Free Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" by P. J. O’Rourke Page A

from the
democracy fad in the Philippines, photographer John Giannini. It
was supposed to be a national holiday, but the Koreans went to
work just the same, the way they do six days a week, starting before
dawn and stopping who knows when. Rush hour doesn't even begin
until seven P.M.
    Traffic in Seoul is a 50 mph gridlock with nobody getting
anywhere and everybody driving like hell. The sidewalks are
endless rugby scrums. Elbowing your way through a crowd is
Korean for "excuse me." The city is as gray as a parking garage and
cleaner than a living room. People stoop and pick up any piece of
litter they see. You can spend twenty minutes in an agony of
embarrassment trying to figure out what to do with a cigarette butt.
And they yell at you if you cross against the light. Everything is
made of concrete and glass and seems unrelentingly modern, at
first glance. But many buildings have no central heating, and the
smell of kerosene stoves pours out every shop door, mixing with
kimchi fumes, car smoke, sewer funk and the stink of industry. It's
a tough, homely stench, the way America's ethnic factory towns
must have smelled seventy-five years ago.
    Giannini and I tried to find the slums of Seoul, but the best we
could do was a cramped, rough-hewn neighborhood with spotless,
bicycle-wide streets. Every resident was working-hauling, stacking, hawking, welding, making things in sheds no larger than
doghouses. Come back in a few years, and each shed will be
another Hyundai Corporation. We felt like big, pale drones in the
hive of the worker bees.
    The voting was just what every journalist dreads, quiet and
well organized. There were no Salvadoran shoot-'em-ups, no Haitian baton-twirler machete attacks, no puddles of Chicagoan sleaze
running out from under the voting booths. People were standing patiently in line, holding their signature seals, their chops, at the
ready. Poll watchers from each candidate's party sat to one side,
rigid on a row of straight-backed chairs. A reporter who could
make an interesting paragraph out of this would get that special
Pulitzer they give out for keeping readers awake during discussions
of civic virtue. Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam said there was
massive vote fraud. But if there was, it was serious, orderly Korean
massive vote fraud.

    Giannini and I did see one fellow getting roughed up by a
crowd outside a polling place. We shoved people, in the Korean
manner, until we found someone who spoke English. He told us the
fellow being kicked and punched was a suspected government
agent. The police came, punched and kicked the fellow some
more, and hauled him off. It was certainly the first time I'd ever
seen police arrest somebody on suspicion of being a government
agent. But that's Korea.
    We went out in the country to find people voting in authentic
traditional funny clothes. But this, too, was a bore. So we gave up
and went to a restaurant-a few floor mats and a kerosene heater in
a tent beside the Han River.
    The Han is as wide as the Hudson, and its valley is as
beautiful as a Hudson River-school painting-but more serious,
with a gray wash over it. The Koreans are serious about fun, too,
thank God. They're perfectly capable of a three-hour lunch, and so
are Giannini and I. We ordered dozens of bowls of pickles, garlics,
red peppers and hot sauces and dozens of plates of spiced fish and
vegetables and great big bottles of OB beer and mixed it all with
kimchi so strong it would have sent a Mexican screaming from the
room with tongue in flames. By the time we drove, weaving, back to
Seoul, you could have used our breath to clean your oven.
    After the votes were counted, the Koreans were not very happy
with their first presidential election in sixteen years. Most citizens
responded in the Korean way, by going to work in the morning. But
some student-radical types decided they'd found a big vote fraud in
a ward, or gu, office in the industrial