are no interior rooms. In fact this whole town was built just to show the prosperity of the north and to entice South Koreans to defect to the north. Um, yeah, I see that happening.

So let me get this straight. In a country that is industrially depressed and the difference is visible at night (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Korean_peninsula_at_night.jpg) here is a government that is willing to waste resources building a shell of a village, wiring it, putting up loud speakers, but they're not going to actually let people live there. Believe what you will about Democracy vs. Communism, but I hate waste.

If you're going to build a town to impress your neighbors, at least make it a working town, let people live there. If it's such a nice town that it's supposed to show how advanced you are, don't you think the folks one town over with their telephoto lenses are going to notice that there are no people in your town, that they can see through your buildings out the other side, that in a town of 200 farmers you're going to see people out and about working not just a skeleton crew that comes out and sweeps the streets. You're missing shops, and animals, and families with children.

And think about it, if you really care one whit about your citizens are you going to build a bunch of crap to show off in turn robbing your people of the good those same resources could have been put to use building roads and schools and bringing power to people who could actually use it? Of course not! A good government, especially a good communist government (if you believe such a thing exists) is going to work to improve efficiency, eliminate waste, and bring resources to the people who need them. North Korea in it's desire to show progressiveness, displays the exact opposite. And they're putting their idiocy on display exactly where it is most easily observed by the south, in the DMZ.

My resources are random articles I've read on MSN and the Wikipedia, so you should probably take everything I say with a grain of salt, cause my facts could be off. Still it seem to me it would be really hard to be people ruled by such idiots.

Oh, and if that was your Coke in the freezer it better be cleaned up before I get back to work tomorrow. If it's not, well, I'll probably end up cleaning it up anyway. But you better watch out, cause I'll be bitchy about it.

2 comments:

  1. Wow, that picture of the Koreas at night really illustrates the point, doesn't it? Nothing like a progressive communist government to get you going in the right direction...back to the stone ages...

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  2. Progressive communist? LOL, you crack me up!

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