First Tale: Impeachment
A few months after Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the impeached president was removed from office.
The National Assembly, South Korea’s equivalent of Congress, had voted in December 2016 to impeach President Park Geun-hye, following a wild corruption scandal and mass protests. The National Assembly has only one chamber, and as far as presidential impeachments are concerned, the Korean equivalent of the U.S. Senate is the Constitutional Court of Korea, who can uphold the decision or acquit.
The following March 10, the Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the impeachment, and Park ceased to be president. If I recall correctly, I was on the phone from New York with my mom in Seoul when the news broadcaster on her TV announced the breaking news. Wow, it’s really happened, I remember thinking.
President Park’s impeachment hearings the year earlier had been a succession of revelations. One Assemblymember in particular, Park Young-sun (no relation to President Park Geun-hye), had no shortage of incriminating evidence. To a witness who vehemently denied knowing a presidential aide at the heart of the scandal, she whipped out an obscure video clip in which the former sits placidly as the latter is discussed in some detail. The cornered witness stammered something about being too old and his memory failing.
The nation wondered: How is she finding all this stuff? It turned out, from the internet — specifically, in large part, from ju·gael.
“Ju·sig” is Korean for “stocks.” “Gael·reo·ri” is the transliteration of the English word “gallery,” which is what the popular DC Inside message board calls its sub-boards. The portmanteau, “ju·gael,” is the stocks gallery.
Every time evidence that they had uncovered and delivered to Assemblymembers was introduced on the National Assembly floor, gallery members were reportedly ecstatic: It’s our evidence! They’re using our evidence!
Wait, why was the stocks gallery dabbling in politics? Don’t they have mods to keep them on topic? Technically yes, but the story goes that gallery members lost so much money investing in stocks that the stocks gallery became the anything-but-stocks gallery. Instead, members work out calculus problems for fun, derive Newton’s laws of motion, and occasionally help impeach presidents.
If the WallStreetBets subreddit weren’t so lucrative, maybe they would have impeached a president already.
Second Tale: Election Fraud
In 2021, it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you ask the internet to choose between chocolate Chex and spring onion Chex, the internet will choose spring onion Chex.
In 2004, Kellogg Korea was not yet so wise. As a marketing campaign for its “extra-chocolate” flavor Chex, Kellogg launched an online poll branded as an election for the President of the Land of Chocolate Chex. It was set up as a two-way race between Cheki, the extra-chocolatey Chex, and Chaka, the spring-onion-flavored Chex.
To Kellogg’s horror, Chaka the spring onion Chex was winning. As the election progressed, Kellogg declared more than 47,000 votes for Chaka to be invalid (they were apparently cast by a little over 200 people), but Chaka was still about 6,000 votes ahead. To prevent a spring onion victory, Kellogg extended the voting window, let votes for their preferred candidate to pour in, then declared chocolate Chex the winner. The internet cried foul.
Chaka became a meme, unsurprisingly, and spawned fanart, mostly of green rectangles decrying election fraud.
Then last year, Kellogg created some art of their own, a poster of a smiling green anthropomorphic Chex in a green suit with a miniature spring onion pin. At the bottom of the poster was the slogan “Yes we can.” Kellogg actually did more than fanart: They released spring onion Chex as limited editions. The accompanying ad featured an old-timey song about how sorry they are for being so late, played over scientists agonizing over how to make the perfect spring onion cereal.
My suspicion, so far unsubstantiated, is that the children who experienced the rigged election in bewilderment grew up to be Kellogg employees. Change the system from within, you know?
Spring onion Chex is apparently terrible as cereal but pretty good with soju.
I wrote these back in January of 2021, when GameStop was all the rage, and the Senate had just voted not to convict following Trump’s impeachment by the House. Caveat: These are the folk versions of these stories, meaning I lived through them but haven’t independently verified all the details.
