The attack on the Boston Marathon is a reminder of the adage that terror is theater. Yes, terror is horror. Yes, terror is murder. Yes, terror is reprehensible. But it is theater, too, played out on a grand stage before an audience of tens of millions. We sit riveted in front of the television or computer screen, demanding the latest updates. We don’t need to know who did it to understand the malevolent brilliance of the staging: an attack on the audience at a sporting event where the crowd is u

Viewpoints April 21, 2013

As North Korea’s Kim Dynasty takes the world to the brink yet again, let’s keep our eyes on the endgame. While Beijing may not be able to tell Pyongyang what to do and it’s clear the two sides aren’t as chummy as most outsiders think, Beijing can pull the plug. And that’s what it must do. North Korea is a criminal enterprise that denies its people the most basic rights and stays afloat largely thanks to weapons exports to fellow bad actors, sales of natural resources to China at below-world-mark

Viewpoints April 21, 2013

Only three seats of the 300-member National Assembly will be up for grabs when the parliamentary by-elections are held on Wednesday. Still, they are drawing much more public attention than they deserve.There are two reasons. One is that the elections are the first to be held since Park Geun-hye was elected president in December. The other is that Ahn Cheol-soo, an independent, who was once Park’s formidable adversary in the presidential race, is now running in one of the electoral districts.Barr

Editorial April 19, 2013

President Park Geun-hye completed her Cabinet lineup on her 52nd day in office when she presented letters of appointment to the maritime and science ministers, along with the communications commission chairman and the prosecutor-general, on Wednesday. But the problem was that Chae Dong-wook, prosecutor-general, was the only one among the four that had won approval from the National Assembly.The most controversial among the appointments was that of Yoon Jin-sook as minister of oceans and fisherie

Editorial April 19, 2013

A Washington Post/ABC News poll this week says 70 percent of Americans think the Republican Party is out of touch.The same poll found that 86 percent of Americans ― and 84 percent of those who call themselves Republicans ― support requiring background checks on gun purchases made at gun shows or over the Internet. On Wednesday, a measure that would do exactly that was stopped in the U.S. Senate after gaining the support of only four Republicans.Any questions?That shameful disconnect defeated the

Viewpoints April 19, 2013

The government has submitted its proposal for a supplementary budget to the National Assembly, hoping for an early passage so that it can inject fresh vigor into the economy. Given the sorry state of the economy, a supplementary budget should have been created much earlier. But the new administration had been held back by a long standoff between rival parties over government reorganization.Now, lawmakers need to rush to handle the bill to give the economy a much-needed boost without further dela

Editorial April 18, 2013

The concept of economic democratization remains as elusive as ever. The vagueness of the concept lies at the center of the ongoing controversy over the proposals under discussion at the National Assembly to promote economic democracy.Some of the proposals have triggered a strong backlash from big business groups as they call for penalizing related-party transactions, a practice prevalent among chaebol groups.For instance, one idea proposes to hold a chaebol chairman accountable, even if there is

Editorial April 18, 2013

This week will see the Korean Association of International Studies and the Korea Foundation host an international conference on the role of middle powers in the 21st century. The significance of the conference being held in South Korea is twofold ― it marks Korea’s prominence as a source of innovative and influential scholarship on middlepowerism, and it marks Korea’s growing acceptance of middlepowerism as a national role.Korea is a late entrant into the middle-power category. At the end of Wor

Viewpoints April 17, 2013

Sportswriters exist in a kind of creative tension. Pulling us in one direction is the desire to draw deeper meaning from the events we cover. Pulling us in the other is the realization that sportswriting isn’t social commentary. So we tend to see the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s gold medal as a triumph of democracy over communism, or the Iraqi national soccer team’s advancing to the semifinals of the 2004 Olympic Games as a metaphor for the resilience of an oppressed, war-ravaged people. Mean

Viewpoints April 17, 2013

Twice in the past two years, I met two Apache helicopter crews at the Gyeonggi Provincial Office during Ulchi Focus Lens exercises. On the ground, the crew members explained the anti-armor aircraft to visitors. The crew even lifted a great number of children into the cockpits ― tirelessly, again and again, for four days. I found this to be touching. In thick combat uniforms and boots, they sweated like pigs, but their work served as a good opportunity to make the U.S. armed forces more familiar

Viewpoints April 17, 2013

“Boston bombings shatter a national sense of safety,” read one headline this morning. “A perfect Marathon day, then the unimaginable,” read another. These summations were plausible enough, because yesterday’s attack was the first successful strike against a U.S. city since Sept. 11, 2001. A national security official from the George W. Bush administration expressed the same thought in even more dramatic terms. “In some ways,” Juan Carlos Zarate said, “this ruptures the psyche.” Plausible ― but n

Viewpoints April 17, 2013