Friday, December 30, 2011

Like a fox.

I've been lax with this blog, like with a lot of other things I guess. I started it as a means to group happenings in Korea into bulletins, some class of a newsletter from the far side of the planet. For a time it worked, as the novelty of the place, the smells, sounds and tastes were still fresh and new. Familarity has got the better of me. It happens too much.

I walk the streets of Seoul these days with an apathy that I attribute to my eventual leaving. The place is the same, the looming of concrete monstrosities a far cry from the forests of Leitrim and the salt air of the Atlantic ocean that shaped me. The idea of it not being the place you're in but the people that surround you is a nonsense. Categorically. I am blessed to have the most beautiful company I could wish for, yet I could never imagine settling here, and for as long as life sees fit for me to stay here it will always be a surreal means to an end. As time's passed, I've grown concerned by the haunting prospect that travelling back across the world is such an ordeal that the only time I'll actually be fit to do so is for family weddings. As lovely as it was to be back for my brothers' weddings at the end of April and the beginning of September, and to catch up with the family and friends I left behind to come here, I can't help but feel aggrieved that all it is is a passing glimpse of the world I belong to before returning to a world that I never will. Others I know are happy here, have found whatever niche they were searching for and have tied themselves to the peninsula, and good luck to them for doing so. I'm not them, nor would I wish to be, my mind is too entrenched in Ireland not to spend the best days of my life there.

For a while now I've been known to wonder whether the city fox dreams of rummaging in dustbins or of the open fields of its ancestors. I guess it's a means of coming to terms with man's inherent complex of nurture against nature. It's something that I first thought of whilst living in London. I've seen no foxes in Seoul, but in spite of myself the longer I'm here, the more the question answers itself; you can take the fox out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the fox.

Maybe it's Seoul, the self-proclaimed 'Soul of Asia', a title beautifully accurate in its parodic lack of originality that has me feeling the way I do. I've lived in cities before, but none so crushingly bland nor uninspiring as this one; where the streets of the truly deplorable foreigner centre are patrolled by the US military, "making sure nothing gets out of hand", and the idea of a good night out centres on  repetitive obliteration in pubs and clubs that lack the authenticity of a fart. For a city of supposedly 10 million+ inhabitants, the apparent lack of anything worthwhile to do within it is galling. Highlights stretch from a walk to the Han river, where fish casually float by belly-up as the fishermen cast for life, or a trip to a zoo that made me criminally ashamed to be complicit in a species that claims compassion as one of its characteristics.

Perhaps it's an issue of mind over matter, and I'm being overtly harsh on the city. My reading list over the past month has been heavy going; Greg Palast's 'Armed Madhouse ', Andrew Ross Sorkin's 'Too Big To Fail', Ron Paul's 'End the Fed' and Naomi Klein's sublime chastisement of Friedmanist economics 'The Shock Doctrine', culminating in a sense of self that wishes only for land enough to grow food, a fluency as Gaeilge, and a place where simple realities trump the grandiose delusions that are pushed daily upon us by the US led military industrial complex that drags us all closer to a precipice of planetary meltdown. Maybe it is being harsh on Korea to speak of its capital with such negative association, but as a pretext for the globalised dream of consumer culture, this city is the glass slipper. With that said, I don't mean to defame the Korean people in any way, who on the whole have been a lot more embracing to myself as an occupier of sorts than I would be in their position. Their continued decency at every turn has made making a life here possible. I speak more of self-realisation; that my own presence here takes a form similar in many respects to the contractors in Iraq attempting to reshape the country to Friedmanism. In truth I was under no illusion before coming here that it would be much different, but desperate for a change of scene to unemployment in Ireland, something had to happen so i took the plunge. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have met Chelsea, and for that alone I shall always be grateful that the decision was the right one. The politicisation of self that I've come to has just reaffirmed the truisms that I've long known, and to continue propagating the ideals further than the end of this contract isn't something I would be comfortable in doing. It isn't for me to speak for others, and to each their own in all regards, but the greatest knowledge I've ever come upon is the understanding of my own mind and the needs there-of.

I've often been accused here of being unnecessarily vocal about my views on all things imperial. An obvious enough accusation, considering the majority of friends I have here are English, and it remains difficult to talk about geo-politics without referencing the history of the British empire within it. Some are so entrenched in their own mindset that they've already pulled the blinkers down on the supposedly open and shut case that I'm anti-English. It couldn't be further from the truth but happens to be a greater indictment of their own world-view than of mine; an inability to distinguish the difference between being British and being English being something I would attribute to an historical upbringing that clouds perspective with a skewed vision of the past; my rationale being that surely those with a composite understanding of the empire's sins would seek to disown it rather than to actively embrace the tag and all that goes with it, up to and including the present day. The best analogy i can link it to is my feeling toward its trans-Atlantic guide dog. Whilst Chelsea, and other American friends I have both understand and empathise with my views on the fascistic crusades of the government acting in their name, there seems to be a stronger resistance among the English to recognise the disparity between pride of place and repulsion of governmental endeavour. If it was a case that I held entire nations of people accountable for the actions of their figureheads, fuck knows I'd have to hate myself for the treason committed in Ireland's name by Taoisigh current and former who serve(d) to act against the best interests of the state in favour of personal gain, which would of course be absurd.

I've been advised by those left behind that 'there's nothing here anymore', that Ireland is akin to Kavanagh's 'The Great Hunger'  and the best thing I could do for my future is to make hay while the sun shines elsewhere because there's nothing to go back to. I would argue that it's exactly the reason to go back, although there are many. The systematic rape that Ireland is being subjected to by the Chicago school body that labels itself the IMF is reliant on emigration to quell the numbers of the badly needed mass demonstrations against the privatisation of national resources, and the explicit transfer of public funds to private black-hole banks. I was criticised, correctly, by a friend of mine for suggesting that the legacy of Ireland as female perhaps attributed to her inability to maintain an independence. A brazenly sexist remark out of context, but within it I would liken figures such as Yeats' depiction of Cathleen Ni Houlihan not so much as the 'sean-bhean bhocht' but more akin in our historical sense to the figure of a victim of abuse who keeps returning to her husband because it's all she knows, and grew up in a household where the mother(land) was subjugated to the extent where it became normal and an accepted reality. I would extend the analogy, however much I've already lost people already to the cries of 'sexist <insertswearwordhere>' to the current occupation of Eire. There's a worrying acceptance of the IMF's unelected presence in Ireland, governing with impunity and dictating national direction; a sense that 'sure fuck it lads we had it good for long enough but we've been found out and it's a fair cop' that smacks of the same sense of demurement with which the battered wife returns to her husband, with the implicit understanding that she must have deserved it for having the audacity to want something for herself.

The euphemism extends to the commonly held ideas in Ireland that we should be thankful that the likes of Royal Dutch Hell should consider us attractive enough to rape us to begin with, the perverse logic seemingly lodged in the ideas that we're so helpless a nation as not to be able to develop the infrastructure for ourselves, ever reliant upon the global corporations to save us from the terror of independence. The reality is different. With a sound and rational approach, ie. the nationalisation of resources, withdrawal from the European Union and re-establishment of a truly socialist republic in accordance with the foundation of the free state, the island of Ireland could not only be amongst the most thriving independent countries in the world, but entirely self-sustaining within 20 years, if projects such as The Spirit of Ireland  were taken seriously as opposed to being castigated out of hand by the increasingly partial media outlets that the people of Ireland unfortunately still consider as reliable sources of information. If the Corrib Gas project, (the estimated value of oil and gas reserves off the north west coast stands at 420 billion euro), was harnessed by, and for, the people of Ireland, the resultant profits would not only see the island as debt free, but invested in renewable resources of energy would see us as entirely self-sufficient within 20 years at most. With enough nationalistic self-awareness, and a political class that we demanded worked for us rather than allowing them to work against us, the potential exists to create a fundamentally renewable island,  (complete with the reclamation of the Vatican controlled education system that has seen thousands of lives destroyed), where the Irish people, instead of moving to the far side of the world to seek employment and a new life, could stay where they belonged and thrive where they felt most at home.

“An Irish Republic, the only purely political change in Ireland worth crossing the street for will never be realised except by a revolutionary party that proceeds upon the premise that the capitalist and the landlord classes in town and country in Ireland are criminal accomplices with the British government, in the enslavement and subjection of the nation. Such a revolutionary party must be socialist, and from socialism alone can the salvation of Ireland come.”

James Connolly, 1909.

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