Bad Behavior

Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images

President Obama was quoted in the Times about North Korea, “They need to understand that bad behavior will not be rewarded (“In South Korea Visit, Obama Visits Border and Warns North," NYT, 3/25/12). The Agence France-Presse photo that ran with the story showed Obama in the DMZ looking though a pair of binoculars at North Korea. “Dildo shopping, spying on neighbors, getting high and getting a facial” is the beginning of the on-line description of the 2004 movie Bad Behavior. There was a more high brow Bad Behavior with Stephen Rea and Sinead Cusak from l993 and that blurb begins, “The McAllister family house is the setting for Gerry and Ellie's grapples with work, children and how to get the bathroom fixed.” Bad Behavior means a lot of things to different people. For those of us who attended public school back in the 50’s, before educational reform changed the punitive nature of many elementary school classrooms, bad behavior meant “no recess.” Obama’s jeremiad to the North Koreans, in the light of their imminent launching of a new satellite, is reminiscent of such 50’s warnings. Kim Jong-un, his dad Kim Jong-il and his grand dad Kim Il-sung are all like those bad kids who continued to do even worse things because they had nothing to lose. Since they can’t be good like Angela, little Nick or Barack they excel by getting very good at being bad. We all know how the bad kids responded to threats of missing assembly or having to go to the principal’s office. It rarely did any good at all. The bad kids simply got so bad that they were expelled. They might not have been the sharpest tacks, but they were the ones everyone feared. They were the kids who waited for the Angelas, Nicks and Baracks to come out of school so that they could beat them up for their lunch money. Only Vladimir and that new Chinese kid were able to protect themselves, but they practiced the martial arts.