Coyner’s Comment:
To paraphrase an old saying, “You can always tell a Gangnam-styled young person – but not very much,” since they listen only to their own narrow crowd.
While we can rationalize why the below-described kind of satire has been so slow in the coming, given Korean society’s shallow history of subtle humor, it is nonetheless long overdue. The Gangnam elite of today make America’s Valley Girls of the 1980s look like serious philosophers in comparison.
One can attempt to explain why this is so. Perhaps one may hypothesize that Koreans are still insecure in their social ranking in their modern, neo-Confucian society so that form over substance still overwhelmingly rules in many aspects of life. So it comes as no surprise that the young nouveau riche and the wanna-be nouveau riche go to extraordinary lengths to fake it in hopes of fooling enough people into believing that they, too, belong to a make-believe elite that self defines its collective place in society.
Fortunately, for those people better anchored in the real world, one can overlook much of this nonsense. Still, unexpectedly one does bump into these great pretenders in social gatherings. When these encounters are not mildly infuriating, they can actually be comical. But it’s all part of the fun of living in Korea.
By Max Fisher
The Atlantic
August 23, 2012
