Earlier this afternoon, Cerise and I were lying in bed at my home in Great Falls, Virginia with all the windows open enjoying the marvelous brisk spring air and sunny weather, combined with the afterglow of a black truffle omelette, Dom Pérignon champagne blood orange mimosa and Beluga caviar brunch, with its natural consequents, when my land line telephone rang. A quick glance at the coded message on my Caller ID revealed who it was – Kim Jong Un, Glorious and Infallible Supreme Communist Dictator of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea.
Kim: Tom? Tom? Is that you?
Tom: Sure. How’s it going, Most Excellent and Brilliant Light of the Free and Proud North Korean People?
Kim: Oh come on, gimme a [expletive] break, will ya?
Tom: Sorry – couldn’t resist.
Kim: Things are getting very, very [expletive]-up around here lately, Tom.
Tom: Really? I thought you’d be on Cloud Nine, what with you and Comrade Ri Sol-Ju having a cute little steamed sweet bun in the oven, a bouncing bundle of Korean Marxist joy headed your way in a…
Kim: Okay, point taken – the pregnancy is total bull-[expletive]! You and I figured out something like that would be impossible the last time we talked, because Comrade Ri Sol-Ju used to be a man!
Tom: So how are your aunt Kim Kyong-hui, your uncle Jang Sung-taek and the Korean military high command handling the situation?
Kim: Comrade Ri Sol-Ju is… sleeping separately now. The official… explanation… is that continued… um… encounters… with my huge… uh… manhood… might dislodge the fetus.
Tom: So you haven’t actually seen any evidence of…
Kim: A baby bump? Forget it! I haven’t seen her naked in over eight weeks!
Tom: And, I assume, there are suddenly several highly attractive female comrades who have come forward from the dedicated cadres and placed themselves… at your… disposal?
Kim: Nice mind-reading act, there, Tom! The only problem is…
Tom: Now that you know what to look for, you can tell that they…
Kim: Yeah, most of them used to be men, too!
Tom: But at least some of them, however, have… the appropriate equipment?
Kim: Uh-huh, but I bet those ones have been sterilized. Tom, if this situation ever gets out, I’ll look like the biggest fool since Miss Vicki married Tiny Tim on the Tonight Show!
Tom: Probably.
Kim: So now, will you please stop gloating and tell me what I should do about it?
Tom: Tell you what to do? You’re the putative absolute strongman of North Korea, right? Therefore, you should simply take charge of things.
Kim: How?
Tom: Just start barking orders and expect to be obeyed.
Kim: Oh, come on, Tom! I’m hiding in the back of a walk-in closet at three in the morning talking to you in a whisper on a bootleg satellite phone! My uncle, my aunt and the general military command run North Korea, not me! They keep me cooped up in this [expletive] palace and then dress me up and trot me out for photo ops and speeches – that’s it! And half the time, it isn’t even me, for Christ’s sake – they use one of my doubles instead.
Tom: Doubles?
Kim: I’ve seen at least four, Tom, and I’m positive there are a [expletive]-load more of them! It’s [expletive] eerie, that’s all there is to it! Those guys look more like me than I do!
Tom: But it was the real you that Dennis Rodman visited, right?
Kim: On February twenty-seventh – it was a Wednesday, I think – yeah, they let me meet with him for about two hours.
Tom: So you had a nice conversation with him, then?
Kim: Conversation? [Expletive], no! I had to speak Korean all the time – through an interpreter. Speaking of basketball, has the NCAA tournament gotten to the Final Four yet?
Tom: They played yesterday. Louisville beat Wichita State seventy-two to sixty-eight; and Michigan beat Syracuse sixty-one to fifty-eight.
Kim: When’s the championship game, then?
Tom: Tomorrow – actually, for you, later today, because it’s early Monday morning in Pyongyang, isn’t it – at nine-twenty-three p.m. Easter Daylight Time, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Kim: Who do you like?
Tom: Vegas has Louisville over Michigan by four and one-half points.
Kim: Yeah, maybe, but who do you think is going to win? I like Michigan myself.
Tom: It matters not if they win or lose – what matters is…
Kim: How they play the game!
Tom: No, what matters is the point spread.
Kim: Damn it, Tom, how can you talk that way about basketball?
Tom: What I want to know is, how can you talk the way you do about destroying South Korea?
Kim: Me? Look, Tom, I just say what they tell me to say, okay?
Tom: That’s not how it’s playing over here in Washington. According to the inside track pundits, you’re consolidating your power within the North Korean political structure.
Kim: Yeah, right. More like my uncle and aunt taking over the [expletive] country, actually.
Tom: Well, whoever’s behind this, they’re definitely making up with enthusiasm what they lack in finesse.
Kim: Like what, for instance?
Tom: Like crude Internet videos depicting burning American cities and North Korean K-9 troops siccing their dogs on dummies made up to look like the President of South Korea.
Kim: Ewww! Gross and stupid!
Tom: So what do you think about how South Korea struck back?
Kim: Struck back?
Tom: Yeah, you know – when the South Koreans hacked the North Korean Web sites and posted those… um… unflattering pictures of you…
Kim: Pictures of me? What did they look like?
Tom: Oh… ah… well, the one that got the most media exposure was you with… um… pig ears and a pig nose, dressed in a Korean woman’s kimono, opened up to reveal a hairy chest and a tattoo of Mickey Mouse on your tummy.
Kim: What the [expletive]?
Tom: The South Koreans also replaced all of the North Korean propaganda videos with parodies. They got excellent reviews – people remarked on how the production values were a perfect replica of tacky North Korean propaganda videos, and how the voice-over announcer sounded exactly like a North Korean media hack, and…
Kim: [Expletive]! What the [expletive] was in those videos?
Tom: Pictures of starving North Koreans contrasted with shots of your father drinking expensive wine, shots of North Korean forced labor camps with sarcastic voice-overs touting them as vacation spas, stuff like that. Also, they hacked the Uriminzokkiri password database and stole…
Kim: When did all this happen?
Tom: Thursday.
Kim: Thursday? [Expletive]! Nobody tells me [expletive] anything around here!
Tom: So you haven’t heard about the B-2 bombers?
Kim: What… what about them?
Tom: They flew a mission from Missouri to an artillery range just outside of North Korean territory, dropped some dummy bombs on some precision targets, then flew back to Missouri.
Kim: When did they do that?
Tom: March twenty-eighth.
Kim: In March? Oh, [expletive] it, Tom, those [expletives] can carry multi-megaton thermonuclear weapons!
Tom: True – just those two bombers could have burned everyone in Pyongyang to cinders. Not that anybody in North Korea would be stupid enough to launch those medium-range missiles…
Kim: What missiles? Where?
Tom: Oh, well, you know, according to the news, you ordered mobile missile launchers to the east coast of North Korea late last week. There’s some debate at the moment concerning exactly which missiles they are, though. The worst-case scenario is they’re Taepodong-2 with a range of six thousand kilometers – just barely capable of hitting targets on the western coast of Alaska. But it doesn’t sound like you’re in a position to shed any light on…
Kim: No, no, they couldn’t be thinking of actually hitting anything with those piece-of-[expletive] Cold War surplus missiles!
Tom: That’s odd, because the official North Korean statement describes them as, “…cutting-edge smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear strike means of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea.”
Kim: Oh, right, [expletive]-A, sure! Look Tom, if they fire one of those [expletive]-suckers off, there’s no [expletive] telling where the [expletive] is going to come down! Sure, maybe they’ll be aiming for empty, open water in the Pacific Ocean, and sure, there’s a huge [expletive] load of that, but with [expletive]-ups like my aunt and uncle in charge of the operation, who [expletive] knows? And okay, sure, it’s bound to have a dummy warhead on it – there’s no [expletive] way it would even have ordinary explosives loaded, and none of our nuclear bombs are anywhere near small enough to fit into one of those missiles, even our biggest one! So it’s just going to be this… [expletive] dud falling on Okinawa or whatever, you know? Worst case, that is, if it doesn’t fall in the ocean. But [expletive], Tom, what if it hits land – any kind of land – somewhere? I mean, that could start a war or something, couldn’t it?
Tom: Um… the Korean war has been going on since 1950 – it has never ended, technically speaking. There was a cease-fire negotiated in June, 1953, but that’s it. And you know that you announced the armistice is null and void, right?
Kim: I what?
Tom: Well, one of your doubles did, then, I guess, last week.
Kim: Oh, [expletive]! There’s four million soldiers in the North Korean Army!
Tom: And another four million in your reserves.
Kim: [Expletive]! If those lunatics launch one of our lame-[expletive] missiles and it hits land, or even if it doesn’t and some hot-[expletive] cowboy on the DMZ starts shooting…
Tom: Dude?
Kim: Huh?
Tom: “Those lunatics” you’re referring to…
Kim: Yeah, yeah, I know! Tom, this is getting [expletive] ridiculous! [Expletive], man, it’s already [expletive] freezing in here – I can see my [expletive] breath! We [expletive] off the [expletive] Chinese and they’re going to cut off our [expletive] gas and oil and then we’re going to be totally [expletive], right up the [expletive] with no KY jelly! Oh, [expletive]! I hear my “personal night security detail” coming by to check on me! I gotta get back in bed, right [expletive] away, or I’ll have to pull my sleepwalking act again, and I don’t think they’re buying it anymore. Thanks for filling me in on what’s happening.
Tom: Sure. My pleasure. Call back anytime.
Kim: Right. ‘Bye!