Oh Kim, ye were aweful

This might offend some (though not sure who). We could not resist the terrible pun, but give us a couple of minutes, anyway.

One day at SVES, two parents sent excuse slips with their children who skipped school the day before because North Korea was reportedly poised to bomb Guam and Saipan. These parents were professionals who I thought should have known better; they were so convinced about the news that it was terrifying to think of media influence in shaping perception and affecting behavior.

This Saturday when Kim Jong Il of North Korea died, a report was made of a missile launched from DPRK heading for Japan! Two days later, it was still repeated to justify Japan, SoKor, and the U.S. air and naval fleet going into heightened military alert. Of course, the alleged missile was nowhere to be found.

The public display of tears and grief still surprises Western media, cynical over similar occurrence in 1976 when Mao Zedong of China died. Mao was accused of personality cult in Communist Chinese propaganda posters with his poster on display in spite of his decry of the practice as a “poisonous ideological survival of the old society,” referring to the long dynastic tradition of the nation, and more recently then, a nod to the Soviet Union’s revision of history in the condemnation of Stalin and his policies. No such condemnation was leveled against similar outbreak of grief the year before when Mao’s ex-comrade, Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan, died.

Back to Kim. It is amazing what words we choose to describe the North Korean leader. He is one of the world’s five worst dictators, one headline said. Time magazine is now working on 28-year-old Kim III-Kim Jong Un, already accused of getting cosmetic surgery to look like his grandpa so that the personality cult continues.

Ferdinand Marcos was called an authoritarian leader, while Chile’s Salvador Allende and Cuba’s Fidel Castro were/are satanic dictators. $Boy General Augusto Pinochet was dear to the U of Chicago gang that transformed downtown Santiago into an extension of the Windy City’s Loop. (When Marcos diplomatically slapped him in the face while the General was heading from Fiji to China with a fueling stopover in the Philippines, he turned around like a spoiled brat and headed back to the Andes; I unknowingly landed from Brazil a few hours after he did, holding a Philippine passport. The airport Interpol was tickled over my ignorance but detained me for half a day for scrutiny nevertheless.) I probably would have faced the firing squad, were Pinochet like North Korea’s Kim, my Western colleague’s mused. Pinochet was an authoritarian leader to the West while the second Kim who just died is labeled by Time magazine, and every respectable Western chronicler, as a dictator!

So why the uncontrolled sobs? The public grief must surely be orchestrated, we speculate, not unlike the paid wailers at an Iberian wake. We doubt the genuineness of the tear ducts!

Kim in the big picture. Twenty-two percent of Koreans are surnamed Kim. In Yanbian (Korea-in-China), Kim is Jin, and there are tons of them; those familiar with their Chinese history will remember the early Jin dynasty more than a thousand years ago. Later, Jins were northern Jurchens, related to the old Kogoryo of what is now northern Manchuria, were ancestors of the Manchus who reigned as the Qing dynasty who were the last landlords to the Hans. The Kims/Jins are related either by blood or by choice.

And here lies the deep cleavage that separates two fundamental understandings of the human mask. The Asian “face” projects harmony and unity sustained, maintained, and preserved at all cost. Its equilibrium relies on trusted authority. The occidental mask values the rights of self-hood, the virtue of self-expression, Greco-Roman “persona” displayed. Since 1776 in America, the individual’s right has become paramount, to be defended by all means necessary. After Hitler, individuals with strong followers are suspect. It makes automatons of followers who surrender their persona to the leader!

We sneer at DPRK’s official depiction of Kim II born on Baektul while the elder was fighting the Japanese, when in fact he was born in the Soviet Union earlier. An aspect of mythical story telling is its non-adherence to historical fact. Just take Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays’ PR work (the art of public manipulation) on Park Avenue. Kim II was a serious and consummate practitioner of the art.

Of course, we do not do that, right? It is Christmas. Jesus the Christian Messiah was born in a manger in Bethlehem on Dec. 25, right? Conceived sans physical contact, sustained in the freedom of the desert wind (aka Holy Spirit), and no less a regal descendant of King David!

The PR stuff is child’s play. It is when we allow our fear of the alien and unfamiliar to make us trigger-happy on land, in the air and sea-lanes that we shake in our shoes. Let us keep the missiles at bay, have Kim III and all the Kims/Jins mourn the passing of kin without having to glance over their shoulders to check our smile and sneer.

It would not hurt for us to sing, “Oh Kim, we are aweful, too!” Ah one, ah two!

Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang Aerospace University in China.