Haylookitsa Food

I have a stack of Oreos on a shelf. They are my agency. My invisible hand.

Once again, as I write this, there are a handful of screaming 12 year old Korean girls screaming, "May I habb wan?" at my office window. This is because, a few days ago, a little girl with a name that sounds like a childish insult (Su-Mi) came to my office after hours and asked for a cup. While I was getting a paper cup from a stack on a shelf near my desk she spotted my precious cache of Oreos. With eyes lit up like a Christmas tree, she pointed at it and said something in Korean. Looking at her, I gestured for her to repeat after me, "May-AYE-HahV-Wuuun". She replied, "May-EYYYYII-HAABBB-WAAAAAANNNN". Looking at her, I said it again, this time more better, "May I have one?" She said. Meeee-eeeeee-hhhhhaabb-un. May I have one. Mai ab wan? May I have one. May I hab un? May I have one. May I hab wan? Figuring this was close enough, I gave her an oreo and sent her on her way. As it turns out, Su-Mi has connections. Leveraging her obviously extensive media contacts, she turned that tiny phrase into a mimetic which has permeated through the long haired teddy bear loving hordes of little girls in the school. Now, they think, if they ask teacher Curtains, "May I habb wan?" They are right. Oh yeah, they like to call me teacher Curtains. This is because my last name, Kersten, to them sounds like curtains. These little shits know how to make puns and beg for food. I work in an entire school of English illiterate overly entitled Dadist poets, Mia Elementary is like the village before Giuliani rolled through.

Speaking of which, I started reading a book on Park Chung-hee. He was the Giuliani of South Korea in the mid sixties. Except he was a dictator. Who was instated by a Military Coup. I guess he wasn't that much like Giuliani on many levels. However, on one level they were alike was that they were the law-and-order politicians of their respective parties. Just one was part of a political party whose platform was based off of interacting with a Democratic system constructed from hundreds of laws stemming from a tradition of political idealism and philosophy. Park had a coalition of like minded corporeal and middle tier officers who he had cultivated into semi-powerful positions such that they had influence without the contaminating effects of upper echelon politics. Their power stemmed from being the most organized game in country and from having lots of guns.

Park came into power by sparking a revolution when the democratic left was at its weakest, during the transition between Syngman Rhee and some other guy with a name like Chonen or something. Using the de-stability that had been caused by a South Korean government rife with corruption, Park built a manifesto which appealed to the order seeking. Likewise, it didn't help that Rhee and his heir had a tendency of pissing off and massacring a very prickly South Korean intelligentsia whose support was paramount for re-mobilizing a war stricken ROK. Park also made appeals to the rural economies and the military establishment with his martial background and well intentioned new-village policies, this allowed him to maintain support from the people that logistically mattered the most on the material peninsula: the ones who fed the populace and the ones who killed Sino-NK-Soviet communists.

This is interesting on a Giuliani front, who helped reestablish order in a borderline Baltimorian New York City by cracking down on all crimes large-and-small, Park operated a kind of a counter "Broken Glass" policy in the top of his structure. Using converse but similar social engineering, because unlike-but-similar-to-Giuliani, Park re-established the ROK industrial machine by creating a top down system that could have a strangle hold on interest rates, enact easy eminent domain, and cause broad social change from policy outwards. Giuliani, on the other hand, had to recognize that full top down policy and economic changes were either too ineffective to work or there was no political power that could combat street crime and had to enact low level policing strategies to change the rampant corruption and crime that was tearing the city apart. They were both Real Realpolitik as hell, just had different policy priorities and principles to reach the same goal: stability, geometric growth, and fast economic growth.

(of course on both sides there are arguments that the achievement of these goals by these men came from a complex and coincidental grouping of savvy social programs and de-regulations which helped to change the social fabric of these areas)

So it is in history, it is now. And I am no chronological snob. I see how it goes.

If these little girls all get snacks, I look like a pushover. They cannot all have snacks, giving away that last one so easily was not a good idea, it was a crack in the glass snack ceiling. The first stone through the abandoned factory window. It will only get worse from here unless I find a solution.

Of course, it's not just about the snacks.

It's more the power they imply. My ample reserve of snacks allows me leverage in the School wide snack index, allowing me to influence snack markets without actually exposing my assets to much risk. My strategic snack reserves are why the kids even pay attention to me, if these unwashed plebeians get near the reserve and realize just how artificial my valuations are, I lose soft political clout and will have to throw my economic weight around. Mind you, this is an reserve that has such an inertia that to mobilize it would require spending upwards of a quarter of the reserve's worth itself.

Snacks, my dear, are a game for the ambitious. One does not lose the game of Snacks. You either win it. Or you die.

Oh hell, the children's voices are organizing. They have switched to a chant of, "Snacks, Snacks, Snacks" and as we all now know, when chants are down to a single syllable; that's when shit gets real.