Follow the Leader

It has become generally accepted lore that the northern part of a region is more prosperous than the southern part. This is because, we are told, the harsher climate in the north forces its people to be more resourceful than those of the lazy horse latitudes. There are exceptions of course.

North Korea has essentially become a prison in which weather and food are weapons. If one were to elect to serve one’s time in the custody of men, one might well choose a place like Cuba because in Cuba the weather is not one of the weapons that can be used against you. The jailers too can be counted on to be of a somewhat gentler disposition because of the climate thing as - again, we are told - gentler climates breed gentler people. Again, there are exceptions.

Still, prison is prison no matter how often you paint its lips. There are two kinds of people in this world: leaders and followers. (We’ll disregard loners and misfits for the time being.) Followers are far greater in number. They will happily cleave to any given leader as long as the leader does not make their subservient position too obvious. Leaders, once again, break up into two groups. There are leaders who are natural born, and leaders who are actually followers (with no leadership skills) who pretend to be leaders. These will lead by threat and deceit. Nations in which this happens are called ‘tyrannies‘. They are hollow and exceedingly fragile.

In our country false leaders have become so inept that their leadership has come to depend increasingly on threat. As we are still much better educated than the norm, the deceit of our so-called leaders no longer works. The feared uprising, therefore, must be curbed by threat. If you do not pay your share of confiscatory taxes; if you speak out against dear leader Obama, you’re automatically on the outs; blackballed; ostracized; ridiculed; excluded; marked ‘failed’. You will be expected to correct your ways or suffer impotence on the fringes of society.

You will make it your life’s work to support the regime. If you are a scientist, for instance, you will obediently go along with the theory of ‘global warming’ no matter what the data shows. If you are a doctor, you will support a woman’s right to abort and the standards set by the state for denying healthcare to the aged. If you are a landowner, you will submit to government regs that limit the use of your own land to favor the snail darter, and possibly even agree to give up your holdings by random declaration of eminent domain. If you are a driver, you will adhere to the posted speed limit even though your car and conditions permit twice that. If you are a smoker, you will try to quit - or lie about trying - while scurrying around in back doorways and alleys.

In North Korea, the game played is considerably more basic than that. Here, both the weather and food are weapons. I suspect that if Kim Jong-Il were to die and we were to go in to check it out, we would find nothing. It’d be like one of those scenes in countless prison escape movies where the warden enters a cell, throws back the blankets and finds only a dummy there.