The North Korean Passion Play
Someone got me to watch a film on North Korea. It was a propaganda film, a film with spooky music and scary narration describing how terrible North Korea was but when I turned off the sound what I saw was a lot of monuments without people visiting them and a lot of young, pretty women. Maybe you have to be a pretty woman to be allowed to live in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
North Korea looked better to me than places like Saudi Arabia. Two things that the commies always delivered on were rights for women and education. It was clear women have more rights in North Korea than in most middle eastern countries. There were no children starving in the streets either, like in India or much of Africa. So it was hard for me to see North Korea as a monster country. True, they have made gods of their present and former leaders, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, very much like the Romans, Chinese and Japanese made gods of their rulers. Or the rulers declared themselves gods and the people didn’t laugh till they choked.
While Bush never got around to declaring himself a god, he did say he was on a mission from God and God had put him in office[1] which is similar. The statues and monuments to Kim Il-sung didn’t seem much different to me than the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorial, though lots less crowded. Or maybe everybody was at work during the times westerners were allowed to film.
The countryside filmed from a train was very pretty. The mountains and forests looked less interfered with than landscapes in the west. I have a touch of agoraphobia so I liked how sparsely populated it looked.
There are famous night time satellite pictures of the Korean Peninsula with South Korea all lit up like, well, like the US, Western Europe and Japan and North Korea as dark as Africa or central Australia. I really don’t see anything that important about street lights. Streetlights, we have them to keep down crime and to help people in cars see where they are going. If you live some place with very little or no crime, almost no cars, and without a nightlife, what do you need streetlights for? In fact, I think every streetlight should be on a UV motion detector so they would only turn on when something warm and moving comes within a certain distance of them. Then our cities could be dark at night and we could see the stars again. I miss the stars. It’s been so long since I’ve seen them.
Anyway, I don’t see that the lack of streetlights in North Korea indicates the darkness of their souls or anything.
Watching the propaganda film got me to watching the North Korean Mass Games. North Korea’s Mass Games are like a Busby Berkeley musical with a cast of a hundred thousand, everyone in beautiful costumes, everyone a star in their own eyes yet part of a beautiful whole. It makes the Olympic opening ceremonies look miserly in comparison. It’s like a national art project.
That got me to thinking about Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. In Cat’s Cradle two friends, Johnson[Bokonon] and McCabe, are washed ashore on the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, one of the poorest places on earth. They decided to take it over and make it a utopia. Taking over proves easy but helping people proves very difficult because of abject poverty of the island. They decide to give the people a better life by giving them a passion play to be part of. They choose the “Tyrant in the Palace and Holy Man in the Jungle” and assume those parts. What you pretend to be you become. The man playing the tyrant becomes a tyrant and the man playing the holy man becomes a holy man. The entire population becomes part of this play and it gives meaning, zest and happiness to their lives[2] .
In the same way a huge part of the population of North Korea becomes part of the mass games, this national art project, this combination of carnival, halftime show and celebration of national unity. It’s inspiringly beautiful, looks like great fun and takes a lot of time. It occupies many people.
There is another play afoot, a more serious one. The “tiny righteous country menaced by evil outside forces” play. That one might get them killed.
[1] ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.” Mr Bush went on: “And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.”
[2]Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
“…when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.”
“How did he come to be an outlaw”
“It was his own idea. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang…”
“McCabe would organize the unemployed, which was practically everybody, into great Bokonon hunts.
“About every six months McCabe would announce triumphantly that Bokonon was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was remorselessly closing in.
“And then the leaders of the remorseless ring would have to report to McCabe, full of chagrin and apoplexy, that Bokonon had done the impossible.
“He had escaped, had evaporated, had lived to preach another day. Miracle!”
“McCabe and Bokonon did not succeed in raising what is generally thought of as the standard of living…The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.
“But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”
“So life became a work of art”
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© Alllie 2009
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