A Ronery Rife: Kim Escapes Earth in Tiny Spaceship

Kim Jong Il has slipped the surly bonds of Earth, shuffled off his mortal coil, boarded his tiny spaceship, and blasted off to plot future dictatorships in the sky. Just as well. He was so ronery in Pyongyang, living among yes men, flacks, and adoring worshipers.

The world now awaits the appearance of Kim III, latest in a dynastic line of North Korean dictators ruling over a nation that is in danger of forgetting why it has to suffer so much, for the sake of a hereditary gang of cockroaches.

No matter. Tears are flowing like a river in Pyongyang. The people are without their deity, who has flown away in his tiny ship, never to return. Will the new deity wield the same magic touch of death and destruction over North Korea as his father and grandfather have done? Or will the cult of Kim outlive its appeal to the long-suffering North Koreans?

Best to take this sad saga for a cautionary tale. It seems it is possible to take a small, vital, ethnically homogeneous people of high IQ and proven accomplishment, and turn them into isolated, quasi-automatons, voluntarily deceived, deprived, and underfed.

What it's like inside North Korea