Long Live Our Papa, DJ Kim

Long Live Our Papa, DJ Kim
October 18, 2000

In North Korea, people pay homage to an old house near Pyongyang City where the late Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, was alleged to be born, as China, Russia, and Vietnam keep their deceased leaders in mausoleum.
There is no reason why the South Korea is different from the North in commemoration of their leaders as they both share culture, ethnicity, history and so on, especially when people in the South rhapsodize their president’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize.

In just three days after the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize, the state-run Korea Broadcasting System showed footage of ‘very important’ news on prime time TV newscast…a senior English couple had nailed the steel-plaque on the front wall of their house where they said DJ Kim and his wife had lived during 1992 and they said they are very happy to live in the residence where the Nobel laureate once resided.
The camera focused on the plaque that reads: this house was once occupied by Kim Daejung who won 2000 Nobel Peace Prize.

It seems nothing peculiar for ‘nothing-much-to-do’ old Anglo-Saxon couple who are living in the crazy environment of celebrities and eager to appear on TV screen in any way, shape or form in order to publicize their celebrity-ness of living in the same quarters of house that the grand winner once slumps in sofa with great despair when he was in no hope of becoming a president.
It is quite an amazing feat for the couple to act such a quick way to prepare a steel-plate in three days and wonderful act to assume the financial burden for Korea.
Conveniently, the reporter did not clarify how he got the story or whether DJ had owned or rented the house that appears to be valued over at least half a million dollars, probably because it would raise the question how he were able to own the house when he was a vagabond international hobo with his feeble wife.
Our Papa used to live off his wife’s back in the 60s, political donation from Korean-Japanese businessmen with close relationship with the North Korea in 70s, research (?) funds from Rockefeller foundation during his exile, and the slush funds from Chaebols when he returns from overseas. Frankly speaking, he has never had a job as ordinary folks earn a living.
Our Papa has been a prodigal custodian for the public money dishing out millions of dollars for useless international conference for his photo-op and Korean chauvinism. In ASEM meeting, his regime feeds 8,000 free meals to a pack of the foreign pigs while his people queue up in the free lunch meals at the railway station.

It is the epitome of a comic farce for the public-funded television to bring the worthless trivial footage for public consumption in order to enhance his image.
There was an once-over news story a few years ago about his ancestral graveyard that he had expanded and refurbished the site extravagantly after he was elected a president, but quickly disappeared into the hole of oblivion as usual.
The head of the KBS hails from the same home province where Papa calls it home and he is determined to wag his tail for any kind of favorable trivia for Papa and leave out anything that might reflect badly upon Papa’s regime.
Despite of numerous assertion by our Papa that he is fair and transparent in regional conflict, people from his home provinces have occupied every nook and corner in all major sectors of the institutions, and that’s why his party in the last election was totally wiped out in the enemy regions barely clinging to power with the minority votes from his people.

In addition, South Koreans begin to feel their Papa’s change of heart that he may want to have another term of Presidency…before the euphoric air of the Nobel mania evaporates into the unfriendly atmosphere of economic uneasiness, his acolytes proposed the revision of the constitution that permits two-term presidency, in which our Papa remains in power until he kicks the bucket, and he would be honored to be embalmed for the public display at mausoleum.
South Koreans are the most civil, generous and forgiving people in the world—more than half of them are now Christians—burying their dictators in the national cemetery and pardoning military tyrants and corrupt mandarins en mass every year.
Our Papa deserves the Prize for one category, human rights, that he pardoned a smorgasbord of so many crooks, cheaters, swindlers, killers, spies, traitors, and dictators,
They surely would shout, “Long Live Our Papa”, allow him another Presidential term, and bury him in the sepulchre, because he is a peacemaker, the first Nobel laureate, and also our kind of Machiavellian sellout.
Our Papa said history will judge him right, because he knows that as far as South Koreans are concerned, history is bunk.