By Michael Breen

In a remarkable display of popular ignorance, tens of thousands of middle and high school students, scared they were going to be forced to eat mad cow meat, have taken to the streets to protest over the past week.

The target of their ire is President Lee, who has lifted restrictions on American beef imports which had been in place since mad cow disease broke out in the U.S. in 2003. The disease, officially called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is linked to a fatal brain-wasting disease in humans, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or vCJD.

Lee took the step in order to remove the last stumbling block to the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, negotiated by the previous government, but held up pending ratification by the U.S. Congress and Korean National Assembly.

Those who were too busy to attend the candlelit demonstration in Seoul were able to sign an online petition calling for the impeachment of President Lee. By midweek, some 1.2 million had signed, thus proving that they don't know the difference between the Constitution and a public opinion poll.

One of the notions that got the protestors out was alleged research showing that Koreans have a gene that makes them susceptible to the disease.

This misleading report, aired on the Bolshevik MBC-TV network, was particularly pernicious because it did contain a half-truth. Vulnerability to Mad Cow disease is in fact linked to the gene that controls one's ability to pronounce English. As the sizeable population of Korean-Americans who eat American beef shows, if you can speak English you can eat beef until the cows come home.

The problem in Korea, however, is considerable because of genetic wiring that makes people say ``beeper" when the brain is saying ``beef."

A well-known actress, Kim Min-seon, spurned the students on with a claim that ``I wooder rador swallow shyanider than eat American beeper.'' Ms. Kim, whose nickname according to my Google research is ``Bambi" and who has type AB blood (don't ask me), is undergoing tests to see whether she has not already turned into a mad cow.

I must confess my first thought upon being confronted with protestors last Friday night and on reading the subsequent coverage was to link their rather ill thought-through cause to other historical moments of popular stupidity, such as when people used the rails of the first train track between Seoul and Incheon as a cooling pillow in summer, with predictably distressing results.

But that would be unkind. Sarcasm will not help liberate Korea's youth from the peculiar education that robs them of both their childhood and their faculty for critical thinking.

But I now wonder if there is not something more sinister at work. As reported in this newspaper Wednesday, police are investigating the source of some apparently deliberate rumors that got people out on the street. Last Friday, many students reportedly received a text message: ``First victim of mad cow disease found on May 2. This is not a rumor, but reality. Come to the rally at Cheonggye Plaza at 7 p.m. tomorrow.'' Others included claims spread online that mad cow disease can be contracted by drinking tap water and breathing air.

As evidence that some expert agitators were at work inflaming the masses, another rumor said that the government had accepted Japan's claim to Takeshima, the two islets better known in Korea as Dokdo. That's a good one.

If found, the rumormongers could face five years in prison or a 50 million won fine. I'm not a conspiracy theorist by nature, and I know there's always a lot of rubbish on the Internet that does not get us out on the street. But I'd be curious to know if there are any skilful political types at work here.

If not, it just means that it was just a question of time before students were distracted away from anti-Chinaism, after the Olympic Torch protests, and back to the safer and less intellectually challenging territory of anti-Americanism.

Michael Breen is president of Insight Communications Consultants in Seoul. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.