The Future Hermit Kingdom

In a world where there is an overabundance of grotesque human jokes the country of North Korea wins the award for excuse-free craziness. Many other countries at least make up some vaguely plausible reasons as to why they oppress their populations, destroy the environment, or periodically look for a rational motive to plunge the world into war. For some its the easy excuse of religion, there's nothing like a few sanctimonious a-holes screaming infidel or blasphemer to get the uneducated masses riled up. Needless, to say I am including all three monotheistic religions in this criticism as well as most, if not all the rest. Another goody is the always trusty ethnic excuse in that some group comes to believe they are privileged in some fashion which means everyone else is slightly sub-human. The final one is the love of money. In this capitalistic age it has come to rival the other two as an excuse to commit all manner of crimes both great and small.

North Korea is immune to all of that, they're crazy and know it. So much that they just sit back in their tiny polluted corner of the world, make demands just like a mentally retarded petulant child, and then watch the rest of semi-civilized humanity fret over whether they will start a war that is almost guaranteed to kill millions. While they were once a Marxist nation, created at the start of the Cold War, I agree with the view that the unfortunate inhabitants of that land now live under some quasi-religious, family controlled cult where reality has no basis in fact.

Yeah, you say, tell me something I don't know. Okay, what I will tell you is that none other than the United States is every so slowly floating down a similar river. Case in point is the newly elected Senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton.

In a move that suggests he wants to unseat Ted Cruz for the most clueless senator this mental giant goes and pens a letter to Iran saying that no matter what possible agreement you reach with a legitimately elected United States president—as opposed to George Bush—the next person to occupy that office could casually abandon that accord. Adding another dash of dark comedy to Cotton's letter is that forty-seven other senators signed it as well forever ending the idea that politics stops at America's shoreline when it comes to foreign policy. Yes, I remember Nancy Pelosi had an ill-advised meeting with the president of Syria several years ago during Second Bush. But back then there wasn't an Israeli/Republican cheer leading party demanding war with them like they are with Iran. 

All that is seriously deranged behavior but what truly freaked me out was another quote by Cotton. 

North Korea is a huge prison, it is a safe assumption to say that unless a person is somehow connected to the ruling elite there is only an extremely small chance of escape from that nightmare. It is a country where absolutely everything is geared for total war. To have an United States senator openly call for America to base its reason for being on anything even remotely similar to North Korea is the very definition of the word surreal. But yet that is where we stand, conflict has become our byword, not the search for peace or the betterment of our citizens but a perpetual call for war. To be sure, the world is dangerous place and we must stand ready to defend ourselves and our allies but somewhere in the recent past a line was crossed.

Yes, the United States has had the blood of innocents on its hands almost since the founding of the Republic but there was a time when we at least paid lip service to the idea that all wars are at their essence are wasteful and monstrous enterprises. Now we writhe almost exclusively in the squalid and stunted glory of how many human beings our laser-guided bombs and trained snipers can kill in a day. At the same time our elites demand yet another war the national infrastructure is falling apart, certain schools are allowed to fail, and poor Americans are told to shut up and just be glad they have a job despite the fact it fails to pay a living wage. Don't know about anyone else but that is starting to sound a lot like North Korea.