Daily Socotra

21 June 2006

Box Office

It is the summer solstice, time to gather at Stonehenge and celebrate our Druid ancestors and swill some liquor. I once had the chance to spend a youthful solstice in Scandinavia, and ran into the pines with a likely companion to cavort in the light that lasts all night. Goes with the genes, I think.

Here in Washington I think I will go to work. The weight of the humidity is heavy, and the events of the day could get you down, if you took time to think of it. The authorities have found the two soldiers who were grabbed by the Iraqi insurgents three days ago, and they apparently had an awful passing. The remains were booby-trapped to try to savage more soldiers.

It pains me a bit that I am so concerned about the Americans. The slaughter continues among and between the Iraqis, with the latest prominent in the steady flood of the dead being a senior defense counsel to Saddam Hussein.

I guess that is why the threat from North Korea is comforting, in a way, since it fits the way we allowed ourselves to think all those years of the Cold War. It was as predictable as a Hollywood thriller, steady box office stuff. One side did something, the other would respond; tensions would rise and fall with the metered rhythm of a big-budget block-buster.

We have that this morning as well. Conditions could be favorable for launch of the Taepodong-2 missile, though perhaps the pot of tension has not been bubbling long enough to suit the chef in Pyongyang. After the last successful test of the rocket in 1998, the next year the components were placed on the pad for almost two months and nothing happened.

It could be that way again. Still, if something real is scripted, there is a US Navy ship in the Sea of Japan equipped with the Aegis combat system, and the SM-3 interceptor missile. There has been much discussion this morning from the chattering classes about the chances of shooting down the rocket after launch.

The consensus is that America's missile shield is not ready, and an attempt to intercept that failed would….fail as deterrence.

Poppycock, I say. The SM-3 has worked most of the time it has been tested against rockets. It is just a question of whether or not it is the proper move on the chess board. Just to complicate things, we should remember that we have sold the Aegis system to Japan, and the Self-Defense Force has ships out there as well, and this could clearly be construed as a matter of self-defense, just like Gary Cooper in the movie “High Noon.”

We labor at a disadvantage in this contest, since our understanding is limited. North Korea is so sealed off that it seems exotic and unearthly. It is as though it is not subject to the same laws of diplomacy and commonsense that apply elsewhere.

To a degree that is correct. But the alien nature of our Korean adversary has more to do with Malibu than it does of anything really exotic.

Let me give you some background on why that is. Kim Jong-il is currently known as The Dear Leader. He has also been known as The Party Center. As a child, before they made up the story about being born in a cabin on the sacred mountain, his name was Yura.

His dad retired the coolest title, the one he bears now in rest: The Eternal Leader.

The younger Kim stands 5'2” in his stockinged feet, and is sensitive about it.

After attending Kim Il Sung University, he went to the former East Germany to undergo flight training. His days there were wild ones, if the whispers are true, and filled with fast cars and lovely German women.

Returning home to assume the family business, he had some adjustment problems. The Rangoon bombing which he sponsored was unfortunate. He might have wiped out the leadership of the Republic of Korea. But everyone has adjustment problems sometimes.

Now, the Dear Leader lives in a seven-story mansion, and has an annual national talent search for fair complexioned young girls to join special detachments of the armed forces. They perform important special missions for the party center.

He is also the largest single customer of the Hennessy Cognac corporation, with imports valued between $650,000 to $800,000 annually since 1992. He prefers the “Paradis” brand, which goes for $650 a bottle, so I suppose the bill is really proportional.

It is an understatement to say that Kim is a fan of western film. He has a video library that exceeds 20,000 Hollywood films, and all four basic plots.

In 1978, he ordered the kidnapping of Choe Un-hui, his favorite South Korean actress, and her husband, a movie producer. They were held in the North for eight years to teach Kim how to make movies. Sergeant Robert Jenkins, held in the north for four decades, was a frequent, if wooden star as one of dozens of evil Americans.

There were not many Meguks- Americans- available in Central Casting. One does what one can with the material available, I suppose.

Kim watches CNN and scans the internet for several hours a day. He is one plugged in despot, and owns the largest collection of Elvis-style sunglasses in Asia, and his shoes have four-inch lifts.

The Dear Leader has three sons- perhaps in tribute to the television sitcom starring Fred McMurray of the same name. In this reality show version, the eldest boy is named Kim Jong-nam, and wanders the world in self-imposed exile. The youngest son is only 23, and has not had a chance to start acting out in any meaningful way.

The second son is widely regarded as the heir apparent to the Hermit Kingdom. Kim Jong-chol was recently caught by Japanese TV wearing blue jeans and taking in an Eric Clapton concert in Germany. The British rock legend played gigs in four German cities in early June as part of the ongoing party surrounding the football World Cup.

Dear Leader Junior, if I may be so bold, is known to have studied in Switzerland in the mid-1990s and is described by classmates as a die-hard Clapton fan. He often wears a t-shirt emblazoned with Clapton's likeness, and this was not a rare outing for the despot-in-waiting. He reportedly already spent a summer like a Grateful Dead fan following Eric around the European concert circuit.

So, with his Dad's penchant for Hollywood-style over-the-top drama, you can pretty much fill in how this crisis will play out, with the tempo rising in the third reel. It will probably have a lot of sequels, too, of which this is another. Kim's favorite film is “The Godfather,” though he is fond of the entire James Bond oeuvres.

So I expect this will go on for a while, installment after installment, unless someone decides to close the box office. And as for the next regime, we may wind up confronting an implacable communist foe who enjoys air-guitar riffs to the sound of "Layla" while wearing a t-shirt that reads: CLAPTON IS GOD.

There is something about a really good blues guitar. The West really does have a pernicious influence. Perhaps that is what the Jihadists are so afraid of.