13) "I OBJECT LEE MYUN BAK"

(The following article is from the October 16-31, 2008, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

By Sean Burton, September 25, 2008, Busan, South Korea

A lesson in English grammar is not typically political. Indeed, language classes tend to avoid politics, and for good reason. When one who speaks little or no Korean is trying to teach English to a group of elementary school Koreans, potentially complicated language has to be discarded.

     But one day during my first week of teaching, I experienced a pleasant surprise. One of the new English words being learned was the verb "object". Along with the other words in the lesson, the children had to create sentences of their own that used the word.

     When I was checking their grammar, I noticed that several students had written "I object Lee Myun Bak" as their sentence. They had forgotten to place "to" after object, but the sentence could be understood. Lee Myun Bak, the current president of South Korea, has far greater opposition then I first thought. Great indeed, if hostility to him extends even to elementary school students.

     South Koreans staged protest after protest in the capital city of Seoul through the summer of 2008. Some protests drew in well over 100,000 participants. They were staged primarily over Lee's plan to resume importing U.S. beef, cut off as a result of the latest mad cow outbreak. Mad cow, or as many of my students call it, "crazy cow", is not reason enough to draw people into the streets in such numbers.

     Widespread distrust of the government is such a reason, as I wrote in the August issue of People's Voice. In short, Lee is a typical right-wing leader, elected during one of Korea's lowest election turnouts, and pursuing the usual pro-corporate and pro-American policies. That included his resumption of U.S. beef imports, as well as an upcoming free trade deal with Canada. Several of his cabinet members were forced to resign over corruption charges earlier in the year. No wonder South Koreans are angry.

     The term "crazy cow" continues to be uttered by students at my school, and it isn't hard to guess what they're getting at. And something else happened recently that indicates how fresh the opposition remains. At the beginning of September, I took over a class for another English teacher while he was visiting his home in the U.S. The Korean teacher who also teaches that class had told them that their old teacher was coming back soon. The class said they didn't want the old foreign teacher back instead of me. Evidently, he had said the protests were stupid, and had an argument with the class on the topic, limited by his language skills. While telling me this, the Korean teacher made it clear that she was not pleased, and that the American teacher should "take his job more seriously".

     These are experiences at one, tiny English school. I would not have expected children to have such political hostility. There's a good chance they just repeat what their parents or older relatives are saying. That they still speak of these things long after the protests have ended indicates that it has been taken to heart. They appear to have a sense that Lee Myun Bak's policies are dangerous for ordinary South Koreans, those who don't stand to gain anything from expanded economic ties to the U.S.