What to Make of Yoon
How to understand the most moronic president in South Korean history
What if you had a dream? An aspiration. An ambition. Let’s say you wanted to be… I don’t know… a news anchor at a major TV network. A fine profession, to be sure. You dream of becoming the next Walter Cronkit, Dan Rather, or if you are Korean, Son Suk-hee. You yearn for it. You study hard. You get yourself into the right school, the right major. You get a job at a TV station, you work yourself to the bone to get yourself promoted. You strategize, figure out how to position yourself to get, just possibly, the job of your life, the one you’ve always lusted after. You press the flesh. You smile, flatter and grovel. And finally, you’re there! You did it! You sit down at the anchor desk, and are overwhelmed by emotion. It’s the culmination of a lifetime’s work - the sweat, the tears, the years you spent burning the midnight oil, sacrificing so much of your life, oh the things you’ve denied yourself to get this job!
It is also true that the path to this ultimate reward has changed you. As any overbearing football coach would say, it’s the process, stupid. You’ve learned the value of hard work, and how to deal with set-backs and failure. Most importantly, you have huge, huge respect for the news anchor job because you know just how hard it was to get that job. You honor it, you are in awe of it, even though you are now sitting in that seat. No-one respects a Super Bowl ring or a World Cup trophy more than the athlete who has won it. He alone knows how hard it is. He knows what it means to succeed where others, so many others, have failed.
But what if you never wanted that news anchor job? What if you were perfectly happy to sit around with a few drinks and hang out with your buddies? And then someone - let’s say, your wife - comes along with a little gadget that has a big red button on it. She says, “Hey you drunken lunkhead, press this button and you’ll get the news anchor job. That’s all you need to do. Press this button.”
“But, dear honored wife, why would I do that? I’m perfectly happy to be kickin’ it here with my homies.”
“Because I’m telling you to. It’s what I want. Besides, you’re gonna like the job. You get to sit at a big desk and meet cool people and read the teleprompter and everything.”
So you press the red button, and poof, you are the news anchor at a very important TV network. But the job wasn’t what you expected. There’s a lot of work. People are telling you what to do. People are incessantly critiquing your performance. Others are sniping at you, trying to take your job. The desk isn’t all that great, and you don’t meet a lot of cool people. The teleprompter? It’s bullshit. So, you do the bare minimum. You yell at people when things don’t go according to plan. What do you care? You never wanted this friggin’ job in the first place. They want me to stand up for this segment? Screw that. I’m sitting. You talk in a disrespectful way towards the employees getting you your coffee. Behind all this, you have no respect for the news anchor job, or the responsibilities of that job. You got it too easily. What’s the big deal? All you need to do is press a big red button.
The current president of the Republic of Korea can be characterized by “the 3 무’s” - 무능하다 무식하다 무정하다. In English, this would be “the 3 i’s” - incompetent, ignorant and indifferent. Some commentators in Korea have claimed that he is the worst president that country has ever had - worse even than the military dictators. Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan had one thing going for themselves - they wanted the job. For them, becoming the leader of South Korea was a personal ambition, and they risked everything to get it. And that means, at the very least, that they had a certain amount of respect for the presidency - ignoring, of course, the extent to which they abused their position once they got there. But even their abuse was at the service of remaining in power. Yoon has never had such an ambition. He is the most aimless person ever to sit in the Blue House. Actually, he never went to the Blue House. Don’t want it, has no meaning for him. I am not in the business of excusing the awfulness of Park and Chun - but they had great ambitions (in service of their self-aggrandizement, to be sure). But the presidency was a bigger office then - the greater the power, the greater the possibilities. And as Korea became a freer and more democratic country, the powers of the presidency have been curtailed. It’s a smaller job, with smaller possibilities - and so we have a very small man to fill that smallness.
It seems clear now - at least, to me - that Yoon never wanted the presidency in the first place and has absolutely no respect for the position. Why should he? As a prosecutor, he procured a twenty-year jail sentence for one president. He openly fought with and resisted another, and won. He slapped presidents around like no-one’s business. He misses his old job. It was good fun being the Prosecutor General. People respected him, and feared him. When he said “Jump!”, everyone jumped. The National Assembly? They were all scared of what he could do to them personally. The Minister of Justice? Ha! Don’t make him laugh. He throttled two of ‘em in succession. The third sat in a corner and didn’t move. The Rule of Law was something Yoon could apply at his own discretion - a sword he wielded as he saw fit.
The presidential campaign was short. He had tried to put the fear of God into Lee Jae-myung, the Opposition Leader, and there was some back-and-forth at the debates. But it wasn’t all bad. People cheered him on the campaign trail. They roared with joy at his uppercuts. They applauded whenever he got drunk. “One of us. A common man.” Good times. Now, it’s all gone to hell. His one-time consigliere Han Dong-hoon is stabbing him in the back. Well, he’s trying to - although he’s so small and timid and cautious that it hardly makes a difference. But how dare he, the little punk. Still, Yoon’s approval rating is in the teens. That’s Park Geun-hae territory. The National Assembly is harping on about a special prosecutor to investigate his wife. He’s battered them down with one presidential veto after another, but the voices are growing louder. The wolves are at the gate.
Yoon pressed a red button and became president. But that red button did not magically appear from nowhere. His wife Kim Geun-hee brought it to him. She did all the hard work - she pressed the flesh, strategized, pleaded, flattered and threatened. She stayed up nights - playing out scenarios, hired goons like Myung Tae-gyun and kept planning, planning, planning. He owes it all to her. He likes to reach for the drinks cabinet, but she has to fill his political cabinet with competent people, and competent people who are loyal to him (a tall order). He fiddles while she tries desperately to keep Rome from burning down. There’s a lot of shouting - people keep crying that she was never elected to anything, and that she should stop meddling in the business of governing. I disagree. Without her, there is nothing. In the areas where she is weak (e.g. foreign policy, Korea-Japan relations) - complicated work that requires people with real expertise where she does not know the players - she steps back and a vacuum is created, soon filled by the utter dregs - those with treasonous proclivities, more loyal to the interests of Japan than to Korea’s, the New Right revisionists. It’s not just progressive rabble rousers like Kim Ou-joon yelling about traitors in the government. It’s Lee Jong-chan, president of the Liberation Association and a former presidential candidate. If she were to really step back, then the whole government would become a vacuum. Hard to keep good people when your approval is at 18%. The scum will take over and they will dismantle the country and sell it for pennies. There would be chaos. It’s either Kim Geun-hee, or cleaning house. And it may come to that. But she’s fed up as well. She badmouths him to everyone, she berates him in public. She’s keeping the whole country together with bandages and duct tape, and they’re berating her over a hand bag? F*** you.
He is a brutal man, willing to use the Public Prosecutors Office like a cudgel. He is also the Invisible Man - without ideas, without ambitions, without thought, without anything that resembles values. He is crass, and callous and classless. He speaks pejoratively to people working in the president’s office. At press conferences, he addressed the country while sitting down. He apologizes to the country, and then goes golfing the next day. When he’s called on it, he makes the lamest of excuses (he’s getting ready to meet with Trump). He doesn’t give a shit. Only the Invisible Man would - at his core - and after a lifetime spent in the legal profession, believe that the law should not be blind. Only the Invisible Man could serve as Special Prosecutor who put a president away for twenty years, and then turn around - when he himself might be a subject of a special prosecutor’s investigation - to say that he believed that the special prosecutor system was unconstitutional. This is dictatorial behavior. This is legal riffing. Improvisational law. As the Peruvian dictator General Óscar Benavides once said, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
This is where we are. Three more years to go.