Opinion: In today’s pages: Kimchi. Oh, and something about voting.
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What is a crucial part of a nation’s culture, makes you fearful on your first encounter, hits you with an unexpectedly strong flavor, stays with you for days, compels you to repeatedly shower and brush your teeth just to wash away the scent, makes you swear off trying it ever again, yet leaves you pining for more?
The election, of course. The editorial pages show you no mercy. Deal with it.
First, you don’t get out of voting just because you heard some cable network declare the winner based on exit polls in West Virginia. The editorial board reminds you that you’ve got ballot measures to vote on here, and besides, the polls may be wrong. They’ve been wrong before. And if you don’t vote, we’ll find you.
Civics-bookish as it may sound, voting is a duty as well as a right. Even when the stakes aren’t as high as they are in California this year, exercising the franchise only when you think your vote will ‘count’ is an act of selfishness, not citizenship.
So you better do your duty. Of course, even if you do, everything will probably go wrong. States have to check names against registration databases, but there are no standards, so the double-check may bounce qualified voters in some states while failing to catch fraudulent ones in others. States have differing rules for provisional ballots. And they might not come up with enough poll workers, especially in poor and minority precincts. Congress should do something. But it probably won’t.
And in case you haven’t yet gotten the message about who and what to vote for, we’ll give it to you one last -- OK, second-to-last -- time.
Now, let Larry M. Bartels of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs explain to you why, whatever your rationale for choosing your candidate, you’re wrong. And don’t be so sure that things will come out right in the end, just because millions of people are voting.
Unfortunately, ‘rational’ rewarding and punishing of incumbents turns out to be much harder than it seems, as my colleague Christopher Achen and I have found. Voters often misperceive what life has been like during the incumbent’s administration. They are inordinately focused on the here and now, mostly ignoring how things have gone earlier in the incumbent’s term. And they have great difficulty judging which aspects of their own and the country’s well-being are the responsibility of elected leaders and which are not.
So after all that election news, it’s time to cheer up. H. Gilbert Welch says all that testing for breast cancer may not be the best thing for most women, at least not the way it’s done now.
‘Look harder, find more’ has been the prevailing paradigm in breast cancer screening from the outset. News reports focus on which approach finds more cancer. Conventional versus digital mammograms? Digital is better because it finds more cancer. Mammograms versus MRI? MRI is better because it finds more cancer. But the problem of over-diagnosis means that finding more cancer is not better — it’s the wrong way to measure progress. Real progress would be to find only the cancers that matter.
And now to the kimchi. We certainly couldn’t find anything in that to make you worry. Or could we? Gregory Rodriguez points out that South Korea has a deficit of the pungent, fermented national appetizer/condiment. Koreans are eating Kimchi imported from China, and that could lead disaffected citizens to question their cultural hold on something dear to them. Could they be facing confusion, a sense of displacement, anxiety? And who knows where that could lead?
If you think these are silly questions, just remember that it was a feeling of cultural displacement that helped fuel the fundamentalism of Egyptian student Mohamed Atta in Germany.
Happy Monday!
Kimchi photo: Rhee Dong-Min, Reuters