It's time for some kimchee

I'm celebrating Korea Week©!

Not really. I just watched a movie about North Korea's Mass Games that was utterly fascinating. It's called "A State of Mind" and it focuses on two young gymnists as they compete to perform in the show. The Mass Games, by the way, are where you see all those incredible images of thousands and thousands of people doing sychronized things to create some sort of gigantic propoganda image. But the documentary shows a lot of ordinary life in the DPRK. Something that's interesting is how genuine the people (granted, most are children...) are when they talk about their devotion to Kim Il Sung (the Father) and Kim Jong Il (the General). It makes sense, if you know almost nothing of the outside world. That country is seriously traumatized by the memory of the Korean War- some of their fears of an American attack seem justified.

In less than twenty years, there will be almost no one left, probably, who remembers a time before the DPRK and all of its propaganda. Isn't that wierd to think about?


Then:

Tonight I went for a walk and found the brand-new Korean War memorial at MacArthur Park, which was paid for almost entirely, it seems, by Little Rock's Korean sister city and Samsung Corporation. It was a nice foil to the previous night's film. Just across the DMZ is a nation that is all about some US imperialism, and they speak the same language, have the same pre-1940s cultural history, etc...