Chronicle of a Farce Foretold, by Kang Chun-suk

Chronicle of a Farce Foretold, by Kang Chun-suk
Chosun Ilbo July.4,2008

What will Korea be like in July 2009? Of course we cant predict that far ahead: we can barely see beyond our noses. But here are some things that might well happen.
The production team of the MBC news program "PD Diary" are ordered to take a 15-day tour of the U.S. and call an emergency meeting. America, they know, is mad cow disease hell, a nightmare country that butchers 7 million cattle over 30 months old a year and flogs them to fast food outlets. A movie star, though he was seen enjoying a beef burger in Los Angeles, said, "It's better to drop potassium cyanide into your mouth than eat American beef." There is no guarantee that no U.S. beef is used in the oxtail soup dens of New York and cold noodle parlors in Washington that Korean tourists flock to.



The four-member team has to choose from a handful of alternatives. One is to prepare enough frozen box lunches to last them 15 days. That totals 180 boxes, so the bulk is a serious problem. Plus they lack the confidence to ask all the hotels where they will stay to keep the lunch boxes in their refrigerators. A second alternative is to eat only in vegetarian restaurants. But will all the cities they visit have them? What's more, they are not sure if they will have the strength to carry the heavy equipment if they eat only greens.



“We shouldn't have knowingly fabricated the story that an American woman died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of mad cow disease, and suggested that a downer cow was infected with BSE,” they reflect. But it’s no use crying over spilt milk. How to get away with prompting a middle school student to cry, "I feel condemned to die of mad cow disease before I have realized my dreams," that is the challenge before them. Just a note at the end of the program would have got them off the hook: "The number of American cattle confirmed to have been infected with BSE is three. All three were born before powdered meat and bone feed was banned in 1997. While the age of cattle is an issue in Korea, no instance of BSE cattle has been confirmed in the U.S. since.” Ah well.

The question is what to do now. The team decides their best choice is to demand that management pay allowances and take out insurance identical to those paid to reporters covering the Iraq War. They are risking their lives, after all.



Now the network has some thinking to do. The origin of BSE is Britain, where tens of times more cows than in the U.S. have died of BSE. Nor did other European countries escape the scourge. Ninety-six countries including Asian ones import U.S. beef without restrictions, so management will have to treat all reporters and producers dispatched to any of those countries as war correspondents. The costs would be immense, and the company would face massive embarrassment if the world press found out. In the end, the whole “PD Diary” team hand in their resignations.



Reports have it that opposition lawmakers who publicly called their children home from study in the U.S. for fear of mad cow disease have secretly sent them back. News that a co-chairman of the People's Association for Measures Against Mad Cow Disease was spotted by college students buying U.S. beef from an alley butcher is so commonplace that newspapers can find no space for it. Leaders of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, who staged walkouts on the pretext that if workers eat U.S. beef, it will affect working conditions, hang their heads as U.S. consumer organizations, provoked by moves in Korea, start boycotting Korean-made cars and electronics products. But members of the Korean Teachers and Educational Worker's Union are made of sterner stuff and persist in putting up posters opposing U.S. beef imports in front of schools.



But ordinary Koreans seem to have recovered from mad cow disease. Housewives who took part in the candlelight vigils wheeling their baby carriages now keep the TV unplugged. They have no great hopes for the incompetent administration that sowed the seeds of the farce in May, June and July the previous year. What remains is pity, for the government and for the KCTU, and the looming question how we can keep importing expensive oil if we squander the US$10 billion in our trade surplus with the U.S.