Word: ils
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Third, the chances of the North Korean regime surrendering its nuclear-weapon capabilities or of inspectors ferreting them all out are virtually nil. Kim Jong Il is unlikely to stay in power by dint of his popularity at home or abroad. Having atomic bombs, though, helps. Why, then, did Kim commit to give them up last week? He knows what we don't know about his nuclear program and is banking on us not learning much...
...space in America's collective consciousness formerly occupied by the planet Mongo. Created by the brilliant cartoonist Alex Raymond, the distant Mongo, as ruled by the diabolical Ming the Merciless, a jaundiced and slant-eyed despot, perpetually plotted our destruction until Flash Gordon foiled its schemes. Substitute Kim Jong-Il for Ming, and nuclear weapons for invading spaceships, and you have a pretty good approximation of America's poor sense of an extremely closed and apparently hostile other world. How appropriate, then, that another kind of comic would be the most readable attempt at exposing the life and culture...
...result the book reads as a series of sharply observed and funny/scary anecdotes on the life of a foreigner in what may be the most hyper-controlled society in the world. One typically smart sequence examines the ubiquitous side-by-side portraits of the leader Kim Jong-Il and his dead-but-technically-still-in-charge father Kim Il-Sung. They appear in every single room, ?except in the shitters of course.? He notes how both men have been made to look nearly identical, "same size, same age, same suit. That way nothing ever changes. It's always the same...
...Visual jokes also lighten up the grim totalitarian atmosphere. One panel imitates a Sunday comics puzzle, depicting a police lineup of ordinary-looking North Korean citizens with the quiz, "Which one is the spy?" The answer, upside down, reads, "No. 6 because he is not wearing his official Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il...
...only during a visit to the huge museum dedicated to Papa Kim, where visitors must wear comical giant slippers so as not to scuff the floor. "What a great and generous man!" Sin exclaims at the ludicrous and nearly endless display that concludes with a wax replica of Kim Il-Sung before which all visitors must...