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The Uri Party is sinking, and the engine in the half-submerged engine room is sputtering. Several crewmen have already plunged into the cold sea. The deck went berserk. Passengers are frantically fumbling with their life jackets while some of the crew are hiding in the cabins, calculating what to do with all the precious metal kept on the ship. "Jump," crewmen who have plunged into the sea shout at their comrades still on deck. No one looks after the safety of passengers. Neither those who abandoned ship nor those who are trying to dissuade other crew from leaving it pay the passengers any heed.
It was on Nov. 11, 2003 that the Uri Party was launched, the vigorously cleaving the waves. In the April 2004 general elections, the party sent 152 lawmakers to the National Assembly, a comfortable majority. It was then that the party bragged about a ¡°30-year administration" and a ¡°100-year party." Lately, its approval ratings have stood at 12.3 percent, about a quarter of the 48.3 percent scored by the Grand National Party. At that level of approval, the right size of the crew is around 40. The ship is sinking because 140 crew are aboard it. There is no easy way out, unless the party manages to emulate what the Hungarian Communist Party allegedly did in the 1950s.
The regime that came into power in the wake of the Soviet Union's suppression of the Hungarian uprising, suffered from the lowest possible public support. Hence it was said to have mapped out a desperate measure. 1. A party member who entices a new member into the party or brings back a defected member shall be exempt from all party activities for one year. 2. A party member who induces into the party five new members shall be permitted to quit the party. 3. A party member who secures 10 new party members shall be issued with a certificate certifying that he was never a member of the party. That was the kind of joke Hungarians told to keep their spirit up in those grim times.
But it won¡¯t work for the Uri Party of today. Nobody wants to get on board a ship navigated by crew who abandon the passengers to save their own lives. Given the Uri Party's approval ratings of 12.3 percent, roughly 5 million out of the 48 million South Koreans could be sleeping curled up in the ship¡¯s cabins. They are doomed to go down with it. It is a question not of the crew¡¯s competence but of occupational ethics. In the past, such crewmen were cast out of the seafaring profession forever.
Last week, one piece of news about the family of the captain of a troubled ship named "North Korea" offended people¡¯s sense of propriety seriously. It was about the life in Macau of Kim Jong-nam, the skipper¡¯s eldest son. Owning two luxury villas in an expensive enclave there, he reportedly relieves his grievance about being pushed out of the inheritance stakes by shopping for luxury and designer products and indulging in the city¡¯s nightclubs. Junior was arrested in 2001 trying to enter Japan on a fake passport in a bid to tour Tokyo¡¯s Disneyland. At the time, a long list of luxury brand articles his two female companions were wearing caught the attention of the international press. Kim junior's recent daily expenses are said to amount to hundreds of monthly wages of an ordinary North Korean worker. The skipper's son, then, lives the life of Reilly while the 24 million passengers are so hungry that some of them forage for scraps in the vast Manchurian plains.
According to a story about life in Moscow in the 1950s, an old lady ended up with a handful of grains after standing in a queue for 10 hours in the bitter cold. She automatically said, "Thank you, Lord." A passerby who heard her cautioned the lady, "Say thank you, Comrade Leader." She asks back, ¡°But when can I thank the Lord?" "Do it when the Lord takes the comrade leader."
Pyongyang in the winter of 2007 is colder and hungrier than Moscow in the 1950s. Neither South Korean citizens nor their North Korean counterparts are being treated as the masters. The degree may be different, but it is striking how much the leaderships of the two Koreas resemble each other, in their lack of awareness of their crimes and the punishment they deserve.
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