Do this for me, will you? Go to YouTube and type (or paste) "ka chingu news 평택미니스톱" into the search window, then watch a few of the top ten videos in that search. A quick summary if you're lazy: some crazy person slams his car into a Mini Stop convenience store, then begins driving his forward and backward inside the store, steamrollering everything inside. Meanwhile, a gaggle of cops is standing around looking totally useless and acting stymied until a couple of policemen take the initiative to go into the store, grab the guy, cuff him, and take him out to a waiting police car. The perp, meanwhile, smashes up the store's interior for around five minutes before the cops do anything.
My buddy Tom sent me a link to a video of the incident, which apparently happened in Pyeongtaek. The video had been uploaded to Facebook, but I did the above search to find the same video, plus many more, on YouTube. I just watched one of the videos and took some time (with the aid of Google Translate) to read some of the comments. Unsurprisingly, the comments to the video ranged from cynical to mournful, from "That's hilarious!" to "If this happened in the States, the guy would've been shot" to "Think about the store owner's and employees' livelihoods." I agreed with all the commenters. The situation sucked and was ridiculous. When Tom sent me the video link via Kakao, I reacted with this:
Wow. Where to even begin. That was a perfect example of mass retardation. No one did anything right. Not the driver, who was fucking nuts or drunk or high; not the police, who kept blocking each other's movements by bunching up like idiots; not the bystanders, who just stood there drooling. And why the fuck did the police allow the guy to demolition-derby the store interior for several minutes? Neutralize him, drag him out of the car, and get a truck to gingerly pull the car out of the store.
Korean law enforcement is a joke. Not saying I want the sort of brutality we sometimes see in the States, but Jesus, this was an embarrassment to watch.
If you've now seen the video(s) in question, you'll have noticed the preternatural calm with which the perp, flanked by officers, marches to a police car. I'm no longer sure he was drunk: were he drunk, he'd likely be stumbling. He might've been high, or he might have insane or insanely angry, becoming calm only after having made his "point." I wonder where I need to go to follow up on news about this individual. He's obviously a train wreck, spiritually speaking, and I admit I'm morbidly fascinated by what would provoke a person to do what he did. It's certainly in the Korean spirit of grandiose but ultimately useless gestures, like the guy who, years ago, protested in downtown Seoul by stabbing himself only partway in the gut.
I may have mentioned the incident witnessed by me and my father when Dad was in Seoul to visit me. This must have been about fourteen years ago, when I was a prof at Sookmyung. Dad and I were in a subway, minding our own business, when a drunken ajeossi in his fifties started screaming and raving. Everyone gave him a wide berth, and then the guy started kicking at one of the subway's reinforced windows. He kept at it until the glass started spidering and dimpling outward. Then, when the train came to a halt at the next stop, he very calmly (and, to my eyes, furtively) made his way out of the train and disappeared into the crowd of exiting passengers. Another grandiose, useless statement had been made. The incident in Pyeongtaek has that same colossally stupid look and feel.
Much of the story seems to be told here in Korean subtitles. Lots of legal-sounding vocabulary that I don't know. But I'm learning! (This video also illogically splices in scenes of police activity in other countries, including the US. Why? No fucking clue.)
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