The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [20]
On September 8, 2008, Kim Jong Il failed to appear in public at a military parade celebrating North Korea’s sixtieth anniversary, a milestone to which the official media had been building up for months. The world press soon began receiving information that Kim had suffered a stroke in August. Speculation about his health intensified throughout the autumn, punctuated by rumors that he had already died, until there finally appeared a few topical and authentic-looking pictures from his endless “on-the-spot guidance” tour. The pudgy, expansively gesticulating General of old had given way to a thin, slack-faced man with one gloved hand hooked awkwardly in the pocket of his jacket. The propaganda apparatus had evidently concluded that offering visual evidence of a stroke was better than letting the world run riot with rumors of an even more subversive nature, but the decision cannot have been an easy one. (Physical infirmity always carries a greater stigma in states that espouse a race theory; the goiter on Kim Il Sung’s neck had had to be kept a strict secret.) Such were the challenges of maintaining a personality cult in the absence of an information cordon.
The photographs did nothing to stop outside journalists from wondering who was next in line for the succession. It was soon learned that young North Koreans had been taught to sing a song glorifying a certain General Kim, whose vigorous stride (so the lyric) was making the very rivers and mountains rejoice. That this General was not the current leader, whose name is invariably invoked in its full three syllables, was clear enough, ergo the poem’s subject had to be the successor to the throne. But the lyric offered no further clues as to which of Kim Jong Il’s sons by his various wives was meant. Various names were bruited about in South Korea and elsewhere over the next few weeks, with expert consensus finally settling on Kim Jong Un, the second son of the Dear Leader’s third wife. Meanwhile the North Korean media stuck to its longstanding policy of acting as if the Dear Leader had no wife or offspring at all.
The regime spent the spring of 2009 launching missiles from sites on the east coast and urging the masses, under the slogan of a “150 Day Battle,” to farm and produce more, the better to strengthen the country against the Yankee enemy. The deliberate ratcheting up of tension did not discourage former US president Bill Clinton from arriving in Pyongyang in August 2009 to secure the release of two American journalists who had been arrested in March for illegally entering the country. Kim Jong Il, it was soon learned, had agreed in advance to look favorably on the request in return for his erstwhile foe’s spectacular pilgrimage. Fittingly enough, the party newspaper carried photographs of Kim and Clinton sitting before an enormous painting of waves crashing on rocks, a standard symbol of the country’s resolve to stand up to a hostile world.
Hardly had the “150 Day Battle” ended amid great fanfare in September than a “100 Day Battle” was embarked upon. Rumor had it that speakers at party lectures and workplace assemblies were crediting these glorious enthusiasm campaigns to Kim Jong Il’s young heir. The national broadcast and print media, however, had still not mentioned him; evidently the goal was to keep the outside world in the dark for as long as possible. At last, in September 2009, a Taiwanese tourist