TIME TO MAKE HIM A HOLEY GHOST

Sins of the Son: Kim Jong Il's North Korea Is in Ruins, But Why Should That Spoil His Fun? (Peter Carlson, May 11, 2003, Washington Post)

The Dear Leader is a pudgy 5-foot-3-inch Stalinist who wears elevator shoes and a puffy pompadour in an unsuccessful attempt to gain stature. Like Hitler, he's an arty aesthete who prefers kitschy artifice to grim reality: While more than a million of his people starved to death in the last decade, he spent billions on gigantic monuments and elaborate stadium spectacles to deify his father and himself. He's a movie producer who says he has always wanted to direct. And he once sent thugs to kidnap a South Korean actress and her director husband so he could force them to help build his country's film industry.

His own bizarre story could make an interesting movie -- a surreal epic with drunken orgies, exotic dancing, gourmet pizza, Michael Jordan, a crying contest, magical albino animals and a mummified corpse that reigns as "President for Eternity."

"One of the most interesting questions about Kim Jong Il is: What does it mean to be the son of God?" says Jerrold Post, a George Washington University psychiatrist and a former psychological profiler for the CIA. "It's hard enough to succeed a successful father, but it's quite another thing if the father is elevated to a godlike stature."

Kim Jong Il's father was an uneducated guerrilla who transformed himself into a quasi-divine emperor known as the "Great Leader."

Installed in power by the Soviet army after World War II, the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, ruled North Korea as a Stalinist dictatorship for nearly 50 years. In 1950 he invaded South Korea. He failed to conquer it, but after four years of war and more than a million deaths, he retained absolute power over his devastated nation, and he proceeded to kill or jail all his rivals, real and imagined.

The Great Leader had an insatiable craving for adulation. By the late '80s he had erected more than 34,000 monuments to himself. His photograph was displayed in every building and pinned to the clothing of every citizen, right over the heart. Benches where he'd once sat were sealed in glass and turned into relics.

Like a king or a Mafia don, the Great Leader groomed his eldest son to succeed him. He dubbed Kim Jong Il "the Dear Leader" and called him "a genius of 10,000 talents."

Apparently, one of those talents was literary. According to North Korean mythology, during the Dear Leader's years at Kim Il Sung University, he wrote 1,500 books -- an average of almost a book a day, a feat even Stephen King can't match.

After the Dear Leader graduated in 1964, the Great Leader appointed him to a post in the ruling Workers Party. There, he replaced thousands of old party hacks with young party hacks loyal to him. His rivals tended to disappear.

But the Dear Leader was generous to his supporters. Like Elvis, he gave his cronies cars -- generally a Mercedes with an elite license plate number that began with 2-16, after the Dear Leader's birthday, Feb. 16.

When the Dear Leader got a crew cut, supporters did the same. When he let his hair grow and permed it into a puffy pompadour, so did his toadies.

The Dear Leader made no public appearances, but by the early '80s he was running the government behind the scenes.

"Kim Il Sung reigned like an emperor while Kim Jong Il functioned like a prime minister in charge of the day-to-day rule, " says Kongdan Oh, a Korean scholar at the Institute for Defense Analyses and co-author of the 2000 study "North Korea Through the Looking Glass."

By all accounts, the Dear Leader's favorite task was running the state propaganda machine, which he gleefully used to deify his father -- and, by extension, himself. Today, his picture hangs next to his father's in every building.

"It's a cult of personality like nothing in history," says Oh. "In North Korea, he and his father are like God and Jesus Christ."

Except one doubts that anyone, even in N. Korea, worships them. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2003 7:13 PM