Koreans’ Pet Peeve
The letter noted that some cultures abstain from the cows and pigs that Americans gorge themselves with, and that people in many cultures, including Koreans, eat much less meat of any kind than we do. “Although we may not choose to practice customs or traditions of others, we also do not have a right to judge them.”
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By the pugnacious standards of Hollinger International editors, Cooke’s reply was remarkably conciliatory. He soon had second thoughts about it and wrote the woman again. “Also,” this appended response began, “I disagree with you when you say: ‘Although we may not choose to practice customs or traditions of others, we also do not have a right to judge them.’ Yes we do….I offer example from today’s news: Iran is raising the age at which a girl can get married without her parents’ consent–to 13….Nine-year-old girls will still be able to marry, but only with their parents’ permission and ‘approval of a “righteous court.”‘
Last Wednesday Brown himself came back to the subject. Imagine how Mike Royko in his later years might have handled the predicament Brown described himself in–“wading through dozens of angry messages every day, which cumulatively have grown into the hundreds.” When Royko found himself in hot water up to his chin he kept going until it was over his head; I can picture him recalling how he’d risked life and limb as a GI outside Seoul back in 1953 to defend the Koreans’ right to eat dog, so he had no idea why they were mad at him now. Seeking conciliation, Brown merely explained that he’d read that 3 million of South Korea’s 47 million people eat dog–far from most, but “a lot more people than eat dogs here”–and that he hadn’t meant to be judgmental, but he did mean to be humorous.
I also spoke with a Chicago woman born and raised in South Korea. “We had a big landscaping business,” she says, “and there’d be like 50 people working on a big project. At the end of it my father used to buy them a dog, and they cooked it. It’s like a delicacy. Not everybody was into it–just a certain sector of blue-collar people.”
Ted Williams: Myth Mongers Descend
Another story frequently retold in the eulogies recalled the 1947 competition for most valuable player in the American League. Williams, despite having won the Triple Crown, lost to Joe DiMaggio by one point, 202 to 201, in the voting of the league’s baseball writers. “The culprit,” wrote Chris De Luca in the Sun-Times–echoing lots of other writers in other papers–was “Boston writer Mel Webb, who detested Williams so much, he failed to list him in any of the 10 spots on his ballot.”
