As America's election race has been equated to a "war on women," South Korea's elections should certainly be deemed a "war on ears." Every day for the past two weeks, I have been woken up at 6:30 AM by what seems like a block party happening at the main intersection outside my new home. The campaign process must go something like this: A rich Korean man decides that he is going to run for office in Parliament. So, he then hires 60 otherwise out of work people (sometimes children) to record new lyrics to a song which is otherwise famous. He then hires a truck with loud speakers, drives around with the 60 otherwise out of work people (not the children), sets up at major intersections during rush hour and makes everyone dance while he blasts said music at surely illegal decibel levels. The result is that the candidate's name is seared into your mind forever. It's actually very successful as I can remember 3 candidates off the top of my head and I'm not even able to vote.
To get a taste of this process, here they are in rain:
And here they are in shine:
Two different candidates, sharing an intersection. Debates? Probably not. They just battle each other on different sides of an intersection. Whose music is catchier and louder? Whose hired cronies dance with the most fervor? That's who will win the office. I actually prefer this method over America's race because 1)it's essentially a dance-off for office 2)most people don't understand/care about the candidate's platform anyway 3)it's clearly more fun and nobody gets called a slut for wanting the government to pay for birth control. Democracy at it's finest.
Anyway, the point of this post was to inform you that South Korea is voting today and we should all take a moment to be thankful that we, too, can vote and at least partly have a say in who our leader is.
If you want a serious, but still light, article on South Korea's actual political landscape, head over to this article I discovered on Yahoo!...here.
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