Pity the groveling South Koreans on all fours

Pity the groveling South Koreans on all fours
April 22, 2007
Dale Han

Within hours after the AP dispatch has made public the identity of the culprit in the carnage at the Virginia Tech University, most of the South Koreans went panic, as a pack of frenzied lemmings run amok as if one of the US Generals during the Korean War ridiculed the Korean refugees, in an anxiety, dismay, shock, and fear that Uncle Sam, the neo-colonial global overlord, might impose several punitive sanctions against the South Korean interests, such as travel restriction, group reprisal, economic sanctions, and in worse scenario, mass roundup as the Muslims incarceration after the 911 and Japanese encampment during the WWII.

The South Koreans reeled and staggered in disbelief that a member of the Korean tribe committed the unforgivable killing spree in their honey and dream land, USA, and they felt all the South Koreans have collective blood-guilt on their hands.
And the Korean-Americans deeply and abashedly wanted to apologize to their host country, USA, by all manner of means, like kowtowing, prostrating, genuflecting, or groveling on all fours…if their apologia could purchase them an escape tunnel from the Lord’s fury.

The Korean Ambassador to the US proposes the Korea-American Communities to open the prayer meeting and take turns a 32-day fast for an apology and condolence.
A gaggle of infamous rah-rah Korean Netizens rants, raves, screams and demands the South Korean Government dispatching the special emissaries headed by the President to the US and seeking a graceful pardon from their half-century overlord, Uncle Sam.
The mainstream media in Seoul editorializes that the South Koreans should travel across the ocean and reach out the hearts of grieving overlord to ensure no harms fall upon them.
And the President of the South Korean Government who duly succumbed to the overwhelming gaga of the dimwit and obsequious people issues a series of condolence, regret, sorrow, remorse, penitence, and apology.

Like the frenzied lemmings run amok for survival, the South Koreans gather, tremble, argue and decide to circle their camp in order to escape from the group reprisal as they had experienced during the LA riot.
And due to their chauvinistic and ethnocentric tribal instinct, they made a fatal mistake here in the Virginia Tech incident…they did not realize that the culprit was not so much a Korean who happened to continue holding the Korean nationality than an American who had been living in the US for two-third of his lifespan.
In other words, he was more an American who was at ease with the US ambience of gun culture, societal violence, and individual identity than the Korean “LA Babies” whose mother delivers in the LA hospital for the laminated US citizenship card and snatched back home for the Korean upbringing.

When the culprit had left for the honey and dream land piggy bagged on his parents, he was a mere eight-year-old brat who had only two years of elementary education that hardly pollinated him with Korean culture and mores.
Without counting his genetic linkage to the Korean progeny, it is even hard to claim that he was a hybrid product of cross-fertilization between Korean and American culture, considering that he’s been formulated as “the culprit” in a 15-year course of nourishing, cultivating, disseminating, learning, and brainwashing process in the lonely, depressed, alienated, violent, emotionally discarded, and individually oriented segments of the American society.
It is extremely and unduly an exaggeration that he was to be considered a Korean except his genetic connection to the Korean ancestry.

We, the human, evolve through much of his or her life span via natural selection…one is biological evolution based on genes and the other is cultural evolution replicated by “memes”.
The term “meme” refers to an element of culture being passed on by non-genetic means from one mind to another mind, as examples of memes are: ideas, values, theories, beliefs, practices, habits, fashions, music, computer virus, etc.
While genes can only vertically be transmitted from parent to child, memes can horizontally be transmitted between two individuals that memes are more similar to parasites or infections.
In other words, memes are the conveyors of customs and traditions…all kind of cultural information passed down through repetition and imitation.

In this perspective, it was obvious that the culprit was open to the good or bad courses of the memetic (cultural) evolution in his new environment where he was exposed the two thirds of his life, and consequently, the society where he lived have to assume the blame or responsibility to be pardoned or reflected upon, not the genetic Korean blood that the culprit carried along. (It was anybody’s guessing game why he did not seek for the US citizenship…you may blame his parents, with a thousand “mea culpa”.
One wonder how the South Koreans react if he or his family happened to be holding the US passport…do they still claim the “Chos” were Koreans?

Records show that the South Koreans were very much selective in claiming the group credit or blame as the tribal identity.
In the first place, the South Koreans are obsessed with how it is perceived by the others…and worry about the backlash that any incidents by their compatriots might bring upon them.
Among several incidents of the Korean notoriety in the US, no South Koreans uttered an apology for the lobby scandal caused by Mr. Park, Tongsun or the Tax Fraud conviction by the Rev. Moon, Sun Myung, both resulted in incarceration in the Federal Prison. (Mr. Park and Rev. Moon held the South Korean passport at the time.)
In contrast, when a super bowl player was named for the most valuable player in 2006, they mobbed and feted him a national hero born from the Korean womb… even though he is nothing but an American Black.

Unbeknownst to many South Koreans, there was a Korean-American named John (Choon) Yoo who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice in 2001-2003, where he wrote the substantial parts of the Patriot Act with a professor of the Vietnamese origin. (Mr. Yoo is now a law professor at UC Berkeley.)
He co-authored the forty-two page memo stipulating that since Afghanistan has no formal government to speak of, neither the Geneva Conventions nor any other laws of war apply. This breaks a fifty-year US military tradition of upholding those rules that the Americans adopted because the US expects them to be applied to US soldiers.
He also support the torture of enemy combatants as Jewish Professor in Harvard University did, and President Bush approved the policies in the memo, ultimately resulting in the Abu Ghraib fiasco and similar atrocities being committed in other Iraqi prisons as well as those in Afghanistan.

It is worthwhile for the moment to reflect the John Yoo’s life with the “Cho’s”…Mr. Yoo left for the US when he was a ten-year-old brat, two-years older than Mr. Cho.
He graduated from Harvard, and Yale Law School, followed by working as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
You could assume that John was schooled in the same ambiance and exposed to the similar cultural evolution as Cho had, and Yoo and Cho came out in an antipodal personality…one, a successful law professor and the other, mass murderer and cold dead. (You may consider Mr. Yoo’s career “cold dead” and rotting in the academia, since the colonial masters love to exploit the minority lapdog and then leave the collaborators in oblivion as many Koreans during the Japanese occupation helped out the policies of the Japanese Empire as a snitch, cop, soldier, teacher, or prostitute.)

Mr. Yoo worked under the guidance of the former Attorney General John Ashcroft who simply refuses to believe that any step taken to defend the United States can be called an evil at all.
In other words, he was a model immigrant to mainstream his every thought into the culture of “America the Beautiful”, accepting and endorsing all the alleged virtues of “my country right or wrong” theme, and taking up the lifetime blowjob at the academia.
In contrast, Mr. Cho, no matter how the mainstream media in the US depicted him a psychopathic, crazy, and sullen loner, clearly stated in his manifesto that he was sick at the social debauchery, hedonistic needs, and deceitful charlatans and he was doing the killings for his children, brothers and sisters…that is, he refused to become a kiss-ass cog in the moneyed wheel and defied the powers of authorities, wealth, and skullduggery in the society.

What has made Mr. Yoo a law professor and Mr. Cho a mass murderer?
Both kids came to the country where they grew up in front of television set that oozes violence, blood, and murder every seconds.
In the Korean immigrant community, there is no middle ground between success and failure… you are either a good or bad boy in a cutthroat competitive life.
And Mr. Yoo became a superb son of the immigrant parent, singing along his master’s tune of imperial march while Mr. Cho cried out desperately against social debauchery and nightmarish charlatans.

The US authorities have sifted through Mr. Cho’s computer hardware, books, emails and other personal files thoroughly, but are not able to find the evidence that began to explain why Mr. Cho committed the massacre…especially in terms of why he targeted to kill an unspecified, random, multiple, and amorphous group in the first place, in contrast to most of revenge-killings in the US involve the personal vendetta.
As if Americans have misconception about the suicide bombers in Iraq who love death as Americans love life, the Virginia Police would never uncover the Cho’s motives if they continue to search at the wrong address: “Mr. Cho is a crazy and psychotic maniac.”
For the South Koreans, who have been bowing, groveling, prostrating, and kowtowing on all fours at the altar of the Chinese, Japanese and now American imperium for two millenniums, they would chatter about Mr. Cho like a pack of crows on heat for some time, but you’d be sure to see that they are at work steam-pressing your shirts and pants in order to produce hundred thousands of “the Yoo”.
Pity the South Koreans!

dalehan@verizon.net