Reading the news this morning I learnt that North Korea has put the corpse of their deceased leader Kim Jong-il on public display.
Sources say that he died of a heart attack brought on by the intense stress of having to wear the same clothes every day. And although his body is still a macabre sight, it’s not as if he has been chopped up by a speedboat propeller or been involved in a car wreck or something. For all intents and purposes this insane, paranoid, war-mongering, power-mad little fellow could infact be sleeping. Albeit in an open coffin.
It got me thinking though. Imagine if this happened in the UK. Imagine if David Cameron was on a routine state visit \ photo opportunity to some youth-centre in Reading and, while commending some black youths for spending their time street-dancing instead of street-stabbing, he suddenly buckles at the waist, keels over, and dies. Would the same thing happen to him? Would we put his cadaver on display ceremoniously in Westminster Abbey for all of his adoring country-folk to file past, quietly sobbing, and pay their regards? Or would we go Gadaffi on his dead ass and sling him onto a mattress in the freezer section of the local Spar and charge people a pound to come in and have their picture taken next to his decomposing body?
In reality I don’t think anyone would care. There would be no mass-outpouring of grief, no body lying in state, not even a coffin for people to see. There would just be a quiet funeral for his family and his party while Nick Clegg runs naked through the empty rooms of 10 Downing Street wanking himself into oblivion.
No, when it comes to mourning it would seem that the British public would prefer to channel their grief into eccentric celebrities like Jimmy Savile or Jade Goody as opposed to the people who have actually had a direct hand in their wellbeing (or lack of it).
In the UK we complain that we have it bad, that a double-dip recession will kill us all, that our benefits have only risen by 2.5% instead of the expected 5%, that we have to wait too long to use a health service that is free. But things here are not that bad. If we turn our attention outwards to the world then we can see how fortunate and lucky we are to live where we do. In North Korea there are people starving to death, crime, disease, censorship, state-controlled media, intense and unrelenting propaganda, and all this present under Kim Jong-il and happening while he lived a life of complete luxury. He didn’t care about the people in his country.
But despite this he is still being hysterically mourned by thousands of grief stricken North Koreans.
So perhaps what this actually means is that in death, the amount of respect that the citizens will have for their deceased leader is inversely proportional to the amount of respect that the leader has for the country that they rule. If this is the case….and if David Cameron realises this……then look out, because things in this country could get a lot worse.
And then maybe we really would have something to complain about.
