Trump as "Delusional Tiger"?

Wounded Tiger
Daily Mail Online

Over at Malcolm Pollack's Waka Waka Waka site, one anti-Trump commenter let his emotions get the better of his rhetorical control, so I took some time to perform a bit of exegesis on one of his sentences, specifically his "Delusional Tiger" metaphor, which I segued into from George Orwell's words on political language:

Speaking of Orwell on language, what would he think of this:

"Trump is a wounded tiger, delusional and dangerous, and he doesn't care if he burns the house down in his never-ending race to the bottom."

I'll grant that a wounded tiger is dangerous, but is it delusional? Well, maybe, if it has blood poisoning from its wounds. Okay, I'll grant that, too. But where did this blood-poisoned, delusional tiger obtain the fire – and how does it carry this fire – that might burn down the house, though the tiger doesn't care one way or the other about that? Moreover, this blood-poisoned, delusional, indifferent tiger is in a never-ending race to an apparently bottomless bottom?

In short, we've got this blood-poisoned, delusional, fire-bearing, house-bound, indifferent, racing-to-a-bottomless-bottom tiger that poses a danger to its own house.

Orwell would agree that these mixed – and even mixed-up – metaphors clearly reveal much to worry about.

There you have it, my explication of words expressed by a man whose political sentiments have exceeded his capacity to control their flow and his ability to judge their propriety.

North Korean Markets and the Power of Money!

North Korean Market

Illustration by Sung Choi

New York Times

Jang Jin-sung, a former North Korean official who defected to the South, has written a fascinating account of his training and of his reasons for defecting in an article, "The Market Shall Set North Korea Free" (New York Times, April 26, 2013). Let's first look at the sort of governmental work he used to do in North Korea:

All of us at the United Front Department -- also known as "the window into and out of North Korea" -- learned three tenets of diplomacy by heart: 1. Pay no attention to South Korea. 2. Exploit Japan's emotions. 3. Ply the United States with lies, but make sure they are logical ones.

Kim Jong-il stressed the importance of these three tenets as the framework within which we were required to implement his vision for Pyongyang's foreign relations. North Korea's dealings with South Korea, Japan and the United States always hewed closely to these principles.

Our department's mission was to deceive our people and the world, doing what was necessary to keep our leader in power. We openly referred to talks with South Korea as "aid farming," because while Seoul sought dialogue through its so-called Sunshine Policy, we saw it as an opening not for diplomatic progress but for extracting as much aid as possible. We also successfully bought time for our nuclear program through the endless marathon of the six-party talks.

These three tenets fit with what I've seen, except that the North doesn't completely ignore South Korea. How could it in its "aid farming" of the South? I'm guessing that this point could have been better translated, perhaps as "Don't take South Korea seriously" or "Treat South Korea as illegitimate." The other two tenets are quite clear, but I never would have induced them on my own, so I'm glad to have come upon this article. How did Mr. Jang break free from his ideological thinking? Through a process like something out of 1984:

Although in my job I had access to foreign media, books with passages containing criticism of our Dear Leader Kim Jong-il or his revered father, Kim Il-sung, had large sections blacked out. One day, out of deep curiosity, I made up an excuse to stay behind at work to decipher the redacted words of a history book.

I locked the office door and put the pages against a window. Light from outside made the words under the ink perfectly clear. I read voraciously. I stayed late at work again and again to learn my country's real history -- or at least another view of it.

Most shocking was what I discovered about the Korean War. We had been taught all of our lives how an invasion by the South had triggered the conflict. Yet now I was reading that not only South Korea but the rest of the world believed the North had started the war.

Mr. Jang's experience reminds me of 1984's main character, Winston Smith, a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth whose thought crime of paying too close attention to information he was supposed to be fighting against led him to rebel, though I suppose the Smith character's job would be more like that of the person responsible for blacking out the forbidden passages in books containing criticism of the Kim family. Be that as it may, Mr. Jang's curiosity ultimately led him to an escape from the North. And he offers some rather intriguing hope:

The social effect of the rise of the market has been extraordinary: The umbilical cord between the individual and the state has been severed. In the people's eyes, loyalty to the state has been replaced by the value of hard cash. And the U.S. greenback is the currency of choice.

Trading with their U.S. dollars . . . for Chinese products, North Koreans have come to recognize the existence of leaders greater even than the Kims. Who are these men gracing U.S. bank notes? North Koreans now see that loyalty to the supreme leader has brought no tangible benefits; yet currency bearing the faces of American men is exchanged for many things: rice, meat, even a promotion at work.

An insight that I never would have imagined -- images on currency leading to political heresy -- because the dollar buys more than the image of a Kim! I'll never look at money in quite the same way again.

I also learned of a website on North Korea that posts articles by North Korean defectors: New Focus International. Mr. Jang is the is editor in chief.

Poetry Minute: "If-"

Rudyard Kipling

(Image from Wikipedia)

Yesterday evening, as I was tutoring my 8-year-old son, En-Uk, in English, we read together the famous poem "If-", by Rudyard Kipling.

I confess to rather liking the poem, though T.S. Eliot did use it as an evidence that Kipling was merely a 'versifier' and not a true poet (though he adds that Kipling's verse was "great verse"). I don't recall having read Eliot directly on this point, but I know from a review by George Orwell that Eliot's remark comes from the preface to a selection of Kipling's poems (A Choice of Kipling's Verse, T.S. Eliot, editor). I also seem to recall that somebody once called Kipling "our best bad poet," but perhaps I'm recalling a similar remark made about William McGonagall, except that McGonagall is so execrably bad that Kipling's poems are by contrast truly great. Orwell, at any rate, called Kipling "a good bad poet," one who wrote poetry that was "a graceful monument to the obvious."

As I was reading this poem with my son, I recalled that when I was about 13, my own not-especially-literary father, whom I didn't know very well, sent me a card with Kipling's poem "If-" printed on it, thereby exemplifying a remark made by Kipling himself:

Among the verses in Rewards [and Fairies] was one set called 'If-', which escaped from the book, and for a while ran about the world .... Once started, the mechanisation of the age made them snowball themselves in a way that startled me .... They were printed as cards to hang up in offices and bedrooms; illuminated text-wise and anthologised to weariness. Twenty-seven of the Nations of the Earth translated them into their seven-and-twenty tongues, and printed them on every sort of fabric. (Chapter 7, "The Very-Own House,"Something of Myself)

It seems that everybody read "If-", prompting Orwell to implicitly compare people who only knew this poem to Colonel Blimp:

In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as "If", were given almost biblical status.

I hope that I'm no Colonel Blimp, and I don't think that my father was that, but here's the poem that he and I both liked:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

I recall putting the card aside with a bit of distate at the final line -- despite my having previously liked the poem -- because I didn't like being addressed that way by my distant father and didn't want any of his advice (and doubted, anyway, his own qualities as a capitalized "Man").

Yet, I still liked the poem, a 'versification' that perhaps illustrates Orwell's point about bad poetry being "a graceful monument to the obvious" -- except that the following lines are hardly obvious to me:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss...

More obvious is the truism that you shouldn't put all your eggs into one basket, but Kipling was likely adducing here an aristocratic virtue of manliness, whereas I'm rather bourgeois in my virtues.

So, anyway, my father and I have both liked this poem. Yet most of what I know about my father suggests to me that he was an ordinary man. Perhaps Orwell's words are relevant here:

The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form -- for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things -- some emotion which very nearly every human being can share. (George Orwell, "Rudyard Kipling: Review of A Choice of Kipling's Verse, T.S. Eliot, editor"; from Critical essays (1946), but originally from Horizon (February 1942))

If Orwell is right, then my father and I shared a certain "emotional overlap," which might be taken as evidence of our special kinship ... except that Orwell speaks of this as a kinship with the entire human race.