In this age of instant celebrity the coverage accorded to successful politicians is akin to that given to denizens of the entertainment industry. After all, the media have co-opted glitzy monikers, referring to folks like Justin Trudeau as “rock star” politicians; Steve Jobs was a “rock star” CEO, and John Lennon, well he was a plain vanilla “rock star.”
The inverse of celebrity is infamy. And those who fall into this category are all lumped generically together in the same proverbial basket as “losers.”. Thus, having portrayed himself as a “winner” his whole life, Donald Trump almost has to win the US presidency, lest he be cast into the same hall of shame as Richard Nixon, the various Kims of North Korea, and Snooki.
President Park Geun-hye of South Korea is perilously close to joining such august company, possibly more so than Trump, whose campaign has picked up of late. She, on the other hand, is in deep trouble. The story’s details are murky but the details have at their centre a close confidant of President Park’s running a massive slush fund, as she extorted more than $70 million from Korea's largest corporations. The confidant, Choi Soon-si, was receiving confidential policy briefings and draft presidential speeches -- all on a totally unencrypted computer. Choi appears to have influenced the college admission process so that her daughter, not known to be sharpest tool in the shed, would be admitted into the prestigious Ewha Womans University. That last bit turned out to be the first step toward the president's ruin, as Ewha students' protest over that act of preferential treatment developed into the larger investigation about the relationship between Park and Choi.
There has been much attention paid to this unfolding drama on CNN, the BBC, Channel News Asia as well as other forms of media, but the English language coverage of this scandal is missing something. Until recently they failed to fully account for the sheer scope of the Korean public's stunned disbelief. Although the corruption scale here is significant, Koreans have seen much, much worse. Not long ago, they witnessed Chun Doo-hwan, the former president/dictator, make off with nearly $1 billion (and this was back in the mid-1980s when the money was worth more than $4 billion in today's currency). Even the democratically elected presidents of Korea -- almost every single one of them -- saw themselves at least tinged with corruption. Lee Myung-bak, the immediate predecessor to Park, saw his older brother (himself a National Assemblyman) go to prison for bribery. Lee's controversial Four Rivers Project, which cost nearly $20 billion, was widely seen as a massive graft project to push government funding to his cronies who were operating construction companies.
For better or worse (mostly worse), the Korean people have come to expect graft from their presidents. So why is this instance by Park Geun-hye causing such a strong, vitriolic reaction? It is not because they discovered that Park was corrupt; it is because they discovered Park was irrationally corrupt. Koreans are not just dismayed at the scale of the corruption; they are shocked to see just what the scale of the corruption signifies.
Park Geun-hye's scandal revolves around a central question: why would the president risk her administration for Choi Soon-sil? In fact, one of Park's selling points as 2012 presidential candidate was that she was less likely to be corrupt because she had no family to be corrupt for. Her parents--former dictator Park Chung-hee and his wife Yuk Yeong-su -- were dead (both assassinated), and she was estranged from her sister and brother. This argument had a modicum of plausibility, since all the previous presidents' instances of corruption involved their family in some way. (Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung had issues with their sons; Roh Moo-hyun and Lee Myung-bak, their brothers.)
But the lack of family did not stop Park Geun-hye from giving money and granting unprecedented access to Choi Soon-sil. Why did Park even bother with Choi Soon-sil, who, on the face of things, is a nobody? To answer this question, we must look back into recent Korean history.
Park Geun-hye met Choi Soon-sil through Choi's father, Choi Tae-min. The elder Choi, born in 1912, was a pseudo-Christian cult leader. He started his adult life as a policeman and soldier, and at one point he worked at a small newspaper and a soap factory respectively. By the 1970s, Choi was fully engaged in the occupation for which he would be known: leading a cult, claiming to heal people. Choi called himself a pastor, but he never seems to have attended a seminary of any denomination.
Choi Tae-min met Park Geun-hye for the first time in 1975, when Park was 23. Park had just lost her mother, who was fatally shot by a North Korean spy. (The spy was aiming for Park's father, the dictator Park Chung-hee, but missed and killed the first lady instead.) Shortly after the assassination, the elder Choi sent several letters to Park Geun-hye, claiming that the soul of Park's mother visited him, and Park could hear from her mother through him. Park invited Choi Tae-min to the presidential residence, where the elder Choi told revealed that Park's mother did not truly die, but merely moved out of the way to open the path for Park Geun-hye to ascend to her destiny.
Once the elder Choi won Park Geun-hye's confidence, he leveraged the relationship to amass a fortune. Choi set up a number of foundations, with Park Geun-hye as the nominal head, and peddled influence. In a Wikileaks cable from 2007 when Park Geun-hye first ran for president, the U.S. Ambassador for Korea noted: "Rumors are rife that the late pastor had complete control over Park's body and soul during her formative years and that his children accumulated enormous wealth as a result."
Choi Tae-min's high times ended on October 26, 1979, when his patron lost her father in yet another assassination. (Ironically, Park Geun-hye's own downfall began around October 26 of this year.) For the next decade, Park Geun-hye and Choi Tae-min were removed from politics.
The assassination of Park Chung-hee led to another round of dictatorship, this time by Chun Doo-hwan, until democratization in 1987. During that time, Park operated several charitable foundations, which were in reality no more than private slush funds made up of the money that Choi grifted during her father's reign. Salacious rumours that Park Geun-hye became so dependent on Choi Tae-min that she became estranged from her remaining family, her sister Park Geun-ryeong and her brother Park Ji-man. In 1990, Park's siblings went so far as to petition then-president Roh Tae-woo that their sister should be "rescued" from Choi Tae-min's control.
Choi Tae-min died in 1994, at which point Park Geun-hye's transferred her confidences to Choi's daughter, Soon-sil. Park entered politics in 1997, winning her first election as an Assemblywoman in 1998. She would prove to be a competent politician, earning the nickname "Queen of Elections." She lost in the presidential primaries to Lee Myung-bak in 2007, but came back strong to win the nomination and eventually the presidency in 2012. Although Park's relationship with the Choi family briefly became an issue during her two presidential runs, she dismissed them as baseless rumors, claiming that neither Choi Tae-min nor Choi Soon-sil was involved in her works as a politician.
As it turned out, the Korean media claims that Choi Soon-sil owned Park Geun-hye just as much as her father did. Peddling the presidential influence, Choi extorted tens of millions of dollars from Korea's largest corporations. Most recently, notebooks recovered from one of Park's aides implies that the president was somehow knowledgeable of these activities and may indeed have appealed on behalf of her friend in a meeting with executives. If this is proven true then it would constitute a very large bullet being shot into a very dead political horse.
It is entirely fitting that this sordid affair began unraveling because of a preferential treatment that Choi's daughter received in her college admission. If there is one thing that Koreans cared more than their lives, it is their (and their children's) college degree. As the heat rose against Choi and her daughter, they hightailed to Germany where they owned a horse farm.
The major breakthrough occurred on October 24, when cable TV network JTBC discovered a Galaxy Tab belonging to Choi Soon-sil in the office that she abandoned. The tablet was the Pandora's Box--it contained the presidential speeches with Choi's markups, presidential briefs for cabinet meetings, appointment information for presidential aides, chat messages with presidential aides, the president's vacation schedule, draft designs for commemorative stamps featuring the president, and perhaps, much more (full details have yet to emerge). The discovery of the tablet was worthy of "World's Dumbest Criminals"-- it was simply left behind in Choi's office with no encryption, and the files were available for anyone to open. And just in case Choi Soon-sil wanted to deny ownership of the tablet, its image gallery contained her selfie.
The next day, the president attempted to stem the tide by issuing a public apology, in which she said Choi was someone who "helped during [her] difficult past." Although Park admitted that Choi had reviewed the draft speeches, she said Choi only conveyed her personal impressions, and at any rate stopped shortly after her presidential office was formed. The ensuing tsunami of revelations showed immediately that the president was on tenuous ground when it came to the truth -- one of Choi's cronies said Choi was receiving presidential briefings as recently as earlier this year. The president's approval rating plummeted to around 17 percent (as of this writing it's around 5 percent), with more than 40 percent of the respondents demanding resignation or impeachment.
Meanwhile, Koreans' collective heads exploded with wonder and shock. As mentioned earlier, it takes quite a bit for Korean politics to roil the Korean people. Having survived a particularly tumultuous recent history, they may be among the world's most cynical consumers of politics. But this? Even the most cynical Koreans were not ready for what continued to unfold.
At first, there was a tiny bit of perverse relief, as if all the eccentric actions the Park administration suddenly began to make some sense. Why did the president only hold just three press conferences in the first four years of her administration? Why does the president always speak in convoluted sentences that seem to border on incoherence? Why did the president fly off the handle and sue a Japanese journalist who claimed that she was with Choi Soon-sil's husband while the ferry Sewol was sinking in 2014, drowning 300 school children? Why did the ruling party randomly host a shamanistic ritual in the halls of the National Assembly? Ohhhh, the relief went. Now it all makes sense.
But this brief relief soon gave way to the terrifying reality: actually, it does NOT make sense. NONE of this makes any sense.
In an ordinary case of political corruption, the politician is in it for himself/herself. At most, the politician is doing it for their family, or other rich people who may end up helping them later. Obviously, corruption is venal. But this type of self-interested corruption at least gives some measure of predictability and conformance with base human nature. We all know what self-interest looks like. Even though we would prefer that politicians are not corrupt, at least we know how corrupt politicians behave.
But not with Park Geun-hye. Her corruption does not appear self-interested at all. If anything, her guilt lay in her self-sacrificing for Choi Soon-sil. Among the numerous revelations (or allegations - one can no longer tell) it appears that Choi exerted excessive influence over the president's dress code, and advised her what to wear and what colours not to wear. Both Hillary Clinton and Nancy Reagan were the subject of derision when it was revealed they had each consulted astrologers during their husbands' presidencies, though none of them were (officially) actual heads of state.
What would a self-interested politician would do, if the corruption of one of his cronies was revealed? The politician would sell that person down the river, denying up and down that he ever knew or interacted with the wretched lowlife Such denial would be cowardly and dishonest, but at least it is predictable. But not with Park Geun-hye. She stood in front of the whole country and admitted that Choi Soon-sil fixed her speeches. Instead of cutting ties with her, Park reaffirmed that Choi was an old friend who helped her during difficult times.
This is utterly irrational. Rational people can expect that a corrupt politician may steal money for himself. They can even expect that he may steal for his family. But no one can expect that a corrupt politician would steal money for a daughter of a psychic who claimed to speak with her dead mother. No one, not even the most cynical Korean, expected that the president would refuse to cut ties with Choi Soon-sil, a woman with no discernible talent other than manipulating the president and thereby humiliating her, the Korean people and the entire process of democracy in the process.
A more plausible explanation than the even more serious allegations that the president is a secret cult member, is that Ms. Park’s lack of family ties, which South Koreans once thought was reason she would never be corrupted the way many other politicians are, was her downfall, leaving her vulnerable to manipulation by others — not that her weakness is in any way excusable.
A former colleague of Steve Jobs once coined the term "Reality Distortion Field," in which truth is fungible and the famed CEO and Apple co-founder could say practically anything and get away with it by making you believe him. And this kind of feeling is not merely confined to celebrities – for example, Donald Trump has a field of his own that defies classification and renders him impervious to pesky details such as the truth.
With this crisis, Park Geun-hye has plunged the entire country into the her own version of the Reality Distortion Field, except that it's operating in reverse - no one is convinced of her perspective or contrition, except her. Every insane rumor about the president--the kind that you would either see from some remote corner of the internet or in tabloids and laugh off--is now fair game.
All of this sounds like a tragicomedy on an epic scale, but it can easily take a terrifying turn. There has been much speculation about the "missing seven hours," where the president's whereabouts were completely unknown for that span of time in 2014 during the Sewol ferry disaster. Rumors are now running rampant that Park Geun-hye was attending a memorial shamanistic ritual for Choi Tae-min, who passed away 20 years ago on the day of the ferry disaster. As ridiculous as these types of prognostications are, Park Geun-hye's erratic behavior forces even reasonable people to think, well maybe.
Even the way forward is not entirely clear. Politically, Park Geun-hye is finished, although it is unlikely that she will resign or be impeached. She will not resign because, like all politicians past their sell-by date she fundamentally lacks the capacity to assess the political reality around her. The opposition would not bother with impeachment-- they would prefer to let the administration bleed out with non-stop investigations (a snap election could result in a revitalized government with a five-year mandate while the opposition lacks a titular head), until the presidential election cycle begins next year.
But remember that we are now in the Reality Distortion Zone where everything is fair game. Even a politically finished president has a few remaining options to short-circuit the political process, and this president does not seem to have the instinct for self-preservation when it comes to Choi. The mere thought of possible crazy scenarios (i.e. presidential pardon for Choi?) very likely sends chills down the spines of many Koreans. But however bizarre, no scenarios are ridiculous.
Americans have to contend with the Donald and Hillary show for a few more days. South Koreans' circus will go on for much longer than that, and any outcome is unlikely to be decisive.