Jan 31 2008
Penny for the old guy
Some Guy had a birthday today
Archive for January, 2008
Jan 26 2008
Kim Jong Il Wants a Formal End to War
The U.S. press has not picked up on this yet, but reports are that North Korea wants to put a more formal end to the unsatisfying end to the Korean War.
The two Koreas remain technically at war and since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. Such an official declaration to the end of the war is seen by the current administration as one of the first steps toward bringing lasting peace to the peninsula.
I would love to hear from a Korean living on either side of the 38th parallel about whether that even with a formal peace treaty, there will still remain among Koreans a sense that things have not been resolved. The histories I have read make it clear that most Koreans were left deeply unsatisfied with the very idea of a partition in the post-war period. Maybe today the newer generations take the division for granted. But the dreams for an independent unified peninsula have roots sunk over the centuries it was either under Japanese or Chinese control.
Jan 25 2008
Krugman On the Presence of the Past
The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had other points to make in a recent piece, but I wanted to use his first, preliminary idea here because it’s about the presence in the present of our past. He puts it well:
Historical narratives matter. That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, ever as from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.
And it’s also why the furor over Barack Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.
Along with Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement of 1938 or the homecoming reception of veterans during the Vietnam era, Ronald Reagan’s presidency is about the most used and abused piece of our past that you see in action these days.
Republican promoters have intensified the use of the Reagan strategy during this campaign season because Republicans calculate that evoking thought of more recent Republicans such as George W. Bush would not help matters, at all.