Jabba the Kim among the Ewoks, or worst photo op ever

Maybe the Associated Press’s new vocation as a propaganda outlet for North Korea has a brighter side than I’d originally realized. Today, the AP brings us what must be the worst photo op ever, a barracks inspection by Kim Jong Eun.

Where to begin? The unwittingly (I think) subversive decision to surround the morbidly obese kid — has he ever looked so fat? — with these lean, hungry leprechauns and their leathery, wizened officers? Posing him next to the their tiny little day-care bunks, about one-third of a Kim wide? Or standing His Porcine Majesty behind the tin plates holding meager rations that can’t possibly exceed his hourly caloric intake, set at intervals to fit wretches stunted down to the size of organ grinder monkeys? It’s things like this that convince me he’s doomed. It’s not just the manifest obscenity of his weight as ruler of a land where the lower castes and their orphans are left to starve in front of train stations. It’s the projection of inept fragility from the figurehead and the machine that made him one.

If the producer of this film really meant to glorify Jong Eun, he deserves to be sent packing to some God-forsaken ash-heap in the outer provinces. If he’s the world’s most cunningly courageous dissident, Seal Team Six should extract him and his entire family. On the Goebbels Scale of insidious propaganda genius, this makes Dukakis-in-a-tank look like Triumph of the Will. Not even Brian Myers can explain this away. Sure, I can believe that this video would be awfully persuasive to North Koreans, but to believe that it will be persuasive in the ways the regime wants it to be, you also have to believe that North Koreans are not just culturally different, but less than fully human.