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South Korean residents and students hold a rally to urge President George W. Bush to renegotiate the beef deal with South Korea at the Lafayette Park near the White House Monday (local time). Their signs say, “Bush, don’t impose mad cow on Koreans,” “We support candlelight vigils at home to press for a renegotiation of the beef import deal.” “Healthy people, healthy alliance,” and “President Lee Myung-bak drowns democracy.” / Yonhap |
 By John Eperjesi
Professor at Kyung Hee University.
The media has begun to portray this weekend's protests at City Hall as ``anti-American''
Korea Times columnist Michael Breen has described the protests as "hysterical." I was on the smoky streets (from barbecue, not tear gas) with protesters until 4 a.m. Friday morning, one of two white faces (the other being my friend Scott Burgeson, author of ``Korea Bug'') floating in a sea of Korean protesters.
Many people asked me why I was there, and I replied to support and to learn. For the record, I've been teaching and writing about the dark side of American history for the past 10 years, specifically U.S. imperialism in Hawaii and the Philippines.
Most of the people I met were very happy to see a foreigner in the midst, and I received quite a few smiles, hand-shakes, and pats on the back.
People went out of their way to let me know that this wasn't an anti-American protest, but a pro-democracy protest.
I experienced very little hysteria, but rather an extremely festive atmosphere with drums, dancing, a rock band, lots of singing and chanting, and of course, Samulnori.
What I witnessed was a broad-based social movement organized around a specific issue that affects us all - food. And hearing Korean children chanting about wanting democracy almost brought a tear to my eye.
The cover story for the protest is concern about mad cow disease.
Breen describes this concern as "hysterical" and "illogical." He asks, "Why aren't Americans protesting against American beef?"
Apart from the vulgar assumption that if Americans aren't protesting something, then other countries shouldn't protest either, Breen is flat out wrong.
Americans have been increasingly been protesting against American beef, albeit indirectly, in a wide variety of ways, as witnessed by the increasing popularity of vegetarianism, of range-fed cattle (if you can afford it), and the fact that, for a variety of reasons, quality being one of them, Americans are turning to alternative sources of protein.
And if Breen needs examples of direct protest, the fact that the first windows to be broken at anti-WTO protests are those of McDonalds, should serve. Consumers in America, and all over the world, have become increasingly suspicious of America's "food-industrial complex."
Anyone who wants to learn about the hazards of the American meat industry should read Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation," in which he describes, in nauseating detail, the numerous sources of meat contamination - animal protein being fed to cattle, overcrowded feedlots where cows marinate in pools of excrement, speeding-up of work at slaughterhouses, lack of government regulation - that have created dozens of new foodborne pathogens. Many meat-eaters were converted to vegetarianism after reading Schlosser's book.
But beyond the very legitimate concerns about the quality of American beef, I think there is also something more going on here, at least for the university students.
I get the sense that young people are bored, bored with pop culture, bored with plastic surgery, bored with consumerism and the fetishization of luxury goods.
They are also angry that they have spent their entire lives studying, only to leave university and enter a jobless future. Korea was convulsed by political revolution in the 1980s, but never really went through an equivalent cultural revolution.
The protests are about mad cow disease today, but social movements have a way of accumulating new meanings and directions over time. Who could have predicted that opening the Korean market to U.S. beef would have sparked such massive protests. And who knows where this thing will end up. That's the exciting thing about history.
In one of the most ridiculous representations of cultural difference I have ever encountered, Breen comments, "Americans are from Mars and Koreans are from Venus, meaning that Americans suppress emotion in public discourse because they believe that we can move forward if we engage rationally, where Koreans do the opposite."
This is a joke, right? Was there an absence of emotion during the Civil Rights, free speech, and anti-war protests of the sixties? Was there a shortage of emotion at the anti-WTO protests in Seattle or the pro-immigrant protests in San Francisco? All social movements combine reason and emotion in uneven ways. If anything, compared to recent protest movements in the U.S., this weekend's actions have been considerably restrained.
For me, the one disturbing aspect of the protests was watching university students taunt the police. When I looked into the faces of the police, I didn't see cops or pigs or thugs, I saw the faces of my students. Their faces looked bored, nervous, tired, and most of all, young. These are young men who should be in school, but are instead performing their military service. I'm sure they would much rather be on the other side of the chicken cage with their friends.
If Lee Myung Bak believes that he can craft an imperial presidency like his buddy George W. Bush, a presidency that ignores the will of the people, then it's going to be a long, hot summer. With opposition to the FTA growing on both sides of the Pacific, there is a historic opportunity to ditch the Korea-U.S. FTA and craft a document that really serves the interests of working people on both sides of the Pacific. I believe one aspect of any such agreement should include "food sovereignty," which Walden Bello, a senior analyst at the Bankok-based institute Focus on the Global South, describes as "the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food..."
With his Spock-like devotion to logic and rationality, the only person from another planet is Breen. The rest of us are here on planet earth trying to figure out how to create a better, more just, and healthier future.
The writer John Eperjesi a professor at Kyung Hee University. He received Ph.d in English and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University, and is the author of a book on U.S. - Asian relations entitled, "The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture" (University Press of New England, 2004).
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yistory@koreatimes.co.kr
