"Sunken Naval Ship, Ground Zero Have Common Legacy" reads stupid fucking headline.

This interview in the Korea Times last week is doing it wrong.

A psychiatrist observed that the sinking of the naval frigate Cheonan in the West Sea last Friday has left a similar legacy to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York nine years ago.

"There are similar patterns in people's reactions and the symptoms that were displayed in the wake of the two heart-wrenching incidents," Lee Na-mi, who received an M.D. and Ph.D. from Seoul National University, said.

In an interview with The Korea Times, Wednesday, Lee stated the two nations also had their own heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice during emergency rescue missions.

Invoking 9/11 isn't anything new. When a guy burned down Namdaemun in 2008 the papers called it "Korea's 9/11." In stories about Sungnyemun---people changed to the fancy name---after the fire, and about the rebuilding efforts and the renewed interest in the site through "dark tourism" they also brought up Katrina, Auschwitz, the Cambodian Killing Fields, and Hiroshima.


"The Korean equivalent of the 9/11 attacks happened while the whole country was watching."

As I see it the extreme lack of perspective stems from two things. The first is the Korean tendency to describe domestic things as "Korea's ______" in order to try and make them seem bigger and more significant. On trivial levels there is "Korea's Hawaii" (Jeju), "Korea's Usher" (Rain), and "Korea's Grand Canyon" (LMFAO, some place in Gwangyang). It moves from ridiculous to inappropriate and perhaps offensive when you equate Japanese Occupation with the Holocaust, or describe the arson of a neglected building in Seoul as "Korea's 9/11."

The second is the importance of sentimentality, and shared public emotion. This occurs on a smaller scale with variety and reality shows, where you're watching celebrities watching something on TV, and where you're encouraged to react a certain way by constant replays of one-liners or silly falls. You have it quite a bit in music videos, where when the video isn't some ridiculous "sexydance" or some goofy pop star dressed like a middle school teacher from 1995, it has somebody getting hit by a car, or dying of tuberculosis, or jumping off a bridge. We see this also with "funeral porn," with news cameras getting right into the face of wailing mourners, and funeral attendees allowing the media that access.





(Top) Funeral porn at a memorial service for a Gwangju student murdered in Russia in February. (Bottom) On May 18, 2008, at the National Cemetery in Gwangju, a woman mourns at the grave of her child murdered in the 1980 Gwangju Massacre, surrounded by photographers, with one man crouching behind a grave to get a better view.

Every time I think about funeral porn---shut up---I'm reminded of this post by Gusts of Popular Feeling, of little girls crying for the camera when Pyeongchang lost the bid for the Winter Olympics.

But back to 9/11, Koreans half a world away watched not only the planes fly into the Twin Towers, but the American public reacting to it with tears, with shouts, or with shock, and watching this on TV provided something Koreans could call upon later. In fact, much of the hyperbole after the Namdaemun arson came from its aftermath covered round-the-clock on TV and all over the internet. Here's a ridiculous column in the JoongAng Daily on February 28, 2008:

We have had our fair share of tragedy ― the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store and Seongsu Bridge, plus the arson attack on the Daegu subway.

And that war.

However, cameras didn’t catch the moment of the accident. The fire at Naksansa Temple in 2005 still sticks in our memory, because we saw it on TV.
People could do nothing but watch the pitiful footage as the ancient temple burned and the bronze bell melted in the flames.
Viewers who saw those painful images will never forget them. The sounds of people shrieking as they looked on has been burned into the hearts of the people of Korea.

And, in a Chosun Ilbo article:

Baek Sang-bin, a professor of psychiatry at Gangneung Asan Hospital of the University of Ulsan said, "Just as Americans were thrown into a panic after watching on TV the World Trade Center buildings, the symbol of the U.S., collapse in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Koreans now feel a great sense of loss and frustration at the sight of the Namdaemun collapse. The disaster in Seoul didn't pose any threat to their lives. But they psychologically felt the equivalent of feelings the American had in the wake of the 9/11 attacks." If they happen to watch the scene of a disaster with their own eyes, people regard its consequences as happening to them personally and feel great unease and panic, Baek added.

Ha Ji-hyun, a professor of psychiatry at Konkuk University Hospital, said Namdaemun was one of two national symbols that “protected us psychologically” alongside the statue of Admiral Yi Sun-shin, who destroyed the Japanese Navy during the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 16th century. “People's sense of panic and frustration over their loss of Namdaemun will linger on for a long time."

Don't get me wrong, many Americans have distorted 9/11 to unreal levels, and mention to some people that American foreign policy may have in any way justified retribution and you're bound to punched in the face or kicked off your talk show. But this careless hyperbole cheapens actual tragedies like the Cheonan sinking and makes them pale in comparison to the "original" being envoked.

I brought that up in a March 2008 Gwangju News piece, "Careless Hyperbole Cheapens Impact of Sungnyemun Fire":

Any well-adjusted person knows that the Sungnyemun arson doesn’t belong in the same line of thought as concentration camps or sites of suicide attacks. So why have these comparisons been made? Well, I feel that there is, first of all, a profound misunderstanding of September 11th by many Koreans. For those separated physically and emotionally, the attacks were a televised action sequence that played out live on every network. Like Sungnyemun, the targets did have symbolic significance, but for many Koreans – and indeed for many outside the United States – the attacks represented a strike against American economic dominance and cultural hegemony. The attacks had a number of unpleasant consequences for Koreans that exacerbated an already fragile US-ROK relationship: military support in Afghanistan and Iraq, the execution of Kim Sun-il, and – as some have argued – the capture and ransom of Korean missionaries in Afghanistan in 2007. The human suffering was buried by other considerations and, I feel, was quite lost in translation.

There is also the belief by some that, to add legitimacy to things Korean, they must be cast by Koreans in the light of things Western. Jeju is called Korea's Hawaii, Tongyeong is Korea's Naples, and the singer Rain is Korea's Justin Timberlake. Such comparisons are damaging to both sides, and always cheapen the Korean claim.

. . .

It must also be said that the Korean press and a fair number of Koreans have displayed a worrying lack of empathy and tact regarding foreign cultures and countries. Lesser examples occur in the papers on a nearly daily basis, and the major gaffes have attracted worldwide attention. For example, the day after the
Virgina Tech massacre the Seoul Shinmun ran a cartoon using the 33 deaths to mock the United States' gun policies, though the newspaper pulled the cartoon when the shooter turned out to be a Korean. In April, 2006, at the COEX Intercontinental Hotel in Seoul, the hotel's president was giving a lecture on poktanju, or "bomb alcohol." The president said to the gathered company, which included most notably the Japanese Ambassador, that poktanju "is like a flash and explosion of bubbles, like the moment of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima." There are also several Nazi-themed bars throughout the country, and they've just recently been given international media attention. In response to criticism, the owner of one such bar told a reporter, "I wanted to be different." One patron told a TIME magazine reporter in 2000 his views on the Nazis: "I don't hate them, I don't like them, but at least they dressed well." The highly-offensive "blackface" make-up has appeared on comedy programs, in music videos, and even in the current national elementary school curriculum. And I know I'm not the only teacher to have had students make jokes about terrorism, Bin Laden, and the crumbling Twin Towers.

I took some heat for the line "any well-adjusted person," which I admit was probably worded indelicately, and for the topic in general, which inspired an attack from an unhappy reader married to one of the Gwangju International Center interns. He wrote in a letter to the editor, unfortunately taking the then-fashionable "you don't understand Korean culture" line:

In my viewpoint, his indication attitude is expressed very arrogantly and it seems that he looked down on Korean, because he insisted that Korean is lacked in awareness of world stance, because Korean is lacked in some awareness of western world. Yes, it's true, but every Korean can't and don't need to know of everything about western culture, like every western can't and don't need to know of eastern and Korean culture. And western also didn't do their best to understand eastern too. It was also proven in his article about Namdaemun, which he wrote that he couldn't understand why Korean was shocked greatly; to such extent they could compare it with the September 11 attack. So I would like to advise him that while he advises Korean to be aware of western culture, he should also try to learn eastern culture in general and Korean culture in particular.

It's a little arrogant to tell Koreans how to mourn, I guess, but there's nothing wrong with objecting to outrageous hyperbole. But, as far as I can tell this latest 9/11 crap has only been repeated in an English-language newspaper of little credibility or merit, and isn't necessarily a commonly-held train of thought. No, when it comes to the media and the Cheonan disaster, you've got one side saying North Korea did it, and the other side taking more interest in blaming the Lee Myung-bak administration for what it considers a shoddy investigation. Very informative.