ah, the media is full of photos of north koreans mourning kim jong il, or, as that late rascal jesse helms used to call him, kim jong 2, mixing up his roman numerals with korean names, later ascending him to kim jong the third– ole jesse was not one to let knowledge and intelligence get in the way  of good demagogy.  oh, how i miss ole jesse but enough on him already– besides, hitchens, who i am really mourning, already told the kim jong the third story much better than i can….

i think i’ll miss kim jong il as well.  like i miss dubya.  when 0le kim died, my first comment on facebook was “the international relations and global politics lost its nabakovian humor, amisian slapstick and kubrickian political leadership… rest as the MC of hell mr. kim jong-il!” and i stand-by my original comment.  he was the 21st century version of chaplin’s immortal adenoid hynkel, in flesh.  team america did him justice, transposing him to ole hynkel with less chaplin grace, but decent humor…

let’s face it– we’ll always have tyrants.  it is a natural byproduct of being human.  we don’t have tyrants, we’re not human anymore. same for psychopaths, same for greedy motherfuckers who suck out and dispose of all our resources, etc.  i love lennon as much as anyone, nonetheless “imagine” was nothing but unfettered utopia and gets on my nerves each time i listen to it– “imagine all the people living life in peace”– my ass..  what he calls for is nothing but the end of being human– without the bad we can’t have good, sans hate, no love…  good ole yin and yang…  it is the human nature.  c’est la vie…

humor is what gets us through that whole process of life.  when we lose our humor, take everything too seriously, this earth becomes hell.  pure and simple…

that’s why we need to laugh at our tyrants.  and some make it too easy– like kim jong il, or like dubya and his sugardaddy cheney before him.  if all tyrants were like mugabe, zuma, milosevic or ________ (fill-in the blank with your favorite dictator without anything to poke fun at- north, south, east, west, past, present doesn’t matter), our collective sanity would be in jeopardy.  hence political parodies, hence saddam on SNL, hence ole kim in “team america”…  chaplin, of course, was the granddady of it all, like rabelais before him, with his political satires…

and that’s precisely why i’ll miss kim jong il…

now, back to the mourning part of this rant– the media prints the photos of north koreans mourning, like the one below.  of course then they say “it is all crocodile tears and the photos are nothing but propaganda”…

tell you what: i really believe they’re sincerely mourning.  they’re mourning because now they’ll have to housebreak a new tyrant, junior… kim jong-un (or, kim jong one, if ole jesse helms was alive, with his southern drawl, he would have called him, like his young ‘uns)  just when they got used to living with one devil, as much as you can get used to living with one, now they’ll have to start all over again.

i am mourning for them north koreans as well…   and nothing i can do for them.  but, at least for the collective sanity of the rest of us, hope junior proves to be as eccentric and nuts as his daddy before him…  and i sincerely hope we don’t get stuck with a reversed bush, sr and dubya situation…  hope it is dubya and dubya junior…

keep mourning north koreans and my sincerest wishes for more power to you… you’re starting over like you did 63 years ago, again with a puppy tyrant, on his way to becoming the supreme leader…

…a puppy tyrant hellbent on proving himself is always much worse than a lazy old fat tyrant…