A Rising Son

by jim finn
illustrations by tara sinn
photos from AP

On July 8, 1994, North Korea’s Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, finally passed on to the great DMZ in the sky. Now, only months later, it’s looking like his embalmed corpse will forever reign from under a glass coffin like an all-knowing bottomless bowl of dog meat. We’re starting to fear that his son and heir apparent, Kim Jong-il, will simply carry on his daddy’s good work of exploiting, killing, and terrorizing his people. But come on, little Kim! It’s not too late. This is our plea to you: Bring your country into the 20th century before it’s over! Join us here in the 90s. We can go get a Whopper Jr. at Burger King and play SNES games together! And, more importantly, you and the West can do a little thing called “have healthy diplomatic and economic relations.” Is most of your citizenry starving? We can help with that! Want to get some better (or any) healthcare in there for the kids in the countryside who are falling down dead? We have doctors! You can use them! All you have to do is stick to Daddy’s promise of putting down the nuclear-weapon blueprints, stop telling everyone that America is Satan, and sit down and jaw with us a little bit. We think you’d really like Bill Clinton (he’s our president).

Hopefully the nuke part isn’t super-difficult. Especially considering that just three years ago, in 1991, the official North Korean publishing house printed For a Free and Peaceful New World, which hinges on some of Great Leader Kim Il-sung’s most well-liked phrasings, in particular: “The Korean people, who are constantly under the threat of nuclear weapons, have proposed the abolition of nuclear weapons as a vital matter relating to the destiny of the nation.” With this in mind, it was admittedly pretty fucking awkward a few months ago when President Clinton forced fey ex-president Jimmy Carter on a diplomatic mission to convince master of mixed signals Kim Il-sung to freeze his not-exactly-secret and monstrous nuclear-weapons program in exchange for some oil and a hand in developing nuclear energy. But then that lout Carter actually succeeded! The result—the Agreed Framework Between the United States of America and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—aims to control the proliferation of nukes and even lay early groundwork for relations with Kim Jong-il’s budding regime. In Daddy’s absence, all little Kim Jong-il need do is scoot things along.

But alas, everyone except for North Korean citizens knows Kim Jong-il as a brandy-swilling, actress-impregnating, snot-nosed rich kid who’s always believed he can spur the growth of the North Korean arts by making exciting propaganda films. Today the pompadoured producer has almost complete power. In Kim Jong-il, the sheltered citizens of North Korea have the second iteration of a personality cult, composed of a salty mix of anti-Western paranoia, bits of autocratic Stalinism, and even a dab of revolutionary Maoism.

The father-son duo had pretty much been running North Korea since, as the legends go, the future Dear Leader was born—at either a Soviet military base (according to capitalist historians) or a mountain cabin in Korea while his father was planning his next move against the Japanese in WWII (according to North Korean historians). But it’s never as effortless as it looks. Even with full, unimpeded control of all incoming and outgoing media, North Korea is still surrounded on all sides by enemies and hostile pseudo-allies.

By the end of the 60s, after having his ass saved from a string of potentially terrible situations (by the Soviets after a limp-wristed slap fight with Japan in WWII and by the Chinese after Mao killed a bunch of Americans and scared them off the 42nd parallel), Kim Il-sung was isolated, vulnerable, and paranoid. He trusted one person: Kim Jong-il, who at this key moment miraculously decided to sober up and slide his pecker back into his pants—at least in public. Kim Jong-il immediately threw himself into the business of promoting his father’s cult, gradually moving the focus of attention onto himself. He produced an opera, Sea of Blood, about the brutality of the Japanese occupation, and he micromanaged North Korea’s official Juche (the official state ideology) film productions. These movies were about stuff like blaming food shortages on wreckers and scavengers, actors in whiteface dressed as US Army officers who took great joy in riddling peasants with bullets, children who discover their parents were no-good traitors during the war, and women who commit the ultimate sacrifice by marrying a disabled soldier.

In the 70s, Kim Jong-il consolidated his power, and by the early 1980s he began to appear in kitschy portraits alongside wheat stalks, directing his father’s attention to the new tractor tires. Dad and Junior were frequently seen side by side on TV newsreels approving women’s shoe designs and critiquing dance steps. Kim Il-sung gradually became the benevolent grandfather figure, while Kim Jong-il’s bouffant became ubiquitous. He has been meticulously metamorphosing into the Dear Leader of 1994 ever since.

So the truth is probably that Kim Jong-il has been covertly running the government for the past decade anyway. The transition to public power should be relatively paranoid business as usual, except for food and these goddamned nukes. As much as the North Korean state likes to believe in its independence, it still relies on subsidies from the USSR and China, its biggest trading partner. But Boris Yeltsin and his cronies running the Russian Federation are too busy figuring out how to make young women the country’s top export and slurping up the world’s oil supply, and China is still reeling from the fall of the Berlin Wall and that shit at Tiananmen Square.

In other words, in the absence of chummy Communist superpowers willing to shepherd North Korea through rough times, the country is the global equivalent of a homely, undeveloped girl who may never be asked on a date by another country—particularly if this nuke pact with the States falls through. Kim Il-sung certainly believed, at least in private, that acquiring a nuclear arsenal would be the only viable insurance against being swallowed up by the post-USSR New World Order. But who can say whether Junior agrees. Are we too late to convince him otherwise?