I Gotta Get Out of This Bad Neighborhood

Wow.  A lot has happened in South Korea in the past twelve hours.  I hesitate to post this, because I don't know what the next twelve hours might bring, but for the moment things are looking up.

First President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law in South Korea, vaguely blaming supposed pro-North Korean elements active in the South.  He did this at midnight Korean time, perhaps hoping it was a good time to spring a fait accompli on the nation.  But thousands of protesters hit the streets, including hundreds of members of the National Assembly, who pushed their way past police and soldiers into the Assembly building.  They then voted overwhelmingly (CNN says unanimously) to overturn the decree; this included not only the opposition but Yoon's own party.  A few hours later, at about 5 a.m. Korean time, Yoon backed down, saying that he would retract the declaration as soon as his cabinet could meet to confirm it.  As I write this, it appears that the cabinet has met and martial law has been lifted.

US and other Western media have reacted predictably enough.  CNN titled this Youtube clip "Yoon backtracks after plunging South Korea into chaos with martial law order," and the word "chaos" appeared in the reports of some other networks.  But it doesn't look to me like there was chaos, not even in CNN's reporting.  The protests were orderly, the assembly members pushed past the cops in an organized manner, and voted Yoon's declaration down.  At about that point, the military trucks dispersed.  But you know, the corporate media hate it when the rabble talk back to their betters: they can't see it as anything but chaos.  (Or CHOAS, as this outlet spelled it.) 

The reporter in Seoul knows some of the history at least, and I give him credit for acknowledging the ROK's history of dictatorship and resistance to it.  This was the first time martial law had been declared in South Korea since it was lifted in 1980, but there have been times when it seemed close, as in 2008, when then-President Lee Myong-bak cracked down on protesters and media who objected to his authoritarian ways. Lee also accused his critics of being in league with the North, but that was normal South Korean right-wing politics then.  (I was in Seoul at the time.)

CNN's analyst wasn't bad either, in an Old-Asia-Hand way.  The anchors, on the other hand, were dreadful, spouting every cliche they could think of.

CBS' coverage was about the same, a mixed bag leading off with the obligatory reference to "chaos."  Their reporter, a White House correspondent traveling with Joe Biden in Angola, reads a preliminary NSC statement announcing America's "serious concern" about Yoon's action.  Yoon hadn't notified either Biden or other elements of the US government of his intention, and caught them by surprise. Biden said he was still being briefed.  The reporter, Willie James Inman, evidently has some experience in South Korea, but is more concerned to boost Biden's diplomacy in northeast Asia.  He says that South Korea "isn't necessarily in the best neighborhood" and mentions the "storied history", with "tense moments" between Korea and Japan.  That's an interesting way to describe the thirty-five year occupation of Korea by Japan,  of notable harshness and cruelty, including a serious attempt to eliminate Korean language and culture, but hey - time constraints.

I have the impression that corporate-media coverage of Korea has improved in the past couple of decades, but it was so desultory and ignorant before that that's not saying much.  At the moment I'm just relieved that this crisis seems to have been resolved so quickly. Our reporters speculated about Yoon's political future: can he stay in office?  He was already very unpopular, even for a South Korean President; again, comparable to his right-wing predecessors like Lee Myoung-bak and Park Geun-hye.  (Despite South Koreans' determination to preserve their democracy, they still keep voting in dangerous right-wingers every other term.  Korean democracy is counterbalanced by Korean authoritarianism.) There have already been calls for Yoon's resignation, and since his own party stomped on his overreach this time, he may not be able to stay in office. Or maybe he will; I'm not going to predict or even speculate.  My main concern, again, is the people of Korea, which includes numerous friends of mine, people I've known for decades.  It looks like they've dodged a bullet, and I'm very relieved, though probably not as relieved as they are.

What Did You Do in the Woke Wars, Grampa?

This is another post I should have written long ago, but unfortunately it's still timely.

The derogatory use of "woke" in our public discourse shows no sign of abating, and Trump's victory probably ensures that it will be with us for a long time to come.  It's another depressing example of the Right's dexterity in seizing on liberal / left slogans and using them more effectively than their predecessors ever managed to do.

Remember "fake news"?  That one came from liberals and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and it was bogus at the time, for reasons the blogger emptywheel explained early on.  Used with some care, the concept might have had some use, but few people (especially in the media) use terms with any care, and it was really just an emotive slogan anyway.  The nominally liberal media that pushed it were in no position to cast the first stone.  Then Donald Trump and MAGA picked it up and ran with it, and here we are.

As for "woke," I always took it for another case of white hipsters adopting (or appropriating) African-American vernacular to feel cool.  When the Right adopted it, liberals and leftists delighted in showing that they couldn't define it, as if that mattered to the Right.  As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of anti-Semites (quoted here), the Right "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words."  The fun part was that liberals and leftists couldn't define it either.  They differed widely on where it came from: this writer who dated it to a 2008 Erykah Badu track was typical, but it was soon established that it was a lot older than that.  

Even then, few if any noticed that two meanings of the word were being confused.  The older one, exemplified by the blue singer/songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, who in a 1938 song warned "of the dangers of a racially prejudiced justice system and conclude[d] ‘best stay woke’."  In context, he was close to the literal meaning of the word: you're in a dangerous place, so stay alert.  That sense quickly expanded to the more metaphorical one of "awakened" or "enlightened," as in the Guardian article I linked to before:

But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke.

I noticed that most quotations from people like King didn't use the vernacular "woke," but "awake," and that makes a difference.  If white progressives used "awake," they wouldn't be allusively tying themselves to the Civil Rights movement, which I presume is the reason they use "woke" instead.  No matter who uses it, I object to the stance that someone is awake or enlightened, because it postulates that once you've awakened, opened your eyes, etc., you don't need to learn or think any more, and nobody can make such a claim. Right-wingers are also fond of this conceit, by the way: many social-media posts begin with the exhortation to WAKE UP, AMERICA! regardless of the political position of the poster.

In a fair-to-middling essay on the pejorative use of "woke," Nathan Robinson wrote:

If we are to make progress in having sensible discussions about the problems with contemporary social justice activism, we’re not going to get there with an imprecise “boo word” like woke. That leads in the direction of absurdity, like Tucker Carlson’s condemnation of “woke M&M’s” and a Wall Street Journal columnist suggesting that Silicon Valley Bank had “gone woke” by having a Black board member. I cannot imagine any sensible discussion in which the pejorative use of woke plays any constructive role. 

I largely agree, but I would add that the positive use of "woke" doesn't play any constructive role in sensible discussions of important issues either.  It's demagogic in the way Patricia Miller-Roberts warned against: it postulates an Us/Them division between people, based on the assumption that We are enlightened and have the answers.  This sort of self-stroking gets a discussion off on the wrong foot from the beginning.  True, people have epiphanic experiences that affect how they see conflicts and controversies, but such experiences should mean the beginning of hard rethinking, rather than its end. To quote Sartre again:

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he's going, he is "open," he may even appear hesitant But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth.  And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not suspect but the very form of the true -- that hinge of indefinite approximation.  It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away.  They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one originally was ...

Much of what passes for public discussion involves trying to "own" the other side: saying or writing something that definitively schools, owns, destroys, shuts down the opposition.  Owning makes for catchy memes, but it usually turns out that the opposition, like a monster in a horror movie, is not actually destroyed but, now that your back is turned, is on its feet for another shot at you. People are always surprised by that, for some reason.

A better way (not the best, I'm open to suggestions) to deal with accusations of wokeness is to ignore them and move on to addressing substance.  I try not to be too attached to particular words, especially slogan-words.  The trouble with Nathan Robinson's call to stop using "woke" as a pejorative is that he issued it in his own avowedly left-wing magazine, Current Affairs.  That's like denouncing atheism in the pages of Christianity Today.  True, some on the left use "woke" as a pejorative, but if they all stopped today, the Right (and not only the MAGA Right) would continue to use it, happily confident that they were owning the libs.  As I've said before, fussing about the Right's provocations only tells them that they've hit their target; it's worse than ineffective, it's encouragement.