The Clapton Gambit
Say you’re the beleagured tyrant of a certain Northeast Asian country. In a moment of financial duress, you signed an agreement in which you agreed to disclose and eventually give up a nuclear arsenal in which you’ve invested a great deal of money, pride, and prestige. You know that in a year, there’s an even chance that you might be dealing with the most naive and pliable U.S. President since Jimmy Carter. You also know that if too many people start getting the idea that you’re stalling on that declaration, momentum will shift in favor of turning the economic screws on you again, which you know could be the end of you. You can’t survive without money from your enemies, and one of your best sources might soon dry up. Even the foreign diplomat who had been the main proponent of going easy on seems to be turning sour.
Can you last this year without performing on that accursed nuclear deal? Yes, you can!
Fortunately for you, your enemies have an inexhausible apetite for superficial displays. They desperately want to believe that the gas chambers, nuclear tests, concentration camps, abductions, famines, and global crime syndication are merely a misguided artist’s cry for attention. Some of them, though not all, even have the self-important delusion that they can change your nature by playing music for you. Not that you showed up to listen, yet still, they seize on this stuff. They breathe it. They inhale. Then they lurk behind bus stations at night so they can afford more.
So what are you to do? You put them to sleep by feeding their habit:
North Korea has invited Eric Clapton to perform in Pyongyang in a highly unusual move that could see the English guitarist playing in the world’s most isolated state next year. The invitation will boost hopes that North Korea is growing more interested in building cultural bridges to the outside world, even as diplomatic negotiations over its nuclear programme hit an impasse. [….]
“These cultural exchanges are a way of promoting understanding between countries,” a North Korean official told the Financial Times. “We want our music to be understood by the western world and we want our people to understand western music.” [Financial Times, Anna Fifield]
This is where that young Claptomanic Dauphin you sired has his moment of usefulness. He’s hardly a suitable heir — too corrupted and too effeminate for the job — but it’s not as if you haven’t tried to let him grow into daddy’s shoes.
Poor kid. Some day he’ll have a helicopter accident.
Does this have risks? A few, perhaps, but that’s why you have people who will make sure no one gets the wrong idea. You don’t have to let just anyone will go to go to this, and gambits like this have worked out just fine before. For that matter, you can cancel the whole thing the second week of November. No one would even notice.
5 Responses
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Listening to NPR and watching PBS….I can say that Kim Jong Il’s philharmonic ploy was a smashing, smashing success…..
This world never ceases to amaze me….
I’ve always liked Clapton the guitarist (his singing though, c’mon, is only third-rate). I like the NY Phil–went to Avery Fisher Hall to hear them regularly until the fatuous one took over a few years ago. Like Kim Jong Chul, I attended a private school in Switzerland (although not the same one). I’ve nothing against Clapton fans or artsy-fartsy proclivities or privileged education.
What I do have a problem with is all these fatuous would-be-missionaries who go to Pyongyang, pay a fee for the fantasy ride, play a tune or two (or, in the case of Kim Dae Jung in June 2000, embrace a smiling Kim Jong Il for an admission fee of $500 million) and come away believing themselves at the very least cultural conduits or agents of change. What I do have a problem with is that Kim Jong Chul’s daddy would imprison anyone other than his own offspring or sycophant who has the chutzpah to own a recording of Clapton or the NY Phil. What I do have a problem with is that the international media chooses to focus on atmospherics instead of the reality of the North Korean regime’s systemic and widespread attack on a large portion of the civilian population with knowledge of the attack; in short, routinized commitments of crimes against humanity, as defined by Article 7 of the Statute of Rome of the International Criminal Court.
I suspect the NY Phil will remember February 26, 2008. So, too, shall posterity. It will be another day of infamy–probably in perpetuity.
Well said, Josh and Wolmae. I will say, though, that the papers I read kept the gulag element of North Korea high in their reports and quoted musicians feeling uncomfortable about sumptuous banquets in a country with such an obviously thread-bare economy. Even NPR lead one segment with the check your cellphones at the door policy of the DPRK. Of course it would have been truly great to have had Joshua go along and blog the NYSO DPRK tour. Other than the majority of the South Korean media and the useful idiot NYSO conductor himself, I didn’t see anyone who was duped by the events of Feb. 26.
I think the Clapton ploy is a joke that reveals the Kim regime’s ignorance about the outside world and will probably die a quiet death. (Side note: Clapton has become totally boring in the last decade or two. I left early the last time I saw him — in Tokyo in 1997). Summoning or inviting EC marks an improvement over kidnapping him as Kim Jong-il did with the actress/director couple and others needed or desired by the regime.
You will hear older Russians say that Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were far more subversive and corrosive to the Soviet system than Helsinki Watch or Ronald Reagan. The Russians, though, were getting their rock n roll through underground routes and sources — not unlike the smuggled South Korean soaps North Koreans reportedly watch in secret at great risk.
I must have caught NPR at a different time, and I don’t listen to it regularly, and after what I heard, I remember why…