A Spectacle Like None Other

I might as well post this while I’m on a spell of reluctant fascination with North Korea. These mass games things.

I will tell you true. Sure, it’s mindless worship of the personality cult of the idiotic “Dear Leader” and his cronies. Sure, the time they spend doing things like this could probably be spent doing other things that might help the population. Sure, North Korea is an ashtray of a tyrannical prison state that routinely engages in the most egregious violations of civil and human rights in the world by far.

Forget that these displays are nothing but reflections of the absolute conformity and rigidity imposed upon the helpless population at the hands of their disgusting communist dictatorship. Forget that these ‘games,’ which the children prepare for six hours per day, six days per week, for months on end, every year, all the time, are performed because the participants are forced to do so.

Forget all that, difficult as it may be, for just a moment. Take one step back, and just marvel at the sheer spectacle of this bizarre cultural tick. The aesthetic beauty of exacting execution and performance. Everything you see is people. Thousands and thousands of them, all performing in perfect synchronization and pulsating as one gigantic and colorful organism. It’s unbelievable.

And be advised that the video is dotted with periodic shots of the Kim Jong Il looking like an dumbass and his commie henchmen being all totalitarian-communisty.



And check out the kids. The kids...



It's so well done (be it a bit hokey) that it's a bit frightening and unnerving.

(shiver)

OK. Now that you’ve done all that, you can go back to being nauseated at what North Korea represents, the threat they pose to regional and world security, and everything else we’ve come to know and hate about the Hermit Kingdom.

Why do I get the feeling that this is what an Obama presidency would look like?

Cross-posted at the Jawa Report.