The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [56]
The forest of serried bayonets gleaming in the sunshine! The “president” hobbling along on his ailing legs!!… We were used to seeing him walking with effort.… But at that moment we felt sorry for him … sad. uneasy. Because it looked as if the old “president” was flustered. But I felt something shooting up inside me when I saw National Defense Council Chairman Kim Jong Il walking at a deeply considerate pace behind him, saw his courteous, polite form.…10
The two men get into a limousine that takes them into Pyongyang down a road lined with crowds shouting the Dear Leader’s (and only his) name. Later, at a banquet, the “president”‘s wife sits at a remove from the two men; the novel contrives to imply that all is not well in the south Koreans’ marriage. The Dear Leader asks her to come and join them. “We can’t be having divided families even in the banquet hall,” he jokes, as the room erupts in laughter.11 On another occasion he peremptorily calls out “Come here, ministers!” to the top-ranking members of the south Korean delegation. The Text claims that schoolteachers in Seoul now use the phrase when summoning their little charges: “The kids get a kick out of it.”12
The “president” is described as having been thwarted by the genius and charisma of the Dear Leader, who, instead of yielding to Seoul in return for handouts, demanded economic cooperation—and got it. He demanded a joint declaration of the need for autonomy and unification—and got that too.13 Of course, to say that the south Korean officials had been persuaded by rational argument would be to imply that they a) were reasonable people, b) had the autonomy to sign inter-Korean agreements as they saw fit, and c) might henceforth agree with the DPRK on some issues. These are all potentially subversive notions. One is therefore to believe that the visitors were somehow dazzled and befuddled into signing on the dotted line, then “came to” during the return to Seoul, where popular “Kim Jong Il mania” kept them from reneging on the agreement.†
In short, the Dear Leader won this zero-sum game and the “president” lost. The south Korean journalist sums up:
“We conducted all manner of preparation and research to pull the North into the ‘free world.’ But in the event, not only we but the whole of ‘Han’guk’ were unexpectedly swept up in Kim Jong Il mania. There’s no knowing what power it was that turned everything on its head in a moment.… [W]e cannot but admit that our ‘peace strategy’ has suffered a total defeat at the hands of the North’s autonomy strategy.”14
This is not pure fantasy. Judging from the South Koreans photographed at the summit, whose star-struck faces would not look out of place on a Pyongyang subway mural, the Leader did indeed succeed in charming his guests. He won over millions of television-watchers in the ROK too. (Schoolgirls there began describing him as “cute.”)15 But there was nothing like the mass frenzy described in the novel, which talks of young Seoulites adopting the General’s spartan work uniform, plum-tinted glasses selling like hotcakes, and crowds piling raucously into restaurants to eat Pyongyang-style noodles.16 Young lovers take advantage of the auspicious event to get married, posing for wedding photographs before backdrops of People’s Army soldiers.17 One man drives around with the DPRK’s flag fluttering from his hood.18 (When it suits the North to exaggerate the freedom of expression enjoyed in the South, it does so; in the real ROK, flying the red star of the rival state remains a punishable offense.) No one spares a thought for the feeble “president.” Truly, the summit was “a meeting between the Dear Leader and the