maybe it's just my lack of imagination or empathy or something, but the sobbing north koreans seem just a trifle disingenuous to me. i need better resolution, but i'm not seeing the actual tears, only hearing the overwrought, seal-like barking. to be honest with you, i don't think you can quite 'brainwash' a whole population; really nothing is more evidently absurd than a cult of personality, especially when the object is as unprepossessing as the various kims. you can call people dear and beloved all you like: that's just funny (well, and a little bit pitiful or desperate), and i would think that many north koreans would be as capable of seeing that as anyone else; they're not robots or puppies, but have, i assume, almost human-like intellectual and emotional capacities. as i've often said, if you don't think there's a little dude in the corner snickering - especially at crap that ham-handed and boring and repetitive and obviously self-serving - you don't know our species very well, and that sort of thing is contagious. you know you can put posters up all over your school; that doesn't mean the adolescents aren't going to think your stuff is jive, or just experience it as white noise.
thank god, we are a fairly skeptical and cynical species, or at least we give rise to cynics and skeptics all the time. it'd very hard not to notice that you're starving while officials are eating, for example. the official you're immediately dealing with is obviously stupid and corrupt and all-too-human; so's the guy above him, whom you met one time; it's just liable to occur to you that it runs right up the ladder. and the ideology of these maoist assmonkeys is just so banal, so luridly false to the reality, so idiotically repetitive, and so on, that i just think that a lot of people won't, or literally won't even be able to, believe it. as havel said: you can get people to sort of act like they accept it (because there are terrible penalties for failing to simulate epistemic compliance); you can get them to shuffle from place to place on schedule or sob simulated sobs in unison; that doesn't mean everyone doesn't understand that they are being bombarded with jive.
