Monday, October 01, 2007

Good News in Korea

Whatever happened to Kim Jong-il A few years ago he was supposed to be the 21st century's short, gender-neutral, Asian Hitler in huge 1980s Sally Jessy Raphael glasses. Now, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is supposed to be the new Hitler. Just a few months back, Hugo Chavez was getting compared to Hitler by uncreative columnists, but he's out of the running clearly; there's only room for one Hitler. We could probably fill the Hitler gap through some sort of television contest akin to American Idol. Tin-pot dictators could sing Whitney Houston songs and execute enemies of the state for a celebrity panel.

Anyway, in what can only be taken as good news, the leaders of North and South Korea have finally met for lunch. The two Koreas have had a cease-fire since the 1950s, but are still officially at war. This bodes well for both North and South, and would seem to improve Jong-il's image quite a bit. Probably gets tiring to be Hitler anyway.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

A sudden regime change would be disastrous for the region. Refugees would pour into China and South Korea, for one thing, and the opinons of those countries have a lot more weight than Middle Eastern ones, so I imagine that's one reason we're leaving him alone.

Rufus said...

God, let's hope they've learned their lessons about sudden regime changes!

Holly said...

And we can't just assign people to take turns being Hitler? Sort of a time-share thing?

SecondComingOfBast said...

This isn't the first time Kim Jung-Il has met with a South Korean leader, he did it a few years back, not long after he came to power. He went to South Korea, met the then Prime Minister (or whatever he's called), and shook hands with him publicly before going off for a discussion.

The purpose of the meeting had something to do with allowing families to reunite, many of whom were separated by the borders of the two countries and had not seen each other in decades.

I think they reached some tentative agreement, but I never heard anything about how it worked out, or whether there was ever any follow through. I assume there wasn't.