A Flintman's Recollections

32
A Flintman in the Era of the Internet, 2000~2003



“오늘 아침 보(洑)나오소!” onul achim bo naoso! "People, come out for dike works this morning!" The town crier had cried his lung out, standing on the top of the background hill. to get people together. Then the adult men villagers, after having had breakfast, had come out to work on the dikes taking shovels and picks, building the dikes, improving them and managing them. At that time Dano's father at Sun Valley had struck a flint to make a fire. The letter carriers had run the wilderness, gotten over the mountain hills, and crossed the stream rivers. The newspaper, carried by a postman three times a week, had given a great joy. And from time to time, it was thrilling when, manuscripts, which had been written on paper by pencil, sent to the newspaper company and through the pruning works of the editor, ran on the newspaper's Letters to the Editor section. Really thrilling.

The onset of the Internet, which had been made possible around the end of the 1990s in the Korean society, needed a new mindset of adaptation into and behavior modification for a new society. But the Internet slammed its way so suddenly into the country that it was unprepared and untrained, which inescapably resulted in conflicts among the community members. The medias, or, the press in general, did not set up paradigms of roles toward their users. The users, too, did not train themselves on the relationships toward the medias and the mutual users.

Dano had hassles on the online message boards of the medias, especially in the initiation period of the Internet, with the other members over the uses of the online terms. Dano tried to convince the other members of the so-called bulletin boards that they were there to "post". They were not supposed to "write" because they were not writers in the exact sense of the word, and because they were not the writers who belonged to the specific writers' association, either. They were not supposed to "read" because the online message boards were not libraries, or something. They were there to "debate." Dano turned out to be, for a long period of time, the butt of ridicule and criticism to the vernacular Koreans.

Dano did not "write" because he was not a writer who had been registered with any writers' union or something, and granted that he had been one, when he was scribbling something down on an online bulletin board in ways by which with the consonants and vowels of the local language were combined, he was composing messages, not writing.

He thought aloud that he, and the others as well, had to recognize the difference, that is, the difference of the mode of speaking. Dano marveled as a "flintman" at the rapidity with which what he had scribbled down on his desktop monitor was immediately published on the online message boards of the medias which might be hundreds or thousands of miles away by one clicking of the mouse. Courtesy of the venerable Mr. Bill Gates and Mr. Lee Chan Jin.

The medias of Korea were trapped, from the cybernetic start, in the triviality of provincialism and specificity of ideologies. One of those aspects was that they began to record the viewerships by number of every post on their message boards, from which all the plagues originated. What had petrified Lot's Wife also turned the medias of Korea and their users into turmoil. A really self-incurred disaster. The otherwise innocuous curiosity, combined with provincialism and leftist-leaning extremism, transformed the Internet sites into the hell of hatred and curse.

The craze for the dominance of message board viewerships spurred the competition among the posters themselves. It could be figuratively said that dominant viewerships were like fashion. That is, the more numbers in the recorded viewers of the post in question could be compared to a pretty woman in Prada fashion. Problem was that "devils tended to wear Pradas"

Just like the women in fashion clothes are looked upon in wonder, the online members with huge viewership records were looked upon in awe. That's where the members of the online message boards began to be attracted to numbers. That's why the so-called computer nerds or geeks were from the earliest tinkering with computer buttons on the toolbar of the monitor.

The people, taking after the attributes of the nation, divided by ideologies into two different sovereign entities, tended to take positions on everything, which developed into sides. People took sides. They learned to take sides before learning to think together, work together, and live together. The medias took sides, too, and the audiences tended to be clustered under the umbrellas of the favorite medias.

Hatred was organized, too. People learned to hate medias before they learned to love, to be enlightened by, and to use them in good ways. The ideology of hatred had been created by militant ideologues; Slogans and pamphlets were scattered; Demagogues were rampant. A specific newspaper was pinpointed for destruction by hostile forces.

The Morning Calm Daily was just the one. On what counts? On the charges of benefiting the Japanese empire by extolling the Emperor of Japan. Though the newspaper media had once or twice run the pro-Japanese articles and editorials during the colonization period (1919~1945), it had greatly contributed to the enlightenment of the people nevertheless.

The flag-bearer and mastermind of the anti-Morning Calm Daily was Mr. Quon. Quon, who might have been in his early forties, was rumored to come from foreign studies, having his lecturer's post at several third-ranking colleges. He was reputed to be wielding the acerbic pen, who had no hesitation in blurting satirical comments on all the gamut of topics personal to public. Quon had virtually settled on the online message board of the Morning Calm Daily mainly during the night hours and posted pointed messages deriding the media family and their past practices. Problem One was that he was recording huge viewerships of 3,000 to 4,ooo per post, whereas commonplace posters like Dano recorded two-digit viewerships. Problem Two was that the media was powerless as to the public hacker, or heckler. Problem Three was he was having "enormous" following, which turned out destructive: The stoppage of newspaper subscriptions increased, such as they were.

Four-digit viewership numbers were a terror in themselves. Quon's messages full of mockeries, slanders, revilement, and derisions seemed to undermine the ramparts of the media and its family to a great extent. Dano questioned the media's wisdom of no response: why didn't they do anything to keep the devil from running wild? At one instant, the media appeared to let Quon run amok, by which the online message board of the media could get packed with cyber crowds. The media deliberately whetted their impulse to curse and attack a target media online. Nevertheless, could it be justified that one part of the population monopolized morals of society, and thereby lynch the other part with impunity? Wasn't it a kind of popular court? Was it possible that the one part of the population was absolutely right and the rest was totally wrong?

Above all things, Dano was wondering whether a certain member of society could be excused in violating the others' human rights under the pretext that he was "assigned" to correct and punish the 70-year-old media mistake of the flattery toward the Japanese Emperor. Dano thought such historical mistakes should be judged and punished by the state only, but not by a specific person or a group of persons. Dano also thought that the statute of limitations should strictly be applied to the history court. The judgement of seditionary and perfidious acts of the pro-Japanese inclination by persons or organs, if any, should have been done immediately after the Liberation of 1945. The then Syngman Lee government had decided to close the deal. It had been an open-and-shut case because of all circumstantial reasons within and without.

You can envision, of course, a speckless sky, but it hardly exists, and if it does, it exists only for a short while. You can't imagine a river bed without mud. Not only irises but also thorn bushes are populated in a mountain valley. You can't live in a perfect society with perfect people. That would be a hallucination at best, a deceit at worst.

That will be an impossible dream. Nevertheless, you can refer to North Korea that has become "perfect" after all that purge and liquidation of its people for the sake of socialist experimentation for the past 60 years. But it was a distilled nation that the ordinary people couldn't live just like fish can't live in distilled water.

The "distilled nation" of course indicated the one shorn of "the anti-revolutionary elements" who had been speckled with the perfidious pro-Japanese past. The dead Kim Il Sung and his Labor Party had created such a nation at last through the brutal purges, merciless self-criticisms and persistent "political studies." They named the state DPRK, or Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Was it really a democratic state? Bullshit. It was a hoax. Was it a republic? A republic Kim Jong Il's ass. How do you call the entity a republic that had been inherited by Kim Il Sung to his son Kim Jong Il? Was it a popular country, that is, the country "of the people, by the people, and for the people"?

An utter nonsense because the people of North Korea have had no rights even to move their place to live. In Pyongyang live only the privileged class. The dead Kim Il Sung and his clique had brought out their own metamorphosis of a nation through the great fuss of "past liquidation": A really unexpected consequence, or a premeditated result.

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The attempt at the "past liquidation," which had been masterminded by the then ruling party of South Korea Yollin Uridang, loosely translated as The Open Pen Party, and supported by the leftist radicals, had to be thwarted. Why? Because it could assuredly have incurred the unexpected consequence, or the premeditated result of South Korea's communization. To elaborate, the complete pursuit of the liquidation would have to dismantle the bureaucracy and wreck the industries, from which the anarchistic utter chaos would ensue, which would provide the basis for the proletariat dictatorships led by the labor class.

Why? The leftist radicals would lead such an anti-capitalistic atmosphere, in which the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966~1974) had run wild, that the people in the hierarchy ladder of Korean society wouldn't go unharmed. Would Dano, the first son of coal miner Toung Doung in the Mitsubishi Company go unharmed? He would, but Dano himself found his father blamable just like Lee so and so, the son of a prosecutor in the Imperial Japan because Dano's father had contributed to the wartime logistics of the colonial Japan.

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Dano sensed a conspiracy of some sort. The Sherlock Holmes in Dano presupposed some backup forces involved in manipulating huge Quon's post viewerships. So he appealed one day to Quon's invisible supporters to blow a whistle on dirty ways of Quon's to magnify the numbers of his own post viewerships. Coded words would do. The very next day an informant showed up on the message board of the Morning Calm Daily who snitched on Quon's evil doings in some coded words, such as they were.

The crux of the snitch's charges was that Quon was abusing "the post of a lecturer" at Shangrilla College so that he used his students in order to inflate the viewership numbers of his own post. He taught art history at the college. He was not punctual. He used to be late for class lecture. He was not driving because he was an environmentalist. So saying he smoked at class for a while, blurting out a biting jest or two targeting the government or the MCD and inciting his students to go trample down the Stars and Stripes at the college gate.

Then he told his poor class audiences to click press the anti-MCD messages he used to post at night to pop up the viewership numbers, brandishing his lecture notebook, and threatening to let them "wear pistols" if the results were not satisfactory. In this case the coded expressions "to wear pistols" were interpreted to mean that the students were threatened by their lecturer Quon to get flunked if the post failed to attain 3,ooo or more viewership records.

Quon's online terrorisms were allegedly reported even to be financed by a shady organ which could be loosely designated as the Culture and Arts Promotion Foundation. How much? The money amounted to no less than 380,000 dollars. Taking advantage of the online encounter with him at night, Dano questioned the wisdom of his taking such huge money. Dano chided him about the illegality of taking money and doing the proxy work of libel on an organized and persistent basis. The online terrorist equivocated by saying that political parties also receive government subsidies from the Central Election Committee, or something.

"Are you a national agency?" Dano snapped, saying that his behaviors violate the Lawyers' Act or something. Dano also made a mockery of his pro-Japanese inclinations, pointing to a weird reality that he was living with a Japanese woman. Can there be a more Japanese-prone behavior than that of Quon who took a Japanese woman as wife. Quon "the judge of the era" was more often than not talking to his Japanese father-in-law in Tokyo, "Moshi moshi..." (Hello?) His international telephone line was busy.