"Look in my eyes.
What do you see?
The Cult of Personality."
-Living Color, "The Cult of Personality.
The man called a "pygmy" by mental pygmy George W. Bush, Kim Jong Il, has died. After the boo-hooing over "Dear Leader" has somewhat subsided, I hope that posterity's final word on Kim Jong Il is that he brought out the failures and shortcomings of virtually every non-Communist nation that was ever forced to deal with him and the failure of the Communist state. That's all that posterity should say about him.
The Clinton administration tried dealing with him in its final months, sending Secretary of State Madeline Albright to talk him into drawing down his missile program and she failed. George W. Bush, reduced to impotent sputtering and name-calling, failed to deter Kim from his single-minded course in obtaining 6-8 nuclear weapons and was aided in his failure by John "Group sex" Bolton, who, as Undersecretary of State monitoring the development of the weapons programs of other nations, helplessly watched as North Korea detonated its first nuclear weapon. Underscoring the Bush administration's failure was in bribing Kim with over $20,000,000 taxpayer dollars which Kim then used to throw himself a birthday party and pursued his nuclear program, anyway.
Kim's 17 year-long reign as North Korea's dictator, a mantle reluctantly handed to him by his father after years of relentless campaigning for more power, also represented the ultimate failure of one of the last Communist states on earth. The belligerent and maddeningly stubborn Kim was so focused on harvesting every single scrap of fissionable nuclear material to create a pitiful arsenal of 6-8 nuclear warheads that he forgot how to feed his own people, depending on his enemies South Korea and the United States to do it for him.
Like Gadaffi and Bush, he was an international punchline, a man who benefited more from the cult of personality and nepotism than any other ruler of his time. The reputed owner of some 20,000 foreign movies, perhaps he saw something in himself in the complete James Bond series, perhaps in Dr. No or Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Kim also represents the absolute stupidity and cluelessness of the human race even while he was turning George Orwell's 1984 into a historical document. The North Korean people knew nothing of him, not even his exact date and place of his birth. News of his declining health were mere rumors and began to sound like the multiple accounts of Big Brother's ceaseless amputations in György Dalos' 1985.
Like Pinochet and other recently-departed dictators, Kim somehow, exclusively through a bloodline based on murder and terrorism, earned the love and idolatry of a people despite the facts that during his reign, roughly two million North Koreans starved to death, dissidents abroad were tracked down by Jong Il-dispatched assassins and countless thousands of men, women and even children were and still are kept in internment camps all over the hermetic nation. Yet in picture after picture, we see this runt in his Michael Meyers jumpsuit, smiling for the cameras while empty suits and military uniforms nervously smile, hands clasped across their genitals.
Kim Jong Il was a joke outside North Korea, so much so that he earned a starring role in the comedy hit Team America. But even worse than a joke, he was such a bad joke that he turned every nation that ever tried to deal with him into a joke, including two presidential administrations and his rival to the south that was obliged to feed the people that he plainly had no problem starving to death. We were forced to treat this man as if he was a legitimate world leader simply because the failures of the Bush and Clinton administrations allowed him to acquire The Bomb. And American foreign policy (especially with Israel) these last several decades has taught us that as long as a country has even one nuclear warhead, it has to be taken seriously.
Kim Jong Il exposed the stupidity and impotence of some of the mightiest nations on earth and ought to be viewed as an object lesson in how not to deal with heads of state in the future.
(Editor's note: Demands on my time this holiday season and the almost complete absence of a legitimate readership and commentary has compelled me to hang it up for at least the rest of the year. The amount of time and energy I put into this almost completely ignored blog fills me with a sense of neverending failure and valuable, dwindling resources going completely to waste. I may post some greeting on Christmas morning but beyond that, at the very least I cannot guarantee I'll be back for 2012, election year or no. The very minimal and intermittent rewards, financial, intellectual and otherwise that I derive from this thankless endeavor simply do not justify the resources I pour into it like a jug of water into a sand dune. I cannot do anything about being utterly and completely ignored but at least I can minimize the sense of unending failure and wasted effort by discontinuing to bang my head against the immovable wall of apathy and ignorance. To my very few readers aside from the perverts who stream in from all over the world looking for .jpegs of "naked fat men" [I am so sorry I wrote that post, "One Minute in the Teabagger Chat Room"], I apologize but there simply aren't enough of you out there to justify this expenditure of time and effort.)
