Sixteen Volts

I remember one card playing evening with the Go boardgame club years ago, in which somebody had brought the copy of local free lefty rag. The issue included an article, written by some leader of the Finnish Juche society who wanted to correct the false ideas that Finns may have about life in North Korea. Between the multitude of rebuttals of American lies and propaganda of how "bad" things are in North Korea, we noticed the sentence "This year, there will be no famine in North Korea", which was worth a hearty laugh. Perhaps the implicit admission of the food situation during the previous years was unintentional, or perhaps author had sneakily hidden this little cry for help in the text, hoping to tell the truth this way so that the Party won't punish him. Who knows?

The graphic novel "Pyongyang" by the Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle must be the most depressing book that I have read for a long time. This book is perhaps easiest to explain as being a combination of 1984, Maus and Dilbert. Its story consists of the bleak description of what the main character, a cartoonist whose work with a French animation studio takes him to North Korea, the ultimate land of cheap inbetweening in animation, gets to see and experience during his trip. Of course, he doesn't get to leave the foreigner quarters without escorts and even then gets to see only what his handlers allow him to see, but revealing little details constantly seep through. For example, the almost total lack of lights. The author wonders how much of the propaganda the North Koreans really believe, and how much of the enthusiasm is just pretending to avoid being sent to dissident camps.

Forget fire and brimstone, reading this book gives you a pretty unforgettable image of what Hell would be like. Frankly, I have no idea why the civilized nations have not already liberated the suffering people of North Korea and taken every Juche party bigwig behind the sheds and shoot them like dogs. The country is in such shambles that one SEAL team should be able to do this since heck, I doubt that the country's armed forces could even match up with the police force of Duckburg. And next year some enterprising Hollywood producer could make a summer blockbuster movie out of this operation. It's certainly hard to imagine how even the most ardent anti-war leftists could oppose this.

On the other hand, it might actually be a good idea to simply leave this country be as it is, to serve as a constant reminder for the future generations of what socialism was and what it will always lead to. Sucks to be a North Korean, sure, but it is more entertaining for us since in the future, we might be able to watch a Truman Show -style reality show that surreptitiously follows the life of North Koreans with flying nanocameras that the Juche party officials cannot even conceptualize, let alone intercept. During the boring moments, the transmission could cut to angry Western socialists who would then be allowed to explain how their socialism wouldn't lead to this and how their socialism would never enslave or imprison anybody.

On a lighter note, I also started reading and already read about half of "Cybill Disobedience", the autobiography of Cybill Shepherd, the actress of Moonlighting fame and then later of her eponymous delightful sitcom. Ms. Shepherd, who originally rose to fame with her supermodel looks, is no longer young and thus gets to complain that media and pretty much the whole world are unfair to old women, rendering them invisible. There is certain irony in this, since I immediately had to wonder whether Cybill herself would have ever gotten start with a movie career in a world that operated along the principles that she advocates in this book.

According to the book, Cybill is a rebellious woman who doesn't obey the rules but is disobedient. Fortunately, the book is not all about radical feminism and female empowerment, but features a colourful description of Cybill getting to know Elvis, if you know what I mean. During a private screening of some movie in which two guys kiss for a moment, we learn that Elvis and his jolly entourage of good old boys were not exactly, uh, open-minded towards male homosexuality, but stopped the film on the spot. Later in bed, Elvis is not that enthusiastic towards "eating sushi" either, as he considers it something that a black man would do. It's funny how we rarely get to read about things like this in the works of the official hagiographers of the great men.

I would also like it if every aspiring autobiographer understood that nothing that he or she did during the childhood and the teenage years is even the least bit interesting, so there is absolutely no need to keep yammering about your just-like-everybody-else's childhood after the compulsory exciting opening chapter whose purpose is to reel the reader in so that the author can describe whatever rust belt hicksville it was that he or she grew up in, and use the exact same template to describe his or her parents that every single one of these books for some reason always uses. But hopefully, this book will in later chapters become as interesting as "Street Justice", the autobiography of Chuck Zito, a Hell's Angel and bodybuilder who among other exciting things, worked as a bodyguard for some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, for example, Peter Weller and Treat Williams.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 at 4:27 PM