Impeachment Day

I was a little surprised to see a bunch of Korean flags in Gwanghwamun. Guessing by the lack of baseball bats that this was not a counterprotester.

This tent housed a lot of interesting art by blacklisted artists.

I was off by seconds of someone petting the horse on its chin. Vladimir, which the sign next to it says, is the name of the horse purchased by Samsung for Chung Yoo-ra for 2 billion won.

An assortment of art pieces.

I don't get the exact reference of this.

They made busts of the central figures of the scandal. The white-and-red labels on some of their heads announce their fates. Park Geun-hye on the left says "dismissed," and to the right of her is Samsung Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong who is "locked up" I think, with the two on the right having the same status. I don't know who the other guy is based on appearance -- possibly Kim Ki-choon, a real bad guy who's been part of the dictatorship establishment since Park's dad -- but the woman on the right covered in black paint is ex-Culture Minister Cho Yoon-sun, a figure I am very satisfied to see punished for her role in suppressing arts and culture in Korea.

The people on these banners, in contrast, went down with the Sewol. They are among the nine whose bodies haven't been recovered (there were more on the other side on the left). Kwon Jae-geun, pictured on the right, has not been recovered, along with his son Kwon Kwon Hyuk-gyu, pictured elsewhere, who was half Vietnamese. They were not from Danwon High School, and were travelling to Jeju to start a new life by founding an orange farm with the Vietnamese mother whose body was recovered days after the sinking and daughter, the family's sole survivor.

The story of the Sewol never seems to get better or offer any hope of levity. The brightest development of this story has been Yoo Byeong-eon's alleged corpse being found in a field. This country will never be at peace with the Sewol, no matter who is punished for what and how much. This crisis is existential.

I saw some artists hauling this contraption past me and setting it up here.

Not the greatest jacket to wear here, though nobody really seemed to mind.

A report on JTBC, Korea's central media outlet in this scandal, is broadcast on a screen, reporting two deaths at the counterprotest. There ended up being three deaths.

In one case, an elderly man hijacked a riot police bus, drove it so it collided with another bus, knocking over a speaker which crushed somebody else to death.

The other two deaths were apparently due to heart problems. So, literally natural causes. Comeuppance for Baek Nam-gi, the man who died last year of "natural causes," ten months after being put into a coma by police water cannons during a November 2015 protest?