ululate!

Seoul mayor Park Won-soon has been found dead in a forest. He was 64. My buddy Mike actually broke the news to me around 1 a.m., Seoul time, via text message, so I found out about Park from an American source. Apparently, authorities had been looking for Park since he'd been reported missing by his daughter. He disappeared a day after allegations of sexual harassment had surfaced against him. Park, when he went missing, had turned off his phone and had reportedly left a "will-like" note, which was found by his family.

Park's mayoralty didn't register much in my consciousness. Unlike previous Seoul mayor Lee Myung-bak (who became president of South Korea, then got taken down for corruption and imprisoned in the wake of President Park Geun-hye's own imprisonment), Park didn't have any grandiose pet projects to offer the people, e.g., Lee's restoration of the Cheonggye Creek in downtown Seoul, or the possible building of a Seoul-to-Busan canal (Lee was obsessed with waterways, I guess). According to certain news articles, Mayor Park had received praise for his local handling of the coronavirus pandemic in Seoul. I don't know the extent to which Seoul—which is the seat of South Korea's national government—is run by the mayor's government or by the federal government, but if the Seoul-based handling of the pandemic has been mostly the work of Mayor Park, then I offer sad and belated praise for his light touch.

At a guess, Park's death was a suicide—maybe by hanging, maybe by a long fall. ROK Drop, linked twice above, speculates that Park may have pulled a Noh Mu-hyeon. You'll recall that President Noh, in the midst of his own corruption scandal, went for a walk in 2009 and ended up plummeting off a local cliff.* I imagine we'll learn more over the next few weeks, and my inner cynic predicts that this issue will be immediately politicized. I had hoped that, by living in Korea, I could have avoided the insanity gripping Western countries like the US and the UK, but South Korea looks to be on the precipice of teh krazee. I hope I'm wrong.

There's way too much urgent news to keep track of these days; culture continues to accelerate, spinning itself ever tighter and tighter. I often wonder whether it's better simply to say "fuck it" and just unplug from it all. The world will continue on its merry gyration; people will continue to be varying degrees of kind and cruel, smart and stupid. Same shit, different day, right? Meanwhile, Seoul's mayor is dead, and things are going to get interesting. Maybe Korea will go nuts, or maybe this country will once again offer an amazing display of surprisingly civilized behavior—as happened during the Park Geun-hye demonstrations, and as has been happening as the country deals with the Wuhan Virus pandemic.

---

*Suicide is regarded very differently in East Asia than it is in the West. Part of this has to do with the difference between a "guilt" culture and a "shame" culture. In anthropological circles, guilt is seen as a private condition—something between you and your conscience, or between you and God. Either way, the focus is on the individual, and on individual integrity. In a guilt culture, how you act, even when you know no one is looking, matters ethically. In shame cultures, such as those in East Asia and the Middle East, shame is a public emotion that has everything to do with how society regards you. Your self-worth is measured by how the public views you; your "honor" is very much linked to things like your social status/position and your reputation. How you look externally is more important than who you are internally. Look dignified, and you have dignity. If, in reality, you're a criminal, then just don't get caught.

In such societies, which also tend to be group-first in orientation, ejection from the group is tantamount to death: to be cut off from the hive is to be shorn of all that makes one human. Sustained disapprobation is little different from outright physical rejection, according to the shame-culture point of view. And that's why suicide is a plausible out: one does much to recover one's honor by voluntarily paying the ultimate price for having fallen in status. Who, after all, can question the sincerity of one's remorse when one is willing to expiate one's sins by dying? Such self-sacrifice does much to restore the honor of the dishonored. To an Easterner, then, Western notions of suicide as selfish, cowardly, and overly rash ("a permanent solution to a temporary problem," as Westerners like to say) make little sense.

But as much as my above explanation of the two cultures might seem to favor the guilt-culture orientation, I sometimes wish American politicians were more East Asian: American pols (and American celebrities, too, for that matter), when their corruption is exposed, simply puff themselves up and deny any wrongdoing, stubbornly clinging to their twisted, abominable, delusional worldview. Facing the opprobrium of the masses is no problem for leprous souls with no conscience. American politicians (and celebrities) would never consider suicide as a way out—perhaps because, like other Westerners, they see suicide as a coward's solution. Me, I think such politicians are cowards for not opting to run themselves through, to dive off a cliff, or to hang themselves. They could learn from the Koreans.