Licensed to Il, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #159

December 20, 2011 Arthur Tebbel 1 Comment

Dear Art,

I appear to be dead.  Don’t ask how it’s possible that I’m sending you a letter.  Let’s just say that the afterlife is an amazing place and you should really just relax.  I have to admit I’m a little worried.  Not about the fate of my country or its people, I mean I was barely concerned with those things while I was alive.  No, what I’m worried about is my legacy.  Like most megalomaniacal dictators who lead a state-sponsored cult of personality I have a bit of an ego.  Will I be remembered fondly?  What could I have done differently that wouldn’t have involved being a reasonable person or introducing basic human freedom into my country?

-Kim Jong Il

Dear Leader,

Remembered fondly?  Don’t you read your own press dude?  You’re the greatest golfer who ever lived.  According to North Korean media (hereafter referred to as media) you routinely hit three or four holes-in-one per round.  Per round!  You also set a record at the Pyongyang Golf Club by shooting 11 holes-in-one in one round.  If you sent me to a miniature golf course every day for the rest of my life I would never shoot eleven holes-in-one in a round.  Even if you told me if I did it I could run a country so badly that Madeline Albright would give me a basketball signed by Michael Jordan in an attempt to make me chill the fuck out.

There’s also the solace in knowing you’ll be an eternal joke.  There’s a website devoted to pictures of you looking at things.  You were the puppet antagonist in a movie by two of the most celebrated creators of comedy in the last 50 years.  There isn’t a medium on which you haven’t been made fun.  Stalin never got that.  Only Hitler has a better spoof presence and he had to almost exterminate a race that produces more comedians per capita than anyone else on the planet.  That took some doing man and you should be proud.

I don’t know that you could have done any better.  You ran a country so recklessly that there were huge conferences devoted to appeasing you or keeping you in check.  This despite the fact that your entire foreign policy seemed to be about trolling Japan, South Korea, and the United States (not necessarily in that order).  You played the media like the fiddle (again, I refer to the state-controlled media).  All this without having to do any of the basic things a world leader does like feed or clothe people.  Maybe the kidnapping thing was a bridge too far.  That seemed to rub people the wrong way and not actually accomplish anything.  As far as monsters go, you won man.  You died of old age and not via Navy SEAL team or at the hands of the people you treat like shit.  You won the Axis of Evil lottery.