Thanks to the people who sent compliments about my “Kim Jong-Wil” post this morning. Funny, as I was in the process of typing it, I came across a Time Magazine article written by a journalist who had snuck into North Korea, the land of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il.
There’s a part 3, but it hasn’t been published yet. I’ll link to it when it appears.
The journalist’s experiences were pretty consistent with ones I had read of another American who visited North Korea. I read Controversy Creates Cash, the biography of Eric Bischoff, the man who ran World Championship Wrestling, on my iPhone’s Kindle app recently. In the spring of 1995, he got the chance to take his wrestlers to North Korea (not with the blessing of the US government, but that didn’t stop him). They had to stop and place flowers at a statue of the late “Great Leader”/”Eternal President” Kim Il-sung, and their rooms were bugged, as one wrestler found out when he called home and complained about pretty much everything in North Korea. The next day his room was torn apart.
They had an interpreter/guide who was assigned to stay with them at all times. However, the guide didn’t know that Bischoff liked an early-morning run, and he snuck out of the hotel by himself at 6:30 AM. All the North Koreans were headed to work in drab blue and gray suits, none of them over 5’5″, stunted by decades of famine. Here was Bischoff, the only foreigner most of them probably ever saw, running through the streets in yellow and red sweatclothes at 5’11” and 200 pounds. To most of the North Koreans it was like seeing Godzilla running through the streets. When Bischoff got back to the hotel he was sternly warned to never, ever do that again. He and the wrestlers then were taken on a tour of a war memorial, told it was to remember the 52,000 North Koreans who were slaughtered by savage Americans. Their reactions were filmed to use in future propaganda.
Um yeah I don’t think I ever want to visit North Korea.
I have a meeting out east after work, so I won’t be able to defend my poker championship at Calhoun’s tonight. I see that Snozberry is playing the Saucer tonight… should be back Downtown by the time they take the stage at 9:30, so I’ll probably turn up to catch their first set.