Crazy like Kim

The world needs the kind of crazy these dictators offered since they gave us a template to compare our own sanity to.

I miss Kim Jong-il already. Few men can pull off immense spectacles and a khaki suit and Kim definitely couldn’t, but dammit he tried. For that, he has my respect. Inventing a food that looked and tasted suspiciously like a cheese burger and then kidnapping a South Korean director to make a socialist Godzilla film; that just guaranteed him my adoration. Sure his son, Kim Jong-un is going to give the job of replacing him a heroic effort, but for me there will always only be one man worthy of the title ‘Eternal Bosom of Hot Love’. There is a new star shining over Pyongyang and it is absolutely, unequivocally and relentlessly crazy.

Not since Qaddafi was taken from us, before we were ready to let his golden mumu (a loose dress of Hawaiian origin that hangs from the shoulder) go, has there been so much pressure to find the right kind of insane megalomania. Who would shield himself behind a wall of hot Amazonians while travelling with a Ukrainian nurse and a golden gun? The pressure, in the end, must have been too much for Kim to handle. He had given us so much, with his world-class golf playing and lack of need to both defecate and urinate (according to the North Korean government website). To ask him to now wear the mantle of craziest dictator as well was just more than his honorific-heavy shoulders could bear. Rest in peace o great ‘Master of the Computer that Surprised the World’. Now, someone put Mugabe in a protective bubble.

The world needs the kind of crazy that these dictators offered. Beyond the easy and obvious lesson that power corrupts and absolute power drives you absolutely bananas, they also gave us a template to compare our own sanity to. Our Pakistani dictators have never lived up to their promise. Ziaul Haq had a fetishistic lust for censorship and oppression but that was just textbook dictatorial behaviour. Pervez Musharraf actually sullied the image of dictators worldwide, by being quite reasonable initially and only sliding into egotistic flights of fancy that resulted in expelled chief justices later in his career. Frankly, it was all a bit anticlimactic. Now President Asif Ali Zardari, on the other hand, shows all the teasing hints of having the right kind of tenacity to go the distance. He stays hidden behind concrete fortifications that not even an Angry Bird could breach, jibbers nonsensically to Obama and disappears for days on end in Dubai, leaving us all to run around screaming of coups. When he is back and arguably healthy, he ignores the plight of women to the extent that over 675 have been murdered in Pakistan just this year alone, and lets enough journalists get killed, kidnapped and tortured, that most of our reporters are applying for postings in war-torn African nations just so they can get some rest and relaxation. Meanwhile, he passes up every opportunity to neuter an overly ambitious military leadership just so he can complete a full term, like some character in a Stephen King novel obsessed with finishing a race even though it costs him his sanity. He still has a while to go before he can be considered completely crazy, but he deserves an ‘A’ grade for effort even if he only manages a ‘C-’ in performance.

Or maybe we are the crazy ones. A nation of collective Kim Jong-ils. We panic and jump to rumour at the slightest chance, consider the army a source of stability when that is the one thing it has always failed to provide, obsess over what an attention-seeking model did or didn’t wear while beating, raping and dismembering [other] women with prolific regularity and worry about honour while behaving dishonourably. When we aren’t locking children in basements to teach them terrorism, we are confusing just another politician for a revolutionary. All of which proves that we need Kim Jong-il. Because if no one is absolutely crazy, then everyone goes absolutely crazy.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 22^nd, 2011.