One Fat Man

Two recent articles in The Christian Science Monitor merit reading. It's not a magazine I'd normally pick up, but Google alerts drew my attention.

Much has been written recently about the removal of Kim jong Il's posters, and the dropping of the Dear Leader honorific in some newscasts. This seems a pretty good summary of the state of knowledge about the back-pedalling on the personality cult, and possible unrest.

And today, Steve Knipp gives a vivid account of his tourist trip to the Diamond Mountains in North Korea. He describes how their bus is checked by lean and hungry young North Korean soldiers (every NK male is by law required to spend 10 years in the army), and how a South Korean woman was reportedly detained for several days for asking why Kim Jong Il was the only fat man in the country. He concludes:

While in the country, I desperately tried to talk to some actual North Koreans. But all outsiders travel in a virtual bubble, as a way to just about eliminate contact between North Koreans and outsiders. Except for the hotel's doormen, all the staff we encountered were recruited from ethnic Korean communities in China - and they are rotated back to China every three months.

Still, I must wonder what those rail-thin young soldiers boarding the buses each day think, as they come face to face with hundreds of South Koreans, whose round smiling faces and vivid, fashionable clothing convey prosperity. Maybe they will start to ask themselves: Why is there only one fat man in this land, yet so many from the South?

For other accounts of trips to North Korea:
Tan Wee Cheng's 8 day visit, many photographs and telling details, and not a little sarcasm.
The BBC's Caroline Gluck visits the DMZ briefly -some good links in the sidebar
Ron Gluckman casts a jaundiced eye on the "schoolyard antics" of both sides of the DMZ show, like who has the bigger flagpole.

All in all, it was like wrestling night at the forum. Only not nearly as much fun. For all the boasting about the superiority of the American Way, sad to say, the North Koreans throw a better border party.

A Palin fan visits the DMZ and garners some unguarded responses on the message board.

The Paranoid State, an article, not online elsewhere, gacked from The Observer.