Every now and then, I read something so brilliant I’m angry at myself for not writing it first.
While I was there, I also found this guilty pleasure.
Archive for Humor/Satire
The Onion: ‘What You’re Doing Is Weird And Wrong,’ Small Voice In Back Of Kim Jong-Un’s Head Reports
Say, do you think Kim Jong Un might just be a complete doofus who happens to have nuclear weapons?
SO THE FIRST WELL-KNOWN AMERICAN to meet with Kim Jong Un is not an AP interviewer, a tribute-bearing Bill Richardson, a ransom-bearing Jimmy Carter, or first choice Michael Jordan. It is this man:
Strain, if you must, to make this into some sort of soft power diplomatic coup; it really looks like a tragic sequel to “Being There.” The very weirdness of it all is evident in some priceless exchanges from yesterday’s State Department daily press briefing.
Delectably, the AP’s part-time Pyongyang correspondent and photographer were scooped by Vice Media, led by Shane Smith, a man who is to journalism what The Dude is to alternative dispute resolution. Nate Thayer tells the story here. At least Smith, unlike the AP, does not ask us to take his brand of journalism seriously. What makes all of this even harder to explain is that Smith’s ventures into North Korea and North Korean logging camps in Siberia have portrayed North Korea as bizarre, controlling, brutish, and ridiculous. Smith, in other words, scooped the AP without (so far) having pulled any punches or sacrificed his objectivity. That’s why I’m willing to see the product Vice produces before I’m as critical as others have been, although I applaud another unlikely source, Gawker, for putting this circus into its rightful context.
You can’t help pity the AP which, for all its literary and literal prostrations – for all its willingness to make jarring ethical compromises to gain the regime’s favor – was frustrated in its priapistic lust for an interview with His Porcine Majesty. It looks like we’ll all have to wait a little longer to learn whether it’s briefs or boxers. Meanwhile, Jean Lee, the AP’s Korea Bureau Chief, must quote pesky upstart Vice to even report what Kim said to Rodman, and was otherwise relegated to tweeting pictures of sandwiches. No word yet on that AP expose on the starvation and cannibalism said to be ongoing a few miles to the south of Pyongyang. Maybe Vice will beat them to that, too.
I’ve been pondering why the North Koreans would snub such willing instruments as Jean Lee and Bill Richardson, people who could actually deliver things a wily regime could use to advance its coldly calculated interests. Instead, it left them all at the altar for a man who does, admittedly, look rather fetching in a wedding dress. The resulting publicity mostly portrays Kim Jong Un as a bizarre, detached hedonist in a kingdom of helots, a gluttonous man-child who is blithely apathetic about statecraft or the welfare of his pitiful subjects. Out west, where I’m from, our fathers teach us to take better care of our tools than this.
After consulting William of Occam, I offer this novel hypothesis: Could it be that Kim Jong Un is just an impulsive imbecile who happens to be the nominal leader of a state with nuclear weapons? Nothing we know about his academic history or his policy record contradicts my hypothesis.
Update: What. The. Fuck. (Hat tip).
This Just In: North Korea fails to absorb any of Dennis Rodman’s tact, class, gentility, or gravitas.
So yet again, we learn that visitors do not change North Korea. The tricky part is getting out before North Korea changes the visitor.
Since I broach the engagement-versus-isolation debate, it’s been argued enough times that I seldom hear any new arguments, but this one by Michael Totten, in response to the reliably trite Nick Kristof, is a terrific deconstruction of mirror-imaging by both the North Koreans and the Americans who don’t understand how they think.
The answer to the debated question, of course, is “both,” but we’ve gotten the mechanics of it exactly backwards. By engaging North Korea’s regime on its terms — lots of cash, no questions asked — we’ve provided it the financial and political means to isolate and immiserate its people, the ones we should have been finding ways to engage in spite of the regime.
What would be the death blow for totalitarianism in North Korea? Aid workers from free societies — kindly Bible-thumping missionaries from Missouri and Busan, side-by-side with German hipsters with pierced lips and eyebrows — all passing out humanitarian aid in the bleakest quarters of Hamhung and Wonsan, unimpeded by the regime’s minders. That will only be possible when the regime is so constricted financially that it is forced to allow that to save the residue of its elite.
Update: Via Spencer Ackerman, Rodman can’t even keep his Koreas straight, so he may also be ignorant of how conditions are for most of the North Korean people. Kudos to Ackerman for trying to shift the focus back to that.
Birth control, Pyongyang Style: Lady-Mullets!
Sure, you say, a list of 18 state-approved hairstyles certainly seems generous and libertine, but on closer examination, it’s actually more like 18 pictures of three hairstyles — three hideous, man-shriveling hairstyles — one of which (6, 10) is a mullet, and the rest of which appear to have been inspired by the 80s metal band Queensrÿche.
Afterthought: The Daily Mail is only marginally more credible than KNCA, so I wouldn’t take this as authoritative evidence that North Korea allows only 18 female hairstyles, but more reputable sources hold that North Korea has paid undue attention to the the hairstyles of its subjects. There is also this:
In Poor Taste
Quite a few readers have been coming in over the last two days from this New York Times Op-Ed by Adam Johnson, author of the acclaimed The Orphan Master’s Son. Johnson links to the Camp 14 page and asks how anyone could be so tasteless as to post a satirical review of a North Korean concentration camp. Johnson thinks that in the same sense as the maps review something disturbing and inhuman about North Korea, the reactions reveal something disturbing and inhuman about us. Writing at Foreign Policy several days ago, Blaine Harden had also asked, “Should we really be making jokes about North Korean prison camps?” Both pieces are well worth a read in full, and reach slightly different conclusions. I have spent the last week vacillating between those conclusions myself.
As a fan of South Park and those sketchy Untergang parodies on YouTube, I feel underqualified to denounce anyone else’s tasteless sense of humor, but there’s a line that I think these reviews cross. The distinction, I think, Read more
Sometimes, a missile is just a missile
Every time North Korea tests a rocket, Hans Blix sheds a little tear and Ban Ki Moon’s fluffy white tail stops wagging, because North Korean rocket tests violate three U.N. Security Council Resolutions — 1695 (which bans “all activities related to its ballistic missile programme”), UNSCR 1718 (ditto, and requires N. Korea to “re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching”), and 1874 (which bans “any launch using ballistic missile technology”). North Korea’s official response is that it is launching peaceful satellites, not testing ICBMs. You may be wondering if anyone on the Outer Earth is still fool enough to believe this.
There’s little reason to doubt North Korea’s claim that it simply wants to put a satellite into space. [John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus]
Maybe John Feffer just needs more reason, so he can reason his way to what’s obvious to the rest of us.
North Korea exhibited the fuselage of what is presumed to be the long-range rocket it launched in December, and explicitly called it a ballistic missile, despite its claims to the outside world that the Unha-3 was part of its peaceful space development program, a report said Monday.
The report by Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun quoted North Korean sources as saying that the fuselage was displayed under the name “Hwasong-13″ among the exhibitions of the country’s missile lineup in an exhibition hall in Pyongyang. The Hwasong line also includes shorter-range scud missiles, which the country has produced since the 1980′s. [Yonhap]
Well, you say, if they’re missiles, then they must be for strictly defensive deterrence. No need to infer any malicious intent here, right? So we now have this, via North Korea’s quasi-official Uriminzokkiri:
If your memory is long enough, may recall that other norksimps in South Korea, the Korean Teachers’ Union, produced an equally sickening video for schoolchildren before the 2005 APEC Forum in Busan, featuring replays of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, set to “What a Wonderful World.” A theme seems to be emerging.
I’m sure that all across the more progressive quarters of this world, there are fevered minds with room enough for the conflicting lunacies that the Jews and neocons pulled off 9/11, and also that on 9/11, nineteen great martyrs fulfilled a divine mandate of vengeance against toddlers, flight attendants, and office workers. Similarly, there’s clearly some market in some quarters of Korea for fantasies of North Korea’s peaceful satellites destroying American cities. I hope that market is a whole lot smaller than it was a decade ago.
If nothing else, it’s a useful reminder that the North Koreans aren’t just fucking around. We already know what they’re capable of, morally speaking. Faster, please.
So … does this mean KCNA believes in unicorns?
America’s finest news source, The Onion, is presented as parody but can be mistaken for reality. North Korea’s finest news source, KCNA, is presented as reality but can be mistaken for parody. But if you compare the best work of each news source, KCNA is clearly funnier:
Pyongyang, November 29 (KCNA) — Archaeologists of the History Institute of the DPRK Academy of Social Sciences have recently reconfirmed a lair of the unicorn rode by King Tongmyong, founder of the Koguryo Kingdom (B.C. 277-A.D. 668).
The lair is located 200 meters from the Yongmyong Temple in Moran Hill in Pyongyang City. A rectangular rock carved with words “Unicorn Lair” stands in front of the lair. The carved words are believed to date back to the period of Koryo Kingdom (918-1392).
Jo Hui Sung, director of the Institute, told KCNA:
“Korea’s history books deal with the unicorn, considered to be ridden by King Tongmyong, and its lair.
The Sogyong (Pyongyang) chapter of the old book ‘Koryo History’ (geographical book), said: Ulmil Pavilion is on the top of Mt. Kumsu, with Yongmyong Temple, one of Pyongyang’s eight scenic spots, beneath it. The temple served as a relief palace for King Tongmyong, in which there is the lair of his unicorn.
The old book ‘Sinjungdonggukyojisungnam’ (Revised Handbook of Korean Geography) complied in the 16th century wrote that there is a lair west of Pubyok Pavilion in Mt. Kumsu.
The discovery of the unicorn lair, associated with legend about King Tongmyong, proves that Pyongyang was a capital city of Ancient Korea as well as Koguryo Kingdom.” [KCNA, Nov. 29, 2012]
Unlike the Editor of The Peoples’ Daily, I’ve paused to ask myself, “Can they really be serious?” A S.T.A.L.I.N. search of KCNA’s archives reveals previous references to unicorns, but in those cases, KCNA characterized them as “mythical,” and this report does use the word “legend.” Perhaps North Korea is throwing a lifeline to its embarrassed Chinese sponsors by planting this cunning and cryptic parody in the U.S. press, although if there’s any place you’d expect to see parody in North Korea, this isn’t it. (The North Koreans are deadly serious about establishing Pyongyang as the historical capital of a unified Korea.) Or perhaps KCNA is offering us scientific evidence that King Tongmyong deceived his people with myths and legends about himself … to bolster the credibility of its own historical claims. Or perhaps they’re telling people to believe in freaking unicorns!
I know I’ve been a little hard on KCNA for its faked photographs, its calls to slit the throat of the President of South Korea, and its attribution of supernatural powers to Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un, but not even I can deny that KCNA reports like this one provide us unique and exclusive access to a world no one else is showing us. As Jean H. Lee recently put it:
Even though the images and words that the AP produces from Pyongyang are clearly shaped and influenced by the regime, Lee defended her bureau’s presence against accusations from media critics that it is serving the interests of a brutal regime rather than investigating the truth about starvation and a vast gulag system. “Some critics don’t want us there,” she said. “But isn’t it better that we are there? We try to get on the ground to see what’s happening. We have to flesh out the narrative.”
Who, me? I want the crack AP-KCNA Truth Squad right where it can tell us what a keun of unicorn flesh sells for in Chongjin today! Far better that we know just the officially-shaped part of the story of North Korea’s unique biodiversity than none at all! Surely there’s a fragile ecosystem here that requires protection through a generous U.N. grant. So far, however, the AP hasn’t put this exclusive KCNA report on the wires. I hope they dare to believe in their sweet dreams, because nothing cloaks a news agency in an air of global respectability like shouting “Look! Unicorn!” to the whole world.
Speaking of which, who else has noticed how quiet the AP’s Pyongyang Journal has been recently? The last report hosted there is this (seriously, no-kidding) excellent October 7th report from Tim Sullivan. Sullivan has published at least one other report since then, about the supposed popularity of “Gone With The Wind” in Pyongyang.
Hat tip to (no, not The Onion) Chico Harlan’s Twitter feed.
ChiComs Behaving Stoopidly: Peoples’ Daily Falls for The Onion’s Award to Kim Jong Un of “Sexiest Man Alive”
As funny as I thought the original parody was at the time, it’s infinitely funnier when humorless authoritarian propagandists don’t realize it’s a parody and put it on Page One. And while the Onion guys aren’t exactly ruthless in the we-send-children-to-the-gulags-on-Mondays-and-Thursdays sense, they didn’t show the Peoples’ Daily much mercy with this hat tip:
UPDATE: For more coverage on The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People’s Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion, Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades.
For demonstrative reference, here’s the Sexy Man himself hitting the gym with a cancer stick clutched in one claw and the pitiful Ri Sol Ju in the other, looking like the victim of the tentacle monster in that Japanese anime flick you won’t admit watching:
And in other news that no doubt has the Fifty Cent Party working overtime, a sex tape of a Chinese official bedding an 18 year-old woman has gone viral. The tape was made five years ago, most likely by the would-be government contractors who hired the woman to “entertain” the official, to ensure that once bought, he’d stay bought. It’s telling that such precautions are necessary. Really, if you can’t trust a corrupt, adulterous pervert overlord of an unaccountable oligarchy, who can you trust?
Frankly, I’m beginning to question all that Thomas Friedman-style “realist” masochism about the superiority of Chinese statecraft, its harmonious public order, and its sophisticated use of non-interventionist Soft Power. Could it be that they’re really just a bunch of bumbling, mirthless goons with nuclear weapons?
Most Unfortunate North Korean Photo Op Ever: The Kim Jong Un Workout Video!
Holy mother of Zeus. No matter how many times I watch this, I can’t believe they actually filmed it. On purpose.
It’s wrong to laugh, but sometimes I can’t help myself.
Hat tip: Chico Harlan.
From the Gallery of Unfortunate North Korean Photo Ops: Jabba at the Gym
Good news: Margaret Chan may have missed the evidence, but at least one North Korean has an obesity problem. Bad news: He just appointed himself National Personal Trainer.
That may be the worst photo op since this one. Or this one.
North Korea’s KCNA state media said Kim was accompanied by his new wife, Ri Sol-ju, and that the exercise centre had been “built according to the direct initiative and plan” of the Young General, as he is known. It added that Kim is “always deeply concerned for the promotion of people’s health and living standards.”
So concerned that he blew enough rice money to feed a small town for a year on a new gym that no one in North Korea but him needs, in the middle of its 18th annual food crisis since his grandpa became North Korea’s largest stockpile of preserved meat.
Kim told the staff that if office workers who work indoors all day, “take exercise and receive medical treatment at the centre, they can devote themselves to revolutionary work in good health.” - The Telegraph, Julian Riall
Can you imagine what it must have been like to be one of the gym staff members, being lectured on fitness and exercise by a morbidly obese man … who showed up in a Mao suit? Suppress your amusement, comrade. Think of your children.
And of course you’re right. This really isn’t funny at all.
Forgive me. If I didn’t laugh, I’d be too depressed to write this and you’d be too depressed to read it. I wonder how many people living outside Pyongyang will ever see that picture.
