The unusually warm winter and early spring here in Washington this year resulted in some strange and wonderful things – the flowering cherry trees, which respond to temperature, came out in advance of the forsythia, which responds to the light cycle. Crocuses, daffodils and tulips, which ordinarily bloom in a predictable sequence, all decided to go off at once. Two weeks ago, the flowering plum trees started up, and, as the official Washington Cherry Blossom Festival Parade was held today, even they were well past peak.
So it was that I relaxed on my deck this afternoon, marveling at the concurrent displays of azaleas, lilacs, roses and honeysuckle, that my land line rang. I decided to let it roll over into voice mail. Thus, it was about an hour later that, when I went inside to make a Hendrick’s and tonic, I retrieved my messages and found out who had called while I was out on the deck enjoying this glorious, if somewhat odd, April day – it was Kim Jong Un. The message stated that he would call back at 2:30 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time. I was, of course, well ensconced on the living room couch with a stiff Chartreuse and Gerolsteiner over Evian ice cubes when the phone rang once again.
Kim: Hello, Tom?
Tom: Greetings, Glorious First Secretary of the Korean Worker’s Party, Illustrious Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Fearless Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, Inspiring Leader of the Korean Socialist Revolutionary Cadres, Infallible…
Kim: Alright, alright! No need to rub it in. I know how much my life sucks, count on it. I’m hiding in a [expletive] closet with a [expletive] satellite phone at three-thirty in the [expletive] morning just so I can talk to somebody who isn’t goose-stepping around with his head up his [expletive]. Did you watch the NCAA Final Four?
Tom: Yes, I did.
Kim: I sure wish I had. There’s absolutely no decent basketball in North Korea, and the Central Politburo stomped all over my idea for a professional league here. They said it was “decadent, bourgeois and counter-revolutionary.” As if they knew anything about hoops to begin with.
Tom: Gee, I’m sorry to hear that.
Kim: And now, there was this stupid [expletive] rocket launch.
Tom: I must agree, that rocket launch would have been a stupid [expletive] idea even if its true purpose had actually been placing a weather satellite in orbit.
Kim: Yeah, like I told them, if we want to know what the weather’s going to be, all we have to do is tune in to South Korean television.
Tom: And it would have been a stupid [expletive] idea even if it hadn’t blown up eighty-one seconds after it left the ground.
Kim: Roger that [expletive], for sure. I mean, as soon as I got my first look at Mission Control, I knew they were going to screw up. It was like something out of the nineteen-sixties, like one of those grainy old black and white films with Yuri Gagarin or Werner von Braun in it!
Tom: Pretty primitive, then?
Kim: Primitive? They use dial telephones! How [expletive] primitive is that? Did you know, the first stage was based on a Soviet submarine-launched missile design that hasn’t been updated since 1988? That’s like, when I was [expletive] five years old!
Tom: But it was the second stage that failed, right?
Kim: Yeah, that’s the one based on the Scud. I mean, holy [expletive], Tom, even [expletive] Saddam Hussein’s camel jockeys could get a [expletive] Scud off the [expletive] ground – in the desert! Off the back of a [expletive] truck! In the middle of the [expletive] night! But us? The magnificent People’s Republic of North Korea? We couldn’t get one to work right even after we gave the [expletive] thing a running start!
Tom: And now, besides becoming a technological laughingstock, to make matters worse, you’ve lost all of that food aid you were supposed to get if you didn’t try this harebrained stunt.
Kim: Well, actually, Tom, that food aid sucked. It was nothing but two hundred forty thousand metric tons of [expletive] infant formula and Meals Ready to Eat.
Tom: Uh, yeah, I know – the reasoning there was that previous shipments of grain and other fungible foodstuff commodities had made it too easy for… ahem… the North Korean government to… um… divert resources away from feeding starving peasants and into… ah, let’s say, less humanitarian uses.
Kim: Say duh! Look, Tom, the North Korean Army can’t eat infant formula!
Tom: They could eat the MRE’s though, couldn’t they? Our Army eats them…
Kim: And what do your troops call the MRE, huh? What do they say “MRE” stands for?
Tom: “Meals Rejected by Ethiopians,” “Most Regurgitated Entrée,” “Mostly Rotten Edibles,” “Meals Resisting Exit,” and “Mother[expletive] Rat Ejaculate.”
Kim: Okay, guess what – soldiers are the same all over the world, Tom.
Tom: I’m sure they are. So you would much rather have had some high quality grain to feed to cows and pigs so your troops could eat some nice, tasty bool gogi instead?
Kim: Damn straight.
Tom: But what about the starving peasants? What about the poor, emaciated little North Korean babies and hollow-cheeked pregnant Korean peasant women?
Kim: Hey, look, we feel for them in Pyongyang, okay? But the Army comes first. Those peasant women and their babies don’t have any guns and tanks, after all. And there’s nothing to stop you guys in America from sending us enough high quality wheat, corn, rice, oats, barley, soy beans and refined sugar to make bool gogi and steamed sweet buns for everybody, is there?
Tom: If we did that, then we’d be propping up a belligerent bully state ruled by a failed political philosophy whose only discernible governmental policy is to threaten its neighbors.
Kim: Oh, right, sure – and how, exactly does that makes us different from Israel?
Tim: Israel’s a democracy.
Kim: If you’re a Jew, or live within the 1967 borders, yeah. Otherwise – not! Same here in North Korea – if you’re a good Communist, then you run the government; just like in Israel, if someone’s a good Zionist, then they run the government. So how about a few billion a year for us?
Tom: Frankly, we’re afraid if we give you too much food, you’ll start feeling strong enough to invade South Korea.
Kim: So?
Tom: So that would get a lot of American troops stationed in the DMZ killed.
Kim: You expect me to believe that? Plenty of American troops got killed in Vietnam. Plenty of them got killed in Iraq and plenty of them are still getting killed in Afghanistan. In America, if you’re in the military, you get treated like dirt. Here in North Korea, at least, if you’re in the military, you get treated like you are somebody special. Come on, Tom, I didn’t call you up to hear the same lame line of bull[expletive] I hear from Bill Richardson! Level with me here.
Tom: Okay, well, bottom line, America has beaucoup dinky-dow mad crazy big time business connections with South Korean chaebol conglomerates – Samsung, Hynix, Daewoo, Jinro, Kumho, Taekwang, Hyundai, Kia, Hankook, Bando, Daelim… the list is huge. Trillions of dollars are involved.
Kim: Now that, I understand.
Tom: To tell you the truth, given what I know about the situation here inside the Beltway, I’d say, what America is really afraid of is if we give you too much food, you’ll invade South Korea and mess up our supply of flat-screen TVs, cameras, tires, computer components, textiles and Asian car alternatives to the Japanese.
Kim: Hey, how about if we invade South Korea, take over their installed industrial base and start making flat-screen TVs, cameras, tires, computer components, textiles and Asian car alternatives to the Japanese – only much cheaper? Because remember – we could use slave labor to make all those things!
Tom: Um… first of all, your buddies, the Communist Chinese, already make plenty of stuff for the world market really, really cheap using what’s essentially slave labor – including the iPhone, and practically every men’s silk tie currently made, for example; and, what’s more, the workers in South Korea aren’t, in fact, all that much better off than the workers in China. So, if you did take over South Korea, it’s pretty hard to see how you could undercut the Chinese – or the Vietnamese, the Thai, the Cambodians, the Singaporeans, the Indonesians or the Malaysians, either, for that matter. They’ve all got huge de facto slave labor forces toiling away making things for Americans, all in return for practically nothing. And there’s another, even more salient issue.
Kim: What’s that?
Tom: Ah… well, I don’t know how to put this delicately. In fact, I don’t think there’s any way to do so, really. But, um… if your country’s recent performance in the aerospace sector is any indication, I don’t think your… er… management talent… or your labor force, for that matter, could effectively operate South Korean industry, if you did somehow manage to end up in control of it.
Kim: Damn it, Tom… you’re probably right about that. Look, I tried to talk these fools out of that stupid rocket launch, I really, really did. But whenever I say anything sensible to them, they just… I donno… they just ignore me, I guess. And now that they [expletive] up that rocket launch, they’re convinced that means they have to either set off another underground nuclear test or… start some… trouble with South Korea.
Tom: In that case, I’d recommend you try pushing them toward conducting another underground nuclear test.
Kim: Another underground nuclear test? You think so?
Tom: Yes. That, at least, shouldn’t kill anybody. Just promise me three things, though.
Kim: What?
Tom: Number One, you’ll make sure they dig the damn hole deep enough to prevent radioactive releases to the atmosphere; Number Two, they X-ray all the shaped charges properly prior to detonation; and Number Three, they don’t use any of those old Krytron switches scavenged from 1990’s Xerox machines to trigger the implosion.
Kim: But… but… old Krytron switches scavenged from 1990’s Xerox machines are all we’ve got!
Tom: I see. Okay, in that case, do you think you could talk them into just setting off a gun ram uranium-235 device next to a bed of lithium-6 deuteride, and pretending they’re perfecting a viable plutonium ignited thermonuclear bomb? It’s all going to be done underground, after all, so it’s not like most folks will be able to tell.
Kim: But… won’t your CIA, the Chinese MSS, Russian SVR, or British MI6 be able to figure that out?
Tom: Believe me – if you don’t tell, I guarantee none of them will.
Kim: Oh, [expletive]! That [expletive] “valet” they assigned to follow me around everywhere! I think I hear him coming! Gotta go!
Tom: No problem. Call back anytime. ‘Bye!