Jonah Goldberg’s latest column floats an idea that I have in fact nursed for some time.
Try to imagine what a North Korea exhibit at Epcot Center would display: emaciated, out-of-work actors (no shortage there) eating fake tree bark while guarding a giant concentration camp where prisoners are forced to worship a guy who should be wearing a tinfoil hat at the local library. Don’t forget to try the sawdust kimchi!
It wasn’t long after the Berlin Wall fell that I started musing with friends about how, as a youth fascinated by the Cold War and our Communist enemies, I had always wanted to be ushered around Soviet Russia by Intourist, go through Checkpoint Charlie, go to a spectacularly bad nightclub in Communist Poland (yes, that’s P.J. O’Rourke’s influence there), have guns pointed at me for photographing the wrong thing in Czechoslovakia…you get the picture. But I never managed such a trip; and it’s all long gone now.
So when North Korea finally falls, somebody needs to acquire a decent-sized chunk of Pyongyang and preserve it as a “Stalinland” attraction. For fun, yes…but also so the world never forgets. (Gotta always remember to work that edifying PSA angle in, to ward off accusations of bad taste.) The experience would start with having your belongings searched at the “border crossing”—including unwrapping each individual stick of gum to check for secret messages, which in fact happened to my mother once—and proceed through a parade of absurdities and indignities until the culmination of the experience: sneaking into the American embassy, where the applications for asylum, the decent food, and the really bitchin’ party are found.
Remember, it’s my idea; but anyone who helps me raise funds for the project is assured of a nice cut of the profits.
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