Back when I was listening to talk radio another regular guest on the Mike Rose Show, Fresh from the `Hood, said something about the then-impending Iraq war that has stuck with me. He said, "It's another case of white people thinking they have to go around the world and tell everybody else how to run their business." I think there's validity to that perception and this evening's ABC News special, North Korea: Inside the Shadows, drove it home.
One of the opening scenes was kindergarten children practicing miming with musical instruments and making these precise, automaton-like movements. Others were doing synchronized dances with hula-hoops. Sawyer's narration colored the scene non-objectively with words like "eerie" and "strange." Maybe the kids are learning discipline and how to work as a team? Or maybe they should all be parked in front of Tickle Me Elmo and eating Doritos and Super Sugar Crisps like American kids.
Then there was a montage of shots from a pageant that the North Koreans hold inside a stadium. The entire audience holds colored panels that, together, create giant mosaics of the national flag and Kim Jiong Ill, and they move the panels back and forth so precisely, across thousands of people, creating different scenes, that from a distance it looks like a computer animation. Then there's also a big parade where everyone marches and dances in perfect unison, like one person replicated a thousand times. Once again instead of admiring their precision, how the group can move as a single unit, creating something really lovely, Sawyer narrates with "this bizzare scene...so strange to outsiders..."
She stopped a few people in a local park and asked them why they "hate" America. A woman takes her hand and says they just don't want America "meddling in our business" (flashback to Fresh!). The first thing out of Sawyer's mouth in our defense is, "But America is a very rich country..." Ah! Because we're "rich" they have to like us?!
Later she goes into a hair salon and asks a young woman wouldn't she like to have blonde hair? No, she says, they like "traditional" black Asian hair. How much more correct could Fresh have been? The theme here seems to be, "My country is rich and we have blonde hair. Don't you wish you were us? No? Then you must be fucked up."
She passed a few movie magazines to a class of schoolchildren and was mystified they weren't more interested in reading about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Surely these people have received severe brainwashing because who in the world doesn't hang on every fart that leaves the buttocks of Tom Cruise? Sawyer tells us it's "weird" again when she asks some Koreans in their early 20's what they do in their spare time the only answer they have is studying, which again Sawyer thinks is a sign they're deeply deprived, rather than just highly-motivated.
Finally she contrasts shots of America and South Korea with North Korea, and the horror is laid bare that North Koreans do not listen to Beyonce Knowles, do not shake their booties in dance clubs, do not play violent video games, and do not eat at McDonald's. In the most interesting shot the words "personal consumption" leave Sawyer's lips just as we see a South Korean gorging on an ice cream cone that must be a foot tall.
One 84-year-old man invites the ABC News crew into his home and tells them he lived in South Korea for awhile (after we're told the two sides are kept stringently apart by barbed wire and guards) and decided he liked it better in North Korea. "In capitalism money comes first and everything else is cutthroat...," he says before being edited (probably what he had to say was too "weird" for us to handle...or thought-provoking).
It's also bizzare, weird, strange, just downright awful that they have lots of pictures of Kim Jiong around and sing patriotic songs. Not like here, where I see "Bush-Cheney `04" and "W, the President" stickers on cars to this day, or where Toby Keith tells us how some gave all and all gave some while Lee Greenwood says, "God bless the USA!"
Fresh, in my opinion, had it right. Other cultures and countries are different from ours, and guess what? It's not because they're weird, it's not because they're repressed, it's not because they just haven't had the benefit of Entertainment Tonight like us, it's not because their leader is a "crazy dictator." It's because they like it that way.
Cultures are a product of the personality of a people. Everywhere in Asian countries, from China to Japan to North Korea, we see a people who believe in the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the group, "horizontal career movement," and a tendency to want to shut the rest of the world out (Great Wall of China) -- the marks of an introverted people.
I wouldn't want to live like North Koreans but I don't look down on them for doing it. Now I'll go drown myself in the personal consumption of some refined sugars and spank my monkey to Beyonce Knowles, American-style. Thank you, Diane Sawyer and ABC News! "My country `tis a vee..."
North Korea is a broken state, where all wealth is controlled by the perverse hereditary junta, and starvation, torture and totalitarianism are well entrenched. At least in Guilty America we can opt in or out of gorging on cheesy poofs and schlock, or not.
I seriously doubt that any of the civilians felt free to speak to Sawyer, but I have a recommendation: read a book, don't take your worldview from a couple things you saw on television. There probably has not been a more repressive regime in the history of mankind than the Kims' North Korea. They make Stalin's Soviet Union look libertarian by comparison.