![]() The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang-which is the most favored city in the country-every night. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. ![]() The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. The glacier begins to melt a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. “Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject.
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