December In Korea

Here in the land that calls itself The Republic of Korea, daily life carries on as usual. The end of the fall semester is upon us, with its typical stress-inducing round of exams that prove nothing, resulting in grades that serve no rational purpose, followed by days of bureaucratic hoop-jumping from the instructors as we satisfy the artificial requirements of a worldwide educational establishment that has long since stopped pretending that it has much of anything to teach about life or the world that the students have not already learned from pop songs and celebrity activists and “the news media,” let alone any human-oriented standard for determining what all its grade points and academic rankings and graduation requirements are for.

Meanwhile, the president has declared martial law in what appears to have been an unwarranted and politically suicidal move — applying an authentic and necessary constitutional provision in a manner that was precipitous and insufficiently justified. This weird power lunge was nipped in the bud partly by internal hesitation within the military and shock within the president’s own party. In response to this absurdity, and as a means of capitalizing on the mood of mass protests and general “public outrage” over the unpopular president’s move, the leading opposition party organized a vote in the National Assembly to impeach the president less than a week after the botched martial law declaration — thus applying another authentic and necessary constitutional provision in a manner that was precipitous and insufficiently justified. The impeachment vote failed due to the non-participation of the president’s party, which was officially calling for him to step down, though hoping to achieve this without recourse to such summary execution by immediate vote (a process eschewing any semblance of due process). One conclusion to draw from all this is that constitutional government cannot work in an age of hot-headed tribalism, twenty-four hour news cycles, social media lynch mobs, and policy-by-protest. (Note: the protests and the overriding sense of democracy by reactiveness to public feelings finally won out, and the impeachment has been successful on a second vote, prior to which nothing much changed beyond the anxiousness of certain politicians in the National Assembly to “be on the right side of history,” as the cliche goes.)

None of this, predictably, has had any noticeable effect on the truly essential and lasting life of Korea, which is exemplified in the winter arrival of millions of migratory birds, whose travels and cycles, oblivious to all our anxious fussing and tussling, remind one that our foreground, to which we humans devote so much of our time and attention, is usually little more than an obscuring distraction from the world as it fundamentally is, rather than as we like to imagine it is in our vanity and self-importance.