Korean Job Discussion Forums

[cwflaneur]

I was sitting at a cafe just now and a group of professional-looking, late-20s Korean men and women were sitting at the table nearby. The Olympics being on the TV, they were fixated, and they burst into laughter as the skater onscreen took a fall. I don't need to tell you that the skater was not Kim Yu Na.

Repugnant, I thought.

But then, what would I know? When a student tells me that "the USA won a medal", it provokes no emotion in me whatsoever. None. I must be genetically deficient in this area, given that the rest of humanity seems to experience it with such religious passion. My own view is that any given player's performance represents nothing at all beyond his own personal luck, capability, and the affluence of his/her nation of origin - whether you come from the sort of background that gives you access to and time for this kind of leisure activity, as well as the extent to which one's national government can be bothered to pump funding into the training - (e.g., South Korea, anyone? Try telling a Korean that their strong performance at the Olympics represents anything other than the inherent greatness of the great Korean nation, nature's Chosen People among the earth ).


Anyway, two writers, George Orwell (author of 1984 and Animal Farm) and Christopher Hitchens express my feelings about these events better than I possibly could.

Orwell's article, from 1945:

THE SPORTING SPIRIT: http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/spirit/english/e_spirit excerpt:
If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will �lose face�.

Christopher Hitchens' article is a kind of contemporary update and addendum to Orwell's:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/233007 excerpt:
Putting it a bit strongly, you say. But what about the border war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969, when the violence set off by a disputed soccer match escalated to the point of aerial bombardment? In Khartoum recently, a soccer game between Egypt and Algeria led to widespread violence, a sharp exchange of diplomatic notes, a speech about affronted national honor from President Hosni Mubarak, hysterical hatred pumped out on state media, and an all-round deterioration of what you might call civility. And this between two members of the Arab League! Incidentally, that observation takes care of the excuse that is sometimes offered: that if rival countries confine their contests to the sporting field, they allow the quarrel between them to be settled vicariously. Before the match in Khartoum, Egypt and Algeria had no diplomatic quarrel. After the game, perfectly serious people in Cairo were saying the atmosphere resembled that following the country's defeat in the June 1967 war � In the India-Pakistan case the position is almost the reverse: relations between the two countries have been poisonous enough for decades, but there is no doubt that the cricket snub has almost effortlessly made a very bad situation even worse.

Their exquisitely-rendered prose gives me much more delight than watching some girl from another country fall onto the ice or a team of ball-players kick each other on the shins.

[djsmnc]

My Korean coworkers and I watched it for awhile. We had an ordinary conversation about all of the female skaters. We nonchalantly mentioned that Miss Kim was definitely going to get it. They were also talking about how well the other ladies did without any kind of nationalistic criticism. I suppose it depends on who you watch it with.

[Moldy Rutabaga]

[cwflaneur]

Seriously, living in Korea I wish I had taken my vacation during the Olympics so I wouldn't have to see grown adults revert back to infancy and conduct themselves like tiny little babies. The spite, chest-beating, and vileness defies belief. I now know that this jeering while watching figure-skating matches, of all things, is routine. Koreans have assured me so, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and they expressed suprise at my surprise. And can anyone seriously doubt that the hatred for this Apolo Ohno guy would be more than a fraction of what it is if the ancestry of that American was not half Japanese? It looks like these games bring out not only the worst of Korean nationalism, but also the nasty little spectre of their ingrained cultural racism, to boot. Korea can enjoy its medals, but in my eyes it will always be the unofficial #1 Loser of the Olympics, simply because of the attitude of its citizenry.

Why hasn't anyone thought of easing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with an honest, hearty game of soccer in the West Bank? The point to be learned from the articles I posted is what a sham the idea is that these international sporting events like the Olympics or World Cup bring the nations of the world together. Of course near-cousins like Canada and USA , or Australia and NZ can compete without inciting frenzied mobs, or inspiring toilet-paper companies to print the face of the other team's star athlete on its paper. The fact is, the more bad blood exists between two nations, the less they will love each other as the result of an organised sporting match.

[Olivencia]

Waving their flags, painting their faces, screaming and chanting the names of the countries is really pitiful. And people fighting and sometimes being killed because of a rivalry between teams (nations)..are you kidding me? You will fight and kill because your team didn't win?! We are talking about a game....
Incredible

[Fox]

[TheUrbanMyth]

[tiger fancini]

[ddeubel]

[ddeubel]

Tribalism.

NO better or no worse than Highlanders in New Guinea running around naked, killing and spearing each other over conch shells and birds of a feather.

DD

http://eflclassroom.com

[mises]

[visitorq]

[caniff]

I'm looking forward to the sporting competitions we'll have when we start making contact with E.T.s

Finally the Earth will be as one, with all of Humanity hoping that FlooGarp from Romulus 7 slips and falls on his ass.

[Steelrails]

[Underwaterbob]