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| Fruit Cake for the Holidays Image (c) Matthew Bietz, 2007, 2011 |
Kim Jong-Un follows in the path of his father, Kim Jong-il,
who overcame enormous adversity in rising to the top from humble beginnings
as the son of Kim il-Sung, a dictator who spent roughly the last half of the
last century as one of only nine men in North Korea able to eat on a weekly
basis. The boy was born in the Soviet Union in 1941 where Kim il-Sung was fighting for Korea as a colonel in the Soviet Army, and he was named Yuri Irsenovich
Kim.
Although his dad was an
atheist, the child Yuri would later be born again, this time in 1942 as Kim
Jong-il, on top of a mountain in Korea. His rebirth, taken as a sign that he
was chosen for great things, was accomplished entirely on paper through the same
sort of sympathetic magic the Fed practices on currency yet with none of the inflation.
Shortly after Born Again Kim rolled down the hill, Stalin
gave half of Korea to his Dad and shortly after that passed over to where ever it is good Marxists bide the afterlife. (I have
always assumed this to be the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where
bureaucratic malaise meshes perfectly with eternity.) His father frequently hinted that he thought the boy should
succeed him and considered the expression of dissenting views as the best way
to identify those individuals whose destiny was to serve on the army’s firing
range as targets.
Kim il-Sung was called the "Great Leader" by his people as an expression of the love that filled them in place of actual food. He went on to build one of the world’s most
impressive highway systems, albeit in a country where there are only nine cars
on the road at any given time, eight of which are driven by somber men with
hollow eyes masked by dark sunglasses, men gifted in making people wish they
had never born.
Born-again Kim inherited this estate and by singular genius
actually made the country worse, no mean feat in a nation that had already
successfully deployed three of the four horseman of the apocalypse in a
population control scheme resulting in the sort of menu the Donner Party
enjoyed during the winter of 1846. Thankfully, pestilence, strife and famine
covered the bases and he never had to saddle up the fourth horseman of war. God
knows the boy wonder who became the “Dear Leader” was certainly prepared to do
so.
His devotion to the arts was notorious. Or criminal, to be
more precise. Kim Jong-il thought of South Korean actresses as his personal
dating pool and dedicated substantial security resources to having them
kidnapped and delivered to his chambers. It is unclear how this helped answer
the problem of keeping people from starving to death in an economy where five
grains of rice was a fat payday, but perhaps this is an example of the remarkable
insight into social problems that made him “Dear.”
And now he is gone, this sterling rebuke against curmudgeons
like myself who are skeptical of any sanguine ideal that world events are shaped by leaders of
rational benevolence and caution. The press in Pyongyang has opined that his
spirit was of such magnitude that it yet dwells upon the Earth, albeit
invisible now, a thought that should strike terror in the heart of every South
Korean actress alive, particularly if she’s seen that very disturbing Kevin
Bacon - Rona Mitra scene in Hollow Man.
The Telegraph
reports that the North Korean press has filmed birds gathered in mourning for
the "Dear Leader;" the more astute observers suggest the silent chirp
proves that all of nature is stricken with grief. One hopes this was based on
the crows’ facial expressions and not a reading of their entrails or those of
political prisoners. In any event,
this stunning miracle of birds sitting closely together in trees has the world praying to the soul
of the departed dictator that these magpies don’t go all Hitchcock on us before
recovering their equilibrium. The
last time we saw anything like this was – hang on, let me think.
Thursday.
Last Thursday, it was, during a light shower – but those black
jays wound up trolling for soggy crickets in the grass. God only knows what these
Kim-minded birds will do if any South Korean actresses hove into view.
Now the curtain rises to show us a quiet boy fiddling with
that big red button marked Apocalypse. He has already had the savvy to
out-maneuver his brother Kim Jong-nam in claiming the mantle of leadership by
avoiding the spectacle the latter created when arrested by the Japanese for
trying to sneak into the country with a fake passport in the hopes of seeing
Disneyland, doubtlessly intrigued by the thought of mingling in crowds of
people in which no one was expected to die from starvation or disease for at
least two or three hours. Japan
could not have been more surprised by this turn of events from a foreign
leadership whose hobbies have included kidnapping ordinary Japanese citizens
and holding them for years at a time for questioning. That’s how hard up for
conversation one gets in a worker’s paradise.
In a country of skeletal citizens devoted to feeding the
various appetites of the Imperial Family, small wonder one of Kim Jong-Un’s
prized endorsements came from the household chef, who noted that the lad was “a
big drinker” who “never admits defeat.” The implications for a nuclear power
that hates Japan and is politically committed to extending the wonder of mass
starvation to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula suggest that Roland
Emmerich may have one more blockbuster catastrophic thriller to make “based on
a true story.”
As for the United States, we must first determine whether
Kim Jong-Un has the same preternatural level of grace with which nature gifted
his father. The former famously bowled a perfect 300 in his first trip to the
lanes. He also shot 38 under par
his first time on the links, a score including eleven holes-in-one that he
officially reduced to five out of modesty, the first and only instance of
socialist accounting being used to discount rather than inflate actual
productivity.
If the young Un comes anywhere close, we’ll need to get in
touch with the folks at Dos Equis and negotiate diplomatic representation for
America by that “most interesting man in the world” guy as he may be the only
jasper that can face the Un-leader across the table.
And we must fervently hope Kim Jung-Un is not easily
over-burdened. The list of titles and grants of authority he has graciously
accepted upon the demands of his grateful nation suggest that deciding whether
to launch nuclear missiles at Seoul or Tokyo will be only one of his daily
activities over the coming decades whereas it is something folks living in
those cities would hope receives undivided attention.
Ever the pessimist, I find it only a mixed blessing that
he’ll have less immediately destructive distractions like pushing his
technicians to develop missiles capable of nuking Los Angeles sooner than the
three to five years currently anticipated. I’d drop a footnote here about the
2012 election but I am loathe to digress again and certain the Dear Reader will
agree.
As a reminder that they are awaiting orders, though, North Korea’s
rocket forces lobbed a couple of missiles out into the sea the day Kim Jung-il officially
went astral. Careful parsing of
the earliest notices, and word around the water coolers in Langley, Virginia,
suggest he died twice. He died once in what we historically minded fools call objective
reality, and then again at a later hour or day with the bureaucratically
approved finality that contemporary news media find curiously comforting. This
was, perhaps, in honor of the manner of his birth.
One thing we already know, thanks to the golden transparency
of the North Korean press, is that the little braniac now in command was born with political, social,
economic and cultural knowledge far in advance of the best tutors a nation
could buy – at one point, they must have cut the daily rice ration per
household to three grains just to pay for the lad’s Swiss education that so
befit a servant of the working class. He did well enough without paying
attention that North Koreans cried out in one voice spontaneously demanding a
national holiday to honor him and his father humbly obliged. Meanwhile, the UnLeader
has spent virtually every waking moment since birth drawing intricate pictures
of Michael Jordan, with whom he is obsessed, leaving the actress population
finally at peace.
In this case, then, the persimmon has fallen pretty far from
the table. There is a new fixation on which this Communist dynasty is focused. Given
no reason to assume that his twice baked daddy’s secret service hospitality
tour guide unit has been disbanded, it seems wise to triple Mr. Jordan’s
security detail for now. Hopefully, somewhere in the recesses of the Pentagon,
someone is drawing analogous conclusions with respect to the sanctity of the
city of Los Angeles.
