By Jahan Alamzad
My attentive understanding of Korea started in late 2007 as I geared up to spend much of last year in Seoul advising a large international corporation.
The late President Roh Moo-hyun was still in the office when I began learning in some depth about the business, culture, and politics of Korea.
The shocking news of the former President's apparent suicide was as startling as it was heartbreaking. A man of character by all measures who dedicated his life to cleansing some of the unfortunate political traits of his country, now found himself unable to fathom the ramifications of events upon him, hence resorting to the unthinkable.
That's a Shakespearean tragedy sprinkled with deep Confucian conviction.
Much has been written and said during the past few days about the former President, his conduct while holding the office, and what has transpired after he left the presidency.
Regardless of the political divide and differing opinions, the unifying theme of all commentaries has been that President Roh was a good man, with good intentions, and no matter how judgmental one wants to be, denying the strength of his character is wide of the mark.
The former President took his life out of a sense of restoring honor that he saw was slipping away. He witnessed his life-long quest to bring nobility to his country vanishing in vain.
And, he found himself as a principal cog in the brewing machination of the events that would one way or another tarnish irreversibly his name and work. That loss of honor became too much for him to bear, leading to his life's self-inflicted tragic end.
Compare that to the case of one Jake DeSantis. As the disclosure of the hefty bonuses to the AIG executives enraged Americans, DeSantis' resignation email to the company's chairman appeared as an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on March 24, creating a sensation.
DeSantis worked in the same financial product unit of AIG that created losses on the magnitude requiring $180 billion bailout by the U.S. government.
Defiantly, DeSantis claimed he had nothing to do with that, even though he had spent years in that unit, precisely at the time the mess was brewing. Yet, he said he was kept, during the past year for the cleanup, working 10 to 14 hours a day!
Beyond the sheer arrogance of DeSantis, his twisted logic would have been amusing were it not for the seriousness of the matter.
He professed not to be ``involved'' in the catastrophic credit default swap transactions in his unit that brought down AIG. Does that mean that DeSantis did not know what was going on, or knew but did not partake in those activities?
If the former, then keeping him at AIG for the cleanup made no sense since he was apparently as clueless as the rest of the AIG cadre about the nature and depth of the calamity.
If the latter, then he is as guilty as those whom he claimed made those outrageous transactions that brought the worldwide financial system to the brink.
Predictably, DeSantis cited his working-class upbringing, so typical of putting forth defenses such as his. It did not occur to him to think of the investments of teachers' pension funds ― the same respectable individuals with whom through his parents he strived to be associated in hopes of deflecting the anger ― his division and other equally-guilty financial institutions plundered away.
Found in all of this is honor, a commodity that is becoming increasingly scarce in the world we live in. On one hand a noble man shows life without honor doesn't have meaning. On the other, a man exemplifies that honor has no meaning in our lives.
I respect those with extreme honor, such as former President Roh, to whom I pay tribute, and value his work and his relentless pursuit of perfection in governance, even in the face of poor judgments at times. I dismiss pompous characters like DeSantis, for whom honor is just an inconvenient footnote.
I dread the day that as citizens of the world, we find ourselves with less of the likes of Roh Moo-Hyun, instead enduring more of the ones such as Jake DeSantis.
Jahan Alamzad is managing principal of CA Advisors (www.ca-advisors.com), a management consulting firm in San Jose, Calif. He specializes in the application of advanced analytical techniques to complex business problems. He can be reached at jahan.alamzad@ca-advisors.com. The views expressed in the above article are those of the author and do not reflect the editorial policy of The Korea Times.
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