So Long, Oedungdong

Today I officially become a couch surfer.

I would like to end my time here on a high note, but filling the empty space during the week will be a challenge. It’s not as if I don’t have things to do. There is plenty of nature to be conquered by my feet. I have to plan for what exactly I’ll be doing when I go home, which is still up in the air. I have a bunch of writing projects I am working on.

I’ve been nostalgic this week about the year that was. I’m not sure what I have learned. I’ll have to really think about it. Probably, when I go home, I will arbitrarily make up life lessons to attach to my experience here. I will selectively remember my time on Jeju so that it fits in with some kind of life narrative.

The three books I was reading have all mysteriously disappeared. I will have to finish “Miss Dalloway”, “The End of Country”, and “Assorted NY Times Wednesday Crossword Puzzles” when I buy them back home.

I mentioned this on facebook, but I am fucking sick of 9/11 conspiracy theories. I’m not a true blue patriot or anything like that, usually I don’t care about days of remembrance; and it’s not offensive for that reason, really.

What separates the obnoxiousness of 9/11 conspiracies from equally dumb ideas about the moon landing and the JFK assassination is the tragedy of the moment, and yes other countries have had equally devastating catastrophes and yes Noam Chomsky shit went down in Chile but none of these things are mutually exclusive.

It’s a dishonor to the people who died on the planes to use the day to rehash crackpot pseudo-scientific (the towers were big, ergo they can’t have toppled without a big push) ideas. Most of this stuff is also surface-level ignorance; just like the moon landing, you can spend 20 minutes on wikipedia and read for yourself why most of the suspicious theories about the day are garbage.

Also, promoting stupid ideas like there was a massive government cover-up involving multiple countries and secret organizations and probably Jews too distracts from the REAL issues, such as government transparency and accountability.

For instance, does it really make any sense that the US government would stage a terrorist attack, blame a group of people from one country, to try and use it as a pretext for war in a TOTALLY DIFFERENT country? Kind of a stupid plan, right?

There are real questions that you can ask about 2001-2002 without needing a conspiracy theory to help guide you along. That year points to many problems that remain today. How negligent was the administration in ignoring evidence of a coming threat? Why did the media allow the administration to be so lazy with the facts? Why did basically everyone in Congress give authorization to go to war?

This stuff is still going on. Even in “biased” newspapers, they cover what happens in government. Page 32 of the front section is still “in the paper”, maybe people should read the whole newspaper instead of scanning the front page and then declaring that newspapers don’t cover what people need to see.

There is NO NEED FOR CONSPIRACIES because politicians and company can get away with almost anything right out in the open because enough people just aren’t paying attention. They are too busy reading about how aliens conspired with Elvis Presley and Rudy Guiliani to detonate building 7, which houses a portal to the eleventh circle of hell, but the laser shockwaves accidentally spread to the Twin Towers.

Until people pay attention to what is ACTUALLY happening in the world, and not what is happening in some fun-house mirror version of the world on the internet, democracies like the US will continue to be disfunctional.