Blog News

It's pretty rare that this blog goes from Wednesday to Saturday night without a single post; to those who dropped by only to find nothing has changed, I feel your pain. Your refund is in the mail.

Actually, something has changed: I can now see when (most of) you visit, and where you dropped in from, at the "FeedJit" live traffic feed widget somewhere to your right. It's not actually a counter, so I live up to my promise to self that I am not so vain--it's kind of like the visitor map widget except with only the last ten balloons. Temporal info, I guess.

It's been there for two or three days now, and I have actually been amazed at the number of hits this blog generates. Often, you can click on the URL that led the viewer here; I am surprised at how many Google search terms place my little ol' blog in the top five or ten. On the other hand, I would not be surprised at all at the number of search terms that don't.

Fear not, though, O Teeming Dozens, The Seoul Patch will not start debasing its clean, wholesome design with advertisements (inevitably ones which offer English teaching jobs in various parts of Asia, soccer togs, and Kim Jong-il Halloween masks) or begging for PayPal clicks to buy me a new computer, since this one is now a year old, and obviously out-of-date. Not me.

Unless of course it becomes clear that there is in fact money to be made ... then all bets are out the Windows. I wish to point out that you can lay to rest any machinations in this direction if you will just BUY MY HOUSE! 150 BOONE RD, NEWNAN, GA! My agent: umbachchris.gamlsagents.com TIA!

While I'm ruminating about life in these United States--well, okay, those United States, even though I am a proud American, born and bred--I have become very concerned about the tenor of the political discourse in my home country. I wonder now how soon I want to return. I don't like what my home country is become.

The duly elected--massively so--President of the United States is planning an address to schoolchildren, as other Presidents have done, to exhort them to try harder and achieve more in school, and this is presented by a significant part of the media as a fascist brainwashing move, with parents literally crying on TV and school board chairmen warning people to keep their children home from school.

WTF?!?! Since when does the school board urge students to skip school? Since the right wing sour-grapes, I-want-my-country-back contingent has captured the media, I guess. I mean, if this is what we have come to, Korea--with its 4000 people die every year from American crazy cow, H1N1 will kill all Korean people who travel abroad, 10% of English teachers are crazy on marijuana in the classroom Korea--has a better grasp on reality than the US. That is a frightening thought!

Korea is xenophobic. That is fact. For three thousand years, 99.999999% of anyone you saw in Korea was Korean. We make allowances for that, if we have any sense at all. Until the Japanese invaded in 1910, Koreans had literally no foreign contact outside of China. WWII and the Korean War brought the first real, sustained contect with people from outside Korea. More to the point, I see efforts being made all around me to improve the situation.

America is just 200+ years old. Other than the native population which has been killed, segregated and marginalized, "American" is not, or has not been, a racial term. Germans, Hispanics, Italians, Irish, etc., right? Melting pot and all that. Light-skinned people grudgingly admitted dark-skinned people have the same rights as them, back in the sixties, right?

Well, apparently not. Black men who are President cannot possibly be born in America, at least according to 60-odd percent of people who call themselves Republicans--the "birthers". The same people who give a pass to the previous administration for calling anyone who disagreed with them Traitor, who were okay with wiretapping anyone who made phone calls overseas, who don't want to look into Soviet-style "black prisons" where the Red Cross cannot go, who care not that US soldiers murdered foreigners under the guise of getting actionable information, and on and on, nonetheless call mixed-race Obama who wants to help sick people get better health care a fascist. Look up the definition, and get back to me.

I weep for my country, that it is more xenophobic than Korea.