By Andy Jackson
The recently concluded ``extra negotiations'' (please don't call them renegotiations) on American beef imports to Korea included one of those Mars-Venus moments that my fellow Americans tend to face in our dealings with much of the rest of the planet.
Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon brought a large aerial photo of the massive June 10 anti-beef protest with him to Washington for use during negotiations with an American delegation led by U. S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab.
As his American counterparts laid out their positions based on the available data, Kim hit them with an emotionally charged counter, for which they apparently had no response.
``When the American side rejected our demands citing 'science,' I showed the picture and told them, 'Look at this. Can we resolve this with science?'' Kim later told reporters.
What can you say to something like that? With that bit of negotiating jujitsu, Kim let his counterparts know that everything they had been saying, while perhaps true, was largely irrelevant.
Facts? They didn't matter. Science? It didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was alleviating the fear that had put tens of thousands of protesters onto the streets and simply publishing data showing American beef was safe was not going to be enough.
In the end, Kim got the concessions his government needed. Armed with new restrictions limiting the import of beef to cattle under 30 months and banning the import of parts considered more likely to contain BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), the Lee administration finally feels confident enough to implement the April 18 agreement on the resumption of American beef imports to Korea.
While the resumption of American beef imports is still not exactly popular, it has at least become somewhat palatable to the Korean public.
In a recent poll commissioned by the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, 53 percent of those who responded opposed the new beef deal while only 38 percent supported it. However, that is a major improvement over the 81 percent who opposed the original agreement in a Gallup Korea poll taken several weeks ago.
Those numbers will likely continue to improve as Korean consumers start eating American beef and fail to drop like flies.
By working to calm public fears about American beef, the two governments have set the stage for cooler heads to eventually prevail among the Korea public. The protesters will still be on the streets, perhaps for the rest of Lee's presidency, but their numbers will gradually decrease.
Of course, having to deal with wild swings in the public mood and emotionally based appeals is hardly limited to Korean politics.
I realize that a large part of the world's population believes Americans are cold and calculating negotiators with a propensity for being legalistic, but it is not like we always reject the power of emotion.
Nor does the American government always ignore emotionalism when dealing with issues like meat safety.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently banned the slaughter of so-called downer cows following the release of a video by the Humane Society of the United States showing abuse of such animals. (The same footage was mislabeled as ``BSE-infected cow'' in the now infamous episode entitled American Beef: Is It Really Free of Mad Cow Disease? which aired on April 29.)
The cattle in question were safe for human consumption. Each had been approved by veterinarians for slaughter. However, no amount of reasoning could overcome the visceral reaction to seeing footage of animals being electrically prodded, dragged by chains or lifted by forklifts into the slaughterhouse.
In a monument to understatement, Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer noted that it was ``challenging to communicate" technical provisions around the downer cow issue, which is not surprising since few members of the general public are experts on livestock maintenance and food safety.
In announcing the decision, Shafer admitted that the ban was not about improving the safety of American beef (which was not threatened) but to ``strengthen consumer confidence'' and ``eliminate further misunderstanding'' over downer cows and beef safety. (For the record, the technical reason for the American downer cow ban announcement was to ``improve the humane handling of animals.'')
In other words, the Department of Agriculture's announcement of a ban on the sale of meat from downer cows was done wholly to alleviate public fear.
To paraphrase late American president Lyndon Johnson, Shafter simply wanted to get those downer cows off of his TV set.
Fear, along with our other emotions, is part of what defines us as human beings. It is an emotion that has protected our ancestors from real as well as imagined threats. There is no indication that the past several thousand years of human civilization has diminished the power of human emotions, nor will it anytime soon.
That is a reality that public officials ignore at their peril.
Andy Jackson teaches American government in the Lakeland College bridge program at Ansan College, Gyeonggi Province. He can be reached at andyinrok@lycos.com.