wiped clean.

I'll keep it quick because I have about a million things to do.

I had to learn about the Jeju protest from Bombs and Shields. We get the Korea Herald sometimes in our staff room. Take a look at the online version.... nothing. I switch on cable (which I didn't ask for, and can't unsubscribe for) and channel surf... all I see is a brief scrolled message saying that the FTA talks have broken down over the usual divergence between toxic neo-liberal rhetoric and toxic corporatist deed. Not one image like this. Not one. It's a complete whitewash. On the teevee is all it's ever been: preachers, soaps, starcraft and anime.

Today I took the bus to Suwon to apply for my 'Alien Registration Card.' Between their town and ours is a gap of maybe fifty yards, and in those fifty there are slums and farms, piled right to the margins of the highway. I ask my co-worker about them, and she looks over them and tells about the gravestones on the hill. We get into a taxi and I flinch a little bit as American fighter jet scream overhead. The cabbie and my co-worker share a laugh at my naivete.

I wonder what the illiterates have been noticing about my country.