I went out and kissed the ground tonight(I think the neighbor saw me, but no worries, I think he's part of the witness protection program and has bigger problems to contend with)
Good old Canada. I'm so glad was born here. Thank you great, great, great granddad, for getting on that boat and coming on over from England, Scotland, wherever...
You see I watched a National Geographic special on North Korea and Kim Jong il, the 'dear leader'. Fuck that guy bugs me. He's running the most isolated country in the world where there is no internet and cell phones are illegal, with the world's 4th largest army (1 million) whose 238km border with South Korea is the most heavily guarded in the world.
WTF is over there? 23 million people, all controlled by one class A pudgy nearsighted dictator freak, with the cult of personality on the turntable 24/7. The people over there are trained from birth to love him. These same people still don't know that a guy walked on the moon way back in 1969!
So this TV crew followed around a Nepalese eye surgeon and the National Geographic lady(of Asian descent) was told that she was the only american in the country at that time (they seem to keep track of this). On the way to the hospital where the eye doctor was going to perform 1000 cataract ops in 2 days they zoomed in on a wonderful 12 lane highway in the main city that was empty(go figure. We have the queensway).
The doc and crew were accompanied at all times by North Korean government minders to make sure they didn't go blabbing about the moon landings or other imaginary things like the Internet or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They were only shown the clean "what we want you to see" stuff about North Korea. They included a clip of a Dutch documentary (zee dutch! isn't zat veird?) and in it a mother and young daughter were skipping to school singing a popular nursery rhyme that went something like
"'the pathetic amercans kneel on the ground, they beg for mercy..."
Gee.. Take that Barney the purple dinosaur.
Then they showed people going about their day, which was pretty wild. Hey, lets go to work and sing songs about our glorious leader! There's an empty town on the North side visible from the south where all the buildings are hollow but look good. It has the world's largest flagpole or something. Pretty much sums it up right there. It doesn't matter how it is, it matters how it looks.
Continuing with the tour, there was a park bench encased in glass. When the tv crew asked what was up, it appears that Kim's ass touched the bench 10 years ago and they honor it in this way, to preserve it for eternity. Like the zillion statues of the guy ain't enough. Christ, Wayne Gretzky scored 800 plus goals and there's only a couple of statues of him. What's this Kim guy done? Getting statues of yourself made up and sticking them all over your country is lame. See Saddam Hussain and Stalin on that one. Their camera guy took a pic of one such statue and lay on the ground to get the angle right and the North Korean babysitter freaked on him! Saying it was somehow disrespectful for a foriegner to do that, and said he was gonna get kicked out of the country for that (didn't happen)
I never knew this but when it comes to the 38 paralell, there's has never been a peace treaty, it's just a 50 some year 'cease fire'. Get that? a CEASE FIRE! There's this
joint security area (follow the link, it's a hoot!)somewhere on the border North/South Korean border where a concrete line splits teh two countries. It's where the army guys from both countries they stand toe to toe with each other, well fed Northern officers staring down real tall Southies and US army guys on the other side(you have to be a certain height to work the south side, all real phsycological like). Actually that's not really true. They don't face each other, the brain-washed freaks on the North side stand in a triangle, two guys stand facing each other (so they don't defect) and their boss faces north with his back to them so no citizens defect. Kim must of come up with that one.
North and South are split by a dmz that's 4k wide along a 238k border, a million landmines, high votage wires, pointy things too probably. No way to get across that safely.
This part is real freaky. At the joint security area There is a room that spans the border where both sides have access, but the north never meets in there. When the southies open the door, they use two guys and they hold on to each other so they don't get pulled in the other side. Freaky eh? If they want to set up a meeting they call on some 1960 soviet crank phone but it's useless because the Northies never pick up the phone. Unless Kim says it's ok I guess, and he's probably really busy watching his collection of 20,000 movies and sipping cognac so there's not a lot of conversation. The documentary crew arrived on a good day because the US army guy had to get a message across to the Northies about a dead soldiers body that washed up on their side of the river and they wanted to give him back. So a drill sargent went out with a magaphone and yelled at them to pick up the phone (a translator repetaed the message in korean), then he just read the order out. As he started talking all the North ern soldeirs headed indoors lest the guy polute their minds with his talk.
"DID YOU ASSHOLES KNOW WE GOT A FELLA UP ON THE DAMN MOON! HE PLANTED A FLAG AND EVERYTHING! IT FELL OVER WHEN THE LEM TOOK OFF BUT HEY! IT'S STILL COOL!"
North korean kids are hungry. About 3 million people died i some bad famines in teh 1990's, about 10% of their population. Imagine that happening here in Canada.
A 7 year old North Korean kid is 20cm shorter and 10kilos lighter than a kid in south korea. They are basically the same in genetic makeup. They call it the stunted generation. It's due to malnutrition. They build beutiful 12 line highways and huge Kim Jong statues and maintain a 1 million string army but there's no food for the regular folks a lot of the time. And medical attention is almost non-exstanant. They interviewed a blind lady who wants to see again so she can see the great leader. Not her kids, or the sun, her own hand or birds or whatever, no. The pudgy nearsighted psuedo Don King haired Jong. Crazy!
Where do these poor brainwashed people get off on this us verses the world stuff? Apparently Kim's pop (kim el sung)came up with a philosophy, ju chea, which means "up yours" to the rest of the world. It supposedly says "We can do everything ourselves(despite the fact they have no economy, no trade, and short hugry little kids ). The philosophy opposes most all things foreign, (like help. The eye surgeon thing getting into the country was amazing in itself). The North Koreans have been abused by so many powers over the past hundreds years, this way of thinking must really do the trick.
Maybe it's the concentration camps like this one,
camp #22 (thank you google earth) the size of a small city 50.000 people. The documentary intervewed a guard who said he was taught that the prisoners are not human. They are regularly beaten, and sometimes shot for something as simple as searching for mice to eat. He told a particularly gross story of seeing kids fighing over a undigested kernel of corn in some cow dung, the winner washed it and ate it. Camp 22 is supposedly a family camp. Get this, most of the people here didn't commit crimes, but had a family member who allegedly did (like maybe they successfully defected). If you complain about something to a buddy about the great leader, or the country in general, they rat you out and your famly, kids, and parents could end up going here. Nazi 101. Same if you defect. People don't know why they are there. Keeps people from leaving that's for sure.
And woohoo! If you manage to escape north, you land in China (also on my list of back-ass countries, great firewall of China anyone?)! where they can ship your ass back if you start looking for chinese mice to eat!
So back to the eye surgeon, he removes all the bandages, the government people put up a photo of kim jong so it's the first damned thing they see and who do you think the previously blind but now they can see people thank? Not the Nepalesan surgeon. They thank friggin Kim Jong. They sing the praise Jong song, the ' all becase of our great general' song. One lady told the picture that "I will work harder at the salt mines to make you happy!"
Ack... "For best lucky wash use Kim Jong detergeant!"
Time after time, they all said the same damned thing. Does anyone believe what they are saying or are they scared shitless? Or has it been so long it's just automatic to thank Kim for everything and anything.
And he has Nukes. Wonderful.
I'm going outside to kiss the ground again.
