Dear Leader: Pomp & Circumstance

click here for Podcast!

You have to hand it to the man for sheer bloody-minded gall, Bush. In the face of world condemnation for his nuclear ambitions, Kim Jong Il stages a torchlight event that rivals the stagiest of Adolph Hitler's hideous spectacles of goose-stepping batallions on parade. Legions of dancers in bright costumes, fireworks... Check out these pictures.All in celebration of North Korea's eightieth year of communist rule. No matter that a reported one third of this Dear Leader's people are starving, it's celebration time in Pyongyang.

At the same time, his regime proudly announces the imminent continuation of the country's "series" of nuclear tests. Sounds like that UN resolution on sanctions really did the trick, Bush, no? Put the fear of God in him. I think that, as with all dictators, his prime motivation is his own survival, and the survival of the regime he has instituted to protect him. He knows, surely, that the likelihood of anyone attacking him is at this point virtually non-existent: not only does he have at least a good head start on nuclear technology, he has his artillery trained dead-eye on South Korea and its capital, Seoul, where he could kill millions at the nod of his head.

Your Rice, meantime, on her grand Asian tour, is reduced to uttering brave words which the whole world knows to be meaningless. (Did anyone else notice the peculiar similarity of the neat gray suit she wore yesterday to Kim Jong Il's?) But to what a pathetic cirumstance are we now reduced, Bush, essentially powerless to deal with a paranoid maniac who may or may not be convinced that you are out to get him. Had you played to his clearly inflated egomania rather than against it, things might have been different now. Maybe not, but it would have been worth the try. We could have swallowed a big piece of our own--also inflated?--ego and allowed him to indulge his own. We might have come off, initially, looking "weak" in the face of a nasty, pipsqueak dictator. But look at us now: for all your show of superior strength and your moralistic refusal to talk to this admittedly ruthless tyrant, you end up snookered by his defiance. Your studied contempt and your bellicose words left a dangerous man in a place where he has literally nothing left to lose except his opportunity for self-glorification.

Ah well, it's another cock-up, Bush, as those Brits like to say. That public celebration was a message, you might say, from one Dear Leader to another. This grandiose act of defiance was reported on the BBC World News last night, but got little play on the networks. We're so busy at election time in this country gazing at our own navel. This time, though, rightly so. There's so much at stake, including the future of the planet.