Good Mooooorning, Pusan!

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Busan:
The city is waking up and going to sleep at about 6 am. The bleary-eyed, red-faced guy who asked me for a cigarette, then another one, assures me that this is the case. He looked like a man in the throes of the Thursday morning coming down, so I obliged and gave him two of my precious American Spirit Ultra-Lights, which one cannot only not get here, but which are perhaps the only ultra-light cigarettes in the entire city. I don’t know; I couldn’t even figure out how to get the store clerk to tell how to say “lighter” in Korean, as in “Those fascists from the airport don’t allow lighters on the plane, but they allow matches. And rum.” Rum is perhaps more dangerous than any butane lighter, at least in the hands of a person like me, which is why I didn’t bring any. No use risking some international conflagratory incident just because I think that rum is good for me. It’s not. It’s a little strange, though, too, to see the city is almost completely dead at 6 am. I imagine most cities are this way, but I am rarely up at this hour. Usually it’s 8 or 9 or maybe 10, sometimes 1. Even the little street market vendors weren’t set up, their wares still stacked in neat columns of cardboard boxes - bananas, oranges, onions, various vegetables that I will perhaps learn about in time - and a few early risers pointing at the few items that are on display already.

The Mystery of the Swastika
Swastikas everywhere. The first one I saw was seriously disturbing. I thought to myself, “what the hell is going on here? How did the fucking neo-Nazis get to South Korea, and what could they be thinking?” Then I remembered that the swastika, though appropriated by the Nazis in their failed attempt at world domination (through ethnic cleansing? Really? Come on, even Idi Amin wasn’t that fucking crazy), is actually a symbol that comes from the Indo-Aryan tradition (I think, not sure on this one) that refers to the invincibility of long life. So of course it shocks me, a Westerner who sees in symbols the things that I cannot read on the damn signs because I was too lazy to make a concerted effort at learning the language, to see a symbol that has in my home land become one of the foremost symbols of ignorance and brutalism. I sort of wonder if the Koreans also see this when they see the swastika, or if it only means “sporting goods equipment sold here.” It’s strange how symbols can be appropriated and ruined for entire cultures - it would seem, especially if the symbol - like the swastika - is thousands of years old, with a history of positive denotation and connotation, that such a symbol would be able to thrive after being used for malfeasance. Perhaps genocide is like radiation - everything it touches can only be completely spoiled by the ugly transformative power of hatred. And perhaps that a symbol loses some of its power if attached to any conquered people, maleficent or not. The Nazional Sozialist Partei in Germany was so completely reduced to rubble that perhaps all the symbolic cues - The eagle, the book-burning, the German people as a national consciousness, and the swastika - were also brought low. And necessarily, perhaps. None of these things had done much good for the greater populace, and the Germans eventually got their national consciousness back, and in better shape, more able to serve the needs of its people. Sometimes a complete devastation is good for the soul.

That's Not a Cop At All...Play Dead!
One of the first things I saw was this bear outside of the police station. I walked out of my apartment, down towards city hall, and there it was: a bear in a policeman’s uniform giving the thumbs up. A polar bear. Constructed out of the same material that they make Ronald McDonald out of, with the same glossy sheen and cartoonish appearance. Surreality sets in. I’m not sure if this is propaganda, a note about the friendliness of police, or both. The strange thing for me is that this is not how anybody in the US sees the police, not even the police themselves. The policemen’s guild would start a riot if there were a large bear in uniform erected as a memorial to the city’s finest outside the downtown police station. They would be taken much less seriously by the general public, who would either start to view the police as too fruity to do law enforcement or outright liars, with their bear and fast food approach to self-promotion. There is McGruff the Crime Dog, of course, but McGruff is directed specifically at children, and is not recognized as a valid law enforcement official - McGruff is more like Columbo than a real cop. McGruff is almost dead, too, as a tool to induct children into socialization. The police in the States do use McGruff when they speak to children and pass out flyers regarding what to do about your heroin-addicted best friend in third grade, but only as an adjunct to law enforcement. McGruff doesn’t do the job of police officer or detective; he merely informs the cops about specious activities. Maybe the bear is really a dog…hmm. Also the bear/dog/thing bears an uncanny resemblance to the Hamm’s beer bear (One finger salute, what? BMC!), which is both appealing and obnoxious.

Mad Love for Busan
I love this city so far, as I love all cities. The bustle, the sheer noise of millions of people throbbing in time to the beat of the workday, rebar being shorn and welded outside my window (believe me, I like the construction outside my window a lot less now that it awakens me every morning), office building on top of coffee shop, apartment block on top of convenience store, everything stacked so much like those cardboard boxes, flooding in and out like a gigantic circulatory system. Busan reminds me of Chicago or New York in that there are people everywhere, and one wonders how and where they all come from and how and where they all go, and why there aren’t more or less. The view from the 14th floor is pretty nice: cranes, high-rises, automobiles scattered, buildings at right angles and 45 degree angles to corners, it’s all pulsing static.

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