Who Is Kim Jong-un's Optometrist?

image: The LoneOptom

Who is Kim Jong-un’s optometrist? It’s a question that has been asked both by intelligence agencies and stylists around the world. We know about Mao suits, the Stalin era overcoats and especially the hairdo, but it's the glasses that give Kim Jong-un a particular distinction (his black frames are similar to the ones worn by Nelson Rockefeller). Most people don’t realize that Stalin was short like Hitler and Napoleon for that matter and neither Hitler, Stalin nor Napoleon sported glasses. Spectacles like the ones that the Korean leader wears weren’t even made back during those long winters in 1812 and l943 when invading armies were defeated by the Russian winter. But there's no doubt that Kim Jong-un’s stature is coming up in the world. When he wears the glasses he almost looks like a Korean Mister Rogers as he peers genially over his babies. Kim Jong-un has the most pleasant avuncular expression on his face when he stands over a bomb; he's never threatening and whoever writes his responses to Trump’s tweets (particularly the one where Trump was called a “dotard”) has the arcane sound of Victorian age Oxford don. As the Times recently reported there are cute little names for his ICBM’s ("North Korea's New Missile is Bigger and More Powerful, Photos Suggest,"NYT, 11/30/17), Hwasong-12, Hwasong-14, and most recently Hwasong-15—this last deemed to have the capability of hitting the East Coast of the U.S. You begin to buy the notion of the North Korean dynasty as a way of life unless, of course, you're a reviled sibling name Kim Jong-nam who doesn't have enough time to administer the atropine, the antidote to the VX nerve agent that killed him in a Malaysian airport ("Kim Jong-nam Carried the Antidote to the Poison that Killed Him," NPR, 12/1/17).

Stagecraft

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget famously wrote about the stages of cognitive development and Freud described the anal and oral stages of infant and childhood psychosexuality, amongst others. The latter is a concept that still continues to raise eyebrows in a schizophrenic culture where increasingly permissive mores have ignited the deep-rooted puritanism that has always been an undercurrent in American life. Human development, of course, ends with death, which has its own protocols. Both Kenneth Nuland and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote books with the titles How We Die and On Death and Dying. But between the stages of early development and the closing act which Shakespeare’s Jaques describes so eloquently in As You Like It (“Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion: Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”), lies a large spans of time and possibility. Fifty Shades of Gray, the title of an erotic romance, is also a good description of the fine shadings that accompany senescence. “Do not go gentle into that good night” urges Dylan Thomas. In fact hardly anybody departs this world without following Thomas’s words to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The end seems so near at some points, but can actually feel protracted, long and almost boring. However, few people have the courage or desire to want to pull down the curtain on their own performance even when they’ve said their piece and have plainly overstayed their welcome.

War Games?

There’s the experience of war itself that ranges from the unspeakable to Remarque’s All’s Quiet on the Western Front and Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night and more recently Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato amongst others. And then there are the famous treatises beginning with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War dating from the 5^th Century B.C. and a perennial favorite of martial artists and leading up to Clausewitz's On War. Clausewitz remarked, "War is diplomacy by other means.” But being prepared for war is a little like trying to predict the outcome of an operation. No act of reason can truly anticipate the outcome of this insult to the body of civilization. Some people have serious surgeries and emerge almost as good as new and others go into the hospital for a simple surgery and emerge feet first. The European body politic was never the same after the First World War, with its enormous casualties that knocked out whole generations of British citizens and led to the economic ruin of Germany where old news footage of the Weimar Republic shows inflation reaching the point where money was transported in wheel barrows. Some populations are resilient, and others never fully recover from their defeats. How does historical memory cope with the atrocities of the Japanese siege of Nanking, the bombing of Dresden or the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Help Wanted: Missionary Position Available

ancient Greek pottery art

Qualified applicants are urged to apply. This is a tenure track position which holds the possibility for considerable responsibilities. Those who are accepted will be furnished with a queen-sized bed in one of the major hotel chains. Duties include discussions and lectures culminating in coitus. Your application must include a CV and a recent photo. The shot should be taken with the position in mind. Simple headshots are not recommended. Experience is important but not essential. Enthusiasm for the work at hand and creativity are valued along with fieldwork. The reputation of the applicant will be taken into consideration and those with a backlog of missionary work should describe their past positions in detail. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a missionary position realizes that it's give and take and involves good degree of putting out. You should be ready to put your best foot forward. All applicants for the position must be ready to throw themselves into the job on a 24/7 basis, though those on the receiving end will be rewarded with the residual benefit of getting to know quite a bit about the architecture of ceilings.

Pornosophy: The Scarlet Letter Redux

There was the counter reformation in Europe which was basically a reaction to Luther.  The question is will there be the equivalent movement here in response to the sexual revolution of the 60’s? The issue with the current spate of harassment charges against prominent figures in the politics and the media is, of course, not sex but power in the workplace. But there's an undeniable undercurrent that cleaves to the heart of the sexual revolution.  It’s unlikely that any of the liberties taken by the likes of Harvey Weinstein and others would have occurred were it not for the umbrella of liberalization that took place in the 60s and in fact almost all of those accused were products of the sixties counter-culture, with the exception of Roy Moore that is. However, even back in the heyday of love-ins, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse coined the term, “repressive desublimation,” which anticipated the notion of sexual addiction in pointing to the narcotic effect of the culture of hedonism. However, today with concepts like “affirmative consent” in play in states like New York and California, it appears that those who wish to express their sexual desires have to run a gauntlet of new ordinances and attitudes, that play into an inherent puritanism in American culture which makes novels like Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter more pertinent today than ever.